We knew it was coming, dreaded it even, but it still doesn’t quite feel real. Yet Ready Player Two, Ernest Cline’s highly anticipated (to someone I’m sure) sequel to Read Player One is here and it’s already getting savaged online. Reading the excerpts getting dragged … I can definitely see why.
To be fully transparent here, I have not read Ready Player One. I did see the movie and found it to be absolutely exhausting and disheartening, mainly because it was so predictable and also because the pop culture virtual world it imagines is not too far removed from our current social media hellscape and that’s terrifying in its own right. But while it was tiring, the book and movie did tell a complete story … but the sequel seems to be returning to the same pop culture overload well and making their protagonist even more unlikeable, and it’s not looking good.
Pleased to report that the opening pages of Ready Player Two are beyond parody pic.twitter.com/qCUYicNXIP
— Conor Lastowka (@clastowka) November 24, 2020
I’m just so tired.
Critic Laura Hudson, who has written extensively on Cline and the franchise, is live-tweeting the ordeal and it’s already been a journey, just 40 or so pages in.
Oh boy. Page 1: We learn that Aech, his friend he thought was a white dude but found out a fat black lesbian and GRACIOUSLY accepted anyway by saying that her true identities “didn’t matter,” immediately disappears to Senegal because she is Black in case you forgot she is Black pic.twitter.com/tKqb7TG2Bu
— Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) November 24, 2020
So real life is … The Earl. As in pronouncing “IRL.” I just …
Great news Ready Player Two just solved poverty in the most horrifying Silicon Valley way imaginable
Why actually feed poor people when they can just buy your tech and pretend to have dinner in their minds
Let those fuckers eat digital cake pic.twitter.com/mpmDirHvdC
— Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) November 24, 2020
And now, I’m sorry but … what? WHAT???
This is how the third chapter begins.
I’m going to take a walk. pic.twitter.com/qOoi5GICMv
— Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) November 24, 2020
It doesn’t stop! This tech where people get to just … relive other lives or be other people seems like it could be a cool idea with a better writer, but here it just sounds … horrifying!
After solving world hunger with digital cake, our hero decides to reboot the US police as a force of drones and tactical robots, because as ever the billionaire tech CEO motto is: “I just can’t foresee anything going wrong with this so why bother worrying about how it could?” pic.twitter.com/0TztFBqlXD
— Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) November 24, 2020
At least the insufferable narrator got dumped.
The only good thing that’s happened is his now ex-gf dumped him bc he sucks, then RINSED him in the press when he spent a gajillion dollars on an elite space bunker he and his friends can bail to leaving the earth and everyone else on it to die
he “doesn’t see it that way” lmao pic.twitter.com/cnnnyJYLI8
— Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) November 24, 2020
Seriously. Only reading what’s above is absolutely bonkers! The amount of stuff covered in a few paragraphs is bonkers, and the stupid references throughout make it even worse!
This is all bad bad bad. But it turns out the sequel is also seriously offending trans readers for a very good reason.
Reading excerpts from Ready Player Two. This has to be one of the most ignorant and dumb statements I’ve ever read.
“Thanks to years of browsing the internet, I know exactly what it’s like to be trans!” pic.twitter.com/jVkUEzFb6g
— JW (@joedwal) November 24, 2020
Yikes, Ernest Cline, YIKES.
The problem here seems to be that after the success of Ready Player One, Cline seems to be one of the authors that can’t be edited. He was too successful and can’t be told his work is no good. Or maybe the first book was this flat and bad and relied too much on references and not real story or emotion too? The movie certainly came off that way.
In general, folks are dunking on all of the ways the franchise doesn’t get pop culture but also exemplified the absolute worst takes on it.
Have not read Ready Player Two yet, but am getting extremely angry remembering how the movie for Ready Player One so fundamentally misunderstood The Iron Giant that it turned him back into a gun! pic.twitter.com/pgURKZffAY
— Alex Zalben (@azalben) November 24, 2020
Ready Player One was actually a good thing because it showed us there is no inherent virtue in reading a book. Sometimes reading a book is vile. People are still arguing that reading a book makes you better than other people so he had to release Ready Player Two to remind us.
— Erika (@Raddishh) November 24, 2020
Ready Player 2 being about the guy from the first novel turning into a weird silicon valley sociopath except he’s still portrayed as the protagonist who whines about people being mean to him just cause he’s a trillionaire who owns everything is funnier than I could have imagined
— The Biscuit Oliva Of Horny Jail (@mrfeelswildride) November 24, 2020
Shout out to my fellow unpublished authors reading the excerpts from #ReadyPlayerTwo in disbelief. pic.twitter.com/LeSmBzC8wJ
— J. Wolff (@JWOLFFH) November 24, 2020
Just please … can we not make this one into a movie?
(image: Warner Brothers)
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Published: Nov 24, 2020 05:18 pm