Fifty Shades Fried: Chapter 25- Meet Fifty Shades
Ladies and gentlemen, devoted minions, I am finished with this travesty of a series. These books are so bad that I may very delete them from my Kindle for all time, because I have no desire to ever read them again. They make Hush Hush look good by comparison.
What happens at the end of the book? Nothing. It's just a lot of nothing. Ana says that everything is resolved but nothing is resolved at all. Christian talks about Mrs. Robinson and then goes on some demented revenge kick against her ex-husband. The ex-husband paid Hyde's bail, you see, because he hates Christian just that much and now he has to pay for it. There's more sex and Ana proudly proclaims that it's what they do. Yep. That's all they have. Sex. Nothing else. Not a life. Not a mission. Not a damn thing but empty screwing like a pair of rabbits on Spanish Fly. This is followed by an epilogue where three years have passed and they are still having the exact same sex. Nothing says family friendly like having restraints around where your kids can see them. Kids love that. Ana is pregnant again with another child (her third? I was kind of skimming this.)
The last two sections of the book are pure filler. They are both narrated from Christian's POV. The first is Christmas at the Grey household. At least this is new material, although it doesn't really add anything to the story. We already know what Christian was like as a child and I think this information would have fit in better elsewhere in the story, possibly coming from both Grey and his mother at different times. The second section is the first part of book one from Christian's perspective, which includes every last word of dialogue we already read in book one. It is a lazy fanfic of a lazy fanfic. How meta. We learn nothing that we haven't either been told by Christian, or seen through Ana's remarkable ability to know things that a normal person would not be able to know while remaining completely ignorant of all the things she actually should be able to perceive. The best I can say is that we now know for certain that Christian really did target Ana as a vulnerable potential victim, then set out to exploit her long before they had any kind of relationship. In fact, his dossier of her history seems so thorough that we should probably assume that he was well aware that she was sexually experienced and only pretended surprise as a way to coerce her into bed more quickly.
Going into this, I promised myself that I would try to keep in mind that it's all a fantasy. Everything that happens, no matter how terrible, happens because the author and her avatar want it to happen. So, I guess the author wanted to romanticize the way a predator grooms a victim? Or maybe this is a book for women who think that being a complete person with goals is just too hard and the best we can hope for is to belong to the richest man possible? Or maybe we are a society in despair, desperately trying to justify being too beaten down and afraid to walk out of Hell. The door is open but we don't know what's beyond it, so we might as well sit tight and wait for the next round of punishment and degradation. Hey, we all feel bad about ourselves from time to time, but do we really feel this bad?
The Fifty Shades series makes me wonder if the world sucks. It's a pretty serious concern. People relate to these books, kids. People relate to a romance between a man who acts like a psychotic two year old and a spoiled, selfish woman.
I want to exuse it. I want to say it's okay.
But I can't.
Everything about these books is bad. Look, I think people should be able to profit from an AU story that is different enough from its source to be reframed as original. This story just isn't different enough. There are too many details left from its Twilight roots. The writing is terrible and the editing is worse. It worries me that there's so little out there for us that we're left with this crap. When did female readers get this marginalized? Or is hating these books an even bigger cultural phenomenon than liking them and this is the literary equivalent of "Friday"?
But at least it's over and from now on, we can all read nothing but good books. Well, we can dream.
What happens at the end of the book? Nothing. It's just a lot of nothing. Ana says that everything is resolved but nothing is resolved at all. Christian talks about Mrs. Robinson and then goes on some demented revenge kick against her ex-husband. The ex-husband paid Hyde's bail, you see, because he hates Christian just that much and now he has to pay for it. There's more sex and Ana proudly proclaims that it's what they do. Yep. That's all they have. Sex. Nothing else. Not a life. Not a mission. Not a damn thing but empty screwing like a pair of rabbits on Spanish Fly. This is followed by an epilogue where three years have passed and they are still having the exact same sex. Nothing says family friendly like having restraints around where your kids can see them. Kids love that. Ana is pregnant again with another child (her third? I was kind of skimming this.)
The last two sections of the book are pure filler. They are both narrated from Christian's POV. The first is Christmas at the Grey household. At least this is new material, although it doesn't really add anything to the story. We already know what Christian was like as a child and I think this information would have fit in better elsewhere in the story, possibly coming from both Grey and his mother at different times. The second section is the first part of book one from Christian's perspective, which includes every last word of dialogue we already read in book one. It is a lazy fanfic of a lazy fanfic. How meta. We learn nothing that we haven't either been told by Christian, or seen through Ana's remarkable ability to know things that a normal person would not be able to know while remaining completely ignorant of all the things she actually should be able to perceive. The best I can say is that we now know for certain that Christian really did target Ana as a vulnerable potential victim, then set out to exploit her long before they had any kind of relationship. In fact, his dossier of her history seems so thorough that we should probably assume that he was well aware that she was sexually experienced and only pretended surprise as a way to coerce her into bed more quickly.
Going into this, I promised myself that I would try to keep in mind that it's all a fantasy. Everything that happens, no matter how terrible, happens because the author and her avatar want it to happen. So, I guess the author wanted to romanticize the way a predator grooms a victim? Or maybe this is a book for women who think that being a complete person with goals is just too hard and the best we can hope for is to belong to the richest man possible? Or maybe we are a society in despair, desperately trying to justify being too beaten down and afraid to walk out of Hell. The door is open but we don't know what's beyond it, so we might as well sit tight and wait for the next round of punishment and degradation. Hey, we all feel bad about ourselves from time to time, but do we really feel this bad?
The Fifty Shades series makes me wonder if the world sucks. It's a pretty serious concern. People relate to these books, kids. People relate to a romance between a man who acts like a psychotic two year old and a spoiled, selfish woman.
I want to exuse it. I want to say it's okay.
But I can't.
Everything about these books is bad. Look, I think people should be able to profit from an AU story that is different enough from its source to be reframed as original. This story just isn't different enough. There are too many details left from its Twilight roots. The writing is terrible and the editing is worse. It worries me that there's so little out there for us that we're left with this crap. When did female readers get this marginalized? Or is hating these books an even bigger cultural phenomenon than liking them and this is the literary equivalent of "Friday"?
But at least it's over and from now on, we can all read nothing but good books. Well, we can dream.