Fifty Shades of Fanfiction

[nytekit]

As is obvious by the title, I started reading the Fifty Shades trilogy since it's been getting so much attention lately. I recently finished the first but even before I did, I started reading some reviews of it on Goodreads. It seems like everyone who reads this book/series falls into one of two camps. The first camp are those who love the book and

Comments

[firefox1490]

The second group seems to be people who are like, 'What? This is shitty fanfiction getting published. What bullshit!'. This group annoys me more than the first mostly because this group is filled with people who write fanfiction. If you write fanfic and you don't like the novel, fine, but why crap on it just because it was fanfiction?

See I fall into this camp. And let me explain why. I give it shit because its FANFICTION. Its someone else's sandbox that you're playing it and you decide to throw a tarp over it and claim its yours which it isn't and a LIE.

If she had gotten published with something ELSE that wasn't so obviously her fanfic with names "copy replace" I wouldn't be offended.

Secondly if your fanfic is so easily hid with just a simply description replace and name replace then you wrote a shitty fanfic as far as I'm concerned.

[nytekit]

But see, I don't think it reflects Twilight that much. I will say the plot and character skeleton resembles Twilight but I think she changed the characters a good bit and the plot, (as far as I know, since I haven't read the other two). And I don't think she never hid the fact that it was derived from fanfiction, did she? Because it's not really lying if she never hid it.

Now, you may be right that the fanfic was shitty. That I know nothing about, but if it was a simple name replace like folks are saying, then yeah, it probably was. But whatever she did with it grabbed some publisher's attention.

[firefox1490]

Its lying being the skeleton she is working from isn't hers.

I'm saying lying but I really mean stealing.

[nytekit]

I have to disagree. I think the skeleton is basic. And obviously the copyright company didn't think it was stealing, else it couldn't have been printed.

[hcolleen]

My issue with this is more along the lines of how BDSM is portrayed as glamorized rape as opposed to a legitimate lifestyle of choice and respect and that the submissive has the power, not the dominant and a whole lot of things that are best summarized by http://das-sporking.livejournal.com/242672.html (and, I don't think the structural writing [the technical part, grammar, syntax, etc etc] is very good, either). I tried, I can't...I couldn't even get past the first chapter of the sporking.

[nytekit]

Yeah, I did have a problem with that. It seemed like she was always toeing the line between how she wanted BDSM to come off. That the submissive has the power was mentioned but other times it didn't come off as a healthy relationship at all. But when I read it, I took as coming from Ana's view and how she as an outsider might look at and think about the BDSM lifestyle, which is how a lot of people would. What I did like about it, though, was how their relationship seemed to be headed towards a compromise of what the two of them know and want. So it wasn't strictly BDSM so some mistakes could be tolerated, I guess?

The sex parts weren't a favorite for me anyway. Like I said, I got bored of them after a while. But I do think the fact that I thought of it as fanfiction instead of a novel worked in my favor. But I could do that since I downloaded free pdfs from the web. *shrug* I wasn't about to pay for it.

[firefox1490]

This is also my problem with it as well. But since I haven't read it I can't make a definitive statement about it.

[nytekit]

How can you say you have a problem with how BDSM is portrayed in the book if you haven't read the book? That doesn't make sense...