You asked. You begged. You offered to bake cakes. You Venmo'd me $14.99.

Who am I to say no to that?

Welcome to

CASSIE

READS

READY PLAYER TWO

(A THREAD)

There's a prologue. It's called a "cutscene" because that's a video game word.

Wade goes back to check on his Easter egg. I forgot how literal it was in the book. Like it's an actual Easter egg?

Anyway it's got a VAULT NUMBER on it now that definitely wasn't there before!

I suppose I'll give him the Max Headroom nod, but randomly throwing "The Thirteenth Floor" in here reads like Cline was just googling stuff without putting any thought into it.

At least mention Wayside School if you're going to make clever 13th Floor references??

Remember how we hated Big Bang Theory because the "geek" jokes were all super broad and obvious references, and the show then had to painstakingly explain them to the audience?

The vault # is 42, and the combination is 867-5309.

The book then explains both references to you.

I'm sorry, wasn't a key theme of the first book "real life is imperfect and that's okay?"

The thing in the vault is the ONI: a device that allows people to have full and complete immersion in virtual spaces, and also allows you to fully relive other people's sensory memories.

Halliday invented this all by himself with no help, because he was a smart 80s computer man.

Ok, so "Ready Player Two" just refers to this new more immersive VR rig and new ways of interacting in digital space.

RIP to anyone who thought this book would have, like, a girl in it.

Now Wade is in the OASIS but it feels REAL! SO REAL!

He's eatin' fruits. The fruits taste like really good, like the best fruits there are.

All the things that Wade does immediately upon entering the OASIS in the immersion rig, in order:

- Breathes Air
- Touches Table
- Touches Apple
- Eats Apple
- Eats MORE FRUIT
- Runs Around Room
- Bites Tongue
- Shoots Self in Foot With An Blaster
- Jumps Out Window

No girls in this book yet, but Wade has already had two separate thoughts about how Samantha won't approve of the ONI but too bad for her!!!

I have no idea why he'd think this, other than spending too much time watching 80s movies where the women are the wet blankets, I guess.

Now Wade's going surfing in the ONI - but it's somebody's memories of surfing - and it's a girl! He's in a girl's BODY!

He has no reaction to this other than "huh, that's interesting," which is apparently the really odd way that cis people react to this scenario.

Ah yes, the three ways that people fuck.

There are 4 pages dedicated to explaining the fake technology of how the ONI was built, none of which is interesting, but the decision for whether or not to release it to the world is just hand-waved as "we voted, and the ayes had it."

That would have been a good scene IMO?

RIP to the bad guys from the first book. They get this paragraph, and that's it.

Wade now has a permanent monopoly on ALL OF CULTURE.

HoORAY FOR WADE!

HOORAY FOR ME!

This seems like an interesting premise and ::checks notes:: oh wait I'm sorry every character in this book is going to be cis, so who cares???

I think @emilyvdw should take this part and just write a sequel called Ready Player Three that's just about her becoming Taylor Swift.

This sounds EXHAUSTING.

Sure, it would be rad to do the total immersion thing once in a while, but who wants to be in all the TV shows they like?

"Ah, time to relax at the end of the day by BEING IN BETTER CALL SAUL."

"We're sorry, but homosexuality is illegal according to the laws in your region. We've contacted local authorities and secret police have been dispatched to your last known location. Have an OASIS day!"

WHAT

NO

WHAT???

WHO WOULD WANT THIS???

Okay I had to go get a beer. A big beer. A very big beer.

This isn't even "haha a man wrote this," because I want to give men more credit than that.

This is "I've never thought about birth before LMAO!"

Okay, so Wade has everything he wants, but he's still unhappy!!!

There's a new Halliday clue to solve because the book needs a plot or whatever, and Wade can't solve it so he decides to offer a billion dollars to anyone who can find it.

End prologue. I mean cutscene.

This is how Chapter One starts.

We're off to a good start.

Nothing evil and degrading about the name BODY LOCKER.

Also obligatory "lol you can guess which one of us cares about homeless people! It's the girl one! Boys don't care about PEOPLE ISSUES!"

For a brief moment I really thought Chapter One would mark a shift in character perspective and the rest of the book would be about a young, underprivileged kid hunting for the new Easter Egg for the billion dollar bounty with Wade playing the Halladay role.

NOPE! Still Wade.

Oh, hey, it's kind of a touching paragraph about trauma and loss and WAIT IS THAT A FUCKING "KANSAS" REFERENCE!?

If this book is about anything so far, it's about Earnest Cline making a lot of money and not feeling inspired to write a sequel.

I mean, um, it's about Wade making a lot of money and not feeling inspired to go on another Easter egg hunt.

Yes, that's it.

Wade lives in a big empty mansion all by himself, where he owns a lot of geeky movie reference cars that he doesn't drive.

But he does sit in them.

He also writes Buckaroo Banai/Knight Rider/Back to the Future fanfic films, and then makes them because he owns all the rights.

I forgot to tell you: in Ready Player Two, everybody calls non-online spaces "The Earl."

It's supposed to sound kind of like IRL.

I hate it.

"Sex is just like Star Wars, except instead of a lightsaber I have a dick and instead of Princess Leia my girlfriend is there, and instead of Salacious Crumb we fucked. But I did cum three times, and then three worse times (that's the prequels!)"

