Believe it or not, there are quite a few books/movies which have female vampires. Except there's one main difference. Almost every female vampire story I've ever heard of had real vampires. Remember back in the days of Dracula or Blade, when vampires were vampires, and not fairies? And humans were food, not romance partners? Make no mistake, 'vampire' vampires make quite the supernatural predator, and can be very interesting when used correctly. Fairy vampires on the other hand...
Owww I remember those days, they were good. But now that we are stuck with fairer vampires can’t we at least have some female ones, to switch up the lame vampire genre.
If she really loves the guy, and he loves her, then it doesn't matter at all how long they wait. But if they are pseudo-christians like a lot of people are, then maybe 2-3 months? If they are Christians, then until marriage. If the guy doesn't want to get busted for being a pedophile, BPD, 100+ year old man... then yeah not at all. You say that the common tropes in vampire stories bug you, yet your story is absolutely riddled with cliches. You also do not understand Borderline Personality Disorder at all. I'll quote from the DSMIV http://www.borderlinepersonalitytoday.com/main/dsmiv.htm "The impairment from the disorder and the risk of suicide are greatest in the young-adult years and gradually wane with advancing age" This means that it is absolutely impossible for your 100+ year old pedophile vampire to have BPD as well.
Incorrect; there is a four year close in age exception in Pennsylvania, so 18 - 15 is completely doable. It might be a misdemeanor, though this is inconsistent. Most US states have close in age exception laws.
I fail to see the problem with what he is doing. It is a story about a VAMPIRE. Vampires are not consumers of his/her writing, so we don't have to worry about them getting in a consensual relationship with a girl who is 100+ years younger than them. I appreciate that you are concerned that some simple minded, impressionable 100+ year old vampires may decide to have sex with an underage girl. Thank you. Freedom of speech does not require you taking any responsibility for the results of your expression. If it did, then there wouldn't BE a freedom of speech. If you have to take responsibility for every impressionable, ignorant, simpleton who consumes or hears any type of speech, then you wouldn't be able to print or say anything.
Apologies if I'm interpreting your post incorrectly, but I think he refers to the fact that the vampire is thought to be an 18 year old human in a relationship with a 15 year old, in which a sexual relationship is illegal in many places. And 18 year old humans are, in fact, possible consumers.
This is a very slippery slope. The vampire looks like he's eighteen, so the prosecutor says, "I THINK you're eighteen, so IF I'm right, it's illegal for you to have sex with this girl, so I will MAYBE charge you with POSSIBLE statutory rape, depending on whether or not you ARE eighteen ..."
Again, you're missing the point and you know it. The illegality is less important than the morality issue in the readers' perception. And I agree with whoever said this story is riddled with vampire cliches. It's buffy meets twilight and the vampire lore is straight out if Anne Rice (who does not permit fanfiction, by the way)
People are now getting silly and being obtuse. It's not about the legality or whether he really is an 18 year old boy or a 100 year old vampire, its about the moral rammifications of sex between an underage girl and an older partner, and moreover the connotation of sexual abuse inherent in an underage girl being manipulated and pressured into sex by an older boy, who is legally an adult. And its not about moral responsibility as much as commercial appeal. Publishers will be wary. They may ask you to change her age. And why can't she be 17 anyway?
Okay, I'm just going to go out on a whim here, and try to ignore all the answers that are up here. The original question was how long they should wait to have sex. Legal issues, personality stuff, and all the other mumbo jumbo aside... Make it whenever it feels right for the story. Maybe they have a little fling in the beginning because they think they're "head over heels in love," and its a mistake. Or maybe they finally click and decide to go for it. In a story, it shouldn't matter about the legal or moral issues unless the police or someone else are part of the plot line. There are many stories out there that have murderers in them (at least, what would legally be murder) as the protagonist. Why are they killing? Because whoever/whatever they killed was evil. But, we (and the author) put the legal issues aside, because the story works without it. If you decide to get the police involved because they found out the two characters had sex, then you consider the laws in whatever state/country they're in. If you aren't planning on that being part of the plot line, don't worry about it. Its YOUR story, you don't have to put the police in if it isn't what you planned. Hope that helps with your original question.
