🎙️So because I like to think about Trash Media(I'm a raccoon, it's a whole thing) I've been... for some inexplicable reason punishing myself by actually attempting to read Fifty Shades Of Grey. What I'm finding is that this series is fascinatingly godawful in like, really novel ways, because it is supposed to be about a BDSM relationship that is written by someone who... doesn't seem to understand what BDSM is but insists on using it as a plot device in the most absolutely bizarre ways.
It is... absolutely buckwild all the twists and turns this takes, but I kind of want to concentrate on the prose and characterization because they're sort of the structural failure-point everything else collapses under. To be clear; I want to say none of this comes from a place of misogyny or disliking bodice-ripper novels. Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with romantic thrillers for a primarily-female audience and there's nothing I object to about the... underlying genre Fifty Shades exists in or the intentions behind it, it's just that it happens to be a spectacularly bad example of that genre whose poor quality made it a springboard for misogynistic dudebros to deride the idea that women should have any sexual existence outside them.
I'm gonna be talking about this from a perspective of both, like, being someone who writes a fair amount and is, uh, bluntly, into BDSM and the kink scene in a pretty big way as both a switch and a semi-regular domme with my partners. I don't really intend to analyze every minute detail, because I just... don't have the time or energy to do a complete sporking, and it's already been done before in MUCH more detail by other people. But I have a ton of thoughts about this that I still need to just... put somewhere so they aren't rattling around our skull.
[CWs behind the cut: discussion of abuse, shitty boyfriends, and also just generally a lot of tacky stuff but nothing really actually all that sexually-explicit because these books are about as objectively erotic as a tea cozy with 'BUTT STUFF' on it]
Okay so, first off: what is the actual plot? Straightforwardly, the main characters are Anastasia Steele(yes, really, that's her name, but the book was hastily scrubbed of her just being literally Bella Swann from Twilight), a comically-naive college student, and Christian Grey(again, lightly-scrubbed Edward Cullen, although written so differently as to be fundamentally a different, and significantly worse, character), a jet-setting billionaire sexual sadist who is written in a way that the author does not seem to comprehend is deeply abusive because she just conflates 'abuse' with 'BDSM' because she doesn't actually know what either of those things are.
Let me be really blunt upfront. There's kind of... no getting around the reality that Fifty Shades is a very thinly-veiled 'reimagining' of Twilight that is so close to its source material that it would probably have been shitcanned as plagiarism if Stephanie Meyer were even remotely more litigious than she is. Like, I just cannot overstate this: Fifty Shades began life as a Twilight fanfic. A lot of its worse qualities, especially in characterization, are like... an inevitable product of this. Not because fanfiction is bad, but because the author, Erika Mitchell/EL James, published this fic serially in a way where it limped along for years with frequent spurts of completely hollow drama to keep it at the top of the reading list. Serialized fanfiction often peters-out based on both the author's interest level and reader engagement, creating 'zombie fics' that push out smaller, less-considered updates over and over, resulting in a lot of content that is technically a lot of words in aggregate but feels comparatively empty if not handled well. And this is extremely not handled well, because fundamentally all that happened to get Fifty Shades from fanfic to book release was an editing pass to change everyone's names, fix some of Erika Mitchell's ballistic approach to punctuation, and a few minor, largely-inconsequential tweaks.
But let's get back to the characterization, because the characterization is really what Fifty Shades lives and dies(mostly dies) by, and the ways in which Mitchell's versions of Bella and Edward, Ana and Christian, are somehow vastly, wildly worse characters and less believable people.
So... I'm gonna start with Ana, because Ana is who we get the most of, and I understand the intention, as a romance story writer, to portray Ana as an audience surrogate, who exists for the intended audience to project onto, who asks the questions that audience might ask about things like BDSM, financial domination, sexual lifestyling, and the culture shock of being a lower-class college student suddenly moving inside billionaire finance circles. The problem is Ana takes the surrogatehood simultaneously too far and not far enough; she's too distinct to easily project into, but she's also... okay, I just have to say this, Ana as written isn't just naive, she comes across like she's so sheltered it's incredible that she actually functions. Huge portions of the text, really most of it since the series is first-person narrated, is Ana's internal thoughts, and she is so easily-confused and disoriented by topics that even in the release era of the book were widely known already or at least easy to find out about that it makes her seem like she's been living in a fishbowl her entire life. Ana doesn't come across as the savvy college student we're told she is; she instead comes across like a particularly gullible dog you could fool with the 'tennis ball behind the back' trick.
