Fifty Shades: my thoughts

This post is waaaaay overdue. Probably 3 months. -1/2/2013

My interest in this topic was reignited today when some person I follow mentioned the books (I can tell he likes it, a lot) and my twin termed it 'sophisticated porn'.

I hardly think so.

Despite the fact that I dislike the Twilight saga so much, it did manage to effectively pull me in and cause me to be madly addicted to the series for some time. I basically devoured Breaking Dawn in two sittings. Because of all that haze and craze in my head, I didn't realise how ridiculously sexist the book was and also how Bella brings shame to feminists like me.
(The movies are reeaally shitty though. The first was bad enough, I stopped watching after that. We have the DVDs but I've never been able to bring myself to watch them. Just look at the bloody way KS delivers her lines, wtf .)

However, I can safely say even Bella is a more polished version of the simply useless Anastasia Steele in the Fifty Shades Trilogy. This is incredibly ironic because for starters, the short story written by E. L. James that served to form
50 Shades is based on Twilight itself. (and we thought Bella was bad enough.)

Let me begin with the tense used in Fifty Shades. First person present tense. I don't have the book with me now (I never plan to touch it again, actually) so I'll just lift off an example from a forum.
I'm walking through a door and the leaf of the potted plant brushes against my hand. A chill runs up my spine as I look around slowly, only to see no one around.
It's not that I have a big issue with first- person present tense. I do admit I had never seen it before Fifty Shades, because the typical first or third past tense is more commonly accepted by the masses and/or preferred by authors. The problem here is, ELJ doesn't do it well.

Most of the conflict in Fifty Shades is internal, i.e. there is only one place that it occurs, inside Ana herself. I find it intolerable that she is oh, Christian, yes, Christian all the way. Yes, Christian! I can't do without you! Fuck me now!

Christian is another irritant. Stop acting mysterious and dark, you stupid man. ELJ should really have expanded on his section (where we see his point of view instead of Ana's) in Fifty Shades Freed because it had so much potential to be something extremely funny. I laughed out loud in those short pages depicting his point of view during the first interview with Ana. I only read that part because my friend was obsessed with it at that time and I found his pov quite a nice tidbit.

I wiped out the entire Twilight saga in less than a month. Two weeks, maybe. I stopped reading Fifty Shades in about 40 pages into the beginning, at the introduction of the Red Room or something. I was pretty much grossed out; not by the room or the objects, but by the characters!
Even if it does not say much about the quality of the book, it does say something about my opinions on them. Twitter tells me the word sex is repeated roughly 275 times in the entire series or the first book. I forgot. The thesaurus exists for a reason. Desensitisation will occur if you use that particular word so excessively, for goodness sake.

It might be ironic that I, a reader particularly obsessed with trashy novels loaded with sexualised/erotic content, am actually criticising this book like this considering it theoretically fits all my criteria for me to define it as something I would simply love to read. However, I like to think (everything is relative, so our opinions might differ) I actually read quality trashy (is that an oxymoron?) novels. That is defined by at least a decent story (the definitions are very broad and differ from person to person, but it should at least have a plot, and Fifty Shades seems to even lack this), decent characterisation and a special one: decently written sex scenes for me.

Now let's be honest here: I don't get aroused - not even mildly - when I read this book they term as 'mummy porn'. Christian Grey's not even special either. 99% of the romance novels have an incredibly hot guy waaaaay out of the average girl's league. Others have those with mysterious dark past and shit. Just name me one romance book - any - that doesn't have one of those qualities I mentioned up there.

Let's not even bother going into Anastasia Steele. (Pun intended; hahahahaha wts)