Adorkable: Natalie is a cute, dorky girl. Nice, plain, uninterested in social politics, with a somewhat endearing tendency to ramble on at length. Taken up to eleven in the movie due to her portrayal by Sarah Hyland.
Broken Aesop: In Blood Promise, Dimitri is turned into an Always Chaotic Evil Strigoi, a Fate Worse than Death. Rose is deeply hurt by this and abandons her education to trek through Russia so she can stake him, and thereby find closure. It's a long and dangerous journey that ends with Rose learning that she has to let go of Dimitri's memory and return to her friends and family, because mourning him in such a obsessive way sabotages her own life. It's a good lesson that is shot to hell by the book's closing chapter, which reveals that Spirit wielders have a completely unforeshadowed ability that allows them to resurrect Strigoi as the people they were, despite nothing else in the books even hinting that was possible. And after she learns this, Rose turns right back around and vows to get Dimitri resurrected this way, even planning to break a criminal out of prison so it can happen!
Lissa gets bashed by Rose/Christian shippers. In Rose/Christian fanfictions, Lissa sleeps with everybody, is jealous of Rose, and uses compulsion without a second thought, while in canon, Lissa's nice, responsible, not at all jealous of Rose, and feels rather guilty whenever she has to use compulsion. Heck, Lissa gets the same treatment even in some Rose/Dimitri fanfictions since Spirit Bound came out.
Tasha also gets a lot of this. She shows some interest in Dimitri in Frostbite and asks him to be her guardian which he refuses and has been bashed ever since. Despite the fact she's incredibly nice. Though it is kind of justified when you get to the end of Last Sacrifice...
Adrian gets hit by this pretty hard by Rose/Dimitri shippers.
Then there are the Rose/Lissa shippers that have tendencies to demonize Christian and Dimitri (and Adrian to some extent). The amount of Ho Yay Lissa and Rose have canonically does not help.
Early in Shadow Kiss during the guardian practice exercise, Rose wants Dimitri to have the opportunity to show that he could be a badass Strigoi. At the very end of the novel, he becomes a very badass Strigoi.
In Blood Promise, Rose notices that Sydney doesn't seem to eat much of her food, but doesn't think much of it, and actually steals some of her fries. It's later revealed that Sydney has fairly severe body issues.
Hilarious in Hindsight: In Spirit-Bound, when Sydney gets in contact with Rose to query her about missing Alchemist records she tells Rose that Adrian is cute for an 'evil creature of the night'. In Bloodlines, she ends up falling in love with (and marrying) him.
Les Yay: Rose and Lissa, especially in the final chapter of Shadow Kissed and a lot of Blood Promise. The part where Rose leaves the academy and heads to Russia is pretty much like a break-up scene, you don't even need to change the dialogue:
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she cried.
“I couldn’t tell anyone,” I said.
“You should have told me,” she repeated, “I feel like you don’t trust me.”
“Of course I trust you.”
“Is that why you’re sneaking off?”
“That has nothing to do with trust,” I admitted, “It’s me...well, I didn’t want to tell you. I couldn’t bear to tell you I was leaving or explain why.”
And then there's this little gem not too long after that:
I shook my head. “I have to do this.”
“Even if it means leaving me?”
The way she said it, the way she looked at me...oh God. A flood of memories flitted through my mind. We’d been together since childhood. Inseparable. Bound.
There's also this:
“I have to do this.” I said yet again, “I’m sorry.”
“You’re supposed to be my guardian and go with me to college,” she argued, “You’re shadow-kissed. We’re supposed to be together. If you leave me...”
Given that Rose is only going to Russia so she can Mercy Kill her ex-boyfriend (who has been turned against his will into an evil, soulless vampire) that whole conversation really comes off as Lissa being jealous of how important said boyfriend is to Rose. And then, when Rose does leave, Lissa falls into this dark, depressed state where she completely changes her personality (admittedly, most of that was because she was being brainwashed into doing so, but still) and starts drinking again, becoming a vapid party girl. It doesn't help that Lissa's own boyfriend tries and fails to bring her out of this state, but when Rose calls...
Rose openly states several times in narration that Lissa and Dimitri (the aforementioned boyfriend) are the most important people in her life, and she hopes constantly that she'll never be forced to make a Sadistic Choice between them- because she doesn't know how she'd choose.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the author spends more time developing Rose and Lissa's friendship and showing scenes of them together than she does for Rose and Dimitri.
Also, the intricacy of Lissa's powers basically demands that a shadow-kissed companion (in this case, Rose) stay with her for the rest of their lives, comforting her when she falls into depression through usage of said powers, and just basically be a trusted, devoted friend that has the strength to sway her from the Dark Side. So there's that, and all the political hate circling around Lissa, what with the vampire court disapproving of her 'progressive' views on how their society should be, and there are so many monologues on Rose's part about the nature of loyalty and love and how they make life worth living...
