Fifty Shades Of Grey: Maybe It Should Have Stayed Fanfiction?

There is no question E. L. James has found the apparent secret to success, but considering her Fifty Shades trilogy began as Twilight fanfiction, it is hardly surprising. Since Stephenie Meyer released the Twilight series, fanfiction about the relationship between human Bella Swan and vampire Edward Cullen have flooded the Internet, and unlike some bestselling authors, Meyer welcomes fanfiction and considers it flattering to have writers love her characters so much.

Certainly, fanfiction has drawn people together from all areas of the country, proven by FanFiction.Net’s Story Traffic feature, which shows the countries readers of an author’s story are from. It is no surprise James managed to come up with a novel-length fanfiction, especially considering some of those lovely, long stories can be found here on Mibba. And hey, which fanfiction writer would not give her props for getting her work published considering publication is an obstacle many fanfiction writers cannot find a way to overcome? But after giving the trilogy a read through myself, I found myself hugely disappointed with the material, the character development, and the hype the trilogy was given.

I found out about the book through the mention of it on a news show, and when I discovered the book contained BDSM erotica, I was thrilled since that area is a part of my lovely, twisted alley. However, the book was lacking in many areas. Sadly enough, the problems I had with Fifty Shades are the same problems I encountered as I forced myself through the Twilight series, which leads me to believe James has written thrilling fanfiction. She managed to capture the characters Meyer created, and if that was her aim, she did a fantastic job. Nevertheless, perhaps publication was not the ideal step for this novel because of just how spot-on it was.

Characters

The character of Bella Swan has been heavily criticized for being the epitome of anti-feminism. She spends most of the four Twilight books pining after Edward Cullen, remaining a breakable human until the fourth book, Breaking Dawn, and she was forced to rely on her immortal lover for protection. Sadly enough, Anastasia Steele, protagonist of the Fifty Shades trilogy, is very much the same. Once she meets love interest Christian Grey, she never seems to stop thinking about him. She ruminates over every conversation they have, e-mails him when she is supposed to be working, and relies on him to come to her rescue every time someone attacks her. This is not too surprising considering Ana is Bella, but at the same time, considering James claims at the beginning of all three books that all characters are products of the author’s imagination, I had hoped Ana would be different than Bella. Stronger, maybe. Instead, she was very much the same.

One concept of the character of Ana that bothered me was the same thing that bothered me about Bella: ridiculous insecurity. After living in Forks for a very limited amount of time, Bella has a vampire, a human, and a werewolf all chasing after her, trying to win her affection, and she still has the audacity to think she is unattractive or plain. In the case of Ana, she is the exact same way. Her boss propositions her, Christian constantly assures her she is beautiful and lavishes her with compliments, and her photographer friend, José, has had a crush on her, proving it when, at his photography show, there are seven large portraits of her. As a young woman who is trying hard for a confident self-image, I am just annoyed and offended by these women who manage to snag gorgeous men without even trying and still try to play the plain Jane image in their heads.

Of course, I do have another problem with Ana, and that was one thing that really made me hate it when it popped up in Bella as I was reading Twilight. I will give Bella Swan an inch on that, though, because she is a teenager, and the whole book is fantasy, anyway, so that lends some disregard for the norm throughout the entire series. I can accept that. But Ana is a smart young woman in college who is making serious decisions about her life, and yet she allows herself to be swept up into Christian until he is all she can think about. I am a teenager, and I do understand that it is possible to fall in love and fall in love hard, but even people who are in love need a break from their partner. Instead, she spends most of her time at Christian’s apartment, then agrees to move in and marry him while barely knowing anything about him other than he has horrid secrets, a twisted past, and a guilt complex involving his mother.

