I think you summarized that nicely.
I don’t know of it’s been much discussed, but I also think people just care more about movies-which-may-become-blockbusters than about books, no matter how hyped or popular. And ready player 1 wasn’t even super-popular (Harry Potter was) so a lot of people who might have had negative reactions never read it, or didn’t care enough to say so at the time.
AV Club has a column about a general backlash against pop culture and in-jokes references across the board, not just RPO although RPO makes an easy target for it.
So when I bought my Kindle Fire I suddenly had access to all of the books, and the device figured out pretty quick I liked Science Fiction. It told me that I should read Ready Player One, because everyone who was just like me loved that book. I was in love with my new device, so of course I bought the book and read it.
I’m not going to say that I hated the book, but when my Kindle later told me I should now read Armada by Ernest Cline, I told it to go fuck itself.
I looked up the cast, expecting to see a nerdy dude and some great beauty of a woman. I saw what looked like 2 similarly attractive averagish looking twenty-somethings. If anything I expected the protagonist to be gifted with a much “hotter chick.” Either way, people often attract love interests effortlessly in real life, especially with proximity and similar looks.
I had the same issue when I watched Downsizing. We were supposed to accept Matt Damon’s character as a typical schlub. No, sorry, my suspension of belief doesn’t go that far. I like Damon but they should have stuck with Paul Giamatti for this role.
Well, I think it’s a bit more than that. I’ve been reluctant to post because I have an arm injury that’s making it difficult for me to type and don’t want to get drawn into a back-and-forth with RPO fans. But this thread has mostly missed what I consider the biggest problem with RPO.
Cline probably had good intentions in giving his straight white American guy hero Wade a diverse group of friends, but these characters seem to be the work of an author who has never even met anyone who isn’t a straight white American guy. The Japanese characters in particular are a painfully embarrassing collection of stereotypes. What makes this even more obnoxious is that Cline often has Wade patting himself on the back for being so open-minded.
If not for this, I’d consider the book inoffensive fluff. But while I think Cline meant well, I also think his nerdy white guy '80s pop culture bubble is so thick that he doesn’t realize that he’s clueless to the point of insensitivity about everything else – or he’s just not a good enough writer to handle characters who aren’t like him. I hope the movie does a better job of this, but I can understand people being worried that it won’t or angry that it didn’t.
I’m almost done with Armada…anyone who finds that to be a terribly written book has only read stuff they make you read in literature courses.
It’s fine. Cline over dumps the pop culture in the first few chapters–like to an annoying level, but it settles into a perfectly fine rhythm. It’s fine.
I get very annoyed when anyone wants to tell me that something I love is “objectively bad” - particularly if they don’t have specific criticisms to make.
Ready Player One has a very distinctive first-person narrator voice. Read by Will Wheaton, this comes across as an engaging representation of a gamer who is often over-excited, nerdily competitive with his peers, or having a fan-boy freakout about what he is experiencing. This goes beyond simply packing in eighties nostalgia and trivia - the book captures what it would be like to be an eighties geek inside a world designed by another eighties geek. Through the occasional self-reflection of the narrator, and things said by characters the narrator respects, it is clear that neither the narration nor the world is as perfect as it seems.
Normally if something is badly written or badly paced, it will be much worse in audio format. I wonder if in this case the audio format hid some of the difficulties with the dialogue that annoyed some readers. Most of the critical online quotes are from dialogue-heavy scenes.
I imagine that someone with just the text might find it as tedious to read as the characters would be to listen to in real life.
Compare with Dan Brown, where the selection of adjectives, adverbs and verbs made me want to throw the book across the room before the end of the first page. I understand why so many people enjoy Dan Brown - particularly if they read in a different way to how I do. For me, the sentence construction keeps throwing me out of the illusion-world, so I can’t help keep noticing the bad writing. I have sympathy for anyone who has the same problem with the Ready-Player-One dialogue so they just see paragraph lists of eighties pop references, instead of three interesting characters arguing about eighties pop references.
