What are the appealing elements in Twilight and 50 shades of grey?

Cafe Society
1

The Twilight and 50 shades of grey series are some of the most popular book series in memory. Now, I’m sure we can think of very many elements which don’t appeal but surely if they’re so popular, there are elements within those two series which have some kind of appeal. What are they?

Do the audiences for Twilight and FS wholly overlap?

What are the similarities and differences between Twilight and FS?
I would like this discussion to be more than a bitchfest about Twilight and FS. You certainly don’t have to be wholly positive in your description but if what you want to chiefly do is trash them, please start another thread. This thread is meant to empathize with people who have different tastes than some of us do so that we may better understand what the appeal of that genre is and how Twilight and FS are apparently the best current examples of that genre.

2

Well for starters, once Ana and Christian started doing the kinky stuff, they both REALLY liked it, and James did a great job of showing how much they liked the sex and describing it with gusto. The issues that Ana and Christian had in fact were never sexual … she liked the submissive sex from the beginning, it was the contractual relationship with Christian that she did not like and which she successfully resisted. I think at heart the book’s appeal may be the notion that a young and innocent (Ana is a virgin when she starts the relationship) woman can change a man who has been deeply wounded emotionally for the better. It was never a description of the ideal BDSM relationship, but DID very thoroughly follow the standard romance tropes.

I am not much of a fan of romances, but I did read the first book in the series and that’s what I got out of it.

Plus, I found the thought of an inner goddess doing a mamba amusing!

3

i guess this is as good as place as any to admit my secret: i cannot stop watching the twilight movies. every time i scroll through the tv listings and see it on, i flick immediately to it. love.

speaking only for myself, i love the movies because they’re wonderfully bad. it’s just some nice eye and brain candy, junk food for the mind. i have attempted the books, and got to about page 5 in the first one before i put it down. the writing was just too bad for me to get into it.

i understand why it’s been so successful, though, especially among teenage girls. bella is ultimately an empty shell of a character that any girl can slip herself into. her traits that we do know of are ones that virtually any teenage girl can relate to-she’s clumsy, self-conscious, feels out of place, uncomfortable in her own skin.

and as it turns out, the very things she dislikes about herself actually benefit her and she really is out of place where she is because she’s something special, something more. out of everyone edward’s run into during his century of being alive, she’s the only one whose mind he can’t read. edward has the perfect ratio of bad boy appeal(being a vampire and all) and nice, safe, hot guy who is content to sit and hold hands with her in fields of flowers and never ask for anything more until they’re married.

i think that’s ultimately the main point, is safety. edward provides that security to bella, and by extension to the target audience. he will never harm her, always shield her from outside threats, never ask anything of her she’s not ready to give. since she becomes a vampire at the end, they will always be young and beautiful and be able to fly off cliffs or whatever superpowers she ended up with(i haven’t seen breaking dawn yet. by the way, the above is not necessarily what i take away from the story, but what i see the average tween/teen girl taking from it.)

i can’t offer any insight into 50 shades, i know nothing about it aside from the basic premise and have no interest in it.

4

I hate reading romances, but I got Twilight because I love reading horror. Although I ended up really loving the youthful heart wrenching crush she described, and thought the whole vampire stuff was corny. I finished the series and saw some of the movies. Meh, s’ok. But the young love stuff in the first book really took me back to that feeling of infatuation.

I read 50 shades books because everyone else was. I’ve read a good bit of erotica and 50 is just mediocre. I just think it became a fad.

I don’t think the 2 series have much at all in common other than encouraging a lot of non readers to read.

5

Gilbert Gottfried reading 50 shades.

6

Are we supposed to be using our imagination?

7

I haven’t read the Fifty Shades book, but the Twilight series seems to be mostly a wish-fulfillment book for teenage girls.

The protagonist is clumsy and socially inept, or at least feels that way. Then someone falls in love with her who is
[ul][li]Mysterious[/li][li]Physically superhuman[/li][li]Eternally young and handsome[/li][li]Who protects her from the dangers of being involved with him[/li][li]At least in the first book, they cannot have sex, so there is both sexual tension, and none of the consequences of a sexual relationship[/ul][/li]
Which kind of echoes a lot of the concerns of a certain emotional level of teenager. She does not have the responsibility of a sexual relationship, and someone falls in love with her without much effort on her part, and he is handsome and mysterious. Just like many adolescents wish their boyfriends were.

Disclaimer: I only read the first book, and only saw the first movie. I am given to understand that the story arc continued after I was able to wriggle out from being dragged to the premieres by my daughter, who loved the books and movies much, much more than I did. Much, much.

Regards,
Shodan

8

You mean you can’t remember Hunger Games and Harry Potter?

