Chatterbox: Blab About Books

Okay. Ready Player One I have looked up several reviews, and boy are the misogynist fanboys mad at anyone suggesting that this book is less than perfect. So I’m going to put a review online saying that this book is definitely less than perfect. Come at me, misogynist fanboys.

Some quick setup, thanks to the Shmoop synopsis: Welcome to the OASIS, a hyper-realistic, 3D, videogame paradise. It's 2045, and pretty much everyone logs in to the OASIS daily to escape their terrible lives, lives affected by overpopulation, unemployment, and energy shortages. Eighteen-year-old Wade Watts is one of these people, and he has a mission: to find an Easter egg hidden inside the OASIS by its wackadoodle creator, James Halliday.

In order to get to the egg, a player must first find three keys and unlock three gates. Wade—playing as his avatar, Parzival—finds the first key.

Okay. Now onto opinions. I’ll be honest, I don’t like this book very much. It feels like a self insert fantasy, and not one that I can insert myself into. I don’t know if it’s a bad book or if it’s just not for me. First of all, it’s all about 80s culture. Now that’s not necessarily bad. Take, for instance, the amazing Netflix series Stranger Things, which is also about 80s culture, but I like it so much more. In Ready Player One, the references are constantly, unsubtly dumped on you. You can’t go 2 paragraphs without reference to some not-so-obscure 80s thing. Stranger Things is also constantly referencing 80s stuff, but it doesn’t scream at you that this is a reference and you should like that it is a reference. Especially because I wasn’t alive during the 80s and I don’t love everything 80s, the constant references feel alienating and annoying. Secondly, I get a kind of holier-than-thou feeling that I often get from older nerds. I self-identify as a nerd, but this didn’t really reflect my experiences. Since the genesis of the internet, the whole of nerd culture has changed. Instead of being unable to talk about my love of the Lord of the Rings, or Star Trek with anyone, I can go online and talk about my love of those things with people on the other side of the planet. As someone who is a nerd, and who has lived most of their life with the internet, I often encounter older nerds telling me how easy I have it, how “back in my day, we didn’t have the internet”. A, I know that, and B, they obviously don’t have much experience with some of the nastiness that both nerd culture and the internet foster. The “you’re not a real fan”  the racist, homophobic, and misogynist comments, the violent and pointless arguing. I looked up a couple of reviews of this book and made the mistake of looking at some of the comments. Needless to say, it was really depressing and made me angry. It also prompted me to write this review. I also get the feeling that this whole book is wish fulfillment for straight, male nerds, who were alive during the 80s. Maybe that’s why everyone loves this book so much. I’ve read so many reviews talking about how much fun it is, how great the references are, and I wonder if the reason people like it so much is because a lot of book reviewers were nerds in the 80s. The whole holier-than-thou vibe is super condescending and I really hated it. Thirdly, it’s about video games. I’m a nerd, but not much of a gamer. The video game stuff was also kind of alienating to me as well. Not just because I’m not a gamer, but also because both now and in this future, women aren’t super welcome in the gaming community.

I don’t know if you noticed, but I keep using the word alienating. This book was constantly reminding me that while it was wish fulfillment, it wasn’t for me, a gay girl who doesn’t love everything 80s.

It really frustrated me that nobody in the story has their own taste. Everyone (everyone important that is) is obsessed with everything Halliday loved. Nobody thinks that maybe that one obscure band he liked wasn’t that good, or likes something that was created after he died. Everyone seemed to completely worship the ground Halliday walked on and it really annoyed me.

Halliday was a jerk. He reminded me of the “brilliant but socially inept” stereotype. It just felt unfair that he was put on a pedestal for being brilliant and then rubbing it in the faces of we ‘normal people’ by being such a jerk. It was also pretty annoying that they blamed his jerkiness on social anxiety and depression. As someone with those problems, this made me pretty angry because people with social anxiety (including myself) do not often respond by being mean and cruel to others. It all felt like the author didn’t really understand those problems and was just going off what he had seen in other pieces of media.

The way women were treated in this book really made me mad. The ‘geek girl’ is treated as either a perfect figure who is perfect in every way and can do no wrong and is a prize to be won, or as a faker. One of the three woman who is really important to the story is a love interest, and she is also perfect. She is a good gamer, and she is smart and witty and charming and beautiful. And in real life she doesn’t feel confident about her appearance until a man tells her she is beautiful. She feels to me like the legions of other women who “aren’t like other girls” in that what exactly makes them special is never really made clear. They don’t have much of a personality, and an odd (but not too odd) quirk or two is supposed to make them “not like other girls”. I see this plenty in books where women are the main characters too. The second is only mentioned in flashbacks. She is the only girl in Halliday’s D&D group, and both he and his best friend are in love with her. She, too is put on a pedestal. She is the ‘perfect geek girl’ too. The third woman to be important isn’t even revealed to be a woman until the end of the book. Her identity is a plot twist. A spoiler. She is a black lesbian woman who uses a white male avatar to bypass racism and misogyny. This is actually a really interesting idea, but it’s never really explored. It’s revealed at the very end, and after a chapter, the Wade decides to refer to her as him because that’s what her avatar’s gender is. This could have been interesting, and I would read her story. Unfortunately it’s never explored and that’s a shame.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I would be interested to hear what you guys have got to say.

This whole negative review has really got me down. Going to go look up the Potter Puppet Pals. Some wizard swearing ought to cheer me up.