🪐 — musecraft.

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* note — muses are sorted first by category, then alphabetically by first name.

🪐 — 𝐇𝐎𝐑𝐑𝐎𝐑 : — lottie matthews ( yellowjackets ) — nancy downs ( the craft ) — sarah fier ( fear street )

🪐 — 𝐕𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐈𝐑𝐄𝐒 : — carlisle cullen ( twilight ) — gabrielle de lioncourt ( interview with the vampire ) — louis de pointe du lac ( interview with the vampire ) — madeleine eparvier ( interview with the vampire ) — nadja of antipaxos ( what we do in the shadows )

🪐 — 𝐏𝐈𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐘 : — calypso "tia dalma" ( pirates of the caribbean ) — izzy hands ( our flag means death ) — stede bonnet ( our flag means death )

ok so. walk with me here. the auction is clearly set after the 2025 lestat tour, because it includes : "the recorded omniscent history of the events of the 2025 album & supporting tour, and the consequential global catastrophes that sprung from said album and tour." so. some BIG shit goes down.

later on in the voiceover that seems to be of this very recording, lestat references "the attempted extermination of the Y chromosome" and a "patricidal queen." that's akasha. like it could not be more obvious. she's already been cast. we know she's coming. so the auction, & therefore the voiceover, is happening after akasha.

in the books, lestat's music awoke akasha from her slumber, & she decided that she wanted to kill 99% of men on earth. just not lestat; he's her extra special guy who gets to live so he can be her sex slave king. with me so far ?

so first, as an aside, i think that the scene when lestat's music starts causing rapture in his band mates & they all started playing well together & put his audience in a trance, that's when akasha woke up. that was her power making everyone follow him.

but now onto the main part of the theory. lestat has this line when gabrielle appears :

but why. would that be ? why would people think of gabrielle first thing upon thinking of lestat ? not louis ? not the book ? not the band or the tour ? gabby ??? WHY ???

well my guess is that. gabrielle has something to do with akasha. either she is working with akasha & is totally fine with killing all men except lestat (not my preference for her character). OR. & this is what i want to see. gabrielle will end up being the one to kill akasha & take her place as queen of the damned.

in the books, akasha spends most of the timeline as a 'living statue.' nearly immobile, stone. still alive, but not like. moving around. it's like something deeper than a deep sleep. & when akasha is killed, the vampire who drinks her last drop becomes a living statue, the new queen mother vampire. in the books, it is a vampire named maharet. to my knowledge, this character has not been cast as of now.

if akasha came back & started killing men like crazy & also kidnapped lestat, i believe gabrielle would want to protect him. this is why she came back in the books, after all : to protect him from akasha when she heard the queen awaken & come for him. so if gabrielle ends up being the one to kill akasha. & then is now (as of the time of the voiceover) a living statue & the new queen mother of all vampires. well. that's certainly the first thing most vampires would think of when lestat's name came up. that he is The Mother's Son, and The Mother's Maker.

& idk there would be something so poetic & fascinating about gabs — who never wanted to be a mother at all — ultimately giving up her freedom to save her son & becoming The Mother of all vampires, the Queen of the Damned.

** obligatory disclaimer that this is my interpretation & it relates to my portrayal only. i think there are several different valid readings of gabrielle's gender, & i am not writing this post in an attempt to disprove any particular label or argue against any particular interpretation. i'm not necessarily always speaking to the canon. there's room for many good faith takes & this is just mine, be cool to each other, etc etc.

ok ! let's get into it !

everyone who has read the books or even encountered any gabrielle lore in the wild likely knows about the ample in-text evidence of gabrielle being some form of gender nonconforming. there's the infamous scene of intense gender dysphoria triggered by her hair regrowing in her sleep after she had cut it short. but there is also, choosing the knight's sarcophagus & carrying its sword, the men's clothing she chooses post-turning, even the way lestat explicitly describes her as a man or boy in multiple separate passages. these quotes have been analyzed to death already, so i'm not gonna do that. i think they speak for themselves.

there's just obviously something going on here with her gender. lestat himself even says it outright : after being turned, gabrielle is really, categorically, Not A Woman.

