Have you read Fifty Shades? Do you want to?

I read all three books, only for the sake of being able to critique and review them thoroughly and fairly. They are poorly written with an unlikely plot full of holes, fraught with crutches for weak writing, redundancy, ignorantly used lofty synonyms, cliches, inconsistencies, and a veritable myriad of other problems. For those who don't know, the story was originally published as a serialized fan fiction project based on Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. It seems it gained enough popularity to be changed just enough to render it able to stand alone for publication in its own right. The characters are weak, flat, static and inconsistant. Those looking for a story about BDSM will be disappointed. This series paints BDSM and practitioners thereof as damaged, unhealthy people needing to be saved from their darkness by true love. BDSM and D/s relationships are portrayed as the very antithesis of a loving, healthy relationship. The author also propagates the popular myth of "natural" submissives and the idea that those who are not "natural submissives" will never be capable of happily submitting or serving. The love story that evolves is controlling and borderline abusive, but largely vanilla with a sparse peppering light bondage and other play, which the characters call "kinky fuckery", just one of the many grossly overused phrases throughout the books. The author has done both the literary world and the kink/fetish/leather/BD SM community a huge disservice. The unfathomable popularity of this series has not only set the effort to promote acceptance and understanding of BDSM back but will likely spawn a new "generation" of newcomers to kink who will have a warped misconception of the lifestyle. less