I actually finished reading Ready Player One a number of months ago, maybe sometime after the first of this year. I wanted to finish reading it before the movie came out because based on what generalities I had heard about the book and story, they had me interested enough to want to see the movie before I had even started reading the book.
Now, in order to spare you reading an entire article to find out how I really felt about Ernest Cline's praised story of one forlorn in life and love in a race against The Man, I should probably just tell you what I thought before we go any further.
I did not like Ready Player One. And there are going to be spoilers, so y'all've been warned.
What I did not like about the story, was that, at least to me, it was about a boy (or a young pre-adult teen) who manages to develop no real self identity and instead has modeled all of his likes and dislikes off of the developer (James Hallidy) of a massive online virtual world/interface called the OASIS. There is no development on this front for our main character Wade Watts aka Parzival. He is essentially the same character at the beginning that he ended up being at the end. I admit that he is a very smart, intelligence-wise character and his ability to learn, adapt and retain knowledge from movies and playing various types of video games is impressive. However, I found him to also be a self absorbed entitled male character whom I wanted to shake by his hairless shoulders yelling at him to get over himself. When he can't understand that the female personality/avatar that he meets in the OASIS (whom he has already fantasized as an online personality before actually meeting her) is not romantically interested in him, he becomes angry, aggressive, and secludes himself away, deducing that all of the effort he put into pursuing his love interest was a worthless waste of time. In the end, the two characters end up meeting in real life, she's afraid that he will shun her for what she sees as her physical deformity. He doesn't, and they fall in love. Just like he always wanted. But he's the good guy because he is able to look beyond what she sees as a negative aspect of herself? Is that really taking the high ground and Art3mis should be thankful that this a guy who is able to look beyond her deformity? I'm going to stop this line of thought now because I could just run myself in circles.
Another story element that bothered me, was the deus ex machina part that came near the end of the book, because of course this book would use this type of literary device. Now, I am not against this as a plot device as long as it makes sense and does not seem to come out of nowhere and is written well. Aragorn showing up at Minas Tirith with an army of the dead could be seen as one, as well as the Eagles rescuing Frodo and Sam from the slopes of Mt. Doom. In Ready Player One, it was used when it seemed all hope was lost due to a series of unfortunate events, Parzival and his group are nearly on their way out from completing the main objective in the story. Then co-creator of the OASIS, who is somewhat of a wealthy recluse (and mentioned a few times earlier in the story), flies in and offers all of our hero characters a wealth of resources at his private estate that helps them to be the winners, becoming the new owners of the VR world. What irritated me was that any risk the characters had going up against the mega corporation IOI was immediately dashed when Ogden Morrow shows up. Any feeling of struggle or loss was completely negated for me, which made the final victory seem all the more hollow and meaningless.
The other thing that really irritated me about the book was that it seemed like it was written with the idea of referencing anything having to do with geek or nerd culture from the 1970-2000. Fewer than five pages into the book, I felt that if the rate at which various aspects of pop-geek culture were being referenced, I would be very tired of it by the end. In American Psycho, which is an altogether very different book, Bret Easton Ellis used a lot of pop and high culture references, but he managed to do it in a way that made sense for the character's mind and by the time I finished the book and started in on whatever book I was reading next, I legitimately wanted to know what brand of clothes the characters were wearing or what brand of alcohol they were drinking and why it should only be drunk straight and never mixed. Most of the time, it felt like something was being referenced just for the sake of it as opposed to it having some kind of impact on the story, and that was something that I felt was difficult for me to look past.
The most enjoyable part of the book for me, I recently found out was left out of the movie entirely, which almost makes me 85.47% less interested in actually getting around to watching the film despite like Stephen Spielberg directing and Alan Silvestri's music. Although maybe I will just so I can have something else to complain about? In the book, Parzival discovers that one of his goals lies within a life size rendering of the Tomb of Horrors, which is an original Dungeons & Dragons quest written and published by Gary Gygax back in 1978. I have read through the module a number of times, but admittedly have never played it. Having parts of this quest in the book was pretty exciting, like reading someone playing a D&D quest that you happen to know. Granted I do not know the quest front-and-back, but seeing this in an non-D&D book I was reading was pretty cool.
And I think that is where a lot of the excitement for this book and its continued support comes from. There were times when one of Ernest Cline's references hit me hard in the nostalgia feels, but for me, I felt that a lot of the attempts to create real nostalgia felt disingenuous and often forced. Because I do not have the book in front of me, I cannot cite any specific examples, but at the same time, how do you quote a passage from a book and have that lack of feeling come across? And at the same time, these are just my words, and for all I know, they may be just as lacking.
The better late than never tl:dr (or if you missed the short third paragraph), is that while there were some elements that I liked in the book, such as a few of the references, and even the world that was created (which I wish had been explored more outside of the OASIS), they did not stand up to all of the things that I did not like about Ready Player One.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental
And I think that is where a lot of the excitement for this book and its continued support comes from. There were times when one of Ernest Cline's references hit me hard in the nostalgia feels, but for me, I felt that a lot of the attempts to create real nostalgia felt disingenuous and often forced. Because I do not have the book in front of me, I cannot cite any specific examples, but at the same time, how do you quote a passage from a book and have that lack of feeling come across? And at the same time, these are just my words, and for all I know, they may be just as lacking.
The better late than never tl:dr (or if you missed the short third paragraph), is that while there were some elements that I liked in the book, such as a few of the references, and even the world that was created (which I wish had been explored more outside of the OASIS), they did not stand up to all of the things that I did not like about Ready Player One.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental
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