It also has the problem of tone issues. Ana's internal monologues aren't just off-tone for an erotic BDSM thriller about an emotionally-abusive dom with deep personal tragedy in his life(that it handles with wild inelegance, more on that later), it feels more like Cathy walked onto the set of an adults-only HBO drama and is resolutely determined to 'Ack!!' her way through everything. We are told that Ana is a poor 21-year-old college girl from the middle-2000s, but she acts like... well, bluntly, a middle-aged, upper-middle-class, priggishly-bland englishwoman and an obvious stand-in for, um, Erika Mitchell, a middle-aged, upper-middle-class, priggishly-bland englishwoman. Like, there's no other way to describe it but cringey when Ana is told about 'vanilla sex' and immediately starts mentally-segueing about 'molten hot fudge chocolate caramel sexy-sex' for like three paragraphs and has to be informed what 'vanilla' means in-context because she can't actually infer it without going 'ooooh, chocolate.' I understand why this series is such ripe fodder for misogynists, because Ana is written like a cartoon of a boring, vapid white lady. Ana however is, like, only half of the problem. For the other... we gotta talk about Christian.
I want to lead off with a simple statement: it's actually fine if Christian is an asshole? Like, structurally-speaking, erotic thriller novels usually have some form of sexual menace going on by design because that is the appeal. Angry bad boys who treat you like dirt but do amazing sex to you are a genre convention and that's not actually a problem, people have kinks and this is fine, fiction is a safe space to explore this. All good on that front, right?
The problem is Christian Grey is written in a way where the menace is misunderstood by the author as the actual point of BDSM and the fundamental purpose BDSM exists for, and not Christian himself being a shitty dom. Because if you actually analyze Christian from the perspective of a person into BDSM(hi) then you only have two conclusions to draw; one is that he's a shallow misapplication and misinterpretation of BDSM to a character that was originally a fucking vampire that reveals the author's deeply-biased opinions on BDSM and fundamental lack of research, or, if you take it at face value, is maybe the worst dom in the history of the universe, one who uses BDSM not as a means of release but as an excuse to mistreat, abuse, terrorize, and berate his partners then exculpate his awful behavior with a set of rules that only apply when they're convenient for him. And if the latter reading was intentional, Christian might actually be an INTERESTING romantic lead, if it bent more into an actual horror direction, except that Erika Mitchell doesn't understand that Christian is abusive and a terrible dom and insists his behavior is just what BDSM 'is.' This is the hinge on which absolutely everything about Fifty Shades collapses, because it's not functional as either an erotic thriller or horror, both of which would be fine, because of the author's lack of knowledge or research on BDSM besides a few buzzwordy ideas she seems to have gotten from other fics.
This also feeds into another problem, mental illness-shaming through the vector of BDSM, because Mitchell implies continuously that the ONLY people into BDSM are people with emotional trauma that compels them to hurt or be hurt by others, a WILD leap in logic that she follows through to the hilt by basically having Ana 'cure' Christian's BDSM by enduring his abuse until he comes clean about how he was abused and thus removing his psychological need for it so they can, like... have straightforwardly boring normal sex and have a baby.
This is just, terrible writing on its face, but it goes a bit deeper because it's shockingly revelatory about the fundamental disdain for both mentally-ill people and the BDSM community Mitchell feels that when she's had it pointed out by critics that these issues exist, she has doubled-down and insists she knows more about the topic than... prominent BDSM community figures and mental health professionals. Presenting kinks as something you just fix a person's need for is such an incredibly bizarre misunderstanding of sexual fetishism I almost want it framed and hung up in the museum of Luridly Bad Ideas.
