I will eviscerate you in fiction. // Hey look! another pointless 50 Shades text post!

Beth. 20. I walk, I talk, I shop, I sneeze. I’m gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back. A mess of tea and pop culture references, chewed pens and empty notebooks.

"Murder Your Darlings" by Chris Piascik; stuff available on society6.

on twitter as @umbrella_seller

Hey look! another pointless 50 Shades text post!

I’m sorry, I didn’t want to, I really didn’t, I’m sorry I’m that person, but.

Yeah. 50 Shades depicts an abusive relationship. There are a thousand other posts floating around with detailed analyses of why this is. But 50 Shades is a fanfiction, a fanfiction of Twilight, transposed into a relatively normal setting. No vampires, nothing supernatural, just regular old super-rich unrealistically talented people.

It’s still pretty much the same story, same characters, even some of the same situations. One of the main excuses for the Twilight franchise when criticism was leveled against it was “but Edward’s a vampire! Stalking is just his vampiric way of showing he cares! Bella’s life was in danger! There were circumstances at work that made his behavior okay!” Because of this, a lot of people were able to dismiss or just didn’t see the abuse in that text.

50 Shades doesn’t have that excuse. It’s had the supernatural element that was clouding the water stripped away. A lot of people don’t even realise it’s a fanfiction! And still it’s a bestseller, still it’s flying off the shelves, still people just aren’t seeing or aren’t acknowledging the abusive elements. Why the hell is that? Are we really totally fine with reading about a guy systematically deconstructing a woman’s entire support system, stalking her, grooming her and trying to own her? That’s not sending up any red flags?

I guess it’s because we’re so used to seeing individual examples of abusive behavior in media and pop culture that when all of it’s assembled together, we just don’t notice. Beauty and the Beast is about a man who imprisons a young woman in his castle with the sole intent of making her fall in love with him. Pride and Prejudice is about how no matter how rude and offensive a guy is, he’s probably a sweetie underneath, he can change. Wuthering Heights is about dangerous and terrifying co-dependence. Gone With the Wind is about a man trying to tame and subdue a passionate woman, and it’s even implied at one point that he rapes her. These are all famous love stories. Women are told to want the Darcy, the Heathcliff, the Rhett Butler, the Beast (whose only flaw, it seems, was being ugly). It stands to reason that when a character like Edward Cullen or Christian Grey displays all of these traits, he’s the Dream Guy. After all, that’s what we’ve been led to believe.