#maharet

[toriangeli]

One of my favorite things about how Anne Rice writes historical fiction: she doesn't sugar-coat her characters.

As in, there was never going to be any way all these vampires going back 6000 years were going to align with modern sensibilities. They're not savory. They suck.

First off, any male of status from before the Great Depression probably did, in fact, look at an underage girl and think, "she LOOKS like she could grow up cute and interesting, but do I want to wait to ask her dad and risk someone else calling dibs in the meantime?"

Lestat: Killed majestic, beautiful animals that were only trying to feed themselves. To save the lives of people who were counting on him, yeah, but still.

Marius: Literally from ancient Rome, lots of ideals from that time, pederastic relationship with Armand, see above disclaimer about males from prior to the Great Depression.

Armand, Santino, most of the de Landens: I do feel like the Children of Darkness/Satan wouldn't have been founded in our time, as evidenced by Lestat so easily disbanding them with basic Enlightenment talking points, so I think it counts.

Louis: LITERALLY OWNED SLAVES. And not in a bullshit "but I treat them so nice and they'd just be owned by someone mean if not for me!" way, he legit believed this was what black people were for. Until he became a vampire and all humans looked equal(ly foodlike) to him.

Gabrielle: Let other people raise her kids while she became a library hermit.

Maharet and Mekare: Cannibals. Oh, sorry. Respectful cannibals.

Khayman: Nnnot even gonna be sarcastic about this one. He was as much a victim of it as Maharet and Mekare, hence them not blaming him in the slightest. But people today would be put on trial for following an order like that one, so I figure it belongs here.

Daniel: idk probably unprotected gay sex. It was the 70's.

Claudia: Gets a pass. She was five. All the bad shit she does is unrelated to her time.

Mael: Helped keep a vampire captive for years, then proceeded to kidnap someone and force them to become a vampire, all because "idk we're kooky druids and it's our religion."

Everard: Laughs at Benedict for being kidnapped and having his blood stolen. Victim-blaming at its finest.

Akasha and Enkil: I mean, we know what they did, but everyone hated them in their own time, too, so.

Eudoxia: Jesus Christ.

Davis: HAS NEVER DONE ANYTHING WRONG EVER IN HIS LIFE. /protects him forever #theonlyinnocentvampireprobably

And you know what? I'd take the worst of these over Bill Compton, Damon Salvatore, or Whassisface Cullen fighting for the Confederacy because "the greater good." Like bro. At least the dickheads above are being honest about it and we can judge those parts of them appropriately. You're trying to make us think you were doing something honorable by being vague. We know what you were really fighting for, and so do you.

Moral of the story: If you're gonna be evil, trying to be sneaky about it only makes it worse.

[swedenis-h]

Queens of the Damned and Jesse!

[kaelio]

maharet be like, armand! Marius! stop hugging! we aint got time for that shit. now then everyone fucking be quiet and sit on your hands ,i've got a fake bronze age society to infodump about for 230 pages

[rhan-hastur]

Ask and you shall receive!

Bonus: even more vampire ladies no one asked for:

[thecactifindahome]

Queen of the Damned: last pages and sequel ideas

- The Witching Hour

- Untitled Talamasca novel

- God Damn It Lestat, You've Fucked Us Again

[desertfangs]

The paralells between Jesse and Daniel losing their connections to family as they pursue the supernatural in Queen of the Damned is really interesting.

It's ironic because Jesse is literally related to vampires and has spent time with them and noticed little oddities, though she does not realize what they are. But she becomes so engrossed in her confidential work at the Talamasca that visits with family become a holidays-or-when-they're-in-London thing, and she stops writing letters because she can't talk about what she's working on (it's Top Secret.)

