The Worst Sci-Fi Novel of 2020 | Ready Player Two Review, Part 2 

Krimson siting upon a throne of books, thrashing a bad book, whilst petting his minion cat is a perfect image.

1:03:45 You can tell he's not even remotely familiar with the culture around LoTR because there's no "Why can't we just ride the giant eagles" joke.

Wade : "Gee, Halliday sure turned out to be a creep in the end. I can't think positively of him the same way anymore." Also Wade : *stalks his ex and feels better about himself by abusing his powers to bully inconsequential trolls*

Cline describes fight scenes like a bad creepypasta author. “And then the music from Earthbound started playing and kefka showed up and laughed and attacked us with the Master Sword EXCEPT IT WAS BLACK AND RED”

I named my playlist for this two-parter, “Ready Player Ew” and I’m way more amused by it than I should be.

Reading Ready Player Two was like sitting at a lunch table in high school, trying to keep up with the conversation of people who were SUPER INTO THIS ONE THING but you don't know it - or them - very well. After a few times of trying to break in and offer something to the conversation and getting sneered at, eventually you start to wonder if there's any reason for you to be there other than to affirm their own superior knowledge of whatever they're into, and you start to wonder if having company is better than just listening to your own thoughts. And after a few more minutes and realized you'd wasted most of your lunch break, you get up and wander off, and they don't even notice you leave, so wrapped up are they in their own air of self-satisfaction.

This book can be summarized as the Pac-Man theme, ninja turtles theme, and Mario theme, as well as the song “I just had sex” playing all at once

"The Dorkslayer" isn't the weirdest artefact I've ever heard of coming out of a D&D game considering the legend of The Kneecapper.

“There is a machine that teaches empathy. It’s called a book.” That is the greatest thing you have ever said. I’m autistic (and yes, the vilification of Halliday for his autistic traits is super wrong), and reading taught me a whole bunch about understanding other people’s feelings as well as my own.

Wait a minute... are you telling me the climatic final blow of the book... is the "*teleports behind you*" meme????

"Ew, we have to work with hobbits!" Me: *thinking it'd be a ton of fun hanging out with the hobbits drinking beer, eating second breakfast, singing songs, and smoking pipe tobacco*

Man, as a writer who struggles with the constant, overwhelming sense that their work is not good enough… I love these reminders that ‘worse works sell’. A great boost to confidence pushing forward.

The prince section is just… gross. Like… Prince was a real person but the way Cline writes about him makes him seem like a faceless cartoon character. He was iconic! My mom is a huge fan of his and she was torn up when he died! A lot of people were. I just find it very disrespectful to portray him as weird power rangers. I cannot explain how hard I cringed when he dropped Jerry Lewis’s name and called Janet Jackson a sidekick. These are real people! It’s one thing to bastardized video game or movie characters but it’s another thing to do that to real people, especially those who died not that long ago or ARE STILL ALIVE! It reminds me of real person fanfic and how gross those are! If you’re going to use real people in your story, either do research and represent them accurately OR use someone that has been dead for over 200 years (so far removed that any descendants that may be around would no longer care).

“I’d be hard pressed to think of anything worse than this.” Careful, remember what happened the last time you said something close to that…

As somebody with autism myself, and easily found Halliday's character the best part of the movie because it captured people like me in a positive and sympathetic light rather than 'broken' things like so many other Hollywood productions portray us as, thank you so much for pointing out how messed up it is that Cline decided to turn around and call him a 'fucked-up human being' with no morality or care for others because he did ONE bad thing -- which he didn't even realise was bad! Just having that passage read out loud made my skin crawl because it brought back so many bad memories. I have had so many small miscommunications with my friends which ended up with me unintentionally making them uncomfortable because I'm not aware of every social cue and standard all of the time. This demonising of Halliday for what seems like the exact same thing that so many autistic people struggle with just comes off as Cline not understanding autistic people at best, and Cline looking down on autistic people and being extremely unsympathetic at worst.

Krimson: "Considering it took three years to gather a few of them, getting the rest in twelve hours would be basically impossible, right?" Cline: "Actually it'll be super easy, barely an inconvenience."

When I stumbled across the scene of Wade "taking inventory" of Kiras body I honestly half expected Wade to start groping himself like the protagonist of a bad genderbend story.

Ready Player One felt like Cline went to the WatchMojo RU-vid Channel, sorted by most popular, watched the 20 most popular videos and went of these references. Ready Player Two feels like he watched the 20 least popular videos and used that as a basis. "The 10 most interesting facts about Japanese Arcade Games", "Top 7 Forms of Prince", "Top 5 racist Allegories made by Tolkien", etc.

