Ready Player Two review: The big book of creeps

Ernest Cline’s new sequel, Ready Player Two, repairs a lot of the problems the original had by, unfortunately, replacing them with new ones.

Book reviews aren’t normally the jam of App Trigger but when a book that takes place within a game that pays homage to video games as frequently as it does, how could we not? And when you’re writing a review about a story focusing on a man named Halliday, why not get App Trigger’s own Halliday to cover it.

Note: The following contains spoilers for both Ready Player Two AND the original Ready Player One. You’ve been warned.

I’m sure you heard of Ready Player One by now. About a decade ago, a book filled to the brim with pop culture references in it dropped. I was very taken in with it as I’m a man who lives off obscure references so having a book that literally features a scene in which Ultraman and Mecha Godzilla do battle over an army of Johnny-5 robots under a sky filled with ships like the Enterprise and the Serenity I absolutely needed to dive into it.

And while I absolutely loved the book, it was on the second read when I noticed something that the initial excitement around the pop culture references distracted me from, every character was a terrible person.

The main character, Wade, was obsessed with pop culture that he failed to have a personality of his own. The pop culture he was obsessed with wasn’t even his own interests, it was the interests of the game creator. His friends are all people that are also fundamentally flawed in their own ways.

Even Samantha, the main love interest, is flawed. First off, there was a lot of criticism about one of the few female characters in this book giving up everything to help the main male lead, and…yeah, that did definitely suck. She’s also constantly against many of the other character’s ideas while rarely offering any solutions. This leads to a lot of her character in the sequel, Ready Player Two where she is constantly against a lot of the proposed plans without really saying what she’d recommend in its stead, something that helps drive the characters apart.

That finally brings me to Ready Player Two. Following the events of Ready Player One, Wade (and only Wade) is in full control of the Oasis, while his three friends that helped him get there, run the company that owns the Oasis with him. They all live incredibly lavish lives and live them however they want, including Samantha who uses her money to travel around the world to witness how the less fortunate live their lives.

Here is one of my issues. The characters are still bad and it’s really hard to tell if that’s on purpose. My wife and I have discussed this many times. In a world like that of Ready Player One’s where everyone is obsessed with escaping reality by entering a virtual reality where they can do whatever they want, a world in which kids are started at preschool age and spend most of their lives there, more than likely everyone WOULD be terrible. In a virtual universe where everyone considers its creator to be a god and everyone is out for clout (feel free to use that fun rhyme I just came up with) everyone WOULD be horrible.

But there’s a problem with this theory and it’s one I can’t ignore. This theory would hold a lot of weight if Ready Player One and Ready Player Two were the only things Kline hasn’t written. But they aren’t. Most Ready Player One fans know that well before Ready Player Two, Kline dropped Armada. It wasn’t as popular because it honestly felt like an attempt to do Ready Player One but in a way that would be easier to make into a movie. This is why all talk of an Armada sequel seemed to vanish magically when Kline found out Ready Player One was getting made into a movie despite it being the worst possible idea. But in Armada the character is VERY similar to Wade to the point where I genuinely almost called him Wade, completely forgetting his name. The character is also a terrible person despite not being in a virtual world all the time.

Of course, this leads into the whole thing about authors possibly writing protagonists from their own point of few but that’s not great either because then that would mean Ernest Cline, himself, is pretty terrible. Good thing he didn’t put out a horrible amount of poetry shaming women in porn for not knowing science fiction trivia.

This leads me to a strange thing with Ready Player Two. It feels like the world’s sloppiest apology for his earlier behavior. The main story, if you saw it, would feel like a shot-for-shot duplicate of Ready Player One. There’s a planet dedicated to a single musical band/singer. There’s a planet that is a replication of a developer’s home town. There’s a part where a character gets pulled into the role of an old side-scrolling game character. There’s even a part where a character has to help recreate scenes of an old movie. Like, MAJOR spoiler, even one of the main villains and final location ARE THE SAME.

But much like when they changed the Pirates of the Caribean ride to focus more on the movies and less on the implied rape (I’m not kidding), Ready Player Two fills the gaps between scenes with a weird amount of self-reflection towards the plight of drug addicts, people of color and the LGBTQIA+ community.

But to make like Ernest himself and drop a game reference, these moments are more heavy-handed than Master Hand of Smash Brothers fame. Not only that but he’s not going about it well.

For example, in Ready Player One, Wade’s best friend Aech (pronounced H), whose avatar is a white male, is later revealed to be a heavy-set lesbian woman of color who was afraid of racism and sexism so she spent most of her time disguised online. But after the truth is revealed she still stays the same pop culture obsessed, slightly aggressive Aech she’s always been.

In Ready Player Two we find that she took time out to visit her “ancestral homeland”, something she NEVER voiced any sort of interest in doing in the first book, and while there started a charity called something like the Wakandan House. So while Ready Player Two has, somehow, LESS characters of color, the take the single black character and suddenly have her go all-in on a culture she never ever mentioned in the first book felt really weird.

In Ready Player One, the Japanese character Shoto was big into samurai. But in Two, the whole samurai thing reminded him too much of his dead friend so…he went all-in on ninjas instead, because I guess Ernest Cline knows two Japanese things.

And the worst thing though. Throughout most of the book, thanks to his overwhelming stupidity, Wade is single. During this time he gets a crush on Oasis’ version of a YouTuber. A charming girl by the name of L0hengrin is slightly obsessed with Wade. Because of her interest in him, it makes him interested in her, which, already is a bit of a red flag but things spiral from there.

See, very shortly after they mention her, the single and ready to illegally mingle, Wade decides to use his god-like admin powers to make a series of bad choices. First, he hacks into her exterior cameras to get a look at her body while she lays unconscious in a neural interface. Instead of allowing us to just feel the horror of the protagonist doing this, we’re supposed to feel for him because he feels bad at how malnourished she appears. See? He’s just concerned.

Then, because he’s bored, he decides to go through her records. All her records. School records. Birth records. And that’s when he discovers (in addition to her real name and address) that L0hengrin was DMAB – Designated Male at Birth. He calls the experience a “surprise” but then assures us, the reader, that despite this information he’d absolutely still have sex with her. He then monologues about how he understands trans people because of all the different forms of cybersex he’s had in the Oasis. Yikes.

All this makes Ready Player Two very difficult. The meat and potatoes of the story are the exact sort of stupid fun that made the first book so endearing but it’s sprinkled with so many problems. Even Ernest Cline’s desperate need for gatekeeping is doubled as big references like Star Trek and Wargames are replaced with information involving specific musicians that have been in Prince’s band and the importance of the game Sega Ninja.