Breaking Dawn question

I think the problem is that these are books for children/young adults so she doesn't want to go into too much detail about the reproductive parts!

I must admit that the fact that vampires can't produce tears yet can somehow produce sperm has puzzled me. However a comment on a Twihard forum (yes, I'm that sad!) gave me cause to think ... if a vampire can produce venom - a bodily fluid - then they can produce other fluids.

This isn't easy to explain. I think the most important thing to know is that they're Stephenie's vampire, and she can make them do whatever she wants.

this series is a fantasy series: not everything has to have a proper reason!!!

It seems strange that they mentioned that vampires are 'frozen' and cannot grow or anything (which is why female vamps can't have children) and yet the males are able to produce sperm... but I have a feeling there is a sort of an explanation in the last book... I don't know

LOL this is why I was not a huge fan of the last installment, it seemed as though having a baby with the one you love was a romantic notion so it had to happen.
I guess artistic license, any mythological lore can be bent to meet your own ends in a novel. Its true, it seems impossible for a vampire to father a baby but then funny that we all wonder 'how???' when really, vampires aren't real anyway LOL.
Just goes to show how you can get caught up in a book.
It's one of those 'it just does' moments LOL.

I know this is completely unrelated, but in another series I've read (Anita Blake, Laurell K Hamilton) male vampires can produce sperm if their core temp is increased for an extended period of time (I guess tricking the body into believing its still alive). They can then impregnate human females, but there is a high probability that the sperm will have something wrong with it creating a child with violent and vampiric tendancies.

I'm very good with suspending reality and just going with whatever the book tells me. :)

That's the beauty of fiction sweetie!
Each story is different and can be written any way the author chooses.

I've even just finished a book where vampires can and DO have children. It's called 'Dinner with a Vampire'.
Vampire's are made, but mostly BORN in this book - and not between a vampire and a human - but by TWO vampire's.

There are no rules when it comes to fiction, regardless whether people think that vampire's should be the 'traditional' kind. Where they can't come out in sunlight, have no reflection or even can't have babies because they're supposedly dead.
Some vampire's sleep - and some don't.

Each vampire book you read will be different. I mean, why not? There are different kind of people, why can't there be different kind of vampire's too?

Actually, I read an article about this a year or so ago. Apparently, becoming a vampire freezes you in time as you are. Which means, if a male has living sperm, he is still going to have it after becoming a vampire, he just won't produce any MORE. Basically, it's like getting a vasectomy. The first ejaculation or two can still make someone pregnant because the sperm was already living and produced before the snip.
Edward, being such a gentleman, hasn't had sex with anyone but his wife. She, being human, had a living egg and he had some living sperm his vampire body had been holding in stasis for a hundred years. Boom, baby!

Coulda swore it explained it in the book or maybe I just figured it out myself

it's not rocket science but it's not that much of a big deal anyway :P

Rebecca wrote: "So, I was just wondering if Meyers had descriptively given us the how on Edward getting Bella pregnant... Obviously not just the sex bit - I know how that works - But not with vampires. Sparkly vam..."

for a male human it's blood that's essential to life and baby making, so I think instead of blood it's the venom that replaces it, it is what moves him, gives him strength and even an existence similar to life, Edward and Bella have a half human and half vampire baby because of that.That's my theory at least

I don't entirely understand why the idea of Bella getting pregnant is so much harder to accept than the idea of a dead body walking around, or another body morphing into an enormous wolf. If you don't require a nitty-gritty scientific explanation of the main premise, why would the baby derail the story?

Meyer just didn't do a good job explaining how it could happen, after all the development she did before that. Her initial explanation established her vampires were beings of living rock, who do not change or grow because their cells have crystallized. Here is her explanation found at Twilight Lexicon:

"They sparkle because they have turned to substance that is somewhat like diamond. Their bodies have hardened, frozen into a kind of living stone. Each little cell in their skin has become a separate facet that reflects the light. These facets have a prism-like quality - they throw rainbows as they glitter." -- Correspondence from Ms. Meyer to TwiLex, in answer to "Why do they sparkle".

In addition to that, here is her reasoning on vampire pregnancy:

"And since we're talking physiology - I've had tons of people ask if vampires can have babies. The answer is no. When someone becomes a vampire, it's as if they are frozen exactly as they are in that moment. His or her (and we'll go with her because it's more central to this discussion) body no longer experiences change. Hair does not grow, nor do fingernails (if you cut your hair, you're stuck. That's why Alice's hair is so short - it was growing back from being shaved in the asylum). This applies to all changes - so a woman would no longer have any kind of ovulation cycle. If she were already pregnant when she was bitten, both she and the fetus would be frozen in that state. Which would really suck - pregnant for eternity? I'm shuddering at the thought." -- Correspondence to TwiLex, in answer to "What happens to a vampire's blood?".