I'd like to remind EVERYONE that the OP didn't ask whether we liked the scenario or not or whether it was legal. We were asked how long the characters would date before they had sex. Like most people, I would think 2-3 months would be reasonable. That feels like about an eternity in the teen world, so she might convince herself after that long that it was true love.
Yes, I keep reiterating and reiterating until I am blue in the face, it is NOT the legality that matters... but I shant repeat my advice again since it has obviously fallen on deaf ears. The question as to 'how long is long enough' or 'how soon without seeming like a slut' produces answers similar to any 'how long is a piece of string' type question. It depends on how you write it, so the original question is kind of redundant.
I feel sad when I think that laws can lead to people not writing about a loving action (like two young people making love for the first time) and yet, even though we have plenty of laws against murder, corruption etc, there are tons and tons of books which describe that and nobody bats an eyelid. There are even books, many of them, where a child becomes a warrior or a wizard of some kind, and goes around killing people (bad guys of course) but it is still murder! And yet, somehow, two teenagers making love is unacceptable, and child killers aren't Anyway, I agree with everyone who said it's individual. I don't know many 15 year old girls who would actually go and have sex, they might think about it, want it, abut in the end, most of them don't quite feel ready. But I have had one friend who did, so there are always exceptions, you just need to get the character right.
Its one of those things that has confused many over the years. Myself included. Personally I wouldn't bat an eye at it. That is if the guy was actually 18. My problem is... exactly what would a hundred or so year old guy see in a 15 year old? Other then she is beautiful.
@Unit7: I agree. I write vampire fiction too, and I am not a fan of the whole Twilight approach, it's rather banal and it doesn't work for me on any level. To me, a vampire is an adult regardless of what they look like, if they are interested in adolescents, then they are no different from any other old perv, just because they look 18 is irrelevant. So while I have no issues with false morality that is embedded in some of the laws, this kind of pairing doesn't make sense unless it's portrayed as an older man taking advantage of a young girl. But that's just me, millions of teenagers will testify that the Twilight approach works perfectly for them, so who am I to complain
I think you guys are missing the fact that the vampire is a VILLAIN in this story. Read what the OP says: the protagonist is the vampire's enemy. So in all likelihood, the relationship doesn't represent true love at all, just lust on the part of the vampire and naivety on the part of the girl. I would think any creepiness about the ages would only help the writer present a convincing villain. Not, of course, that it matters since it's not my story and my opinion was not asked. I maintain that a few months is reasonable for a novel character, even if most 15 year olds wouldn't do this in real life. It's a book. You don't have all the time in the world. And there's always a bit more sex in books and movies than in real life.
As far as the whole waiting thing, there's no clear answer until we know a lot about your characters. There are a lot of factors that go into how people view sex or sexuality in general. And, even then, most of that information won't matter much once your characters sleep together and we see their reaction. If the general reaction of the characters having sex was good, then they were ready for it. The point of it all is to make it believable, not necessarily accurate. Note that it should be as accurate as you can make it, but with something like this, artistic license will take you far.
Because I'm deconstructing them. Deconstruction of a trope means you have to have the trope in your story, but portray it more realistically than it usually is portrayed. I'm taking a character similar to Edward and showing exactly why you do not want a romantic partner like that. Besides, you seem to think my story is a vampire romance story. It's not that at all. The main character is the best friend (or pretends to be, since she's a loner at heart but fakes friendship to seem normal) of the girl in the romance. The main plot is about her stopping her psychiatric meds and realizing that what she and her doctors thought was a psychotic disorder is actually her having supernatural powers - she can read supernatural creatures' minds and eats magic, which means she can kill certain magical beings with a single touch. (Plus, it's actually her psychiatrist who first realizes she's not nuts, and convinces her of this.) The vampire romance is just a subplot designed to get her started on vampire slaying in revenge for her best friend's murder. Besides, this is one of the more cliched stories in this series. The other kids with the same powers are much more morally gray, and the first book of the series focuses on their efforts to find out what happened to their telepathic mentor (he was killed by a vampire who hunts slayers). The protagonist of that book mind controls the vampire responsible, frames him for several murders of vampires, and then leaves him severely mentally damaged. Meanwhile, they figure out what their mentor had in mind for them (taking over the last of the elves, saving their race while getting as much power as they can in the process) and ruthlessly set out to fulfill his wishes. About the only story I've read that's anything like this one is Spiral: Suiri no Kizuna, and only in that it also has a bunch of ruthless scheming kids with supernatural powers acting towards a common goal. No, it's you who doesn't understand BPD. The basic personality traits usually remain, they just don't have the energy for so much angst as they get older. He won't slow down because he's not getting older physically. Besides, it's certainly possible for an older person to have BPD, and even a severe form of it. That's a general trend, not an absolute rule.
