YMMV / The Hollows

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Nick. Is he a bumbling Smug Snake egoist who used Rachel solely to have an in to demons and magic, or does he only appear that way because it's all we can see from Rachel's narrative? There may be a lot more to Nick and his motives than the reader sees, because Rachel does not see every aspect of his life.
  • Rachel earlier in the series with Ivy can be seen this way. Is she simply being The Tease, using the act of potentially sharing blood to cater to her own Thrill Seeker ways and/or hide behind her own I Just Want to Be Loved feelings at the time or is Rachel really seeing Ivy as more than a possible Heterosexual Life-Partner and desiring a possible Relationship Upgrade romantically?
• Designated Villain: Lee and Piscary, though Lee seems to have retired from this role.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Kisten, Trent, and Nick.
  • Piscary and other dead vampires could be considered an in-universe version of this as no matter what evil they perform their underlings will forgive them.
• Estrogen Brigade: Several characters have these, most notably Trent and Kisten, even after Kisten died.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Despite the fact that Rachel and Trent end up together at the end of the series, most fans ship Rachel with her roommate and best friend, the bisexual vampire Ivy. This is mainly due to these fans feeling that the two have better chemistry and the series having multiple people mistake them for lovers. Most fanfiction for the series is Rachel/Ivy, with it having a little over six times as many fics about it as Rachel/Trent on AO3. It is also easily more popular than Ivy's canon ship with Nina.
• Les Yay: Rachel/Ivy and Ivy/Skimmer Ivy with Rachel to the extent that some of the readership sees them having more chemistry than many of her male love interests.
  • In the 4th Book, Rachel even wonders if it actually is love she's feeling towards Ivy.
    • Rachel: ... She needs to be accepted for who she is so badly. And I was able to do that. Do you know how good that felt? To be able to show someone that, yes, you are someone worth sacrificing for? That you like them for their faults and that you respect them for their ability to rise above them? ... Damn. Maybe it is love.
• Meaningful Echo: In Million Dollar Baby, (told from Trent's POV), he briefly reminisces about one of his former horse whisperers, who talked too much, even in bed. Later, in The Undead Pool he tells Rachel that he hoped she wouldn't be a talker right before they sleep together for the first time. In that same scene in The Undead Pool, Rachel notes that it's the quiet ones you really have to watch out for, in this case referring to Trent.
• Moral Event Horizon: Many for the villains including Piscary's off-screen rape of Ivy and Lee allowing several innocent people to die in an explosion on his boat. For some fans Trent's murder of Brett also evokes this trope. Kisten originally setting the bomb on Lee's boat to begin with seems to have avoided this because to most fans Beauty Equals Goodness, and he called and warned Lee about the bomb, expecting him to evacuate everyone.
  • As if we needed more proof that Ku'Sox is a complete bastard, in his latest exploits he kills an infant. Keep in mind, this infant would've even been useful to his plans at the moment since it had Rosewood Syndrome. He just did it to mess with Rachel because she was rescuing the nursery of terminal babies he stole. Guess Harrison needed to stress that yes, in a world of grey and grey morality, he has absolutely no redeeming qualities.
  • In the prequel book, The Turn, We find out that Trent's namesake father is responsible for the plague that kills most of humanity, all because he was jealous of another elf's work. His punishment? to live, create Brimstone, and marry the elf he was willing to destroy and allow to take the blame for the plague, all because she decided to sleep with him once, and he got her pregnant. It throws a lot of another character's actions into a different light come the regular series.
• Narm: The series' backstory, in which a quarter of the human race die off from eating genetically modified tomatoes, exaggerates the potential risk of GMOs to the point it sounds like a parody.
• Squick: A few examples in the series including the fact werewolves are the result of demons in wolf form raping human women in the middle ages and Ivy's play by play of her own rape
  • Al's insights into the jaded excess of demons is a generator of squicky concepts even though most of it is Off Stage Villainy.
  • The HAPA-staged murder scenes and the Sick and Wrong witch hunter murders.
  • The way master vampires breed generations of their "children" for their looks and susceptibility to manipulation. Piscary apparently started with Ivy's great-grandmother.

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