I get that Twilight is a phenomenon. But the Influenza pandemic infected a fifth of the world's population, and killed 5 to 20 percent of the people it infected, depending on the country. It could kill you within a few hours of infection. We're talking ebola on a grand scale. It wiped out entire towns. There were not enough coffins or gravediggers. It killed more people than World War I. There was no one alive in the world that time who did not have someone close to them die.
To write something that takes place in that time period and not include the effects of a global pandemic would be like writing the middle ages without the bubonic plague, or expunging references to nukes from a cold war novel because Tom Clancy used them as a plot point. Whether this minor character died of the flu or not has no bearing on whether other characters did: history happened. It doesn't go off the table because another writer is popular. Particularly since who knows when this will be anywhere near publication, or whether anyone will be reading Twilight then.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2008-12-16 02:06 am (UTC)To write something that takes place in that time period and not include the effects of a global pandemic would be like writing the middle ages without the bubonic plague, or expunging references to nukes from a cold war novel because Tom Clancy used them as a plot point. Whether this minor character died of the flu or not has no bearing on whether other characters did: history happened. It doesn't go off the table because another writer is popular. Particularly since who knows when this will be anywhere near publication, or whether anyone will be reading Twilight then.