The Awakening question

L.J. Smith set the bar for which all other YA supernatural standards were derived from, not the other way around. That being said, she still introduced new ideas into the previous molds for vampires (like the daylight rings) and her Secret Circle Series was the first to introduce more authentic practices by the witch characters, i.e. herbs, stones, rituals, vegetarians, etc. rather than just having some kind of 'power' they could wield. I have never read any of the newer TVD novels, nor would I, if L.J. Smith is no longer the author, but she should get her credit for originality when the first editions were published instead of held against today's copycats.

As someone who has just started reading these books, I would say that this series is completely cliche but that is one of its main appeal. It gave me the feeling of watching an old vampire/romance movie which is not always a bad thing. I liked it because the cliche's were never too in-your-face or annoying and the general teen fiction traits that it suffers from takes me back to when I used to read the likes of Jacqueline Wilson and Stephenie Mayer; don't like those authors at all anymore, but the emotions I felt reading those books at the time were very real. Now an adult I feel I can read something like the Vampire Diaries and enjoy it properly because the cliche's present themselves to me as quirky little segments in the story and not manipulative plot-points to grip the teenage mind.

i think that the book was good but it just had too many elements to keep up with i mean vampires, wolfs, witches, Japanese legends, the underworld, with the demons, and then elena comes back to life as an angel and then the wings of redemption and things like that, it was just too much stuff to keep up at times. its just too much.

I don't know if I would call it cliche, since to my knowledge, this was one of the original Young Adult vampire love stories/love triangles. This series has always been strange for me, becuase even though the writing isn't that great and the characters are all pretty much terrible--with the exeption of Damon, Matt, and Bonnie--I couldn't stop reading this series. The insta-love was terrible, but I was strangely invested in what happened to the characters. Plus the plot for the first couple weren't bad, even if they were a little slow. But it does get weird toward the end, and since the author got replaced, I haven't read anymore.

I actually read this series after reading Twilight, and I was surprised that there are people ignorant enough to think the Vampire Diaries copied Twilight and not the other way around.

I think that some of the descriptions were cliche, blonde hair and porcelain skin. I don't know.

I read this book when I was like 12 or 13 (10 or more years ago) and this was one of the first young adult/vampire novels that I read and even then the book was 10 years (or so) old. So I think that it might be safe to say that this book probably invented some of the cliches you see in other novels now. But the series does get incredibly corny after the fourth book.

I didn't like TVD at all. To me, it was just another lame crap-fest with emo vampire lovers and the precious angel super speshul MC stuck between two HAWT guys

I feel like they were cliche and predictable. That said, I can't stop reading them. I do think that the series gets better as it progresses with the higher fantasy, which she did write. For example, (view spoiler)[ traveling to a demon realm (hide spoiler)] is much better than sitting around and whining as Elena did in the first two books.