I'm rewatching numerous other Fifty Shades Darker reviews and it's reminding me just how hard it was to assemble a reasonably accurate portrait of the fanfiction origins.
It's recent *internet* history, it should be super easy to re-assemble, right? Everything's just a well bounded Google search away!
Hahaha.
No.
Hahaha.
No.
I had to go down rabbit holes inside rabbit holes to find simple things like "when the hell were the books actually published?"
When did things start migrating to her personal website? What parts were published when? What versions were published where? Which versions did I have?
It's all *there* but it's in forum threads and reblog-of-a-reblog-of-a-reblog Tumblr posts and "oops, E L James had the Internet Archive strip this page from their records" dead ends.
Someone updates their forum software in 2014 and, oops, every old post now has a publication date of March 31st, 2002! Whoopsie doodle!
It was shockingly difficult just to confirm what parts of the fanfiction lined up with what parts of the books.
An actual goldmine was when on a Waybackmachine version of a defunct forum cataloguing fanfiction I found a link to a PDF of Master of the Universe 2 that had scraped the HTML off fifty shades dot com, leaving author notes, time stamps, and hyperlinks mostly intact 
This shot right here, confirming the actual original publication date, took weeks.
Anyway, it's been a trip and I think I can see the end.
The end where I have accidentally become an expert on the fragmentary publication history of Fifty Shades of Grey.
The end where I have accidentally become an expert on the fragmentary publication history of Fifty Shades of Grey.
