Fifty Shade of Grey pt1
Sep. 16th, 2013 10:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
babydracoYeah, this is what I'm doing instead of anything I should be doing.
So I found this blog that's doing one of those "let's read through and mock" series based on Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James. And I had a file open as I read the blog, filled with my own comments.
It sounds truly terrible. After all the complaining and mocking of Twilight, it turns out there's something much worse- bad Twilight fanfic trying to pretend it's an original work.
It's not bad because it's Twilight fanfiction- anyone who reads enough fanfic has encountered terrible pieces based on wonderfully well written stuff and super good work based on terrible source material. Fifty Shades didn't have to be bad just because Twilight doesn't deserve any writing awards. The fact that it is bad is entirely its own fault. It has moments where it almost starts to get good, but mostly it fails in every way- as art, as story, as romance, as porn, as a story about people who live in Seattle, as a representation of BDSM...
And part of the problem with “serial numbers filed off” fanfic to published novel type things is that when done badly, they only really make sense if you understand they used to be fanfiction.
Okay, like, Edward Cullen does a few things in the Twilight books that are creepy, controlling and sexist (most of these are downgraded for the movies). But Edward is also a hundred year old vampire. He's an actual supernatural monster built to prey on humans and there's nothing holding him back from killing and eating Bella and everyone she knows except his own willpower. That's the context Edward's actions take place in. In that context, the context of a man who has to fight every day not to eat his girlfriend, Edward's actually doing really good. But what if he wasn't a hundred year old vampire fighting his desire to kill and eat all the other characters? What if he was just some human guy?
Now he's really a serious jackhole.
The characters in Twilight rarely try to involve the police in their problems, even though Bella's dad is the police chief of Forks. Because, as we learned from Buffy as well, cops are useless against immortal fanged demons. In Fifty Shades, which has no vampires, the characters continue to operate with the same logic.
The Cullens were super rich because they were immortal and never needed to sleep or buy regular food or turn up the heat and they probably didn't have a lot of medical bills. If you have the potential to live forever and you don't need to sleep, imagine how much work you'd get done and how much knowledge you'd acquire.
Christian Grey is supposed to be a billionaire businessman, but he's terrible at it. The only explanation for his wealth is "Edward Cullen was rich".
Exaggeration is another well known trait of fanfiction. A character's favorite food becomes all they ever eat, an expression they used once or twice becomes a catch phrase, an unfairly strict/emotionally unavailable parent becomes abusive while actually abusive families turn into things from horror movies. People who are below average height become tiny, people who were seen crying a couple of times become constant fountains of tears.
All Edward and Bella's worst traits are over emphasized in Fifty Shades. Edward is bossy and controlling for much of the early parts of Twilight but he doesn't... he cares about Bella's happiness and keeps trying to please her and tries to avoid physically hurting her. He's a monster but he doesn't want to be, he wants to be a good man. That's the appeal of Edward Cullen. He's weirdly naive about a lot of stuff, which makes sense, he was teenager when he died in...1918. He has good parents, who enforce a strong moral code and empathy. Christian Grey is just coming off as a monster even though he's a regular human being, instead of trying to be a good man he whines about how he doesn't know how to do that. He demands that the rest of the world change to suit him, instead.
Edward's obsession with "keeping Bella safe" is actually perfectly logical considering that halfway through the first book, they're being threatened by a gang of evil vampires (and the Cullens themselves are vampires who are only able to keep from eating people by their steely willpower). Bella's safety's a pretty big deal. In Fifty Shades however, until Leila the Crazy Ex Sub shows up, as far as we know, Ana is actually in no danger at all. Nobody's trying to hurt her except Christian himself.
Bella is self centered, shallow and rejects people who try to love her, but she's not stupid. She loves 19th century novels but she has routinely uses a computer with no trouble. She's clumsy, but Ana can't even walk straight. And it's not strange that Bella was a virgin, she was a teenager who was written by a Mormon (and let's point out now that it's strongly implied Edward is also a virgin, which is popular fanon and I believe, also the opinion of the actor who played him). Yet Bella is still more of a sexual being than Ana is at what, five years older? Bella is the one aggressively pursuing sex with Edward. I read a great essay (which I can't find now) about how this is one thing that teenage girls were loving about the books, the descriptions of how it feels to feel sexy, because they're usually force fed the idea of sexy as performance and no one seems interested in what's actually going on in their bodies. And here's Bella, with her somewhat realistic teenage urges. And Ana, who is five years older but has never even had a dirty dream because even involuntary actions of your unconscious brain can make you impure.
