Hang on! In Twilight, the main vampire character is totally against his girl becoming a vampire because it risks her eternal soul, moreover, he won't have a sexual relationship with the girl unless they are married because he does not want to make her sin that way, either. And then, when they do get married, and she gets pregnant (they didn't know she could), she refuses to have an abortion even though the pregnancy kills her.god+dogGirl said:We Christians should focus on the damage of the Twilight series.
The whole protagonist vampire group is "vegetarian" that is they will not kill humans.
It was one of the most chaste, anti-vampire books I've ever read.
I posted this new thread to hear the reasons God+Dog thought it was so much worse than Harry Potter for kids.
I guess I do understand, in a way. Potter is written with a different flavor - Good versus evil, but no emotional/sexual conflict really at all, so if it harms any audience it's going to be a younger one that is more easily corrected by the obvious fiction of the witchcraft part. The delineation of who is Good and who is Evil is clear by their actions, while the witchcraft part is clearly nonsense.
Whereas Twilight is making the reader discover whether someone can be born/made "evil" but refrain from the actions that made them evil. Sort of a "love the sinner hate the sin" treatment, and it covers in depth the conflict about sexuality among teens. So it may seem more dangerous to that audience.
But in the actual book, as I summarized above, no one has sex until they are married, and characters talk about why they feel this is important, even to the point of staying celibate for 110 years.
And in addition, the "good" vampires are all committed to NOT doing the thing that supposedly makes vampires bad; that is, killing humans. They call themselves "vegetarians" as a joke and actively try to turn other, less noble vampires toward their goal of goodness.
The two main vampire characters are Christians, and it is their very fear of God (as in, wanting to follow Yahweh's rules) that keeps them from doing anything to harm humans, including pre-marital sex. One line is (paraphrased) "I'm already lost in God's sight because I'm a vampire, the only virtue left I have to offer him is my purity and if there is any hope at all for me for heaven, I will not do more harm to my soul by disobeying this. And I'm absolutely not going to put your soul at risk by either making you a vampire or having sex with you outside of marriage."
The whole book is about restraint and hard choices and the narrow path, and how making these choices is the only chance to overcome the inherent evil of what they were made/born (i.e. vampires). There is discussion about whether God has mercy and whether it is worth trying to be good, even though you were made a vampire, just in case there is any forgiveness to be had, any chance at all, it is worth staying to the narrow path even in the face of your doubts.
It's really almost the perfect allegory to the inherent sin of man - "we are born sinful (vampires), but we do not have to be sinners (human killers) if we try hard enough (use animals to eat, and even though we are never "satisfied," we are not killing humans) and care enough about what is right (God's command to not kill humans)."
There's even a heavy heavy dose of respecting your parents and your parent's culture.
Meanwhile, the "werewolves" exist in the book as nature's (God's) unvolunteered army against the evil of the vampires. Their existence only manifests when vampires are present, and their only role is to protect humans from vampires.
I was actually surprised that I liked the books because I assumed they were shallow, stupid and loaded with teen raging hormone bad choices, romanticization of "bad guys" and shallow emotions.
But I heard from one of the moms at my daughter's sports that they were actually quite readable and so I got them out of the library. I was surprised to find how chaste they were and how loaded with purposeful good choices and discussion of values. They are still definitely a "teen" book in their straightforward plot, and I spent most of my time enjoying the author's use of first person narrative and the reliance on expository dialogue that it requires. Still, I was indeed surprised at how... wholesome they turned out to be.
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