“I sincerely apologize for copying your wife without her knowledge or permission.”
Ready Player Two
By Ernest Cline
I disliked this book immensely. I was taken aback by how I could love the first book so much and detest its sequel. I avoided Ready Player Two for a while after its release because I feared this eventuality. Especially because the book seemed to be a reaction to the success of the movie and not because there was more story to tell. In this book Halliday shakes things up, postmortem, one more time. At the end of Ready Player One Wade Watts wins Halliday's easter egg hunt, becomes part owner of Gregarious Games and the OASIS, and receives all of Halliday's money, but in Ready Player Two Wade learns about his final prize, Halliday's secret final invention.
Halliday's most prominent invention in life was a digital world called the OASIS where people can create an avatar and escape their lives with a visor and haptic gear. Halliday's final invention is the OASIS Neural Interface (ONI). The ONI would take gaming in the OASIS to a whole new level by letting users plug their brains directly into the OASIS. Now gaming can feel as real as reality. Together Wade and his gang must decide whether to release Halliday's invention to the world, a decision that tests their relationships and will certainly change the world. Ultimately, the invention is released.
ONI booms, and Wade and his few remaining friends become even more rich and famous as the world’s population sinks further into the fantasy of life in the OASIS. Everything is relatively on track, until Halliday's all-powerful, OASIS avatar ghost locks all of the ONI users into the OASIS will a kill switch and countdown. To disable the impending mass murder, Wade and friends must band together to solve Halliday's final puzzle by traversing through more pop culture references and Halliday's personal life.
Sometimes I don't respect a book, not because of the writing, but because the book has an ugly personality. I could complain about how the format of Halliday's new deadly game is a dull rehashing of the first book, or how the attempts at comedy feel out of place with the new stakes. But, my ultimate gripe was just how unlikable, unrealistic, and uncouth the characters and plot of this book were. Every lesson learned in the first book is forgotten as character's backslide and regress, and never in my life has a book felt like reading the grimy, perverse mind of an incel.
This book had motifs of sexism, abuse, and delusion. Perhaps a second reading would reveal that this was satire or a clever commentary on those subjects, but no. This was disgusting. And if it was satire, it was clumsily handled. And boring. The plot point driving the story forward is a man’s hatred for a woman because she wasn’t romantically interested in him. In response he violates her in a way that is grotesque and yet the book minimizes the harm done. Moreover, after the main men in this book betray and turn their backs on their relationships, somehow the women in their lives forgive them. This forgiveness was disturbing because to make this work in the plot, the women lost the characterizations they had up until that point. In the end the women become the male protagonist’s gift for existing by losing their personification. They were trophies.
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For example, when Samatha forgives Wade and sides with him in the end, she didn't read like the same person anymore. Her values which she had shared vocally throughout Ready Player Two dropped away in the final act. The switch didn't make sense narratively and after that happened, she read like a mannequin. Samantha as I knew her was dead. In fact, this threw me off so much that I went to see if there was any discussions about this, and I found theories that Samantha may have actually died (there was a scene where she seemed to explode in mid-air but somehow made it out) and she may have been replaced with something artificial.
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I mourn the development lost for the characters from Ready Player One and the lack of creativity. There are plenty of better stories about being trapped in a digital world. Try Sword Art Online. Try the Matrix. Try Digimon. Just please don’t waste your time on Ready Player Two.