It's hard to distinguish between Ready Player Two parodies and excerpts from the real book
Aux Features Books
Ready Player Two, the sequel to Ernest Cline’s ‘80s reference-laden 2011 novel Ready Player One, released on November 24, with critics getting the book the same day as everyone else. That led to a flurry of activity on Twitter as readers shared excerpts from the books largely dunking on Cline’s prose.
Most of the images of the text have since been removed after copyright complaints, which, as one Twitter user observed, is somewhat ironic given that most of the book is based around characters reenacting movies, singing songs, or playing games that are someone else’s copyrighted work.
At the same time that the real excerpts were circulating, there were also plenty of parodies going around mocking Cline’s focus on geeky references. “Wow ready player two is wild,” wrote one Twitter user in a post with the lyrics of “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny,” a 2005 nerdy mashup viral video that really does feel like a scenario that could happen in one of Cline’s books.
In fact, it’s not too far from an actual excerpt on page 32 of the book where protagonist Wade Watts describes what he does when he’s not helping to run Gregarious Simulation Systems, the world’s biggest corporation: Making the ECTO-88 film series as a therapist-suggested creative outlet.
GSS already owned the media companies that owned the movie studios that held the rights to Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Knight Rider, and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, and by paying hefty licensing fees to the estates of Christopher Lloyd, David Hasselhoff, Peter Weller, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray, I was able to cast computer-generated FActors (facsimile actors) of each of them in my film. They were basically nonplayer characters with just enough artificial intelligence to take verbal directions after I placed them on my virtual movie sets inside GSS’s popular Cinemaster movie-creation software. This allowed me to finally bring my longstanding fanboy dream to life: an epic cross-over film about Dr. Emmett Brown and Dr. Buckaroo Banzai teaming up with Knight Industries to create a unique interdimensional time vehicle for the Ghostbusters, who must use it to save all ten known dimensions from a fourfold cross-rip that could tear apart the fabric of the space-time continuum.
Other parody tweets mocked Cline’s tendency to over-explain his references, like this one that just lifted text directly from the Wikipedia page for Dinosaurs, complete with footnotes.
Again, the parody isn’t too far from reality. Take this exchange when the characters are trying to parse a clue about “the very first heroine, demoted to hero.”
“Rieko Kodama co-created the first arcade game with a woman as its hero!” Shoto said. “Back in 1985.” I searched my memory, but the only woman hero of a Rieko Kodama game I could think of was Alis Lansdale, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Phantasy Star I—and that was a home console game. Released for the Sega Master System in Japan in 1987, and in the United States in 1988.
Other parodies are more out there, like this imagined quest where Wade must reenact a scene in a 2007 manga by masturbating.
Not only is 2007 way too recent to get that much attention in a Cline book, but a scene like that would really get in the way of a family-friendly sequel to the 2018 film adaptation. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t sex spliced with references in the book. Wade describes his blissful time with his crush Samantha early in Ready Player Two:
We lost our virginity to each other three days after that first kiss. Then we spent the rest of that week sneaking off to make the beast with two backs at every opportunity. Like Depeche Mode, we just couldn’t get enough.
It’s unlikely that removing the excerpts from Twitter is really going to make people pay to buy the book, but it does have the effect of making a distinction between what’s real and what’s parody that is otherwise somewhat difficult to detect.
If you want more on Ready Player Two, check out our review and wait patiently for the film adaptation that’s all but assured should Cline figure out how to get the rights to The Silmarillion and all of Prince’s music.
Send Great Job, Internet tips to [email protected]
56 Comments
To be perfectly honest, Cline’s writing hasn’t really changed that much from back when he was writing creepy poetry asking for more “Nerd-friendly” porn…Incidentally, someone’s being a little trigger happy with DMCA takedowns on screenshots of RP2…
Holy shit that’s some next level misogyny. Yuck.
