I believe you are confusing "free will" with "do whatever you want without consequences". It just means we are free to make choices, not that all of those choices are good.
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Anyway. My previous post was simply made to elucidate the fact that one can be physically attracted to someone without thinking about or desiring sex. The attraction=sex is a social construct, not a hormonal one.
In fact, the statistics that we mentioned rather prove my point. Only 50% of men think about sex on a daily basis. So only 50% of men see attractive women daily? And those 50% only see attractive women once a day? No. So therefore, half of men do not immediate have sexual thoughts about attractive women upon seeing them. And I'm sure that the 50% that do think of sex on a daily basis do not think of it every time they see an attractive woman. Some, sure. But to say that ALL men, MUST equate attractiveness with sex is patently untrue.
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Now, I don't really care whether you think sex is good or bad. What matters in the case of this story is that in the condensed time-scale of this book, there just was not opportunity to highlight every little thing. Brandon already stated a couple of times that the publishers were worried about the length of Well of Ascension as it was, without adding superfluous material that didn't move the plot forward.
I hold to the opinion (yes, because that is what we've all been expressing, and all we really have here) that their relationship was well done. There were little hints and clues sprinkled throughout the books that showed Vin and Elend's feelings toward eachother. I was in no way disapointed by it. It seemed JUST right for their circumstances. They were in the middle of a war. There is not much time for hanky panky, or for even thinking about it.
I don't think it is fair to call it sanitized. I thought it was just right for this particular series of books and for this particular pair of characters. They both had hang-ups.
The fact that they were able to develop a relationship at ALL in the middle of all that happened is marvelous! And yes, there was a large section of time that passed between book 1 and book 2. They could have (and probably) developed their relationship quite a bit during that time. Possibly even including sexually. However, that was not the point of the books and therefore it did not focus on that aspect.
It is not a romance novel. It is a novel that happened to have a romance between two characters. It was not the main plot, not even a subplot. There were much more important things happening. Which is why all of us enjoyed the books. Because the important things happened, and they were described well.
I might as well wish that Brandon had included more pink unicorns, because I felt a distinct lack of them in the series (I didn't, really
). But they wouldn't have made the story itself any better, nor would there have been room to talk about them. Brandon states in the Annotations that they were often looking to cut any fluff from the story, so if it didn't help him get to the ending, it didn't make the final cut.