I'd say that trying to apply medical science, that usually applies to humans, to magical creatures like vampires and the like is a very slippery subject, even more so than having such medical problems in a story with completely normal characters. You could offend someone if you misrepresent it in some way, or simply leave your audience shaking their head because you didn't do the research. Contrariwise, you could represent it perfectly, but still have people shaking their heads because they don't feel it applies to magical creatures and such. You might be dealing with an unpleasable fanbase, especially so if you're trying to deconstruct a specific brand of vampire (read: Twilight vampires).
She doesn't need to write out in the novel that the vampire suffers from BPD; she can just describe him with typical BPD traits, to make him more alive/believable/whatever.
That's not what it says at all. Just because there is a greater risk of suicide in the younger suffers of BPD, that does not mean it is IMPOSSIBLE to suffer BPD in later life - it simply means that suicide among the more mature sufferers is less common. The condition itself is not uncommon in older people - in fact it states that many young people are incorrectly diagnosed with BPD because they display transient symptoms of the disorder (this is also known as BEING A TEENAGER). My friend's mother was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder after her husband (my friend's dad) died of cancer. She displayed severe abandonment issues, inflicting endless emotional blackmail on her adult daughters for not being with her 24/7, paranoia, religious fantacism (she would literally walk around with crucifixes strapped to her knees because she was convinced the house was possessed by her husband's ghost, and got a priest to perform an exorcism). She also used to think she was a 17 year old girl sometimes, saying she looked younger than her daughters, while also developing a nice bout of anorexia nervosa and dropping to about 6 stone. Oh, and she tried to kill herself a few times, threatened to kill her daughters, and was on the verge of being sectioned. She was in her late 50s.
No, you read the definition incorrectly. It speaks about impairment and suicide. It sounds like your friend's mother was suffering from other disorders as well. She was also 50, not 100+ years old. This is far more realistic, considering how it is nearly completely impossible for someone 100+ years old (especially vampire) to be completely diagnosed as BPD. The symptoms seems much better. As someone who has been in the field of psychology for 25 years I can tell you that it is extremely rare for a BPD patient to be old. It shares almost the same likelihood of a vampire existing in real life. Also, even if you don't age physically, your dendrites will continue to develop and you will continue reacting differently to certain stimuli. Even if he's a vampire, he'd still change. This is evidenced by the many character transformations that authors give vampires. I wish you luck with the deconstruction. I would be hard pressed to find originality amongst so much cliche, but I think you just may be able to do it with deconstructionism.
It does not matter. The average reader understands that when it is communicated that a 100+ year old vampire looks like an 18 year old, he is still a 100+ year old vampire. I really don't think people are as stupid as you may think they are (and I'm the biggest cynic I know).
Not reasonable at all. I wouldn't take massive risks like that, if you keep your story the way it is it's going to be a big problem. It will concern plenty of parents and will possibly get your book banned if your aiming for Teens. I know the whole banning thing is quite overdone with certain books, but this would be reasonable to resist it from getting teens to read it. Now my apology if it's not aimed for Teens, but i assume you are so it's only a dose of advice. But since your Asexual, it's okay to not be familiar with this. I personally don't want to digg too much into detail, but it can be quite a damper on sales like it was said above.
Well, if you were to really get the readers to feel her confusion and wild, risky love for him it might work. But to be honest, if you were to realease it in the years to come... it would just be classed as been and done(cough Twilight). Books that have suspiciously similar storylines to best sellers never go well. Books Worms like me want something new and exciting to munch on!!