Also, as I was reading the trilogy, it became glaringly obvious who all of the characters were based on either from looks or behavior. Everyone loves an in-character AU, especially when done with the detail that James captures in each scene, but halfway through the first novel, I was just mentally replacing character names with the Twilight ones I believed they were either from looks or attitude and sometimes both. Instead of veiling who each person was and making it look like it was original, which is what the notes at the beginning of the book claim, James left the characters as they were. If Meyer was not such a nice author when it came to fanfiction, it would most likely bode for an interesting and exciting plagiarism trial, and any Twilight fan could attest to obvious similarities between the characters of Fifty Shades and the characters of Twilight. And though I really want to publish some of my fanfiction, I do plan on tweaking it to extreme amounts so it is nearly impossible to see who the characters were. I do not need to be in a court room explaining to a judge why one of my characters resembles someone like Tony Vincent in attitude, manner of speaking, and physical appearance.

And though inner character thoughts are fun to me, and I find them an exciting way to express what a character feels without dialogue. Having read many novels that were later converted to films, I can safely say those inner thoughts are precious commodities thrown out because they do not fit into screenplays well, and that is why the books are almost always better than the movies. However, I soon became sick of Ana’s inner goddess and subconscious and just wished they would take shots in her goddess’s chaise longue until they lost consciousness. At first, the side “characters” were fun and playful, and it gave insight into the split in Ana’s mind when it came to Grey, but after a while, they were on every single page, in multiple paragraphs on a page. And though they were enjoyable at times, I did not need their input on every single thing Ana tried to do from beginning to end.

Plot

As for Fifty Shades on its own, I was excited for a raunchy tale as the news reports and criticisms online convinced me that was what I was going to get. Well, the joke is yet again on this gullible reader. Instead of being what I consider a BDSM erotic novel, most of the book was what Grey himself called “vanilla sex”, AKA sex without the addition of any outside objects or forces. The plot was dragged through the mud again and again with sex scene and sex scene. Do not get me wrong, some of them were well-written, but considering James’s use of the same types of language and adjectives over and over again, the novels became rapidly monotonous and dreary. Oddly enough, this is yet again a tactic I noticed in Meyer’s Twilight novels. The use of the same adjectives multiple times might show just how concrete a character’s thought process is, but considering Ana’s high IQ and her love of literature, she should be able to come up with something other than “copper” for Christian’s hair. Though I do enjoy character imagery in a novel, Fifty Shades hardly needed it considering how alike James’s characters appear to Meyer’s.

Had the novels not been so monotonous and dreary, though, the unbelievable plot of the third novel might have worked out. Fifty Shades of Grey had a plot based on the relationship of Ana and Christian, which came through since it seems to be the main focus of every single paragraph. Fifty Shades Darker, the sequel, involved a crazed ex-lover of Grey, and considering we see more and more of his problems throughout the novels, yet again, it is believable. But the boss of the protagonist linking himself with the spouse of Grey’s female Dom in order to attack Ana and ruin Grey just fell through. Yes, Jack was delightfully mad, but he made a cosmic shift from slightly flirty to all-out crazy in only a few chapters, and it was not done artfully enough to catch my interest. Considering I do enjoy my psychological thrillers and have seen the lush build-up of insanity, it was hard for me to see Jack’s through the foliage of Ana constantly e-mailing Christian when she was supposed to be working and not seeming to care she was wasting the time of the company. Not that it mattered, since Christian had Jack fired, and Ana had his job before Christian changed the name of the company and handed it to her on a silver platter.

Conclusion

For someone looking forward to reading published fanfiction just to see what had been done to make it ready for the market, I was sorely disappointed by all three novels. I had hoped to see how James tucked hints of Twilight into the novels, wanted to have fun trying to pick out who was who, but considering most of the characters even looked like their Twilight originals, it was like watching an AU fanfiction come to life. Since Fifty Shades is in the market for being converted to a screenplay, may this lowly fanfiction author kindly suggest just using the Twilight cast? My inner goddess is out for coffee, but my subconscious is peering over her Ozzy Osbourne sunglasses and nodding in approval.