OMG!! So he thinks the sexiest thing in the world is a woman who is smarter than (him) you are? If that was the case, no smart woman would want to get with a troll like that. From what it sounds like, he would rather get with Amy Fowler over Penny? Do nerds like him really fantasize about Amy and not some of the “bimbos” he described above? I get someone wanting to be with someone who has smarts too. But you’re not fucking their brain are you.
Holy. Fucking. Balls.That is next level AWFUL “poetry”. Like…….. It’s just a personal screed about porn with seemingly random sentence breaks.Writers: Throwing random sentence breaks and white space into a personal essay is not fucking poetry. Even slam poetry, which I tend to dislike for its reliance on polemics and cheap confessional melodrama, has some semblance of rhythm, purposeful structure, vocabulary variety…UGH!
372 Pages is already on it (The only way to read the book in my opinion.
This was a running gag in 329 pages you won’t get back podcast. Here’s three quotes, which one is real. Its really hard to figure it out.
As much as I love Mike Nelson the comic voice of movie riffing, there are moments in the podcast where I feel like he’s being a real elitist prick. Both hosts, actually. There’s some weird literary superiority in there. I may not think much of RP1 but the fact that those guys bring up James fucking Joyce is just… ugh.
Has Cline ever lashed out at critics of his books? The reason I ask is that, while I can see why people wouldn’t like them, I think a lot of the criticism of his work seems a little too personal. Kinda like Stephenie Meyer, who, regardless of the quality of her books, as far as I know didn’t really do anything to warrant the kind of vitriol she got.
Meyer and Cline both write terrible books, but the backlash to both is outsized and predicated on, I think, the impression of online nerds that somehow both writers are taking something that is theirs (monsters and horror movie stuff in Meyer’s case; everything else in Cline’s) and abusing it for an audience that isn’t Their Kind Of People.
Lol no. People hate Cline because his prose is bad and no one likes self-indulgent nerd shit anymore. The only nerdy boys club that’s going on is in his books and the infamous nerd porn poem he wrote.
Cline is receiving a lot of hate from anybody who has any sense of the distinction between good and bad writing. And yeah, so long as Cline enjoys some degree of success beyond 15 followers on a wordpress chapter-by-chapter storyblog, that criticism is going to smack a bit of gatekeeping and tribalism. But some gates do need to be guarded against some barbarians. Lines must be drawn. Cline is a *really* bad writer. He’s so bad that he regularly gets in the way of his own story ideas, even when they’re good. Contrast that with Rowling’s series, where the writing wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but it at least stayed the fuck out of the way of the rippin’ yarn she spun.And after Armada and RP2, I think the time has come to suggest that Cline isn’t a great creator, explorer, or curator of ideas either, even insofar as much as you think those roles can be entirely separated from the quality of his writing.
Well somebody, most likely Cline himself, has been making DMCA takedowns on screenshots on some of the more messed up passages of RP2.
It’s interesting you bring up the Twilight comparison, because both Twilight and Ready Player One are similar in a lot of ways: they’re both wish fulfillment series, essentially, which is why people on the same wavelength as the respective authors glom onto it so hard. The difference is that a lot of the outsized backlash towards Twilight (and Meyer) stems from our contempt for women (particularly teenage girls) and the things they enjoy, whereas Cline is part of a backlash against, like, shitty nerds.
OK, but some people make his books out to be emblematic of bad nerd behavior in general, and I haven’t seen anything that indicates to me that he’s guilty of that kind of thing.
-shrugs- It’s just an easy target. It’s a bad book that people online overreact to.
I haven’t read the books but from a brief skimming of the referenced tweets, it seems like Cline’s writing throws up a bunch of red flags re: toxic nerd behavior (think GamerGate) that is predicated upon “uppity” women learning a lesson and ceding to the greater wisdom of the male protagonist, whom they then devote themselves to.
At least he hasn’t actually engaged in problematic behavior in real life as far as I know. For comparison, one guy who gets a lot of praise around here for his treatment of nerd culture is Dan Harmon, who’s had a pattern of immature behavior that includes sexual harassment. To his credit he did seem pretty remorseful, and I don’t think his past behavior has to affect how people see his work anyway, but I think it’s weird that Cline is the one who gets tarred with the Gamergate brush.