Meyer has since tried to modify that statement by saying she was only talking about female vampires not being able to carry a baby to term. But what kind of sense does that make? The venom that converts the entire body and somehow adds two more chromasomes to every cell works on everything BUT the testicles? Sure, that makes a lot of sense. *eye roll*

And if you've read The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide, you'll see she's trying to change the record on what she said before. Here's what she says on these subjects in The Guide:

Reaction to Sunlight, pg. 68:
"The cellular membrane of the vampire is not as soft or permeable as in a human cell; it has crystalline properties that cause the surface of vampire skin to react prismatically, giving the vampire a glitter-like shimmer in sunlight."

Vampire Hybrids, pg 83:
"Male vampires do have the capacity to pass on genetic material with a human female partner. ... Female vampires still carry ova similar to human ova, but the unchanging state of their bodies results in a total absence of a reproductive cycle. Even if the female vampire could somehow continue this cycle, her frozen body would be unable to grow and change to accommodate a growing and changing fetus."

Sure sounds like she's trying to back away from her original statements, to me. The phrase "it's not as soft as a human cell" is not as absolute as "frozen into a kind of living stone", giving her wiggle room for the baby to be possible. However there is another passage from the guide that emphasizes the fact that Edward is not making any genetic material:

Physical Change, pg. 71:
"Vampires are frozen in the state at which they are transformed. They do not grow older, taller, or wider, or experience any other physical change, including unconsciousness (vampires never sleep). Their fingernails and hair do not grow."

So as far as a good explanation for how the pregnancy was possible, sorry, just didn't happen. Just a lot of hand-waving and insisting that it was, even though she wrote it out of her universe.

Who cares!! Its obvious Mayer was making it up as she went along because the series has no plot! Because no, I don't count a girl falling in love with a vampire who gets her pregnant a plot. I like the Twilight books, but I don't pretend that they are a work of art on the literature front.

There are a lot of incubus legends out there. That's the only thing that would make any amount of sense to that part of the plot. There is some of overlap with incubus/vampire mythos. So, if that's the case then Edward is a little more demon-y than previously thought. (At least that was my first thought about reading the pregnancy part "Oh good lord! He's an incubus?!")

Well it kind of makes sense to me. I mean they did mention a lot that vampires can't make babies. Which would almost foreshadow (if she wrote it right) that this would in fact happen. Kind of like how your read a book and the girl is all like "I can sometimes move things with my mind, but it's SO not magic". Or there's that magical legend everyone talks about, the one with the long lost princess and you just know they've mentioned it enough that the princess is so the main character. I think that that was what Meyer was going for, it just didn't work because she didn't know how to make it work logically. If any of what I just said makes sense....lol

The ONLY thing that was not explained was how male vampires produced sperm.
Everything else was explained well enough.

I don't see what's so perplexing about it.
(And before anyone says anything, erections are not necessary for human males to ejaculate. It's a scientific fact, not a Twilight thing.)

In the book Bella reasons it out for you. A woman's body must change in order to have babies. That is why the female vamps can't have them. However a male once he reaches puberty can produce babies. Since edward was 17 he went through puberty, thus in theory can produce babies. Now for me it is a little out there...I mean you would think all that would be produced is dust at this point(109+ years old).

As far as her just wanting a 4th book, that is wrong. Stephanie wrote this series as 2 books. Her publisher pushed her to do the four and basically told her it was 4 books or none. So she had to stretch the story.

It's a miracle of God. Seriously!

I think she describes the "basics" on her website. Go check it out.
stepheniemeyer.com under "Breaking Dawn FAQ"

www.puffpost.tumblr.com

It's a definite flaw in the plot, as Jeni stated. Not only can't vampires supposedly go through meiosis (because they can't age and thus can't make ...), this is the only time Bella's period is even mentioned, which makes almost the entire story pointless- Edward would have killed her from the very beginning.

I don't want to know. I don't see how it could have happened. Meyer broke her own rules, let's leave it at that.

It was suggested in the book that Edward was an Incubus. An incubus is a demon male that has sexual intercourse with a human woman (a succubus) thereby producing a half-human offspring (a cambion). Merlin (from King Arthur) was a cambion. - Meyers supposedly came up with the idea for the preganancy after reading about the incubus legends.

I really like Twilight but i have to admit that there was a lot of things that should have been explained a little bit better. I for one find it impossible for Bella to get pregnant when none of her husbands organs work anymore.
She should have thought things out before just putting it all together.
And I don't like how she made the vampires in this book. They should be allowed to drink blood without killing the person or changing them. Drinking animal blood is different from most vampire books and I like how she did that part.

She figured she didn't need to explain it because she is the worst writer and we would all understand. That's the trust behind it, she made everything up as she went along and we were just suppose to buy it. She wanted a 4th book with a good ending and that was all she could think of along with a "peaceful gathering in the forest". If Bella having a baby is the only thing your second guessing your a much more understanding person that I am. I could seriously go on and on about what was wrong with these books.

This is probably one of the largest fundamental flaws in the storyline.

The characters swear it can't be possible, the author convinces us through her story telling it isn't possible, yet Bella gets pregnant.

In some vampire lore, vampires can activate the nether regions (haha) after drinking blood, but this is never expressed by SM.

If she had just said at some point "This is magical-go with it!" some of us wouldn't have as much problem with the science as presented.

Not much help, perhaps, but that's where I'm coming from. It's magic. :-)