Meanwhile, Daniel pursues vampires and finds Armand, who then pursues him, and gets so caught up in running around the world that he probably doesn't do much more than send the odd postcard home, maybe make the occasional phone call on holidays. We don't actually know how much contact he has with family during that time but I personally suspect it was not a lot. And once he and Armand get together, he's spending his nights being dragged all over the place, and his days sleeping it off. There's not exactly a lot of time to write long letters or make phone calls at normal waking hours.

We do know by the Night Island Era (1982? 1983?) he hasn't really had any contact with anyone from his previous life for a while:

"It had been years since Daniel had even thought of his family, of the friends he used to know. Checks went out to kin, of that he'd made certain, but they were just names now on a list."

Anyhow, it's just interesting that both Jesse and Daniel get so caught up in the pursuit of the supernatural that their mundane, mortal lives fall away and they lose those connections. Then both of them end up becoming vampires. Jesse, of course, gets to reconnect with her family and her "aunt" Maharet. Whether Daniel ever has contact with anyone in his family afterward is unknown but dubious and unlikely.

I guess the point is that you cannot pursue the supernatural and continue to live a normal life. Which is something we see play out in the series again and again.

[paparaxote]

Red hair time! These are my take on the characters from the third book of Vampire Chronicles, The Queen of the Dammed. Sometimes a girl only wants to do a 3/4 portrait and call it a day.

DISCLAIMER: Maharet's appereance is based on middle eastern bedouins, since she was from the mount Carmel originally and before any abrahamic religion. I wanted to despict her in the most accurately way possible and with all due respect. If you want to know more about the tattoos, i would recommend checking their art

i took this north palestinian woman as a reference as well

[vamp4rebatscave]

Last year fanarts!

[chicalepidoptera]

Lestat chained after Memnoch, as @slutaciouslestat asked 😊

(I was this 🤏 close to replace David with vampire old Daniel but in the end I decided to stick to canon🙄).

[missfreija]

[swedenis-h]

Heart and Mind (X)

Just in case the link doesn’t work:

[faerywhimsy]

This is entirely @fofoqueirah and @cbrownjc's faults (for COMPLETELY different reasons) but now I'm pulling out Merrick, only to find the below passage and did I just read that correctly?

As told to us by David, of course,

Louis had refused her (Maharet's) offer. Louis had turned her away. I shall never forget the conversation. "I don't treasure my weaknesses," he'd explained to her. "Your blood conveys power, I don't question that. Only a fool would. But I know from what I've learnt from all of you that the ability to die is key. If I drink your blood I'll become too strong for a simple act of suicide just as you are now. And I cannot allow that. Let me remain the human one among you. Let me acquire my strength slowly, as you once did, from time and from human blood. I wouldn't become what Lestat has become through his drinking from the ancients. I would not be that strong and that distant from an easy demise." [...] Louis would very likely die if exposed to sunlight, though he was well past the point where sunlight would reduce him to pure ash, as it had done Claudia only seventy years or so after her birth. Louis still had to have blood every night. Louis could very probably seek oblivion in the flames of a pyre.

Can someone please just answer me in a simple y/n kinda way: Was my son, Monsieur Louis de Pining du Lestat planning his attempted suicide as early as the end of Queen of the Damned?!

[kaelio]

Tale of the Body Thief opening chapters, cut from the novel! These are interesting because there's a fair bit of new material here, and there are significant changes in tone and content between the early drafts of the aforementioned chapters as well. Because of the size of these uploads, we will be posting them in parts as we are able. This is Part 1. The above are just a couple sample pages.

(Tulane University special collections)

Download Link

(Part 1)

[bubblegum-blackwood]

Valenfangs - day 3 - girl's night

Bianca, Pandora, Maharet, Jesse, and Gabrielle

@valenfangs

[thecactifindahome]

Tulane notes on Rhoshamandes, Khayman, and Maharet's death

Rhoshamandes really does seem to have been kind of a fall guy at first. And it's interesting that Benedict doesn't even seem to exist yet.

[simostara]

Maharet & Mekare

Anne Rice : The Vampire Chronicles