Don't worry gang, we get a sick Flock of Seagulls reference and then we won't have to think about Art3mis for a while!!!

How do you do, fellow kids

Also, please stop misgendering Aech, who is clearly a trans man.

Wade and Samantha (Art3mis) break up because she thinks ONI will just cause people to live in VR forever.

Wade's response is, and I shit you not, that the ONI would have saved Samantha's parents from being killed by COVID-19.

Yeah. Read that again.

The set-up's now pretty clear: Samantha thinks ONI is bad, Wade thinks ONI is good.

I'm sure Samantha's viewpoint will win out in the end (or at least some sort of compromise) but not before we get 300 pages of RAD VR ADVENTURES that SENSIBLE GIRLS wouldn't approve of!!!

I would have thought we'd have reached the end of the "random power fantasies written in summary" section of the novel, but apparently we're just beginning.

Anyway, here's Wade casually paying off the national debt while building an army of domestic attack drones!!

What is Wade's plan now that he's unleashed his army of terrifying police robots on the United States? Well now he's going to Proxima Centauri to look for more Earths.

Seriously.

He built a spaceship.

It has The Internet on it.

ARC@DIA sounds like they built a new thrift shop at Denver International.

This whole book has big "More games should avoid politics, like Bioshock and Fallout!" energy.

At least Ol 'Cliney Boy is saying the quiet part out loud.

This is 100% why Elon Musk does spaceships, too.

The billionaires are going to kill the planet, and then they're going to leave.

Oh no! If only Wade knew somebody who could do something about this!

Like maybe somebody who essentially owns the US government and built an army of aerial drones and telebots!

OH WELL! BETTER GO TO SPACE!

We're 44 pages in and there has yet to be anything even resembling a scene.

We've had 40 pages of summary, and 4 pages of movie script style dialog.

I feel like the first book had scenes in it and was written like a normal book?

This reads like the outline to a NaNoWriMo.

At some point someone is going to write a thinkpiece about how this book is Starship Troopers style winking satire of techno-fascism or whatever, and they'll probably point to passages like this as evidence.

I don't buy it. This is...this is just supposed to be cool. That's it.

Counterpoint: this orgy recording seems like something that a super rad group of well-organized (and probably queer) sex workers put on, and I applaud them.

Cyberstalking your ex so that you can literally embody them or people in their lives is creepy and bad,

Yet you participate in society! Curious!

I am very intelligent

Update: I am back with a second beer and a second bowl of salad.

You haven't missed much. Wade is still describing things he could do if he wanted to but doesn't feel like doing. Example: learning guitar from a hologram of Eddie Van Halen.

Me: Oh thank god Wade is going to therapy.

Me, one moment later: Oh god what does Ernest Cline think that therapy is, is this going to be another pop culture reference.

Me, one moment after that: oh no no no no no n

This is just Ernest Cline talking about himself in the year two thousand and twenty, right?

Won't somebody think of the poor billionaires???

So the multibillionaire head of the world's only entertainment company, payer-downer of the national debt, builder of robot armies, spends his time...violating the anonymity of his users so he can pwn a bunch of trolls?

This...this seems realistic, actually.

Cancel culture comes for Wade.

In the span of about ten pages, we went from, "oh yeah, the AI arms race is going to end all life on Earth in a fiery nuclear apocalypse but lololol what can you do???" to "maybe SOCIAL MEDIA is the REAL fiery nuclear apocalypse? Really makes you think."

Wade is so scared of being killed or whatever that he's built a giant armored spider-walking OASIS rig with machine guns strapped to the side so that he can walk around town while fully immersed in VR and not have to worry about not being able to gun people down.

This book has some weird lines that were clearly written during the first days of the pandemic in an attempt to make the history feel more lived-in, but they're just so weird to see.

We've kind of had a scene now!

Wade climbs into his spider suit and goes down an elevator and into his bomb shelter and now he's online. https://twitter.com/Kyrathion/status/1331452179811610624

1. Please do not deadname Aech, Ernest.

2. The name Aech has STRONG enby energy, and we know that Ernest knows about non-binary people from that weird sex paragraph.

3. Writing a queer-coded character and then saying "THEY'RE THE ONLY ONES WHO LIKE THEIR REAL BODY" is weird AF.

There's a weird undercurrent of eco-fascism and nationalism in this book.

Wade's very worried about how there are too many people on the planet now and we're all going to die to overpopulation, but Shoto feels compelled to marry and have kids NOW because Japan is underpopulated.

The last 20 pages have just been Wade being sad and grumpy about how his friends have better lives than him and also, like, the GSS quarterly reports.

If anyone wants any quality tunes to listen to while reading this nightmare thread, here's a badass synth/new wave playlist I made a year years ago that I've named GUNTER SYNTH ANTHEMS to be fully on-brand for y'all. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/35LaqIxUcF2Px3EiYqxTCD?si=60OpkhDDRGu4WzbkAK2B3A

This part is about how GSS owns the brain scans of all their users, including all deceased users, and they keep them around forever because reasons.

At least I think that's what this part is about. I'm essentially reading the notes of a corporate meeting and I'm kinda drunk.

ugh, girls, am I right???

Is...is this a hint of self-awareness???