to think 50 Shades of Grey is a disaster for everyone involved?

[sieglinde]

Can't believe there are still people who don't know 50 Shades of Grey is a Twilight fanfic reprinted with the names changed.

I think frankly that everyone involved in bringing it before the public in the guise of a legitimate original work should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves - I don't mean the readers duped by the hype, as everyone is suckered by hype sometimes, and I am definitely not dissing the content for being sexual, but for being unoriginal, unbelievably badly written and misguided about the sexual universe it claims to describe.

It's plagiaristic, endangers the fanfic community (especially if Stephenie Meyer ever wakes up and takes action), and it's utter shite.

And as BDSM goes, it is utterly and criminally irresponsible, both for failing to use the most elementary safety precautions and for dissing BDSM as sadism, which it bloody ISN'T. I'm not in that world myself, but I have friends who are... and I lost a colleague to it a few years ago, to self-strangulation.

My views are admittedly based on the fanfic, which I read a while ago, but I gather that the 'book' is 86% the same as the fanfic, and that most of those changes are name-changes (Bella is Ana, Edward is Christian).

What cheered me up is the emerging parody - 51 Shades... Google for it.

MisssV my sex life is nothing to envy (well not anymore), hence my need for entertaining erotica. Which this most definitely is not.

I am currently reading the third one. Have never read Twilight, and found the first frilm so boring that I turned it off after twenty minutes..

The books are ok, and the second and third are much better than the first.

I really want to read them, saw the banner outside asda for them on offer but since dp has ishoos about the amount of books I have and he was driving I couldn't get them :(

I will if I ever get near asda though, sounds right up my street tbh

I have read and found it underwhelming. The same with Twilight (of which the first book in particular was so dull in parts - all that doing the washing up and emailing her mother and doing her homework, fgs, who wants to read about that?) But what I genuinely still don't get is how it qualifies as a fanfic.

I don't particularly like either set of characters but it seems far more than a straightforward name change. Bella = high school student moving to father's town, Anastasia = university student living with friends. Edward = vampire posing as high school student, Christian = older wealthy sadistic businessman. Bella & Edwards's relationship all about not being able to have sex, Ana & Christian about lots of S&M sex. There is a common thread of young inexperienced woman falling in love with older more powerful man, but that's hardly unique to these books, is it? So for me, there are some similar character traits but the scenario is not that similar at all. Not sure on what grounds Meyer would sue other than it appearing on a fanfic site in the first place - is that enough? Surely you'd have to prove the new work could only have been written by taking inspiration from the old and I don't see that that link is strong enough.

Promoting female masochism and male sadism and domination is extremely dodgy.

It's a shame so many women fall for it.

never read twilight or the 50 shades book but wondering how the colleague self strangling is involved?

For those interested in 50 Shades's derivation from its parent fanfic, someone ran it through Turnitin. See dearauthor.com/features/industry-news/master-of-the-universe-versus-fifty-shades-by-e-l-james-comparison/

It is from this that the figure of 85% the same is derived. This site also gives a list of the changes.

What you possibly don't know, EightiesChick, is that the fanfic is what is called an AU, or alternate universe. These are very common; in this case, Edward is not a vampire but a CEO, and Bella is a student.. in the FANFIC. But the goal of AU fics is to be absolutely true to the characters while putting them in a different situation - so there's a Buffy fanfic where she and her friends are all pirates. I suppose the fuzzy grey legal area is whether characterisation can be 'owned'.

My point was simply that for zero quid you can get the same books and download them to iBooks. If you want them...