14 is the literal target audience for that series. You're fine.

>some people on google believe it is not appropriate for a 14-years old, because of the details that are in the book about kissing etc

Ignore them, they're morons.

Soon, all will be by Clarke.

Hence why I said "codified," not "created."

There's a metric ton of things pre-Pondsmith that I treat as proto-cyberpunk, because they have part of the picture but not the whole thing. The Sprawl trilogy is part of the way there (enough that it slots in neatly to the genre now), but it's not the whole package. Ditto Blade Runner, Hardwired by Walter Williams, Bubblegum Crisis, RoboCop, The Running Man, Akira, The Caves of Steel by Asimov... we could be here for a while if I just rattled off every work that put some ingredients into the soup pot.

Cyberpunk 2020 was what synthesized all of those genre elements into what we, in the modern day, immediately recognize as the cyberpunk genre and not just weird sci-fi noir stuff. It was the point at which cyberpunk went from a relatively loose literary movement, branched off from New Wave sci-fi, to a genre.

e: To put it another way, if CP2020/2077/ER is to cyberpunk as Star Wars is to space opera, then stuff like Neuromancer and Blade Runner slots into the same relative role to CP2020 that stuff like Flash Gordon and Lensman does for Star Wars.

>I'm looking to write a Cyberpunk story without being too derivative of the series I'm watching right now (Cyberpunk Edgerunners).

Cyberpunk 2020, the tabletop game it's all based off of, more or less codified the genre, and every cyberpunk thing made after it is, to some extent or another, derivative of Mike Pondsmith's work.

There's no way you're going to be able to avoid standing on the shoulders of this particular giant, and that's okay. Don't worry about it too much. Trying to write cyberpunk without being too derivative of Pondsmith is like trying to write space opera without biting off Star Wars too much, or high fantasy without making it too obvious you're drawing from Tolkien.

The Crosley knockoff is a record killer. The original Sound Burger was fine, and this will probably also be fine.

>if a woman can drown her kids in a bathtub

I should note that Andrea Yates, the case you're thinking of, is... a way, way, way fucking weirder and sadder case than pop culture has largely determined it to be.

She was suffering from unmedicated bipolar 1 that wasn't taken seriously by... more or less anyone around her, and while her husband was away on a business trip, she fell into a manic episode that caused the delusion that her kids were possessed by demons and that God was going to damn her to Hell if she didn't kill them.

She's one of the very, very few high-profile murderers in... the entire recent history of the first world, really, to successfully use an insanity plea, and will likely spend the rest of her life in a mental institution, and that is in no way a miscarriage of justice.

This isn't really relevant to Gone Girl, I'm just bringing all of this up because that case happened relatively locally to me and pop culture's mutation of it is a little bit of a sore point for me.

>I lived in Japan for a few years and have always been interested in the folklore & monster myths, so in theory I'm the target audience. DNR, saving grace was that it was a library book so I didn't pay for it.

If it helps, there's tons of better stories out there about youkai and Japanese folklore. If you haven't read Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan, it's basically the book on that stuff and an incredible read.