Jacob had an unrequited crush on Bella and kissed her enthusiastically without her permission but he didn't actually try to drunkenly rape her. And in a moment that gave you a brief glimmer of hope that the writing wasn't setting feminism back fifty years, Bella got herself out of that all on her own by punching him. Ana is unable to accomplish this same feat. It's not just an unwanted overly aggressive kiss, it's an actual attempt at rape, with a helpless heroine who has to be saved from the bad romantic choice by the man we're all supposed to want her to pick. It combines the tendency of fanfiction to exaggerate, with the tendency of shippers to vilify whichever character stands in the way of their ship. Some shippers go around with such blinders on that not only can't they fathom why their character might actually want the third person in the love triangle but they can't see the third person's point of view at all.
A lot of Jacob's complaints about Edward are genuine concerns the readers not completely dazzled by Edward actually share with him. A girl he's known for years and loves (whether it's friendship or romantic) is obsessed with a guy who could kill her and she has admitted that she wants him to kill her. His best friend wants to kill herself. He's not just upset because Bella doesn't love him back. He's also got his own subplot, where he's dealing with a lot of his own problems, like being a , you know, werewolf.
Meyer takes time out to develop Bella and Jacob's friendship, Jose's relationship with Ana just feels shoehorned in and unearned. You just honestly don't care about him the way you cared about Jacob. Let's not forget Bella keeps repeatedly, intentionally, leading him on even though she doesn't really return his romantic feelings. Ana hasn't been leading Jose on and Jose doesn't even know Christian, so his violent attempts to seduce her place him as an intended villain from the start. Exactly what would happen when someone who doesn't understand why Jacob would do anything that he did, tries to write him into their Team Edward story.
The werewolves and vampires in Twilight often tossed slurs at each other, but it was Fantastic Racism based on their own unique issues with each other. Christian calls Jose "boy", which could just be a jab at his age but tends imply a double, racist meaning when a white man says it to a PoC.
James should have just made them both from the UK and set it there. I'm seeing a lot of misunderstandings of US geography* and awkward attempts at American slang. And too much tea drinking. There's no reason they have to be Americans except that this was originally Twilight fanfiction. Setting it in the UK might have enabled James to write in a style more natural to her. In a setting she knew better or could at least more easily access, she could just concentrate on things like decent characters and accurate representations of a somewhat risky lifestyle. She's trying very hard to get the details of time zones and geography right, but it's at the cost of everything else.
Bella is from Phoenix because Stephenie Meyer is from there. Meyer chose to set most of the story in Washington state for reasons specific to the plot. It's famous for its rain, heavy forests and offbeat people, so a family that has to avoid direct sunlight, loves its privacy and comes off as kind of weird (and extremely pale) would find Washington an easier place to exist in. Bella looks the way she does because she is Stephenie Meyer's author self insert. Edward is absolutely Joseph Smith. People have theorized that it's all about Meyer's struggle with reconciling herself with her life as a Mormon housewife. These things don't work as well when removed from this context.
But it's really, really different in two distinct ways.
Twilight was responsible for people asking if "not having sex" was the new sex, because of the book's subtle abstinence message. Bella and Edward don't have sex until they're married and they don't get married until nearly the end of the series.
All Ana and Christian ever do is have excessive premarital sex with each other. I'm not sure they'd like each other at all if they weren't having sex.
Since Twilight was written by a devout Mormon (and is also aimed at teenagers) characters hardly drink any alcohol. In fact, at one point Bella confides to us that she was so depressed she drank "unnecessary cough syrup" to knock herself out. Ooooh. In Fifty Shades, however, if you read the books straight through and took a shot every time someone consumed alcohol, you would black out.
I'm not sure what this means.
ETA: But another thing that separates them out is that Bella does grow into a stronger, smarter, braver and more mature, person. Imagine how post turning, post baby Bella would've handled this incident compared to how Ana handles it.
