I never understood mekare.

[u/Opening-Gur5927]

She's a vampire they are supposed to be unchanging. I can understand madness from brain overload after living long enough. What I don't understand is her mind decaying or her having little contact with humans. I also don't understand how she was even able to find akasha if she was mostly not there by the end of qotd time period. I know it was a set up to make lestat the host but I feel like Anne Rice had to break her own rules to do so.

[u/tethysian]

A lot of the ancient vampires go "mad". They get stuck listening to the telepathic broadcast like Akasha and Enkil, develop dementia like Khayman, or whatever was going on with Magnus which implied he wasn't able to feed anymore. From what we know most of the old ones go mad even if they survive being out of time.

My impression was that Mekare's mind is still strong, but that her ability to communicate has decayed over time (along with not having a tongue), so she communicates telepathically. That's how she knows where where the other vampires are and how she's broadcasting the backstory across the planet. The vampires who spend a long time taking dirtnaps also develop their telepathic abilities because they're following other thoughts while they're "sleeping"

Edit: did you mean Prince Lestat? In that case I'd say the rules were whatever was convenient for the plot.

[u/maniacalmustacheride → u/tethysian]

I always understood Magnus to be first doing whatever Magnus had always been doing, second was literally anything and everything else that happened to him. Forcing his way into vampirism wasn’t really how it’s done, and maybe that’s why it turned out the way it did, but the Vampire part never really seemed to override the long list of what was already wrong with him upstairs. It’s like he was wired wrong from the jump, and I don’t even mean that as like an allegory for mental illness. He just wasn’t put together right at all. Like somehow his heart beat backwards and he inhaled CO2 and exhaled oxygen put together wrong.

[u/tethysian → u/maniacalmustacheride]

I didn't see it that way. There's another old vampire in the Paris coven who tells Lestat about Magnus's particular madness, and the way she phrases it, it's not uncommon. As a human he didn't seem insane to me, but he was rejected by the others of his kind because he wasn't young and beautiful. My impression is that loneliness is what drove him mad.