I'm going to tell this story again because I think it's hilarious.
When I was in grad school working on my fiction writing MFA, a friend of mine, John, came to class one day talking about this book that had just been published and someone he knew recommended, saying it had an interesting premise.
The rest of us went out and bought the book, read it over the weekend, and were discussing it the next week. I mentioned that I liked how brutal it was in satirizing nostalgia for consumption, and that it was refreshing to see someone lampoon that impulse in post-boomer generations. My classmates all had similar thoughts.
In the end, we all agreed that, while a bit heavy-handed, Ready Player One was a pretty good satire piece. We all moved on and didn't really think about it again.
Fast forward five or six years later, and a friend I'm talking to (might have been @miss-prince actually) says something to me about Ernest Cline being a cringey hack.
"Wait, the guy who wrote Ready Player One? But that was such a pointed piece of social criticism about nostalgia pandering?"
"...What?" my friend says. "RPO wasn't critical of the nostalgia porn. It was entirely sincere."
"That can't be true. What would the point even be if it was just about how cool the 80s were?"
"Exactly. The book doesn't have a point beyond being shallow masturabatory fantasy."
They then linked me to some interviews, where it became increasingly clear that Cline was, in fact, earnest.
This whole thing is just so funny to me. A whole class of writers, many of us really skilled, were convinced this dumb slop novel that was using "gunters" unironically was in fact satirizing everything it depicted, because otherwise, why would it exist? The possibility it might just be barfing up scenarios the author thought were cool didn't even occur to us, because we were all people who took writing seriously, and assumed if you bothered to write something, you had something to share or communicate beyond surface aesthetics.
Part of me believes that if you read the book through that lens, it's still a semi-competent warning about the coming deluge of Gen X/older millennial nostalgiabait that was on the horizon in the early 2010s.
It also makes me wonder if someone else out there in an MFA or game design program played YIIK and assumed it was doing All That for a greater narrative purpose.
Anyway, I don't know what the moral here is beyond "you will always be at the mercy of your biases" and "death of the author is very real and powerful."