“That was one of the many things that made navigating Middle Earth difficult.” If Kline discovers real geography, it’s gonna blow his mind.

"Both of the Elven blades continued to glow bright blue as I turn to face Carcharoth." Hey Cline, just a heads up man. Anduril/Narsil was forged by a Dwarf for a king of Men. It's not an Elven sword. It was reforged by Elves after it was broken, but that still by no means makes it an Elvish sword. Also, Anduril didn't glow blue in the presence of enemies. And on that note, Glamdring would only glow blue in the presence of Orcs/Goblins, not werewolves. And as far as I know, Cline's book never mentions Orcs being alongside Carcharoth, so Glamdring shouldn't be glowing.

I think the fact that Cline couldn't even come up with a plot and had to essentially copy SAO but add a time limit and reference it by name to somehow avoid people calling that out really speaks to how little he actually cared about writing this and just wanted a cash grab.

"hello fellow gamers haha wow vibeo ganes amirite" ~ cline

Something interesting with Sorrento is that he actually has a real motivation. He wants to shut down the OASIS using the big red button because his sister got so obsessed with the hunt for the Egg in the Ready Player One, she resorted to using meth and died from an overdose. He believes the blood is on OASIS's hands and wishes to shut it down, knowing the great consequences it would cause (economy crash, schools being destroyed, etc) because he's so dedicated to his revenge. Wow! What a natural and great character motivation that acknowledges the flaws of both the OASIS and Halliday's Egg Hunt! I'm so glad it was so greatly utilized in Ready Player Two :'] It was from a short story not written by Cline (go figure), instead by Andrew Weir, author of The Martian. Cline liked the story so much he declared it canon. This was before Ready Player Two, so there was a good amount of time to bring it up but nope, that would be interesting. Can't have that in this book.

As a fan of both, Lord of the Rings is very, *VERY* different from Dungeons and Dragons. Lord of the Rings is almost strictly medieval with a few magic elements sprinkled on top. Dungeons and Dragons is high fantasy, centered around a tabletop game experience. To see Cline conflate the two is *maddening.*

Omg, not even kidding. JUST LAST NIGHT I was thinking, "you know who I haven't seen in a while? Krimson Rogue. I could go for a new book review video." And now it's happening! I'm so pleasantly surprised!

"This feels like a stupid reference for the sake of a stupid reference" - That's it! That's this book and the first! Seriously, these books are some of the least sincere 'Love Letters' to the 80s and 90s I've ever seen. They don't even really go into WHY these idiots love these things, they just go "Hey, remember this movie?" and leave it at that.

Tolkien didn't dislike allegories, he hated the specificity of them. He hated people saying "Lord of the Rings is an allegory for the World Wars" because it wasn't. That reduced it to a point of "The Great War bad" instead of "War bad in general"

Okay, but one thing I’d like to point out is... lack of empathy isn’t necessarily that bad a thing. I’m autistic, and I do have empathy problems - but I still feel sympathy and compassion. If someone’s visibly upset, I still want to help them out. I don’t *feel* bad with them, but my brain still makes the connection of they feel bad -> let’s make them not feel bad. My empathy problems aren’t me not considering other people’s feelings, it’s that as a kid I didn’t notice when people were getting annoyed with me until they ended up running out of patience and trying to get rid of me in a way that made me feel upset. I wasn’t uncaring, I just genuinely didn’t know that they wanted me to stop talking. The villainisation of Halliday gets on my nerves for that reason. He wasn’t being shown to be malicious, just unaware of how he was making people feel - tell him to stop, tell him you’re getting uncomfortable, there’s ways to fix this *before* jumping to “yeah he’s a horrible person”. It’s like having a bunch of students sit a maths exam and then getting mad at the one kid who wasn’t given a calculator for doing worse than everyone else

About the D&D part : RPG's set in the Tolkien universe use their own system, MERP (Middle-Earth Role-Playing) that has nothing to do with the D&D system. The concept of "alignment" is nowhere to be found in the MERP manual. So yeah, if Kline is a nerd I'm Cthulhu's ex-wife's lawyer.

