🦣 - Favourite insane detail about [Mael!]
(TVC ASKING GAME!)
My favorite CANON DETAIL about Mael is like everything from his QOTD chapter with Jesse at Sonoma..... what do you mean he sucks her titties and asks what chocolate tastes like... what do you mean he's in a situationship with maharet... what do you mean he loves wearing leather and hates cloth fabric.......................
But my favorite meta/bordering on headcanon is the sort of unspoken stuff about him and who he would have been as a human!
I've said this 100 times but like Mael as described by Jesse and by Marius is my FAVORITE example of unreliable narrators in VC. From Jesse he's like this sweet uncanny weirdo and from Marius he's a stupid dumb ugly idiot who is so stupid and everything he does is so dumb because he's just this unwashed untrained animal.
And because the ONLY bit of human Mael we get in the whole VC is from Marius's POV, it really shapes the way we think of him. AND EVEN THEN TBH like Marius is SWEATIN when he's telling Lestat about the night they met, like, he's clearly trying to communicate MAEL HOT and doesn't really want to admit it, and doesn't want to admit that he lost his life because he was thinking with his dick.
But we know about human Mael that he's a priest, that he's attractive, and that he is so devout and dedicated to Marius while holding him captive, and that he isn't actually an evil barbarian but a sincere worshipper of the God of the Grove who thinks he's doing something good.
What's funny too is like, if you ever go down the rabbit hole studying Ancient Gaul and the Druids, they didn't believe in writing anything down, so there's very little surviving history about them and their customs and their beliefs, and a lot of what we DO know about them are texts that have survived that were written by the Romans, like Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico.
So in TVL when Marius starts talking about the Keltoi and calling them barbarians and talking about them riding horses nude and etc, it's a little unclear if any of that is true or if it's racist Roman propaganda. And it's kind of funny on a meta level to ask where Anne Rice was doing her research from, like did she take Commentarii de Bello Gallico's word for it, did Marius take Caesar's word for it, is Marius repeating that even though he would've spent time with them and it would've dispelled some of these rumors, or is he repeating it because he fuckin hates these people and is happy to continue with the Roman propaganda?
Anyway I say all that because I'm fascinated by Mael and the only text we get about him as a human is from Marius's pissy & racist POV and would be leaving a ton of information out.
Like, because! I think a lot about him being a priest, for example. And his age is ambiguous in the text. I kinda feel like if he were OLD old, Marius would've told us LOL, I don't think he can be like "This IDIOT with his BIG NOSE and his DUMB IDEAS" without also teasing him for being OLD. I just, think maybe he would've told us. So if Mael is like, yknow Marius's age, or in his 30s, it means he is like a super Druid Prodigy who fast tracked his priesthood training. Like especially because the druids didn't believe in written record and relied on oral history, priests would study for like decades! So I think this hole in canon makes us ask "does that mean Mael is older because he studied for 20-30 years" or "is Mael a super prodigy because he did all that as a young man?"
And it makes me wonder like.
In the VC universe the way witches exist and whatnot, that like, there's a level of mysticism that exists in the universe, it makes me wonder if Mael had any gifts as human, like could he read minds, did that make it easier for him to study, was he seen as somebody who had powerful vision? Was he able to communicate in any way with Teskhamen?
And if he WAS, it also kinda comes back to like his sincerity and good faith in what he was doing, and it also leads into the themes of faith vs belief that are all over VC. Marius especially as the Token Atheist of the series, his entire book is sort of about like true belief in what you can see vs empty ritual and faith in an institution. And the way Mael behaves about like, Akasha, or about the Veil, makes me think he's someone who also needs true belief, and the entire time he was alive wasn't an exercise in blind faith at all, because he knew for certain that Teskhamen was a preternatural creature and divine prescence!
WHEW ANYWAY OOPS THAT WAS A LOT MORE THAN I MEANT TO SAY, IM JUST SO PASSIONATE ABOUT MY LIL TREEFUCKER BLORBO.
