67 pages • 2-hour read
Court of the Vampire Queen
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Themes
Content Warning: This section discusses sexual content, cursing, physical abuse, emotional abuse, child abuse, sexual assault, substance use, graphic violence, death, gender discrimination, and mental illness.
The Power of Consent and Choice
Mina’s father abused her and maintained power over her by taking away her choices. Malachi is the first one to care about Mina’s consent. Cornelius’s power of compulsion can be contrasted with Mina’s power to compel her sexual partners as a seraph. Furthermore, Mina and her partners’ choosing one another expands their magical powers. Across the novel’s three sections, consent is not just a prerequisite for sex but a moral principle that determines who is trustworthy, who is monstrous, and what kinds of bonds are worth sustaining.
At the beginning of the omnibus, Cornelius sends Mina to Malachi as a sacrifice; it is not Mina’s choice. She is “a pawn in other people’s power games, destined to be moved from one side of the board to the other without any agency of my own” (63). Robert’s metaphor compares a human with an inanimate object to show how Mina’s father deprives her of agency. However, Malachi doesn’t immediately take Mina’s virginity. He feeds from her and gives her pleasure with sexual caresses and kisses. However, he will only penetrate her if she asks nicely while he isn’t biting her. She must consent to their sexual acts. Deciding to be with Malachi and Wolf sexually “might be the first fucking choice [Mina’s] ever made” (78). Consent is a cornerstone of her relationship with Malachi and Wolf.
Malachi repeatedly asks for consent: for the same sexual act and different sexual acts. Mina thinks:
Does he understand by constantly putting this in my hands, he’s stripping me of the ability to fully let go? I can’t pretend I’m just a butterfly being swept along before a gale-force wind, praying that it doesn’t rip me to pieces. It’s so much easier when you don’t have a choice, and Malachi insists on giving me one, over and over again. I kind of hate him for it. I kind of love him for it, too (140).
Mina is not used to being given a choice, and Malachi demands that Mina consent. Here, Mina is contrasted with a butterfly that doesn’t have agency. She is a subject, not an object, to Malachi. Once she releases the feeling that she’s not allowed to make choices, Mina loves Malachi for always checking in with her and saying they can stop at any time if she changes her mind. The passage also acknowledges that choice can feel burdensome for a survivor—having to name what she wants forces Mina to confront her own desires and fears instead of disappearing into passivity.
After Mina begins to value being able to make her own choices, her powers as a seraph manifest, including the ability to compel her lovers. She doesn’t want to use this power like Cornelius used his compulsion. She “never wanted to tie these vampires to [her], not in a way that defies their free will” (156). Mina not only cares about being asked for her consent, but also cares about obtaining the consent of her lovers. However, she stumbles along the way and compels Wolf to tell her how to summon Azazel so she can free her men from Cornelius’s imprisonment. She believes she should be the one to make the choice of bargaining with Azazel or not. However, she regrets her actions, telling Wolf, “I love all of you. I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want to take your choices away. I shouldn’t have compelled you” (422). Cornelius would never apologize for compulsion. Mina uses her powers more responsibly than her father.
Robert’s most powerful argument for consent is when all members of Mina’s polycule choose to be one unit. At first, they have group sex in order to free Malachi from the blood ward. The second time they all have group sex, they are “choosing each other” (272). This consent leads to them being able to share bloodline magics. Everyone can use all three powers: fire, shapeshifting, and fire. Rylan posits that “the bond responded to that willingness” (282). Consent is magical, Robert argues. The narrative demonstrates this by making enthusiastic agreement the condition for expanded, communal power. Only when every partner actively opts in does the bond stabilize and become a shared resource instead of a constraint.
By tracing Mina’s journey from coerced pawn to active chooser, the text links bodily autonomy to ethical magic, sustainable relationships, and even political authority. Robert uses Malachi’s insistence on consent, Mina’s discomfort with her own compulsion, and the magically rewarded act of choosing each other to suggest that genuine power is grounded in mutual, ongoing choice rather than domination. Within the logic of the story, consent is also what keeps both love and power from becoming abusive.
Reimagining Romance Beyond Monogamy
Robert also argues in favor of polyamory with the relationship between Mina and her three vampire men. Mina learns that Malachi is polyamorous before he takes her virginity. She isn’t jealous of his history with other men or that he continues to have sex with those men; rather, she loves him being with other men. She wasn’t raised to be prejudiced against polyamory:
Everyone is obviously into this and it’s not like vampire culture is overly monogamous. That whole mates-for-life thing is nice in theory, but when your life spans centuries, even the most intense love can shift and change. I’ve noticed partner hopping just from watching the way the vampires in my father’s colony operate. There’s no reason to think this is abnormal (102).
In Robert’s supernatural world, there isn’t a stigma against polyamory. The main characters have a complicated, but fulfilling, non-monogamous relationship. Instead of presenting nonmonogamy as a temporary deviation from a monogamous ideal, the text treats polyamory as a stable structure that can support intimacy, loyalty, and long-term planning.
