Fifty Shades of (Alleged) Plagiarism

I haven't read or watched Fifty Shades of Grey, so I may be the least qualified person to do this.  But as someone who cares about defending the legitimacy of Remix culture, I really feel the need to address the accusation of it being guilty of Plagiarism due to it's relationship to Twilight.

The deepest I've actually dug into this is these two Folding Ideas videos I recommend.
A Lukewarm Defense of Fifty Shades of Grey (The Movie).
Book Club is a Theatrical made for TV Movie

First thing I want to say is that E.L. James or at least her lawyers have been unfortunately hypocritical in going after Fifty Shades derivative works.  I don't like defending hypocrites, but it's for the benefit of others I'm doing this.

Even some people who are ardent defenders of Fan Fiction and other Fan Works like Vraik are calling Fifty Shades plagiarism and saying that it's exactly us who should be condemning her for doing what Copyright holders are so irrationally afraid of.  But I disagree, to me agreeing with the notion that this is plagiarism is in and of itself vindicating the notion that all Fan Fiction is plagiarism.  And that's without even getting into how I ultimately reject Copyright law altogether.

The first context that needs to be added to the fairly well known "it started as a Twilight Fan Fic" fact is that it was specifically an Alternate Universe fan fiction, and one that was more of a retelling of the basic story of Twilight then a sequel or side story.  And that's the real crux of the plagiarism accusation. It wasn't her telling a completely brand new story with Twilight characters and then later writing the Twilight out of it.  Instead we have a story that, in both the version using Twilight names and the one that doesn't, can be described as following the same basic beats as the story of Twilight, but without Vampires or other Supernatural elements.

Thing is, lots of very different stories follow the same basic beats.  Frankly what I'm far more annoyed by are Remakes disguised as Sequels like The Force Awakens and Superman Re[dacted], but no legal objections will ever come up there since they're made by the Copyright holder.  But of course even The Phantom Menace which I really love can also sort of be described as following the same basic story beats as A New Hope.  And comparatively it seems to me like Master of The Universe was closer to TPM then it was TFA in how much it mimics the original.

And that subject brings us to Star Wars relationship to The Hidden Fortress.  The Phantom Menace draws even more on THF arguably, in fact it's TPM similarity that makes me want to get around to actually watching THF some day (maybe once I've actually watched it I'll stop mis-remembering the name as The Forbidden Fortress).  And I shouldn't need to be retreading the defenses of Remix culture that have already been laid out, but my usual allies sometimes disagree with me here.

The thing that makes this Inspired By story feel like more of a Rip Off story is that it actively began under the Twilight name and then later removed it.  And that's why George Lucas is very relevant here.  Because you see there was a stage in the development of Star Wars where he was considering trying to get the rights to simply make it as an adaptation of The Hidden Fortress, but dropped that idea once certain similarities were dropped.  Likewise key aspects of Twilight are dropped for Fifty Shades, I mean MOTU may work fine as a fan fic but if it was an officially licensed Twilight Elseworlds project the publisher tried to make money off of you know darn well someone would go "how can you call this Twilight when no one Sparkles?"

One of the main reasons Star Wars seems so creative even when people are Nerding out over it's influences, are that there were many influences, the creativity is thought to be in how Lucas mixed them together.  So the question is, is Twilight really the only literary ancestor Fifty Shades has?  Often the point of an AU fic is putting the skeleton of one kind of story into a totally different genre and that's exactly what we have here.

What the final product of Fifty Shades still has in common with Twilight is mostly what Twilight has in common with many Teen/YA romances.  The removal of the Vampire aspects make Fifty Shades seem a lot less directly like a Gothic Romance, though Christian Grey is arguably more Byronic then Edward.

If I were to analyze Fifty Shades with no prior knowledge of it's origins, I'd compare it to the many Harlequin romance novels about women having affairs with hot young rich guys that become arguably unhealthy relationships way before I would any typical Young Adult Romance.  And if you told me it started as a Fan Fiction but without telling me of what, my first guess would probably be an Ayn Rand novel.

That's right, once you have even entry level knowledge of Ayn Rand, the ways Christian Gray fits her ideal Individualist male shouldn't take too long to notice.  I'll bet I'm not the first to write about it, but I haven't looked for it yet.  It's interesting how Rand comes up discussing both Batman and Iron Man (I love how Zach Snyder haters will constantly complain about the Randian influences he puts in his DC movies, but are besides KyleKallgrenBHH blind to the far more Randian implications of Tony Stark.  For the record I despise Rand's philosophy, but I can enjoy fiction I don't ideologically agree with).

Recently I've watched YouTube videos comparing Frank Miller's DKR Batman to both Rand's ideal male, and to the Byronic Hero.  And that makes me wonder to what extent the Byronic archetype was an influence on Rand.  But either way this Randian similarity, intentional or not, is a big factor in distinguishing James writing from Meyer's, Meyer as a Mormon was certainly no Individualist.

So at the end of the day Fifty Shades of Grey is no more or less similar to prior works then any other trashy romance novel.  It's only the direct involvement of internet fan fiction and it's stigma that gets it singled out.