Out of all the treehouses why wouldn't you want to have Moonbase from Kids Next Door or any of the tree houses from Kids Next Door they're like these huge mega complexes

Steps Clive could've taken to make this book infinitely better: Step 1: Make the protagonist someone other than the richest, strongest, most in-control, person on the planet. Step 2: Research every non-original element that's going to come up in the story. Step 3: Employ a beta reader (I'm assuming/hoping he already had employed an alpha reader).

Including dialogue in a fight scene to hammer home fights as a clash of values is great advice! Though I can’t help but think of “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!”

Somehow I feel like the only reason RDJ came up in this book is because Cline wants him to have a cameo in the movie

It’s the “neither Wade nor Shoto even think about how they can’t resurrect Daito, despite him being a member of the High Five and close as a brother to the latter because he also died before the ONI was created, yet a teeny tiny background character like Art3mis’ grandma gets a special mention and a resurrection” for me…

Basically, Cline is world building by name dropping.

I feel like the "Orcs are black coded and Elves/Humans/Dwarves are white coded" thing is probably due to the Warcraft universe (which was heavily inspired by Tolkien) definitely coding some races in certain ways (orcs and trolls being "savage" and "violent" while also having attributes like dreads or accents typical of Black people, goblins being super greedy and having large noses, etc). So it almost makes sense why Aech would confuse the two, since this is set in the future, but it would've been better for Wade or someone else who likes "retro" video games of years past to clarify that Tolkien never had that intention and instead bring up the cultural impact Warcraft had on the fantasy games genre or something.

"This is using a reference for the sake of using a reference." Pretty much sums up all of the two books right there

If you’re an aspiring writer, you’re probably going to do fine. The standards for publishing are really this low. Don’t worry.

The dude wrote his book, made his adventure in easy mode and then he gave the protagonist a cheat code for god mode. It deserved this complete trashing thank you for your suffering.

The first Easter egg should have been the math tree house thing. Have the main character at his lowest so he goes to visit a 'happy place. Maybe he has a recording of his mother he plays again and again. In playing the clip he looks at the badges and realises he never cashed the badges in for a 'certificate' to prove he completes the game. He hands the badges in but finds his own mother has taken the place of the math quest giver. He has a touching moment with his mother and being the owner of the game this triggers a new cutscene where he gets the shard instead.

Its weird how Ernest tries to set himself up as this like progressive guy considering how much cringe dudebro hornyness there is in both books Strong nice guy vibes

i was using this as background noise, but when I heard "and then they run into Robert Downey Jr." i literally had to do a double-take to see if i heard what i heard

1:10:15 disregarding alignment not even being a thing in the books, how the hell is his alignment still chaotic good when he spends his free time senselessly murdering other Oasis users over petty squabbles???

So because it just bugged me that much I spoiled a perfectly nice walk thinking about how would I do the Prince themed challenge and here's what I've got. Firstly, no fighting. Instead we have a Prince trivia quiz where the fight is. These characters are good with pop culture trivia, so while some of the questions would be tricky it's absolutely something they can handle. But of course the trivia quiz doesn't unlock the shard like Wade expects. No, that would be too easy. Instead a door appears. Once they go through the door they find themselves in a room with a piano in it. I'm sure there's a video or photo shoot that the room's design could reference. The only thing that would deviate from the real version of the room is a panel on the wall with two rows of four lights. As wade approaches the piano the top row light up green and the piano starts to play itself. It plays the opening three bars of a song. At the end of each bar one of the lower lights comes on leaving just one turned off. The solution is obvious. Play the fourth bar. He sits down, runs the tune through his head a few times and gets it wrong. The three lights on the lower row go out and one of the green lights change to red. One of the others looks around. "Did anyone else hear thunder? It was quiet but I definitely heard something." Everyone shakes their head. "Must have just imagined-" At this point the piano starts playing again, a different song. Wade looks confused. He doesn't know this one. He looks around to the others and nobody knows. One of them makes a suggestion. It's a guess but it's the logical way to finish that phrase. He hesitates but nobody else has a better idea. He plays it. The lower row of lights go out again, and a loud grinding noise echoes through the room before another green light turns red. The piano starts to play again. Three bars. This one Wade knows. He plays, but that noise has put him on edge. His finger slips and he plays two keys at once. The three lights go out. There's another grinding noise, much louder this time, and the whole room vibrates with the sound, causing everyone not sat at the piano to lose their balance. A third light turns from green to red and the piano starts playing again. Wade thinks for a moment then very slowly starts playing. The same person who guessed the second tune hums the next bar. They see what key Wade's about to play and yell for him to stop. It's the wrong note. They argue for a moment. Wade doesn't trust them after the incorrect guess but eventually he agrees. He plays the note and after what must have only been a second or two but felt like minutes the fourth light comes on and am exit leading to the shard appears. As they leave one of them asks what do you think would have happened to them if the last light had turned red. Nobody answers the question. .... If you managed to read all that nonsense. Well done. You deserve a cookie.