Rylan has a harder time accepting Malachi is polyamorous, but by the end of Part 2, he embraces it. He comes to believe that “‘It’s not a bad thing to have an abundance of love.’ Love. Love” (265). The word love echoes in Mina’s mind after Rylan decides to be with Malachi and the rest of the polycule. Malachi is everyone’s primary partner: “he’s truly the one who holds [their] little foursome together” (175). However, members of the polycule have sex in various combinations or groups. They don’t only sleep with Malachi, or with the others, but only when Malachi is involved. Mina “loves that [her] men love each other. [She] wouldn’t have it any other way” (402). They are free to enjoy each other as they wish, per both Malachi and Mina.
Romance in the polycule includes possessiveness and protectiveness. Not only does Mina refer to Malachi, Wolf, and Rylan as “my men” (307), with the possessive pronoun and plural noun, but she also belongs to them. Malachi says, “You’re ours as much as we’re yours” (269). They all share the power of possession. Malachi is the most protective of Mina, but she is fiercely protective of all three of her lovers: She “would commit unforgivable acts to keep [her] men with [her] and safe” (364). Her morality revolves around keeping her loved ones together and unharmed. This mutual possessiveness is not framed as ownership that restricts partners’ options; instead, it signifies a collective commitment to one another’s safety and emotional security within the group.
Love in the polycule also includes expanding their family. The men are unconcerned about whose sperm inseminates Mina’s eggs. The “baby is [theirs]. All of [theirs]. The genetics and powers matter little” (445). All three men and Mina are equal parents, and they all claim their offspring. Mina imagines “a future with several children, with a family that’s built on love and respect instead of fear and threats. [She has] a chance at that future with Malachi and Rylan and Wolf” (445). In the final chapter, set four years later, this future comes true. Mina has three children, and everyone lives together safely in the compound. By portraying parenting as a shared, non-hierarchical project, Robert extends polyamory from erotic relationships into a broader model of chosen kinship and communal caregiving.
Robert argues that polyamory not only benefits the lovers involved but also be provides a good family structure for raising children. Mina and her men function as a positive representation for real-life polycules. Within the logic of the novel, their nonmonogamous bond is what makes it possible to overthrow Cornelius, protect the compound, and give their children a stable home; monogamy is not demonized, but it is not treated as the only or most effective way to build enduring love. The text ultimately imagines polyamorous romance as capacious enough to hold desire, loyalty, co-parenting, and political partnership at once.
Overcoming Trauma and Discovering the Self
Cornelius’s abuse causes Mina to doubt herself and everyone around her. It also inspires her to be a better person than her father. Mina is able to defeat her father after she accepts her true self. Her trajectory from captive to ruling queen maps a classic trauma narrative—moving from chronic hypervigilance and self-doubt to integrated identity and chosen responsibility—but filtered through the language of paranormal romance and erotic power exchange.
The trauma that Cornelius dealt with ranged from compulsion and psychological abuse to physical abuse, such as withholding food. Mina preferred the physical trauma:
Hurt is such a strange concept. I was a child when I realized that physical hurt is far preferable to the pain someone can cause with their words, with their willingness to lock me away and deprive me of their attention. Compared to that, being beaten is almost a relief. At least I know that pain will fade (205).
Being raised in these conditions caused Mina to believe she would never develop magical powers or experience pleasure, intimacy, and connection. Her mind, sense of self, and perceptions of others were eroded by Cornelius’s abuse. He taught her that “Everyone is the enemy” (51) because trusting someone would help her escape him. For instance, Mina doubts Malachi’s intentions for a while because of her trauma, even though he is never hostile towards her like Wolf and Rylan are initially. Robert uses Mina’s suspicion and hyper-awareness of danger to depict how abuse shapes cognition as much as it shapes the body; learning to trust her partners is therefore part of her healing, not a simple romantic subplot.
In addition to distrusting others, Mina distrusts herself. Being traumatized kept her in a state where she had to focus on survival, and she couldn’t develop herself in any way. She felt like “letting in that old hope, the fragile belief that maybe I am special…It’s too dangerous” (135). Deep down, she senses that she is different (a seraph), but doubts her intuition. She has to accept her new powers to confront and kill Cornelius. The most important of these powers is being able to use the magical gifts of her partners. Mina thinks, “The only path to peace is through power, and it means taking my father’s place as head of the compound…and head of the bloodline. Ironic, that. I hold three sets of bloodline powers inside me, but none of them were passed to me by my father” (331). Mina uses Rylan’s shapeshifting magic and Malachi’s fire magic to defeat Cornelius. Her bond with her lovers and their choosing to be a polycule is how she gets revenge; she prevents Cornelius from traumatizing anyone ever again. The text suggests that healing does not mean rejecting power altogether; instead, Mina learns to inhabit power differently from her father, grounding it in consent and mutual protection rather than fear.
At the end of the novel, Mina’s goal is to rule more ethically than Cornelius. She thinks, “unlike my father, though, I won’t abuse my power over them. I fully intend to be a queen they’ll grow to love over time, or at least respect” (463). She doesn’t plan to starve them or torture her subjects and family like Cornelius. Four years after Cornelius’s death, Mina has fully come into herself. She is a lover and a mother, as well as a strong and beloved queen. Roberts uses Mina’s journey to argue that people in the real world who have been traumatized can find themselves and love. Small details—such as Mina finally being able to call the compound a home, or her scars disappearing while her memories remain—underscore that recovery is ongoing. Her erotic, magical, and political selves are no longer in conflict. She can be a seraph, a partner, a mother, and a ruler without reproducing the harm she endured.
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