hello! If you’re willing and have time, could you let me know how the books portray the variations of sire/fledgling bonds? A million thanks!
This is a bit of a tricky one, but I'll do my best! Ultimately, each pair of maker and fledgling is a relationship that is unique, but I'll pull together some broad groups. Please note that, as I'm discussing relationships in a series where they can be ambiguous, much of what I say here will be subjective; if you disagree with my view of a specific relationship, keep in mind that I'm one person talking about my own read of the series.
Spoilers below for the series in general.
The relationship between maker and fledgling we see most of in the series is one that is romantic/pseudo-romantic, parent/child, and really frequently, a little of both, with a sliding scale from "really incestuous" to something that leans more heavily in one direction or another. This is because vampires are making fledglings to be their companions (and often romantic/pseudo-romantic life partner), but are also literally featuring in the creation of a new vampire "life" when they do so.
For makers and fledglings who have less of a romantic and more of a specifically parent/child relationship, my first instinct is always to reference Lestat and Claudia. The quote here is from The Vampire Lestat, but he also calls her his daughter specifically in The Tale of the Body Thief:
And I cannot say even now that I regret Claudia, that I wish I had never seen her, nor held her, nor whispered secrets to her, nor heard her laughter echoing through the shadowy gaslighted rooms of that all too human town house in which we moved amid the lacquered furniture and the darkening oil paintings and the brass flowerpots as living beings should. Claudia was my dark child, my love, evil of my evil. Claudia broke my heart.
For a more specifically romantically phrased and less parent/child relationship, the best example to me would be Marius and Pandora. Her turning is specifically framed as a wedding in Pandora:
He fed on me. I fed on him. This was our marriage. All around us, the grass was waving softly in the breeze, a majestic conjugal bed, and the smell of the green flooded me.
For the relationships that are down the middle, both parent/child and romantic in an incestuous way, there are probably the most examples. A few of the ones that jump to mind for me are Armand and Daniel ("You're my firstborn" - QOTD), Lestat and Gabrielle, Pandora and Arjun, but of course, Marius and Armand are just constantly saying stuff like this (in The Vampire Armand):
“Good night, my young love, my child love, my son.”
Some maker/fledgling relationships exist to facilitate either a parent/child or a romantic relationship on another vampire's behalf. Because makers and fledglings can't read each other's minds, there are occasions in the books where a vampire makes a fledgling for another vampire to allow that telepathic bond to continue, or because the other vampire can't, or won't, turn a mortal they love themselves.
Whether the maker and fledgling have a relationship after that depends on who the maker is. Marius is the character who ends up being a "proxy" maker the most in the series, and we don't see much about his relationships with Benji, Sybelle, or Viktor. We do get some insight about Lestat and Mona, who do have more of a relationship where he serves as her mentor/father figure in Blood Canticle:
“Oh, you miserable girl!” I said, deliberately gnashing my teeth. I received her in my embrace, sweet bundle of panting limbs. “You intolerable witch. You wicked undisciplined Blood Child. You contemptible pupil. You worsling, you rebellious and obstinate fledgling.”
“I adore you with my whole soul, you’re my creator, my mentor, my guardian, I love you,” she cried. “You have to forgive me!”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “But I will."
Some of the more unique maker/fledgling relationships come up when the maker and fledgling have animosity between them. Sometimes, like with Louis and Lestat, this animosity is primarily because of the act of one turning the other into a vampire, and Armand believes all fledglings will eventually feel this way about their makers. Others have resentment between them just because of how their relationships have gone on over time, whether they operate like ex-partners, absent parents, etc.
Some makers turn their fledglings either to achieve an end, or just out of pure possessiveness. Akasha, turning mortals to serve in her army, is a great example, and most of her fledglings don't have a lot of love for her. Rhosh in Prince Lestat:
Well, he had scant affection for Akasha, who’d been a raving tyrant by the time he’d been dragged into her presence and forced to drink from the Sacred Fount and pledge his eternal fidelity. Icy merciless goddess.
The most interesting one to me is between Petronia and Quinn, who is turned against his will and pretty brutally, in Blackwood Farm. Quinn claims to hate Petronia, and she has very complex motives for turning him.
‘Want you to love me?’ she repeated my question. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I wanted you to love me for a while. Maybe I want it still. How do I know what I want? If ever I knew, I might have been content. But why do I tell such lies? Or more to the point, why do I believe them? I wanted you thus from the very first moment I saw you. I marked you for myself. And only for this night or a handful of nights after."
And finally, the bond gets especially tricky between a fledgling and their maker who has died. Whether or not the vampire and the fledgling know each other well before the fledgling is made, the act of turning or being turned is very intensely intimate, and you come to know a lot about the other person. As vampires, that intimacy is sometimes even more of a tie because they are such outcasts and there are so few of them. The Vampire Lestat, of course, has multiple major storylines about dead (or perceived to be dead) makers and how that affects their fledglings, but, of course, I'll pull a quote about Magnus and Lestat:
This tormented me. I wished the words weren’t there, and my longing for Magnus, my helplessness, threatened to close in on me. I hated him for leaving me! And it struck me with full ironic force that I’d felt love for him before he’d leapt into the fire. I’d felt love for him when I saw the red garments.
Do devils love each other? Do they walk arm in arm in hell saying, “Ah, you are my friend, how I love you,” things like that to each other? It was a rather detached intellectual question I was asking, as I did not believe in hell. But it was a matter of a concept of evil, wasn’t it? All creatures in hell are supposed to hate one another, as all the saved hate the damned, without reservation.
There are as many answers to "what is the relationship between a maker and their fledgling" as there are makers and fledglings in the series, but hopefully this is a useful overview!
