Russell wrote:
This Is The Phantom Lady wrote:
The 50 Shades triology... and I'm not enjoying it.
But I figured I had to read it before I complain too much about it... my head hurts from too much face-palming though.
Uuuughh…. Wow, impressive. Although totally get you with the 'ok, let's see for myself what this book is that causes such vitriol and passionate insanity'. I did the same with the whole Twilight series. Yeah, I know. But draw the line at more fan-written inaccurate badly portrayed relationships and writing style of those books. Still gonna stick with it, though?
I struggled with 50 Shades too (I found it rather boring), but I'm fascinated by the phenomenon! When it was at the height of it's popularity, every woman I knew seemed to be reading it, regardless of background. I'm interested that a book about an aspect of women's sexuality was so popular, famous and widely read. Has that ever happened before?
This is just my opinion, and I may be misinterpreting the book, but it read to me as - trying to put it politely - women-orientated fantasy soft-porn. Not meaning to demean the book, but I think a lot of the criticisms of it are because people are trying to read it as a piece of literature instead of fantasy fodder. A lot of it just screamed "fantasy" at me - the very ordinary, awkward heroine (to make it easier to insert yourself into that fantasy, if you should wish) paired with the very extra-ordinary, impossibly attractive hero (definitely a fantasy figure) who is besotted with her in the extreme. And then the fantasy situations. It's not about real life relationships (or real ilfe BDSM). It's about what women might fantasise about (but not necessarily want in real life), and I feel it legitimises those fantasies for women.
Apparently, it was written originally as Twilight fan-fiction. I'm not so familiar with Twilight, but it seems to have some of the same fantasy elements (self-insertion heroine, impossibly attractive and besotted hero) without the sex aspect.
I know it's odd that I'm defending a book that I didn't actually like (and I couldn't bring myself to complete the series, so may have a different view if I'd read them all!), but I do think it's misunderstood. Expecting it to be an accurate portrayal of relationships is like expecting the same of pornography. Or of rom-coms, etc. (Did anybody see the film Don Jon which compares pornography and rom-coms? I love that film!).
Last edited by Liberty (December 10, 2014 5:55 pm)