Yes, I did get your ask, but I have decided not to answer it. I still haven’t finished PLROA bc of reasons, but bc I still don’t entirely accept PL as canon, I will just post to the fandom to answer, momentarily.

Re: Whether our gang of vampires are a formal coven, and what that means, and how welcoming they are of eachother and how welcoming they are towards the as-yet unknown vampires? There is alot of welcoming in PL and PLROA towards new and unknown vampires. They all seem to want to be together. What do we really know of the covens of old? The Children of Darkness were a coven, with branches in different locations, that all served (probably) a Dark Pope of some kind. Or maybe it was a democracy? We don’t really know. We know that they had laws, rites, and a sense of purpose. They had common goals. 

What is a coven?: With people, there is wide variation in what constitutes the structure of witch covens. Vampires are not people. I don’t know that I would call the Children of Darkness a “cult” even, I feel like it was more like the wolf packs that occur in the wild. More organized because the vampires had communication, written texts, and more goals than simply survival, but I would think there would have to be a major amount of inhuman element(s) to it all.

Just discussing the dividing up of vampires into covens is a delicate issue bc it deals with the exclusivity of vampires being already set apart from society as a whole, and then this whole push in the recent books to gather them up into a *~Tribe~* so that they no longer have to be wandering lost souls and/or forming their own small covens. It’s 2017, and according to canon, they’ve gathered, they’ve chosen a LEADER. They have the beginnings of a community to share their knowledge/gifts/news, they have the beginnings of a justice system, for the airing of grievances. They have court performances for entertainment! It feels like we have the United Vampires of the World ™ or something. 

*~Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.~*

[^This gif is from the ‘91 movie ‘Hook’** in which we have a tribe of Lost Boys (it’s no mere coincidence that there’s also a vampire movie called ‘the Lost Boys,’) with a leader they elect, who reluctantly takes on that role. It’s kinda like Lestat accepting leadership of the vampires of the world even though, yes, the power and camaraderie is nice, does he really want to sacrifice so much of his own nightly freedom for it? ‘Hook’’s Peter Pan doesn’t want to stay in Neverland despite all the benefits, so he delegates leadership before he goes back to Real Life.]

So, the Tribe concept, well, it’s clear to me that it’s something many fans really enjoy, and I enjoy it as AU fanfic. Even if noone else enjoyed it but AR herself, it falls under #Live and Let Live ^______^ IDK what the breakdown is within the Tribe itself, but from my reading, it feels nebulous and amorphous, most of the vampires (those in good standing in the Tribe) are basically invited to come and go as they please from one coven house to another all over the world.

TL;DR: So many VC relationships, both platonic and romantic, are up to the individual reader’s interpretation, and how much the individual reader projects their own imagination onto it, that’s where groupings of any kind are formed.  

**More comparisons between VC and Peter Pan could be made, especially w/ this adaptation, but that’s for another blogger and/or another time.