Oh, but we do know why Christian is so fucked up. It's all the fault of his biological mother and the first four years of his life he spent with her, which is TOTALLY enough to explain everything about why he's such a manipulative, misogynistic, unlikeable, pompous, waste-of-space, raping and beating asshole. */Sarcasm*
You know, the fact that it was originally fanfic... is almost why I want to say it's so bad. But then I would be insulting my work and those of thousands of other fanfic writers, who write better stuff (whether sex scenes or other scenes) and are younger than she is.
I actually enjoy reading fanfiction, but I just thought that this was a bad fanfic that should never have been published. You're right, this is an insult to all the actually talented fanfic writers who write stories of actual quality, not this tripe.
Those poor five people.
Not to cramp your style, but putting the word "martyr" so close to the word "Christian" gives me weird associations.
It is generally agreed upon that people who are afraid to type "vagina" shouldn't try to write erotica.
@Tylda: Well now, just cause someone doesn't use the word doesn't mean they are afraid of typing it. For example, I tend to not use the word, but not cause I'm afraid of it. More that I think the word would feel out of place for the way I write sex scenes.
But ELJ has no excuse for that. Her sex scenes are so clunky, short-sentenced and awkward, I would expect the word vagina to pop up. In fact, if she began to write sex scenes with the word Wee-wee, wiener or similar, I wouldn't be surprised, because that's the mental level she seems to be writing at. (And having a grown woman refer to her genitalia as 'down there' just... makes her come across as, quite frankly, retarded and that makes reading about her having sex worse... feels like someone's taking advantage of someone who doesn't have the mental capacity to know about sex...)
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Worse than anything I've ever read
This title may sound drastic, but it's true. As of now, I have never read anything as poorly written, riddled with Unfortunate Implications, or less entertaining than this.
First of all, the "romance" that EL James wrote - or tried to write - is just disturbing. Ana is a Love Martyr to Christian, an abusive stalker who threatens her, stalks her, raped her...Not to mention that this was unintentional on the author's part.
Now, the way the novel was written is what I have issues with. The writer has no interest in exploring a healthy, consensual BDSM relationship(which actually had decent plot potential) and genuinely doesn't appear to see how toxic it is. All she appeared to be interested in was the erotic part, which was completely ruined thanks to the terrible prose. Ana's narrative is stilted and frankly strange at times("down there"? "Holy crap"? Really?) Christian's backstory would be interesting if we got some more exploration into how and why he is such a troubled and screwed-up character; but obviously James is too busy writing about Ana and Christian fucking to bother making her story the slightest bit intriguing.
All in all, the reason why I have issues with this book is because it achieved the exact opposite of what it set out to do: the sex was uninteresting and poorly written, the series appears to glorify emotional and physical abuse, the BDSM is poorly represented, and all in all, the writing is just bad. It's as though the author never bothered refining the story from the fanfic it originally was.