Monday, September 10, 2012

50 Shades of Hypocrisy

'pot and kettle' photo (c) 2006, Loz Pycock - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
It’s not our genre, we know - and it is the excuse we will cling to should anyone suggest we should review 50 Shades of Grey (so don’t even try - do not even try! You might however manage to get Tami to wax prophetic about her favourite porn. if you really want to see a review - go read Jennifer Armintrout’s excellent recaps - we can do no better and it says it all) but since it’s based on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series (which we read - AND watched the films; we have suffered enough) we felt we could talk about this.

Now, everyone who knows anything about this series knows that it is based on Twilight fanfiction. If you’ve actually read any of the books it’s pretty blatantly obvious. The characters in this book have had their names filed off, but otherwise they’re not appreciably different from Twilight.

Well, it seems that E. L. James is MOST upset at people using her work without permission. And Her lawyer has said - I kid you not: "You can't just hijack something someone else owns."

How she said this with a straight face is beyond me. C’mon, she had to laugh. Before the end of the sentence she must have cracked. Despite the fact that 50 Shades of Grey has probably out sold every other book but the bible it’s still nothing more than cheap (and poorly written at that) Twilight Fan Fic. This book is so bad that it actually makes Twilight look like a stroke of literary genius and believe me, that’s saying something and it amazes me that James could become so precious about such crap. Somewhere there are trees crying because they gave their lives to produce this.

Still, in terms of sheer chutzpah, we have to applaud. We never thought we’d say it, but at last something about 50 Shades of Grey has left us in awe. We can only hope that James will feel the same if Meyer gets around to reminding her that copyright belongs to her as well.