Vanessa — The Family Samira Was Supposed to Obey

Vanessa — The Family Samira Was Supposed to Obey Vanessa hears Samira talking about a future for vampires and seems mostly annoyed that she's still talking. She's old enough to have watched empires rise and fall. She has food, companions, and no obvious reason to change the arrangement. As far as she's concerned, Samira's big ideas are a young vampire's problem. That attitude is all over their history in Vampires: The Eternal. Vanessa is part of the Black Death, the group Blaine belongs to when he finds Samira dying of plague. She made Blaine into a vampire, and when he brings Samira into their lives, she has to watch his attention shift toward somebody else. The way she uses that family connection is what stands out to me. Blaine is her progeny. Samira is his. Vanessa treats that chain as a reason Samira should know her place, even after centuries have passed. Growing older doesn't seem to buy you much independence when the person above you is going to keep being older forever. In Spain in 1680, Samira wants to cross into the New World and build something bigger. Vanessa rejects the whole idea that vampires need a destiny. They exist. They feed. What else does Samira think she's entitled to? When the argument gets ugly, Blaine stays with Vanessa and the group while Samira leaves. By the time they meet again in the present, that hierarchy doesn't match what Samira has built. She's the one with the castle, the followers, the magical infrastructure, and the ambitions. Vanessa gets to see people being delivered for the vampires to feed on without the inconvenience of going out to hunt them. And she likes what she sees enough to decide she should own it. That's the part I find funny in a nasty way. She has spent all this time dismissing Samira's ideas, but once the results are sitting in front of her, she's quite happy to take them. She plots with Mund, attacks Samira, and makes it clear that taking the castle is only part of what she wants. She wants Samira reduced to something she can control. Vanessa nearly kills her. Blaine intervenes, then tries to get Samira to forgive her because of the blood they share. It doesn't work. Samira stakes Vanessa, and the older vampire dies in the castle she meant to steal. I wouldn't turn that into a victory for a better kind of ruler. Samira is monstrous too. But Vanessa gives her a very personal enemy: somebody who thinks having been there first should entitle her to the person, the power, and everything that person builds afterward. In a family that can keep the same grudges alive for centuries, that's a miserable arrangement to be born into. Source: Vampires: The Eternal #1–3.