imnotgettingatumblargfuckyou replied to your post “ppl who liked Ready Player One”
Okay, I want to hear your opinions on Ready Player One. (Also, currently glad that I got forced into Goodreads, too.)
thank you for asking bc I love ranting about books I hate
okay to be fair, like I said to Alex (@xalxe), I didn’t hate RPO, but I do think it’s a bad book. My three-word summary is “masturbatory 80′s nostalgia” - like, not nostalgia toward any thematic message, or with anything unifying it besides era - just reference after reference piled on top of you so you can feel clever when you catch them. It doesn’t even work to build up an 80′s aesthetic, it literally just namedrops all over you.
the biggest issue to me was the way that he set this book 30 years in the future, dropped in some cool new technology, and then didn’t put any effort into exploring how culture changed between now and then. And to me that’s the most interesting part of sci-fi, or really of any novel - that “what if,” the human implications of your premise. For that matter, the writer doesn’t seem aware that women play video games NOW, much less that hopefully gaming culture will grow less aggressive toward them in the next few decades. (And like, if it doesn’t, you can explore why that is.)
It falls straight into a typical “dude beats woman at stuff even though she’s far more qualified than he is, but it’s cool ‘cause they inexplicably fall in love.” I mean in this case I think they’re set up to be about equally qualified, but I still was totally unconvinced by Artemis (?) falling for him. Wade (I think that’s the protag’s name?) is the most boring character I could possibly conceive. Like you know how people (esp dudes) complain that Bella from Twilight has no personality and is just a self-insert fantasy? Wade is that x10. I think at one point he says he literally thinks of girls as an alien race and it’s amazing I didn’t go blind from rolling my eyes right out of their sockets.
and it tries to make up for that with (SPOILER) the reveal that his best friend is actually a black woman, which is a plot twist I FULLY ADORED, but it still like. It doesn’t count as representation to assume a character is a white dude through the whole book only to have a twist at the end, ESPECIALLY when the narrator is like “i mean i’m just gonna continue to use male pronouns tho ‘cause it’s weird otherwise.” Like I loved the reveal, but you don’t get points for it.
idk man overall the virtual world was like, somewhat interestingly developed, but the real world and the culture that has resulted from societal changes was just like. Cartoonish. No thought put into it at all. And the fact he flies around in a delorean doesn’t salvage that for me.