& i think it's important to remember that gabby doesn't have to be a Man to be trans ; she just has to not be a woman. & to me, the text pretty unambiguously supports that reading. so. she's trans. yay ! ok, post over, everybody go home, i guess.

but no, i actually am not quite or even close to done. because i think that the simple fact that gabrielle fits the baseline criteria for trans identity doesn't tell us how she personally identifies, nor does it really tell us anything about how she feels, thinks, or conceives of her own gender. so i want to break that down a little farther & interrogate her actual lived experiences, how i understand of her feelings on gender, & how all that affects her personal identity — to whatever extent we can. so, without further adieu . . .

let's talk perceptions + experiences.

in the absence of any direct gabrielle-pov musings specifically on her gender identity, we are forced to examine some other things. i've already linked several examples of lestat thinking of gabrielle as a man or boy after being turned. as i said, i think those speak for themselves. but then armand has this to say in tva ;

Gabrielle, she looks just like him, except she’s a woman, totally a woman, that is, sharper of feature, small-waisted, big-breasted, sweet-eyed in the most unnerving and dishonest fashion, gorgeous in a black ball gown with her hair free, more often dusty, genderless, sheathed in supple leather or belted khaki, a steady walker, and a vampire so cunning and cold that she has forgotten what it ever meant to be human or in pain. Indeed, I think she forgot overnight, if she ever knew it. [...] Gabrielle, low-voiced, unintentionally vicious, glacial, forbidding, ungiving, a wanderer through snowy forests of the far north, a slayer of giant white bears and white tigers, an indifferent legend to untamed tribes, something more akin to a prehistoric reptile than a human. Beautiful, naturally, blond hair in a braid down her back, almost regal in a chocolate-colored leather safari jacket and a small droopy brimmed rain hat, a stalker, a quick killer, a pitiless and seemingly thoughtful but eternally secretive thing. Gabrielle, virtually useless to anyone but herself.

i think this passage is a genuinely incredible description. in it, armand's perception of gabrielle waffles between "totally a woman" to "genderless" in literally the same sentence. then it shifts to something entirely inhuman, likening her not just to a predator but to a prehistoric reptile – but beautiful, still, always ! & this description actually creates a really poignant idea of what i think makes up gabrielle's general perception of her own gender. so please put a mental pin in this, because we'll return to this quote in just a bit.

when we consider experience of gender, obviously, gabrielle's human life was entirely dictated by the expectations of her assigned gender. & it sucked. she hated it. therefore, she hated being a woman — not because of anything inherent to womanhood on its face, but because of pretty much everything that came along with it under patriarchy. from the second-class status it relegated her to, to limits on how she could dress, to restrictions on where she could go & what she could do, all the way through being forced to also be a wife & mother against her will.

in her human life, she sees these gendered expectations as inescapable. she sees no path out of them. she thinks she is doomed to them & one day she will die still bound by them. it makes me consider this incredibly poignant quote from andrea drowkin's feminist manifesto, woman hating ;

"Death is our only remedy. We imagine heaven. There is no suffering there, we say. There is no sex there, we say. We mean, there is no culture there. We mean, there is no gender there. We dream that death will release us from suffering — from guilt, sex, the body. We recognize the body as the source of our suffering. We dream of a death which will mean freedom from it because here on earth, in our bodies, we are fragmented, anguished — either men or women, bound by the very fact of a particularized body to a role which is annihilating, totalitarian, which forbids us any real self-becoming or self-realization."

then she is turned, & all those pesky human rules are suspended. including death. including gender. & gabrielle simply cannot wait to get as far away from all of them as she can.

Post-Transition Presentations & Motivations

consider this a disclaimer that this next bit doesn't have a ton of canon foundation, because we don't see these scenes from gabrielle's perspective. so i'm mostly speaking for my own portrayal here, based on vibes. but my vibe reading is that initially gabrielle takes on masculine clothing because in a patriarchal society, taking on the masculine presentation when she disguises herself as a human allows her to move through the world with greater freedom.

& she does like it. we can't deny or minimize those feelings, because they are present & intense. she is obviously drawn to masculine styles of presentation & dress over the feminine. but i would argue it's rooted in, at least in part, simple utilitarianism. there are obvious & incredibly intense feelings of gender dysphoria at the return of her hair, & there is also some gender euphoria at being able to be perceived as a man by others. but i think the former stems largely from the sudden realization that there is at least one way that she still lacks autonomy over her body, while the latter stems more from the fact that being perceived as a man means being allowed to move through the human world freely, unaccosted & unquestioned, rather than anything inherent to Manhood.

there is also a clear desire for & idolization of male bodies. i will bring up the quote later where she essentially says that lestat is her missing penis. so, like. the penis envy is there. i can't look you in the eye & say in good faith that there is no penis envy happening. there is. the extreme interest & investment in masculine beauty is also there. &, sadly, i think that it is very likely for gabrielle to have a tendency to roundly reject, minimize, & belittle women who easily conform to feminine expectations, uncritically seeing those roles as lesser because she hated doing them so much. i do think this could be classified as a shade of internalized misogyny. so, she certainly has some unlearning to do.