TL;DR Ready Player One is a perfect example of where immersion makes the difference between loving and hating a work of fiction. If you have the chance, listen to the audio-book first.
If I have to find a specific person reading a book to get a good impression of the book (as opposed to y’know, reading it myself) then I would say that is a sign of failure on the part of the book.
This is one of the weirdest arguments I’ve ever seen.
My favorite part of the movie was an homage to The Shining, which was a Spielberg conceit and not in the book (which I have not read). Not really controversial, but I can see swapping out scenes like that to be upsetting to book readers.
The book and the movie are similar but not chapter and verse.
Wade Watts in the book is an overweight nerd orphan…that saves the day playing games and gets the hot chick at the end. Ernest Clines fantasy!
I didn’t say that the book was only good with Will Wheaton reading it, just that it was possible that listening to the audio first made a difference in me enjoying it.
Written dialogue is weird. It never matches the way people actually speak, but it has to capture the essence of how certain types of characters communicate. Take Wodehouse: I don’t think anyone would deny that he is a great writer, but no one has ever spoken remotely like his characters speak. Most readers slide into a rhythm where the weird speech is just part of the farcical world and the charmingly weird characters, but it doesn’t work for everyone. You can read Wodehouse in a way that made the conversations sound stilted and fake, and some people find the situations silly rather than charming.
I don’t think Cline is remotely Wodehouse level, and one of the problems is that the writing doesn’t offer enough clues about how it is meant to sound in your head. That doesn’t mean that the book is a failure, but it does mean that the book can fail for some readers. That’s the reason I was offering for why the book is so polarising.
I was also trying to draw a distinction between Cline, where the writing is dependent on how you read it, to something like Dan Brown, where enjoyment depends on not being distracted by the objectively bad writing. As far as I know, not even Dan Brown fans praise his prose.
Eh, I’m secure enough in myself to admit what he wrote was MY fantasy.
I enjoyed the book (especially the audiobook, as mentioned above). It really captured my 80s/90s nerdhood in a way that no other work I’ve seen has been able to.
I don’t expect it to have some lasting cultural impact, and yes, some of the stereotypes really are a bit… much, but to me it is no different than the jarring look at some of the stereotypes I see on revisiting movies from the 80s. It’s part and parcel of the whole nostalgic romp, and it really FEELS like true nostalgia from somebody that would have been my peer, at that time.
Most nostalgia nowadays is “Remember that this was a thing?”, but RP1 had, in its ham-handed approach, a real earnestness that I appreciated.
YMMV.
ETA: And, for what it’s worth, when my kids heard Wil Wheaton describing James Halliday, they asked me if he was describing me (“It sounds just like you!”).
…
Huh.
On that topic, am I incorrect in recalling that in the book the girl turned out to be black (and overweight) IRL, and Aech was actually a fairly well off white guy? It’s been awhile…
I’d say if there was “controversy” it might be that they seem to have backed off from the interracial angle for audience appeal reasons.
Aech was a black woman in both book and film. The film didn’t make her obese but that’s Hollywood for ya.
If I remember right, Aech’s avatar in the Oasis was a white dude in the book (to prevent harassment) and the big ogre looking dude in the film.
Basically if John Hughes made Sword Art Online, it would look like RP1. Spielberg was not doing the lords work here, the movie was an homage to what 80’s kids would have remembered, and since it was set about 60 years in the future, its probably the lack of gamer gate shit that annoys people.
The only thing that annoyed me about the movie was that the actress from killjoys was not given room to spread her wings so her role was basically Dutch being Dutch.
The only issue I had with RP1 was this - You have this contemporary movie about gaming, social networking, VR and corporate greed at a time when those things are having a huge impact on actual society, set in a world that is essentially an homage to the 80s, directed by the guy who brought you Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, ET and so on. I would have thought that it would have been a bit more “mind blowing” or “magical”.