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Topic : Keep it "desire for another person," but scale down the sexiness depending on audience How old is your YA audience? Many YA books contain characters with “succubus-like” traits. The succubus - selfpublishingguru.com

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Keep it "desire for another person," but scale down the sexiness depending on audience

How old is your YA audience? Many YA books contain characters with “succubus-like” traits. The succubus can still represent the evils of "lust" (i.e., an intense desire for someone that leads one to ruin), but presented appropriately for the intended audience. You can scale down the sexual factor depending on the age of the intended audience. For example, for young-ish teens, the succubus just causes people to fall desperately in love with them. For older teens, a sexual succubus (or incubus) is very possible. For the very youngest audience, perhaps intense friendship would be enough.

Any of these can be written as appropriately "evil," since any relationship that goes to the point where one person will do anything for the other, even hurt themselves, can be very toxic. Whether the succubus represents the evils of doing anything for ones peer groups, an abusive girlfriend or boyfriend, or straight-up evils of "lust," this same theme can work.

As far as the actual power to induce lust (which is nearly obligatory for a succubus), lots of YA novels have something like this, with greater or lesser levels of explicitness.

For example, in the film version of Twilight (the quintessential YA novel?), Edward claims to have a very incubus-like charm.

EDWARD: I’m the world’s most dangerous predator. Everything about me invites
you in. My voice, my face, even my smell.

Twilight (film)

In Lockwood and Co., by Jonathan Stroud, a ghost with the power to seduce people mainly operates through creating an intense desire for her, but not necessarily in the sexual sense. Even one of the main characters, though not her type romantically, falls for it.
Harry Potter has the Veela, who cause heterosexual male characters to go all macho and become infatuated and boastful.

And, as mentioned previously, depending on the age of the teens you’re targeting, a full, sexual succubus or Lust (not necessarily pornographic) is also a possibility.
By way of analogy, the Iron Fey series, by Julie Kagawa (definitely in the YA category) has the fey using their glamour to exert a clearly sexual influence over many humans. Similarly in the Wicked Lovely series, or Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (both considered YA).

Generalize it further

Other answers have already mentioned generalizing sexiness to similar desires. I’m not sure you need to go this far, but many authors have done this.

Garth Nix, in The Keys to the Kingdom, has a Denizen representing each of the cardinal sins. Lady Friday, corresponding to Lust, instead is obsessed with experiencing all aspects of human sensation.

"I am defeated, I know, but only as a mortal can I truly know the
feeling of defeat. Give me just a few minutes more, let me enjoy the
rich textures of mortal life once more —”

Lady Friday

You can even still call it Lust. For example:

In Pandora Gets Heart, (a series seemingly aimed a young teenagers or tweens), Lust can be for an object or a person. This particular solution might pose a problem if you also want Greed.

“So we simply have to ascertain someone or something that is consumed
with a burning, insatiable, voracious, and unquenchable desire for
someone or something else,” Iole said softly. “Correct?”

Pandora Gets Heart

Swap it out

If all else fails, you can simply replace Lust with a more “child-friendly” sin. Some possibilities include Fear (that certainly causes a lot of problems in the world), or Despair (which has the advantage of actually having been a Deadly Sin in some taxonomies), and having an appropriate cardinal virtue to oppose it (hope, generally). I don’t quite know of any authors who have taken this route with regard to Lust, but the previously mentioned Pandora series swapped Gluttony for Fear, probably in order to incorporate aspects of it into Lust….

One word of warning. You mention that this succubus or Lust demon character might be a “love interest.” Whether or not the character actually uses their abilities to make people feel lust (or even have sex with them), or does something more PG-rated like causing strong romantic feelings toward them, or just messing with people’s minds in some other way, if they become a “good” character, there’s definite risk of it seemingly like an endorsement of this kind of thing, which can turn off a lot of readers, and not only in adult fiction. Someone who messes with emotions, free will, or consent as an antagonist is expected, but a protagonist who does the same, except in exigent circumstances, stands a high chance of losing sympathy (how many people will be lost depends on how overt it is).

So if your “succubus” character is going to become a good character (and you’re not interesting in telling the story of a morally ambiguous anti-hero who uses mental manipulation casually), they’d probably better have either plausibly repented, or have been decent from the beginning (e.g., only feeding off of people who agreed to it, inspiring lust in others but totally unable to help it, etc).


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