Everyone's familiar with E L James's "Fifty Shades of Grey", you know, that "Twilight" BDSM fanfic turned bestselling erotic novel turned strangely subdued movie?

Well, for the next three weeks it's all I'm going to talk about.

This novel (if we're going to call it that) needs more analysis than just covering some of the problems presented in this lukewarm tale.

Today I'm just going to focus on the link between "Fifty Shades of Grey" and "Twilight."

Am I the only one who is astounded at how unsubtle this is?

Sure, all the names have been changed but the characters are nearly physically identical to their "Twilight" counterparts.

The biggest change, I think, is probably the difference in eye color (is it sad that I know that? Ugh I need to bleach my soul).

Besides that Christian Grey matches Edward Cullen to a T.

Allegedly Christian runs a business, but I've never actually seen him do anything business-related. It's all just creepy sex things and stalking Anastasia.

Add to that the weird obsession and the abusive/stalker-ish behavior and the two characters are basically the same.

Anastasia Steele surprised me, however. I just assumed that she would be a Bella Swan transplant. But she felt like more of a character than Bella Swan ever did.

The problem, as I'm sure you all remember, is that Bella Swan is left (intentionally?) blank and personality-less so the audience could insert themselves into her and live through her as an audience insert.

Anastasia, on the other hand, appears to have some sort of internal monologue and though her "inner goddess" feels really out of place, at least the character seems to have some sense of self.

She did, however, pick up Bella's "plain Jane" sort of behaviorisms which I could do without.

Honestly the biggest problem is that it just feels like "Twilight" to me. Sure "Twilight" was super sexless, it had a lot of weird "no premarital sex" vibes, but "Fifty Shades of Grey" just feels like Twilight.

I don't remember many of the character names, but Ana works at a Hardware Store just like Bella does, gets attention from boys that she doesn't understand -- just like Bella. There's even a Mike Newton insert. Also the descriptions of the parents and where they are in life are basically the same. Sure Charlie and Renee aren't the same in "Fifty Shades of Grey" but the mom is still scatterbrained and remarried like Renee is. There's no real difference in the characters between their "Twilight" counterparts.

Furthermore, it would be nice if many of the events weren't just ripped from "Twilight." For example, Christian stalks Ana to a party where he "saves her". Christian/Edward saves Ana/Bella from almost being run over (I think that happened? I may have made it up? I seriously can't tell the difference between the two stories).

This does, however, contribute to a small problem. There are sometimes interactions that only make sense within the context of "Twilight." Christian often likes to comment on Anastasia's smell, which makes perfect sense if this were Edward and Bella (remember that Bella smells like Edward's own personal brand of heroin, as Stephanie Meyer put it), but like within "Fifty Shades of Grey" itself, it feels really weird that he's constantly smelling her.

I don't know, it feels like a red flag.

More red flags will be discussed next week when I'm diving straight into the erotic sections of the book.

Spoiler Alert: Did not find the book arousing.