& to speak to this a little more, i do think that gabrielle takes a good while after being turned to realize that men are also bound by the gender binary. from her vantage of extreme violent oppression, she romanticizes what it is like to be a man, & doesn't entirely grasp that — as andrea dworkin pointed out in that last quote — everyone, including cis men, face oppressive gendered expectations in a patriarchal society. even if she had a penis, even if she had been born amab, there is not really any way for any one in any body to escape gender . . . unless you somehow are able to escape everything. all of it.

which brings me, finally, to what i believe to be really central to this, which is : gabby does not really want to participate in gender at all, because she does not want to participate in humanity at all. as armand astutely notices in that quote from earlier, after being turned, gabrielle becomes very animalistic in many ways. he says that she has "forgotten what it ever meant to be human," & likens her to a predator, a hunter, even a thing. we know that in her canon, she leaves human society behind entirely for a century or more, & embraces her sense of self as somewhat of a wild animal. she goes feral in the most literal sense. she entirely abandons all expectations & trappings of humanity & becomes a creature of legend.

& something interesting about that is... gender is not actually like, naturally occurring in the animal world. like, there are female animals. there is obviously sex in the animal kingdom. but there aren't woman animals. lions don't do gender. animals have sex differences, of course, but they don't build up & enforce gendered roles & expectations like humans do. & i think that's what gabrielle wants in her heart. to just... not engage with it. with any of it. & just be seen as the inhuman apex predator she is.

so when she was entirely on her own, she didn't feel any dysphoria, because there was no one to put gendered expectations or assumptions on her. so i think it's not necessarily about feeling inherently "wrong in her body," the way some people may conceptualize being trans. it's more about the treatment, expectations, assumptions that come with her body within a society. it's not necessarily about her body ; it's about facing oppression, risk of violence, & sexism. & honestly... those feelings of discomfort with womanhood as it is defined or experienced under patriarchy is something a lot of afab folks — including cis women — feel. & on that note . . .

Let's Talk About Anne !

it may sound a little odd, but one additional element that i really wanted to consider as i try to get at the heart of gabrielle is actually the real mother here, the architect herself, the freak of all time, anne rice, & specifically her own relationship to her gender.

while rice was never out as any particular label within her lifetime to my knowledge, there are many well-known interviews where she discusses her experience of gender & sexuality. she said said in 2014 that she identified with the gay community, stating :

"I've never really felt any strong gender identity, myself. I've always found gender a bit confusing and I've never been too comfortable with stereotypical female definitions."

and in 2016 ;

"I think I have a gay sensibility and I feel like I’m gay, because I’ve always transcended gender, and I’ve always seen love as transcending gender" and "It’s very hard for me to remember that I have a gender."

then there's the infamous quote from The Roquelaure Reader: A Companion to Anne Rice's Erotica ;

"I see a beautiful gay man in the park and I say, “That man has my body”. [...] I felt like a gay man in a woman’s body. [...] I knew when I was young, about twenty-four, that I wished I was a gay man. That was a common fantasy of mine. I felt that the physical response I had to men must mean I’m like a gay man. I identified with the way gay men talked about other men. I felt like an imposter as a woman."

& finally, while she has stated that her husband was a major inspiration for lestat, she also wrote in 2016 ;

"I, myself, identify completely with Lestat. I can say Lestat is my other self, he's my male self. He and I travel together. He does the things I wish I could do, but can't."

this, in my mind, rings as really strangely similar in content to the infamous quote from tvl that reads ;

[Gabrielle] spoke in an almost eerie way of my being a secret part of her anatomy, of my being the organ for her which women do not really have. “You are the man in me,” she said.

especially when combined with this quote from later on, also in tvl, but after gabrielle is turned, when she says ;

“I can do the things now that you used to do. I could fight those wolves on my own..."

so. what are we to make of this. well, maybe nothing. it could be nothing. or... it could be that gabrielle's experience with gender is actually very close to rice's own — possibly even a little too close for rice's own comfort.