It's just so utterly wild that the flagship novel series for public perception of BDSM is penned by someone with such an unwillingness to actually engage with BDSM that she actively seems to sort of hate that the community exists because it gets in the way of what she wants it to be for dramatic purposes. I'm gonna highlight one particular bit here, the actual contract negotiation for Ana and Christian's BDSM play, because 1) the writing in it is TRULY, heinously awful, and 2) it's very revealing about the problems that riddle the series like dry rot in a dead tree.
The big thing that makes it awful is, bluntly, during a consent negotiation, Christian gets Ana, who is a notable lightweight, drunk in order to try and pressure her into accepting things she isn't comfortable with. Now, like, if this were intentional to demonstrate that Christian is a fucking jackass who will bulldoze any objections to what he wants by manipulating the other party and drugging them into compliance that he can hold over their head later, that would... actually be better. That's at least a point of dramatic tension it can pay off later. Instead, it's presented like this is normal and fine, as if the idea is that the dom should be attempting to start social dominance play by getting their prospective sub blitzed before they've even come to an agreement about conduct. Mitchell substitutes her idea of reality for actual protocol, and as a result, unintentionally makes Christian come across as an utter monster to anyone even remotely familiar with consent agreements.
Late in the story, as part of the actual climax of the first part of the narrative, Ana, after pushing Christian on a couple points in the contract(which for some reason they negotiated but never signed, which is a recurring point of oxymoronic tension because there's not even ink on the paper but both act like the spirit of it has to be fulfilled even if they never actually agreed to, it's dumb), she asks 'okay, so, how bad can the punishment terms get if I'm disobedient?' and they sort-of tentatively agree that Ana's going to be whipped with a belt 6 times. In the original and filmed version, this causes Ana to have an emotional breakdown because she realizes she's not comfortable with punishment play at all and mentally shames herself for NOT being okay with it because... I don't know, she doesn't want to assert her boundaries around a rich guy.
This leads into The Thing that caused Mitchell to have an hour-long on-set meltdown at the director and writer of the first film.
So yeah, let's briefly mention the Fifty Shades movie. It's... garbage, but like, it's garbage because the source material is garbage and the crew making it largely wasn't allowed to like, do much to fix it. There's some decent skill in shot composition and cinematography, but there's so many structural and stylistic flaws in the book it's being based on that there's just... not much you can do? You can polish dirt until it gleams but it is still, like, dirt.
So back to that consent thing. In the originally-shot filmed version of the whipping scene, the director and writer realized this would be a perfect time to demonstrate the obvious, face-value reading: that Christian is a shitty dom who uses the rules to get his way and ignores them when they're inconvenient. In the version they wanted to use, Ana uses her safeword after the third belt-lash, and Christian ignores it and keeps going anyway, which is horrifying but also a much better scene that makes the subsequent breakup make much more sense because... yeah, he crossed a stated line and there's an actual justification for Ana to be angry with him and unwilling to continue without restitution.
Mitchell blew her fucking stack about this, and essentially spent an hour terrorizing the crew until she got her way, which is why the first director and writer didn't return for the subsequent two films. It's both a demonstration of what an insufferable control-freak Mitchell is and how poorly she understands her own characters, given the first-shooting version actually sets up multiple plot points in the next part of the story and provides a more comprehensible point to leave as a cliffhanger. Instead it's replaced with the original version, wherein the consent negotiation itself is basically irrelevant because Christian ignored it anyway and Ana doesn't even make a token show of sticking up for herself in the moment even if that could be used to push the actual dramatic tension and makes it clear what the problem is. Christian's an abusive asshole in either version, but one of them advances the story and the other doesn't, and the consent negotiation becomes a completely empty, nothing scene rather than the hinge point of the entire characterization arc for both leads.
This to me is the beating heart of why Fifty Shades isn't merely trashy, but fascinatingly trashy; at every stage where it could be improved or even made into something truly good, the slug-brained unwillingness to admit she's wrong or take meaningful criticism makes Erika Mitchell derail the series back into obnoxious drivel. It's not just... one thing. It's not just terrible dialogue or shoddy characterization or the creator's defensiveness. It's... terrible dialogue causing shoddy characterization that invokes the creator's defensivness. It's a fractal of authorial incompetence, where every dumb choice spirals out into fifteen other dumb choices that reverberate through the work like ripples in sewage.
It is, in short, top-notch garbage.
