Hello to all of you beautiful nerds and welcome back from traveling the vast nerd universe! I am back with a new post!

Thoughts on Midnight Breed Series

So, Lara Adrian finished the midnight Breed Series this past summer and I felt it was a bit abrupt after how good the series was but I felt that there are some things I thought that were okay and I feel like talking about it as a whole. I remembered searching for the Vampire Academy books and found the ten book bundle on Bookshare and now that it has been years since reading these books, I do have some things I would like to talk about, but first!

Disclaimer!

This post is based on thoughts and observations made by the writer of this blog. Please respect what she has to say in the piece of media that is being talked about in this post. You have been warned!

Plot

The plot of the series is that we get to see stories based on a supernatural community of vampires who are called the Breed. They are sons of an alien race that crashed and landed on Earth thousands of years before the story really started. We meet not only the vamps but females that are special with a certain mark which is a moon with a teardrop placed on their body and have certain powers from their Atlantian ancestors. We follow the novellas and the novels of the many vamps and females we meet and the troubles they go through such as the son of one of the first ancients to more vampires and Atlantians!

Overall Thoughts

I have to say that I preferred the first half of the series and the novellas and a few of the second half of the series because I felt there were things that could have improved on during the second part. I felt the first ten books should have been the only series due to how the final book ended the story very well but of course we had to see what happened afterwards when the world knew that they had vampires living among them. 

With the first part of the series, we got to meet Lucaine Thorn and his other breeding partners, Teagan, Dante, Rio, Gideon and Nikolai, but also another one who ended up dying in the first book due to sabotage. Of course we got to meet some of the Breed Mates, Danika, Savannah, and Eva since Lucaine started to meet Gabrielle in the first book, Kiss of Midnight.. As the series went on, other vampires and breedmates appeared since of course they fell in love and brought them into the compound, which is where a lot of the Breed lived in while other vampires lived in places called Dark Havens which are mansions that kept families of vampires, which include children and Breed Mates belonging to them. We also get to meet some that are international since the first part dealt with finding out information about how some of them suffer from blood lust and how the first villain, Dragos, is doing things behind the scenes such as doing experiments on Breed Mates and crating new vampires with the ancient DNA called Hunters. Speaking of which!

Villains

I feel like touching upon the villains, well the main two in this series which happened to be Dragos and Opus Nostrum in part two. I preferred Dragos as the better villain because we got to see what he was up to throughout the first ten books, especially with the Breed more secretive. I even liked how he got to meet the Hunters since they were created due to an ancient vampire, which they were supposed to be wiped out by the earlier version of the Breed. While Opus Nostrum, on the other hand, I felt like at first they were something new and interesting for the Breed to contend with and was hoping to see what Dragos had done before but what sucked was that we didn’t get to see the behind-the-scenes stuff they were doing that Dragos did in the original ten. With Opus Nostrum, we not only had more corrupt Breed members but also Atlantean people being a part of it, which we saw in Edge of Dawn. I was hoping to see them in action, such as how they created Crimson Dragon, which the second book, Kiss of Crimson, showed how a human created Crimson which used to have blood lust come on easily, while Red  Dragon did the same thing but faster! Not sure if Adrian was trying to bring the idea of Crimson but with the same ingredients? If so, then how did Opus Nostrum get the ingredients? If it’s a new recipe, then what brought on the idea? It’s a mystery. Heck, I remembered how they pointed out the scarab tattoo that each person in the circle or related to the one who is in it is a sign of who they were. It would have been great that we would see them show this before meet-ups in the books. Not only that, Nova in Marked by Midnight which is one of the novellas had her’s covered. At least she revealed who she really was during book twelve alongside her family connections.

First Part vs. Second Part

This is going to be a hard one but I admit I liked from books one through thirteen and then, sixteen, and the novellas. I felt that books fifteen, seventeen, and eighteen were a bit rushed and the story had some empty holes.I also felt that fifteen could have had a meeting with Opus Nostrum and how the Red Dragon was explained since that got introduced in Defy the Dawn. I felt that in the first thirteen books that each character was developed well and how they interacted with each other while a few others weren’t as much. Heck, even in the Hunter Trilogy where we got to meet other hunter types with the same ancient DNA they had better development. I noticed some of the loose ends is where Eric Chase’s Breed Mate had a twin sister and while reading it I was thinking if she was also one? Since Eric and Charice were both given birth where Charice had the Breed Mate mark like Tavia had but with the extra vampire strength and power. The twin sister thing was never answered and it would have been nice to see if she would have a mate among the breed despite being pregnant.. I mean they did that with Corrine and Hunter in book nine. The bigger disappointment was the last book. Oh boy! How could I say this? It felt like I was reading an adult version of Sailor Moon! As a nerd, I was excited that Adrian named Gabrielle’s and Lucaine’s son Darien but was not expecting for him to fall for Celine, which I felt I was seeing Usagi and Momaru falling in love back in Silver Millennium except Celine turned out to be extra crazy. I understand she was trying to protect the remaining Atlantians but how she did it was way beyond nuts!! Even while dealing with Darien was even crazier. Even though Adrian said she had that extra time to work on the last book but wished it didn’t feel so rushed in some areas and the ending, I am wondering if Darien is with Celine and protected by Atlantean light due to her blood to keep him from turning to ash in the sun, then wouldn’t Micah and any other vampire besides Brine of course also protected from the sun? That should have been explained better.

Conclusion

Again, I felt the first half was better, books eleven through thirteen and sixteen were better alongside the novellas and Hunter series. I wished they had a better explanation on items and could have changed things. I also wished we could have seen scenes with Opus Nostrum. I may re-read this series and see how they sound when read all the way through and see how I liked it but this is the initial thought on this series.

Well, that completes this post. I am thinking of doing a post about what if this was an anime and who I would cast each character, let’s see how it goes! I am currently waiting on my subscriptions to arrive. Stay tuned!