9

Yes, I’m also baffled at how a story about a clumsy girl who moves into a new town, becomes instantly popular, and is the focus of a romantic rivalry between a hunky jock and a brooding beautiful boy (both of whom have supernatural powers) could possibly interest young teen girls. It’s a real puzzler!

10

The males in Twilight and 50 Shades love the heroine down to her very core, to the point where they literally cannot live without her. To a lot of people their obsessive behavior would seem crazy and stalkerish, but I can see how it would be extremely romantic to an inexperienced teenage girl.

11

And both are infinitely better than the books the OP has taken names of.

12

Said “some of” not “all of.”

13

14

They’re self-insertion empowerment fantasies. In both the protagonist begins as a weak, unimposing figure, but by the end they’ve control of the most powerful person in their respective universe. By wrapping a very dominant (although that’s debatable, it’s how he was intended to be read I think) businessman and a mind-reading vampire around their little fingers our heroines transform into powerful figures. Entertainingly both rely on sexuality to ensnare their counterpart, which is the most safe, mundane choice possible on the part of the authors even if they do try to conceal their stories’ frame with a thin veneer of edginess in the form of a vampire prone to domestic abuse and a rich guy who thinks he’s a dom.

15

We’re not supposed to be posting simple snarkery here, per the OP.

16

Haven’t read Fifty Shades, sorry.

I liked the Cullens. I liked their histories and the movies did those historical scenes very well. I liked Michael Sheen’s portrayal of Aro – he was so strange. I liked James and Laurent and Victoria when she was played by Rachelle LeFavre, not so much Bryce Dallas Howard. Jane could have been a lot better if she were played by an unknown and not Dakota Fanning.
I was intrigued by the werewolf/Quileute link but the imprint turn was a little overdramatic to my liking and presented too many problems.
I would have liked Edward better if he were a side character and not the main guy. He seemed too hyper fixated and self-flagellating. I loved Jasper: how polite but private he was, but once he started with the military training he transformed into a confident drill instructor, and how his Texan accent filtered through. I would have loved to have Emmett for a big brother, and it was hard not to like Alice, or Esme, or even Rosalie, who came through to Bella when Bella asked her for help protecting the baby. Carlisle was a great Giles equivalent.
The characters really resonated, even if the plot was a bit too emotionally jerky.

17

There are two reasons someone might enjoy Fifty Shades of Gray.

One, they understand that Christian Gray would be a horrible person in real life, but can still enjoy the character as a work of fiction. The story is still poorly written crap, but there’s nothing objectionable about enjoying Fifty Shades the same way I enjoy Kenpachi’s antics on Bleach.

Two, they do not understand that Christian Gray is a horrible person. These are the kind of idiots who write love letters to Charles Manson. Gray is a rapist, a domestic abuser, and a stalker who uses his money as a weapon to beat women into submission. James’ constant insistence that rape and abuse is just BDSM is dangerous to anyone stupid enough to believe it.

18

Are you a mod? No? Well, ok then.

19

This. I doubt that the books the OP names are actually the “best current examples” of their genres in any objective way.

What makes a book a runaway bestseller is usually a combination of acceptably good conventional writing (not anything too challenging or experimental in form), intriguing subject and plot, broad audience appeal, and a hefty slice of luck.

The circumstances that cause a certain book to be read by a lot of people are at least partly random. And once a lot of people are reading it, then everybody else reads it simply because everybody’s reading it.

That’s not to say an exceptionally good book can’t be really popular, just that an exceptionally popular book isn’t necessarily really good.

20

While both have been very, very successful, there are a number of other recent series that have enjoyed comparable popularity. If Wikipedia’s numbers are correct, the 50 Shades of Grey books have sold a bit better than the Left Behind and Series of Unfortunate Events books, and a bit worse than the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. These four series have very little in common except for being huge bestsellers.

I’m sure they don’t wholly overlap, but since the latter quite literally originated as fanfiction for the former then there’s presumably significant overlap.

I didn’t make it far into Twilight and have never read any of Fifty Shades at all, but it’s my understanding that one big difference is the number of sex scenes.

Again, I know the Fifty Shades series only by reputation, but I don’t think these two books are examples of the same genre at all. One has prominent supernatural elements, very little sex, and was marketed at teen girls. The other has (to the best of my knowledge) nothing supernatural but lots of explicit BDSM sex scenes and was marketed at adult women. I can’t think of a genre of popular fiction broad enough to encompass both, unless you consider “books targeted at female readers” to be a genre.

I also see no particular reason to assume that these books are the best examples of their respective genres. They’re certainly popular, but that’s not the same thing as being the best.