50 Shades of Controversy

I was planning to write a review of Fifty Shades of Grey, but that is going to have to wait a few days as I was distracted by the very entertaining controversy that is swirling around the story of its creation. Put simply, some very sad people are terribly upset because they feel hard done to by Erika Leonard, the authoress of the trilogy, who writes as SnowQueens-IceDragon and E.L. James.

Those sad people are based around the world of fan fiction, a genre that I did not even know existed until I began to look into the origins of 50 Shades. In a nutshell Erika Leonard wrote the whole 50 Shades trilogy in chapters which was then uploaded as a work called Master of the Universe to a fan fiction site, that was dedicated to the Twilight novels. The Twilight fans - and there are thousands of these people - then helped her edit each chapter until it became a far more readable commodity. For instance, the authoress is British and needed help to turn her English terminology into the curious colonial dialect spoken in the United States. The readership did that for her and generally acted as editors should with the evolving manuscript, the difference being that in this case they did it for free. That is the root of the controversy because these fans claim that they only dedicated long hours to the work because they thought that Erika Leonard, or SnowQueens-IceDragon which was the nickname she used, was as much a fan of Twilight as they were, and it is obvious that she is nothing of the kind.

What is fan fiction? As the name suggests it is the fiction written by fans of a particular book or series, using the same names as the original characters, but either putting  them in different scenarios or creating a whole new reality for them. Erika Leonard took the second path which is why her work is a homage to Twilight, and cannot be seen as plagiarism of it. She kept the names from Twilight, but her Edward is a fabulous wealthy businessman and not a vampire, and the BDSM element which is central to 50 Shades is missing from Twilight. Nevertheless, she kept enough of the Twilight personalities in her fiction to please the fans and they raved over her work as it was uploaded chapter by chapter.

What this authoress had done was upload a completely new novel to an existing consumer base. To attract attention from that base she used the names from the main characters in Twilight and some of their personality traits. What she got was a fan base of her own and Master of the Universe began to attract attention from some of the publishing houses who keep an eye on these fan fiction sites. One such outfit is The Writers' Coffee Shop who eventually bought out the work as the 50 Shades trilogy. Obviously the names had to be changed, but aside from that the two works are almost identical.

That was when Erika's chums became her enemies as they started to scream that she was betraying the fan fiction ethos, that she had used them shamelessly, and so on and so forth. To be candid it looks to me as if Erika did play these people as suckers, but as W.C. Fields used to say, we never give a sucker an even break, so they deserved all they got in my view. If they were stupid enough to work hard for nothing more than a pat on the head then that serves them right.

As 50 Shades till sits on top of the best seller lists the rest is history. If you want to read the pathetic whining of some of Erika's former friends, then you might want to start with this site, if you can stomach it, as the writer behind it is one of the major whiners in all of this. One writer who has criticised Erika without whining is Jami Gold and you can read her piece at this link.

There the matter rests. Obviously Erika Leonard has not crossed any legal lines as no writs have been issued, so the claim is that she engaged in ethical misbehaviour. I do not accept that, but I would be interested in hearing your views.