anne rice does not like gabrielle. that's why she's not in the books much. & this isn't me speculating. this is something that rice has said herself at least twice. & while i am certainly not here to make any claims about rice's personal identity, i suspect that her feelings of distaste towards gabrielle may be a point of discomfort for her because she embodies some things that rice sees within herself — most notably, in my opinion 1. her specific projection of the self onto lestat & 2. her general discomfort with being afab / a woman.

for those reasons, i think that these quotes from rice about herself can reasonably be taken to offer a bit more insight about how gabrielle feels, too. i'm not saying gabrielle feels exactly the same as rice does, of course, but i do think it's fair to assume that rice's experience of gender absolutely influenced gabrielle's, whether consciously on rice's part or not.

conclusions !?!?

so ! that was kinda a lot. many words were said. but what do we actually think tho.

well. after taking what we're given from the canon, a bit of inspo of anne's own shared experience of gender, & some feminist theory-based-vibes, i think that it's safe to say that gabrielle is definitely trans. even trans-masc. i would also make an argument for her most accurate label‚ if she cared to have one, being agender.

when dealing with others, she still realistically knows they will assume a gender when they look at her — & likely that will affect their treatment & perception of her. so as long as she is engaging with society, she will continue to stack the deck & dress in a manner that reflects masculinity. & in that way, genderfluid also feels like a realistic reflection of her experience when operating within society, whether human or vampire. all of these labels are accurate. & all of these terms also fall under the trans + nonbinary umbrella. so... she's genuinely a bit of everything. she defies categorization. she's all of it & none of it at the same time.

but ! crucially, she does not have the kind of language to communicate these complex feelings. she's not been keeping up with the field of gender studies. while she is a thoughtful & intelligent person, i don't think that gabrielle entirely understands the current conception of sex & gender being separate things. she is not 100% woke, i fear. she does not totally get our notions of what it means to be trans, at least not just yet. so i don't know if she would freely apply these labels to herself even if she did know them, accurate or not. & frankly, she's not highly motivated to parse it all out. her preference is not to understand it all necessarily, but to simply remove herself from it, if she can. in her mind, she's not a human any more, so she shouldn't have to do gender at all anymore if she doesn't want to. & she doesn't.

when it comes to terms & pronouns, i think gabrielle is much more concerned with how she is perceived, how she is treated because of how she is perceived, & how she feels inside than the language that others use to describe her. to that end, she expects others to use feminine pronouns for her, but appreciates when she is surprised with masculine ones, & accepts any. i think she would also get a genuine kick of euphoria out of being called it / its. she's just a creature ! but gabrielle would likely never correct someone on the pronouns they used for her, no matter what they were. she certainly wouldn't argue if someone called her a woman, but she definitely enjoys when she is described in masculine terms, too.

& to add one small note of her attraction, i definitely think that gabrielle tends to be more attracted to masculinity than femininity, & taking some notes from rice, i believe that gabrielle conceptualizes the way she experiences her attraction is masculine in perspective, too — that she finds men attractive specifically as another man might. she can certainly be attracted to women, as well — even feminine presenting ones. but i think due to her projection onto lestat & her discomfort / trauma surrounding sexuality as she experienced it as a mortal woman, a lot of her attraction & personal perceptions of beauty are wrapped up in the masculine perspective, & she tries to distance herself from what she perceives to be "feminine" experiences of sex. i also definitely think she is some shade of aromantic, or at least grey-romantic. she is interested in sex, but she is never really going to be romance focused, & falling in love — while not impossible — does not come naturally to her.

in terms of modern day, her presentation tends to be largely utilitarian, which in our perceptions tends to lean quite masculine, but is actually fairly androgynous. think indiana jones, or laura dern in jurassic park. some evenings she cuts her hair & burns the trimmings upon rising, others she simply braids it & tucks it back. depends on how she is feeling what she plans to do that day. this fanmade moodboard is a pretty close representation of how i imagine her visual vibe. there will be absolutely no push-up bras or body-con dresses for her, thank youuuu. & high femme ? literally never. sorryyyyyyyy.

tldr oh my god ;

as my parting thought, i would just reiterate that gabrielle truly feels most in alignment with herself when she is entirely removed from expectations of gender — & indeed, all human-created social systems — to the greatest extent possible. she really doesn't want to do any of that anymore. please don't make her.

but if you did make her, these are a few of the labels that i feel would be accurate : - agender - gender fluid - trans / trans-masc - nonbinary - aromantic / grey-romantic - androsexual - pansexual