See the post directly below for the sort of thing (“if you can tell me Luke Skywalker’s planet, you can have the honor of me masturbating to you, previously neglected Nerd women”) as the sort of thing that sets up the Gamergate associations.
Now add to this the fact that these were poems he performed at Poetry Slam competitions…
That was 20 years ago.
That’s not unfair. I’d hate to be judged on stuff that I wrote as a teenager. I’m usually not one to jump on hate trains like this, but in this case I’ll make an exception just because it feels like I was riding this one before a lot of other people. I read RP1 5-6 years ago, and immediately went online to enjoy people dunking on it…but they weren’t. There were a bunch of videos praising the shit out of it. Which made me really hate it, and glad that the backlash has caught up. I can’t comment on Twilight (I’ve neither read nor seen any of it), but in this case I think it’s because A: the prose itself isn’t very good. It’s not the worst, but it’s not very good.B: Cline is concerned far more with making references than with coming up with a plot or any boring shit that other books do. Take away the references and there’s not a lot there.C: even the stuff that is there is stuff that he didn’t really think about. Like, the stacks. Urban poor live in slums, rural poor live in trailers, mash them up and put them in piles of trash. Except that nothing about stacking trailers on frames to make towers makes sense if you know about trailers, buildings or land use (structurally unsound, while being more expensive than just clearing or packing down some more trash to put those trailers on the ground). Or how Wade takes an electric bus that has to stop to recharge, but everyone riding it was using it to power their VR rigs. It’s like the only things he gave more than a cursory thought to was the references.D: because of these references, he was unreasonably successful when this book should have languished on AO3 or FF.net, without ever even rising to the ‘you gotta read this’ level of something like ‘My Immortal’.E: the fact that he made ‘gunter’ the portmanteau of ‘egg hunter’, despite the fact that every time I read it I think of the preexisting ‘gunt’
Glad you agree he doesn’t deserve to be judged for writing some tasteless poems 20 years ago. Also, in case Laserface is reading this(his history of dismissing my replies to his posts doesn’t give me much incentive to reply to him directly): I already knew about the poems but I didn’t mention them because a)I assumed people already knew, and b)I don’t think writing some tasteless poems 20 years ago is something he deserves to be judged for today.
The Cline’s describes the female love interests in his books tells me that his views on women honestly haven’t changed that much.
Since Laserface isn’t even bothering to deny that he’ll dismiss me if I reply to his post, but I’m pretty sure he’ll read this anyway, I’d like to say that I’d much rather someone write some questionable things in their book but treat people well in real life(I haven’t heard anything about Cline being a dick in real life), than vice versa.
Moving the goalposts already are we?
Agreed. It’s a huge, disproportionate overreaction. Particularly considering how hard he seems to have tried (however ineptly) to address criticisms of his first book and be as inclusive as he himself seems to be capable of being.
Its contempt for nerds in both cases. One for nerdy men/boys one for nerdy women/girls.
I have not read the Twilight books and don’t go online to view these things and I only have the words of a few women I know telling me the Twilight books are terrible. However, what I have read suggests there is some problematic sexual politics. Also, I saw another article arguing that the book was allegorical for Mormonism.
While I agree that *some* Twilight backlash was weird gender shaming, that’s ignoring the awful race shit. And awful dialogue. And staunchly empty cipher of a “protagonist”. And subtle Mormon shit. And toxic romantic fantasy.Like yeah, it’s dumb to mock Twilight as swoon fodder but that series is fucking trash.
Stephanie Meyer has had a kinda fucked parasitic relationship with the real life Native American tribe (the Quileute) she portrayed in her books. Is it as bad as how other people have depicted and treated Native Americans? Definitely not. Would she be a better person if she had insisted on casting an Indigenous actor in the role of Jacob and/or at least compensated the tribe with some portion of her massive royalties? Yes.Also people on Twitter just love to dunk on bad writers, which, fair. That’s a time honored tradition.
