This past Wednesday, I was browsing online and wandered across an article on Entertainment Weekly that was talking about popular books being made into movies. It had a picture of the Hunger Games on it, so I clicked on it in mild curiosity. As I browsed down the books listed, I came upon a title I’d never heard of; Fifty Shades of Grey. Hmmm, intriguing title . . . kind of mysterious. Instead of finishing the article, I looked it up on Goodreads, wanting to see some reviews. It had a lot of polarizing reviews, and I decided to read the description.
As I read through the summary, this thought went through my head . . . “What the heck????”
Basically, this book is about a young, innocent college student who falls for a wealthy entrepreneur with unusual sexual proclivities. This book is categorized as erotica. Yep, erotica is on the NYT’s bestsellers list for paperbacks and ebooks.
Seriously??
Wait, it gets better.
This book was written by a woman who writes fan fiction. She finds a book that she loves and decides to write her own little fantasy story using either the world, the characters, or the theme, and taking it on her own merry little ride. In general, I find fan fiction pretty harmless. It’s the same thing as those lame videos you see on YouTube where they try and make videos out of books and patch together scenes from random movies to make a trailer. Yes, very lame. But pretty harmless. In this case, the author created fan fiction (titled Master of the Universe) based on the Twilight novel characters. Granted, she completely changed the basic story line, which involves vampires and werewolves. Instead, she makes Edward into a hot millionaire named Christian who enjoys whips and domination and Bella is an uninteresting, meek college student named Ana who completely falls for him . . . okay, that part is mostly the same.
So, this author wrote MOTU and it got rave reviews from readers of fan fiction. With such a glowing response, she decided to publish it as her own book, Fifty Shades of Grey, by changing the character names, places and a few other details.
Seriously??
According to software produced to prevent plagiarism in schools, FSOG is 89% the same as MOTU. Yep, 89% the same as a piece of work that she wrote as fan fiction and published online for free. You can now buy the ebook version for $9.99 online.
Don’t get me wrong, the Twilight series wasn’t some great work of literary expertise, but if I was Stephanie Meyers, I’d be outraged. Not only did she take her very pure, chaste characters and turn them into sex maniacs, but she had her characters in mind the whole time she was originally writing. If that isn’t a breach of intellectual property, I don’t know what is. And because these books (oh yes, it’s a trilogy) are becoming so wildly popular, they’re also making a movie out of it. Which means that every genius who’s ever written ridiculous fan fiction is suddenly going to have an “inspiration” to write their “own” book. Unbelievable.
I’d just like to add a disclaimer that I have not read Fifty Shades of Grey, nor do I intend to. I’m not a book snob; I’ll read almost anything, especially if someone recommends it to me. But I won’t curb my curiosity in the mania by supporting an author that was too lazy to develop her own characters. Sorry if that sounds harsh, it’s just my opinion. Any thoughts from my book-loving friends? Speak up in opposition, I’d love other viewpoints, especially from a legal standpoint:)
