For all the 80s pop culture references the book is famous for, there are absolutely no women referenced in it. No female authors; no female directors or creators; no movies, tv shows, or games starring female protagonists. It has Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Knight Rider, WarGames, Revenge of the Nerds, THX 1138, but no Alien or Terminator. Classic authors from throughout the century, not just the 80s - to quote the book itself, "Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny." (Yes, that's a direct quote. A list of authors the main character has read.) But never even once an acknowledgement of such SF giants as Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Madeline L'Engle, Lois McMaster Bujold, Anne McCaffery, Anne Rice, James Tiptree Jr., Tamora Pierce, Leslie Fish, Diane Duane, Diana Wynne Jones... these are just off the top of my head famous female SF authors writing in, or well-established by, the 1980s, but it doesn't even occur to Cline that any of them are worth mentioning. Eventually I started keeping a tally of every woman referenced in the book. The grand total was... wait for it... 3. Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, and Kaylee from Firefly. That's it. Every single other reference in the entire 300+ page book was to a man or a male-centric narrative. I guess the 80s were a decade when women just didn't fucking exist, or something.
Ready Player Two, meanwhile, fell over itself to try to address those problems - the Black girl got to be the expert on Prince, the white girl got to be the expert on... John Hughes movies, I think? And Tolkien. And the Japanese boy got to be the expert on a specific Japanese arcade game. This felt like an attempt to rectify both the "are you aware that women and people of color, like, exist" criticism and "the MC single-handedly knew more than everybody about everything" criticism, but oh boy was it clumsy as hell.
Other very obvious points where Cline was clearly responding to his critics: the main character makes a thoughtlessly transphobic remark in the first book, so in the second book he learns not to be transphobic by having lots of VR sex with - and as - people of different genders and body types. He uses admin access to hack a girl's account information and learns that she's trans, and then he hires her because she's good at video games.
But the funniest one was that the villain of the first book has apparently gone insane in prison, and he rants at the protagonist that the protag is just stagnating in a world where everyone is obsessed with the cultural relics of a decade they never lived through rather than making anything new of their own and they're pathetic for that. The protag basically responds "you're just mad I sent you to prison, and also you're crazy." The villain dies shortly thereafter. This is never addressed again. I bet Cline really felt he got an awesome dunk in against his critics there!
