RPO is pretty crappy

Gonna get this out of the way straight off, I haven't seen Ready Player One and I don't intend to, from what I have heard and read about the film it seems to be relatively harmless and fun which lord knows I can't have a problem with considering my own tastes. That said I have read the book and folks, it won't be hard for the film version to improve on the source material.

On it's surface, RPO is a reasonable enough concept, sort of a mash up of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Last Starfighter, basically in the shitty future of roughly thirty years from now the world is awful, there are far more people than jobs, the economy is in the shitter, the cities are overpopulated hellholes of poverty which, if a throwaway line in the beginning are to be believed, regularly are destroyed in nuclear fire, and everything outside the cities are basically a Mad Max style wasteland of gangs and murder. Most people don't care though because they have Oasis, a virtual reality universe where you can be anything and do anything, it and the company behind it basically drive all aspects of the world economy and culture, which, because the games creator was a huge fan of 80s pop culture, is pretty much stuck in that decade. This is also because when the creator died he left a contest, whoever could solve a number of clues and overcome challenges would gain sole ownership of his creation and a shitload of money. This leads to an entire generation basically immersing themselves in the stupid pop culture shit from the 80s (really the 80s-2010 or so, because Ernest Cline can't commit to a theme.) in an attempt to figure out the clues and win the prize.

Our hero is of course one of those people, things progress as you might imagine from there, because there really isn't anything unique in this story.

The book is shit, and it's popularity reveals a really telling quality of nerd culture in general, I have an example in the form of a picture:

This is from the book, unmodified, and it sounds fairly dumb, but honestly could be a useful plot device, a flying car that can phase through walls and has an AI? Neat, could be a great side character and useful weapon right? Wrong, because after this scene it is put away and mentioned maybe one more time in the book, KITT never gets a line, he never flies through walls, or busts ghosts, what this is, and what the book is, is a list of things the author thought were cool, but he doesn't bother to show us how they are cool, we are just expected to know.

Vast swaths of the book are like that, lists, lists of movies, lists of video games, lists of musicians, more lists of movies, some TV shows, actually quite a lot of TV shows. In between the lists, the story follows the pattern of "I ran into a challenge, thanks to my knowledge of (Relevant pop culture thing) I overcame the challenge and was rewarded with money and the respect of my peers, then I found a new challenge".

I mean that literally, there is a scene where the protagonist must reenact, faithfully and without deviation, the entirety of the movie Wargames from beginning to end. Thankfully the book skips over us having to read every scene, but there it is.

That is a good example actually, so if you know anything about Wargames you probably only know the basics, AI threatens nuclear apocalypse, and the line "What a strange game, the only winning move is not to play." It's honestly a pretty forgettable film, but the lesson there is relevant in a world of mutually assured destruction. In the hands of a good writer, we could maybe draw a connection between the lesson of the movie and the slavish devotion to the trivia of the tests, perhaps even make it quite literally unwinnable until you stop playing and think for yourself, but this doesn't happen, and it never happens.

The point isn't to think for yourself, the point is to like the same things that Ernest Cline likes, and do it in the exact same way. There is no getting around the tests, no unique answers.

In one of the first posts on this blog, I talked about how nerds have a tendency to see themselves as "gatekeepers" for their hobby or media of choice, and this book does nothing but reinforce that, the endless lists, and that is what they are, of things that Cline thinks you should like, are not included out of love and a desire to expose other people to them, but rather there to show how much cooler than you he is for knowing about them, and how people who don't know about them are losers. Quite literally in this case, from my viewing of clips from the movie, that aspect of the novel seems to have fully translated to the big screen, what with a character like the Iron Giant being used as a weapon, something which someone who knows the barest minimum possible about the movie would know is directly antithetical to the character.

There isn't any love here, it's a story about how the meaningless consumption of outdated pop culture in its shallowest form is all you need to be rich, popular, and get laid. The only major female character is the girlfriend prize who the protagonist, in what is almost their first interaction, straight up asks her if she is trans for some reason. The supporting cast are similarly treated, with a pair of Japanese caricatures and a "best friend" who the protagonist thinks is a guy but turns out to be a black lesbian in the real world, this is also treated with care and taste, by which I mean our character spends a good few pages feeling pissed off and betrayed. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen. The movie does that character no favors by giving her an orc avatar either.

I take it back, there is love here, but it is a love for the most superficial and toxic aspects of nerd culture, it doesn't want to change anything, it doesn't even want to learn the lessons taught by the very properties it insists we love! It is basically a couple hundred pages of:

Combined with stupid as hell white "nice guy" bullshit, our character would be a villain in a properly written book, he stalks and harasses his love interest, he uses his friends but never really seems to show he cares for them, his home blowing up and killing hundreds of people, including his only living relative, is given perhaps a couple of sentences of reaction, he literally spends more time fuming about how is friend didn't tell him she was a black girl.

And you know what? There is a great book there in the hands of a writer who cared even a little bit about a good story! Have our main character be the complete tool he is! Focus on the people he hurts by his stupid fucking quest to save to World of Warcraft, have the hunt for the prize be a trip through the mind of a person just like him, who maybe learned at the end of his life just how toxic his obsessions are, have him learn, or have someone learn, those lessons. Have him fail, maybe the grand prize is actually the off switch to OASIS. Fuck me, the dude wanted to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but thought Mike TV would make a better protagonist, and you know, that would be sort of cool if it had any interest in teaching a lesson, but Cline isn't interested in that, and that might be the biggest shame of this whole mess.

There was a good story that could have been told with this setting, but he didn't tell it, and now it can't be told without a lawsuit or to be condemned to the fanfiction pages.