So I found this blog that's doing one of those "let's read through and mock" series based on Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James. And I had a file open as I read the blog, filled with my own comments.
It sounds truly terrible. After all the complaining and mocking of Twilight, it turns out there's something much worse- bad Twilight fanfic trying to pretend it's an original work.
It's not bad because it's Twilight fanfiction- anyone who reads enough fanfic has encountered terrible pieces based on wonderfully well written stuff and super good work based on terrible source material. Fifty Shades didn't have to be bad just because Twilight doesn't deserve any writing awards. The fact that it is bad is entirely its own fault. It has moments where it almost starts to get good, but mostly it fails in every way- as art, as story, as romance, as porn, as a story about people who live in Seattle, as a representation of BDSM...
And part of the problem with “serial numbers filed off” fanfic to published novel type things is that when done badly, they only really make sense if you understand they used to be fanfiction.
Okay, like, Edward Cullen does a few things in the Twilight books that are creepy, controlling and sexist (most of these are downgraded for the movies). But Edward is also a hundred year old vampire. He's an actual supernatural monster built to prey on humans and there's nothing holding him back from killing and eating Bella and everyone she knows except his own willpower. That's the context Edward's actions take place in. In that context, the context of a man who has to fight every day not to eat his girlfriend, Edward's actually doing really good. But what if he wasn't a hundred year old vampire fighting his desire to kill and eat all the other characters? What if he was just some human guy?
Now he's really a serious jackhole.
The characters in Twilight rarely try to involve the police in their problems, even though Bella's dad is the police chief of Forks. Because, as we learned from Buffy as well, cops are useless against immortal fanged demons. In Fifty Shades, which has no vampires, the characters continue to operate with the same logic.
The Cullens were super rich because they were immortal and never needed to sleep or buy regular food or turn up the heat and they probably didn't have a lot of medical bills. If you have the potential to live forever and you don't need to sleep, imagine how much work you'd get done and how much knowledge you'd acquire.
Christian Grey is supposed to be a billionaire businessman, but he's terrible at it. The only explanation for his wealth is "Edward Cullen was rich".
Exaggeration is another well known trait of fanfiction. A character's favorite food becomes all they ever eat, an expression they used once or twice becomes a catch phrase, an unfairly strict/emotionally unavailable parent becomes abusive while actually abusive families turn into things from horror movies. People who are below average height become tiny, people who were seen crying a couple of times become constant fountains of tears.
All Edward and Bella's worst traits are over emphasized in Fifty Shades. Edward is bossy and controlling for much of the early parts of Twilight but he doesn't... he cares about Bella's happiness and keeps trying to please her and tries to avoid physically hurting her. He's a monster but he doesn't want to be, he wants to be a good man. That's the appeal of Edward Cullen. He's weirdly naive about a lot of stuff, which makes sense, he was teenager when he died in...1918. He has good parents, who enforce a strong moral code and empathy. Christian Grey is just coming off as a monster even though he's a regular human being, instead of trying to be a good man he whines about how he doesn't know how to do that. He demands that the rest of the world change to suit him, instead.
Edward's obsession with "keeping Bella safe" is actually perfectly logical considering that halfway through the first book, they're being threatened by a gang of evil vampires (and the Cullens themselves are vampires who are only able to keep from eating people by their steely willpower). Bella's safety's a pretty big deal. In Fifty Shades however, until Leila the Crazy Ex Sub shows up, as far as we know, Ana is actually in no danger at all. Nobody's trying to hurt her except Christian himself.
Bella is self centered, shallow and rejects people who try to love her, but she's not stupid. She loves 19th century novels but she has routinely uses a computer with no trouble. She's clumsy, but Ana can't even walk straight. And it's not strange that Bella was a virgin, she was a teenager who was written by a Mormon (and let's point out now that it's strongly implied Edward is also a virgin, which is popular fanon and I believe, also the opinion of the actor who played him). Yet Bella is still more of a sexual being than Ana is at what, five years older? Bella is the one aggressively pursuing sex with Edward. I read a great essay (which I can't find now) about how this is one thing that teenage girls were loving about the books, the descriptions of how it feels to feel sexy, because they're usually force fed the idea of sexy as performance and no one seems interested in what's actually going on in their bodies. And here's Bella, with her somewhat realistic teenage urges. And Ana, who is five years older but has never even had a dirty dream because even involuntary actions of your unconscious brain can make you impure.
