I was just wondering, do some of you need to be reminded that vampires are fictional characters? A fictional character can be defined in any manner the writer desires, as long as the reader is entertained. In fiction, you can always (and should) break the rules, you just have to make sure the reader knows what you're doing and why.
I'm still trying to figure out how George Martin gets away with it then? If all this writing about underage sex is so terrible. His books are fulll of underage sex, rape and incest.
Well, it's not that writing about bad things is bad itself. Hell, half of the time, those are the best stories because there's lots of drama to be found there. Problem is, some writers may write about, say, rape, without doing enough research about the kind of feelings and mental standpoints that can be a product of such a horrible event. At that point, a lot of readers may find that the piece of offensive because the author didn't correctly represent the horrors of rape, despite the piece and all characters and all situations therein being totally fictional. Another problem may be due to lack of information conveyed. Some writers see something like underage sex as bad, don't want to misrepresent it, and therefore leave out a lot of important information regarding it when it comes to the creation of the story. So now you've got two underage characters that had sex, and suddenly bad things are happening and there's bad feelings because there was little else conveyed about the drama and tension save that underage sex is portrayed as bad and these two characters had it. Writers may use dramatic kinds of drama like this expecting tension to naturally flow from the event because it seems expected.