Also, you know the whole 'biting-gives-you-intense-pleasure' thing that most vampire fiction has? Yeah, this series uses it too, although with a fair side of deconstruction. And yes, there are scenes where Lissa bites Rose, and Rose's narration...doesn't really gloss over things like that. Hell, their first scene together is Rose, in her underwear having just woken up, inviting Lissa to bite her and then mentally monologuing about how, while she knows Lissa needs the sustenance, she feels a little guilty about it because she likes it so much.
Interestingly, the bullies at the high school they go to do briefly shout insults about them being 'fags,' but Lissa and Rose just ignore them, and it's treated as a fairly common slur, with not much truth behind it. Later, the bullies switch to spreading more malicious rumors-that Rose is a "blood whore", a dhampir woman who gives blood during sex. The stigma behind it and Rose's reaction to the rumors is....unsubtle. The film gives us this gem:
Lissa: It's not like we were fornicating or anything. We just didn't have any feeders.
Moroi cross this if they kill a human/dhampir when feeding on them. They become Strigoi.
Victor Dashkov crosses this when he abducts Lissa and tortures her to make her heal him.
Older Than They Think: Many people seem to think that the books are a rip-off of The Twilight Saga mixed with Harry Potter when in reality Richelle Mead came up with the idea for and began writing the series before Twilight became popular.
Dimitri. The poor guy gets forcibly turned into a Strigoi, his mind, his soul and his love for Rose become twisted and wrong as a result of said change, he kills hundreds (possibly thousands) of people and enjoys it, he horrifically abuses his lover Rose when she comes to free (read: stake) him from the state he never wanted and after her return to the U.S. hunts her down and endangers the Moroi he'd once been dedicated to protecting, including Lissa. And when he's brought back to life by Spirit, he realises just what he'd done (not just the immediate preceding events, but his treatment of Rose and the innocents he'd murdered) and it does not go over well with him. It's no wonder he wallows in depression and guilt straight after his change back into a dhampir and refuses to see Rose.
Christian saw his Strigoi-turned parents staked by guardians after they'd tried to abduct him in order to awaken him when he grew older. He was only five years old at the time. The scandal surrounding his parents caused him and Tasha to be ostracized by most of the other royal Moroi families, and even some Moroi in the Ozera family wanted nothing to do with them because of their association to the people who blackened the Ozera name. In St. Vlad's, before meeting Lissa Christian is practically a pariah and a loner, and is considered a 'Strigoi-lover' who will probably become Strigoi like his parents one day. His sole reason to going to mass in the chapel is to convince the other Moroi that he isn't a Strigoi (because Strigoi can't enter hallowed ground). His life is like hell at this point, and, to make things worse, after he finds the one person who truly makes him happy he's tricked into rejecting her by Rose, who says mean lies about how Lissa sees him as she believes the rumours about him and believes that he's dangerous and unstable. Rose is extremely guilt-stricken when she finally learns the whole truth about Christian's life and realises that she's taken away the only happy thing that's ever happened to him in his life.
Even after he and Lissa become a couple, he still has to deal with haughty royals (including the Queen of the Moroi herself) claiming that he'll never be good enough for Lissa because of his blackened family name and that he's only holding her back from realising her true potential as a leader of the Moroi and a member of the royal society. And not to mention the Queen herself actively tries to tear them apart by conniving to bring Adrian and Lissa together.
And then in Last Sacrifice he finds out that the one person who'd been like a mother to him for most of his life is a traitor to the Moroi throne and the true killer of Tatiana Ivashkov. He takes the news really, really hard.
Lissa saw her parents and brother die in a car crash two years before the beginning of Vampire Academy, a crash which also killed Rose (though Lissa inadvertently brought her back).
Fandom Rivalry: During the 2014 MTV Movie Awards, there were a rash of small fandom wars between the film and Godzilla (2014), after a Godzilla fan insulted Vampire Academy and its fans when the vampire movie was beating Godzilla in the polls.
Like You Would Really Do It: The scene where Christian turns Strigoi, invades St. Vladimir's, kills Dimitri and even goes as far as turning Lissa, before they all circle around Rose threateningly. Yeah, it was pretty obviously a Dream Sequence.
Opinion Myopia: Many either think the film failed because it was a half-assed Twilight ripoff or think it failed because Twilight was so bad that it poisoned the well for other, better supernatural young-adult novels being adapted to film.
Special Effect Failure: The psi-hounds are laughably bad. Also, Christian setting them "on fire" wasn't very convincing either. They appear heavily unfinished.