Jacob had an unrequited crush on Bella and kissed her enthusiastically without her permission but he didn't actually try to drunkenly rape her. And in a moment that gave you a brief glimmer of hope that the writing wasn't setting feminism back fifty years, Bella got herself out of that all on her own by punching him. Ana is unable to accomplish this same feat. It's not just an unwanted overly aggressive kiss, it's an actual attempt at rape, with a helpless heroine who has to be saved from the bad romantic choice by the man we're all supposed to want her to pick. It combines the tendency of fanfiction to exaggerate, with the tendency of shippers to vilify whichever character stands in the way of their ship. Some shippers go around with such blinders on that not only can't they fathom why their character might actually want the third person in the love triangle but they can't see the third person's point of view at all.
A lot of Jacob's complaints about Edward are genuine concerns the readers not completely dazzled by Edward actually share with him. A girl he's known for years and loves (whether it's friendship or romantic) is obsessed with a guy who could kill her and she has admitted that she wants him to kill her. His best friend wants to kill herself. He's not just upset because Bella doesn't love him back. He's also got his own subplot, where he's dealing with a lot of his own problems, like being a , you know, werewolf.
Meyer takes time out to develop Bella and Jacob's friendship, Jose's relationship with Ana just feels shoehorned in and unearned. You just honestly don't care about him the way you cared about Jacob. Let's not forget Bella keeps repeatedly, intentionally, leading him on even though she doesn't really return his romantic feelings. Ana hasn't been leading Jose on and Jose doesn't even know Christian, so his violent attempts to seduce her place him as an intended villain from the start. Exactly what would happen when someone who doesn't understand why Jacob would do anything that he did, tries to write him into their Team Edward story.
The werewolves and vampires in Twilight often tossed slurs at each other, but it was Fantastic Racism based on their own unique issues with each other. Christian calls Jose "boy", which could just be a jab at his age but tends imply a double, racist meaning when a white man says it to a PoC.
James should have just made them both from the UK and set it there. I'm seeing a lot of misunderstandings of US geography* and awkward attempts at American slang. And too much tea drinking. There's no reason they have to be Americans except that this was originally Twilight fanfiction. Setting it in the UK might have enabled James to write in a style more natural to her. In a setting she knew better or could at least more easily access, she could just concentrate on things like decent characters and accurate representations of a somewhat risky lifestyle. She's trying very hard to get the details of time zones and geography right, but it's at the cost of everything else.
Bella is from Phoenix because Stephenie Meyer is from there. Meyer chose to set most of the story in Washington state for reasons specific to the plot. It's famous for its rain, heavy forests and offbeat people, so a family that has to avoid direct sunlight, loves its privacy and comes off as kind of weird (and extremely pale) would find Washington an easier place to exist in. Bella looks the way she does because she is Stephenie Meyer's author self insert. Edward is absolutely Joseph Smith. People have theorized that it's all about Meyer's struggle with reconciling herself with her life as a Mormon housewife. These things don't work as well when removed from this context.
But it's really, really different in two distinct ways.
Twilight was responsible for people asking if "not having sex" was the new sex, because of the book's subtle abstinence message. Bella and Edward don't have sex until they're married and they don't get married until nearly the end of the series.
All Ana and Christian ever do is have excessive premarital sex with each other. I'm not sure they'd like each other at all if they weren't having sex.
Since Twilight was written by a devout Mormon (and is also aimed at teenagers) characters hardly drink any alcohol. In fact, at one point Bella confides to us that she was so depressed she drank "unnecessary cough syrup" to knock herself out. Ooooh. In Fifty Shades, however, if you read the books straight through and took a shot every time someone consumed alcohol, you would black out.
I'm not sure what this means.
ETA: But another thing that separates them out is that Bella does grow into a stronger, smarter, braver and more mature, person. Imagine how post turning, post baby Bella would've handled this incident compared to how Ana handles it.