Also, the imprinting shit. Which is basically just grooming and the text condones this shit.
“If you want more on Ready Player Two…”
…just stick a red-hot wire up your nose until the feeling passes.
If you want more on Ready Player Two, check out our review and wait patiently for the film adaptation that’s all but assured should Cline figure out how to get the rights to The Silmarillion and all of Prince’s music.Alternatively, you can just watch Sword Art Online, which the book blatantly rips off key plot points from and even has the gall to have characters state variations of “This is just like Sword Art Online!”.However, as I’ve mentioned before, you can just not watch either and instead watch SAO Abridged, which is SAO but better…
That first Tweet is especially accurate. There are sections in the first book that are seriously just listing things from the 80’s. I don’t know how anyone could finish reading that piece of shit.
“Oh my God”, I said out loud, after reading the Depeche Mode line.
ME TOO
I wondered to myself, can this Ernie Cline fellow Speak & Spell, which is also the name of the album on which the song in question is featured. I gave thought into how I’d rather be like the lead singer that died by auto-erotic asphyxiation than have to read this book. Then it occurred to me, no, that’s the INXS guy, but actually not really because that’s just an urban legend. But I always confuse the two bands because they’re roughly similar, much like I confuse the Carradine brothers and oh boy did that one guy die by choking himself, I mean more like the rosy palm exploding heart technique, right?
REACH OUT AND TOUCH [redacted]
It’s a shame he couldn’t have worked “Sex Dwarf” in there somehow. That’s Sex Dwarf by Soft Cell which was the fifth song on the A side of their debut album “Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret” which came out in November of 1981 and oh by the way they’re also English.
Well, I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumors…
Then there’s the transphobia…
In what way is this transphobic? The entire second paragraph reads like someone who is virtue signaling the fact that they are, in fact, not transphobic.
When trying to be woke goes wrong.
jesus christ that’s terrible on so many levels
Speaking of parodies, I can’t get over how obvious the title to the sequel is — so obvious that they predicted it in On Cinema episode (at about the 5:20 mark.)
I was hoping for “A Challenger Appears!”
It is probably the least of the problems with this book, but the main reason we never got a TV show based on or a sequel to “Buckaroo Banzai” is nobody knows who owns the rights. They were sold off in a “Spring Time for Hitler” type scheme so no studio or distributor will come anywhere near it because the lawsuit risk dwarfs any potential gains from making a few geeks like me happy.
Psh. What would YOU know about Buckaroo Bonzai?(Looks at profile pic)Ah. I see.
I don’t know much compared to the guy who used to publish the World Watch One Newsletter and interviewed WD Richter for it (among others) a few times.But he WAS in my D&D group in High School 🙂
Okay, super tangent but I’m curious. I was in a few D&D sessions with a Highlander superfan who would *always* play an Immortal (literally Duncan McCloud a couple times). And I played with a dedicated The Who guy who would always name his characters after The Who albums. Did your guy try to crowbar Buckaroo references into his D&D gaming?
Nah. I am old enough that most of our D&D occurred before BB. It came out when I was 16 and we didn’t play very much after everybody went to college a year and a half later.
I read all the book excerpts in Griffin Newman’s voice for some reason. I apologize to Griffin Newman.
“Rieko Kodama co-created the first arcade game with a woman as its hero!” Shoto said. “Back in 1985.”1982 begs to differ.
I JUST CAN’T GET ENOUGH of this horrible Reddit post posing as a novel!
Wow, i feel like Speilberg must have already made a deal with Prince’s estate for that shit to even be in the book
Who the fuck is this chump? He’s a fucking hack, when will he reference Dean Cameron? What a poser. Also why does he want porn revolving around clothed women speaking quantum mechanics?
Gotta admit, the only thing I’m finding more boring, repetitive, and lacking in creativity than RP1 and RP2 is the resurgence of how trendy it is to roast a RP book…*shrug*