As a priest in the Church of the Algorithm, I bless this video with a comment.

To desperately ignore the “Orcs are black people” cringe, why would someone not want to hang out with hobbits?

Cline did do something good with this book: he created an amazing guide on what not to do when adding a pop culture reference to a story.

Given how many times Cline brings up how Wade slept with Samantha, makes me think Cline saw the fanfics shipping Wade with pretty much every other male character in RP1 and decided he needed to “prove” Wade is straight.

Another tick in the "Cline isn't invested in Lord of the Rings and is just using it for nerd points" box: Wade says "made-up languages" rather than "fictional languages" or "conlangs". Sure, they all mean the same thing, but calling a language "made-up" is more dismissive than calling it "fictional". It's like saying that since Quenya and Sindarin didn't originate in the real world, they're not "real" languages, no matter how well-realized they are.

theory: clive put the star wars holiday special treehouse in the movie so spielberg has to recreate it on the movie adaptation

Ready Player Two being disregarded as "failed SAO clone" already shows how terrible it is.

Very happy you pointed out the error relating to the 9th Circle. I also love Inferno and almost immediately felt something was off about that sentence. At least we can confirm that Klein is a fake fan now.

A scene of the main character showing off dual wielding for the first time in order to defeat a giant monster singlehandedly that took out the rest of his party. Where have I seen that before?

Definitely agree on the Pretty in Pink part. It was one of the hardest sections to get through and one of the most alienating things that I've ever read. It was a lot of "go here, do this" without explanation and I had no idea why anything was happening until it exposition dumps at the end of the section. Also, one thing I didn't understand is why there is literally any challenge in any combat focused shard (like the Prince one). They put on admin rings that made them immune to damage from players, but shouldn't they also make them immune to damage from quests? Like if you needed to playtest a quest you would want immunity while doing it.

haliday as protrayed in the first book: i may not understand people that well but my friends' happiness is more important than my own haliday in book 2: from my heart and from my hands, why dont people understand, my inventions? and that, my friends, is how you do references *right*

Krimson: "The Prince Planet sections are incomprehensible to readers who don't know much about Prince." Me, who knows about Prince: **instant concern** Krimson: **begins reading offending sections** Me: **disgust** Great video as always, Krim! (...why would you make a Prince planet where the objective is to...fight Prince? I would much rather watch an endlessly personalized Prince concert 24/7, but hey, that's not conducive to SAO I guess)

23:04 I know you meant 2048, but honestly I would love to see Wade make references to 1940s pop culture.

Lmfao when I saw the animation of Wade I was like “THAT’S WHAT HE LOOKS LIKE? No way.” And then I saw the movie clip of Wade

In four sentences, fifteen words, a single line on the page in most printings, Jim Butcher created the simplest, most to the point moment in fiction that was able to devastate me emotionally. (vague spoilers for The Dresden Files: Changes) "I used the knife. I saved a child. I won a war. God forgive me." I still get kinda misty eyed even thinking about it a decade later. It's my go-to when thinking about the power of writing. But I think the reason I'm thinking of it listening to this book, is that this book is what an unskilled hand does to a character like Harry Dresden. "Well, they like referencing a lot of old movies and TV shows" is commonly chosen by a lot of writers to give a character a bit of personality. On it's own, it's inoffensive. But it's cheap. You have to use it as a garnish, else the entire dish will taste like what it probably is: shit. Look at when Harry slips into popcult-isms. It's when there's already an air of levity. It's when his ego's been bruised. It's when he's trying to negotiate with something pants-shittingly-terrifying and he's trying to take a little refuge in his mind. It's when he's trying to suck a little wind out of the sails of the BBEG of the book. Or when he's well aware they're nowhere near human enough to be annoyed by cracking wise. But you know when it typically goes away? When things are serious. Because we, the audience, don't want to be distracted from the actual stakes at play. At most it comes up as a quick, one line thing to make a big toothy thing less scary. This is because Butcher, the author, knows what this is to the character: a defense mechanism. It's how Harry feels safe when he really, really shouldn't. It brings him back to when he was young and life was decent. People around him rarely find this amusing. At most he gets a chuckle from someone geeky he's talking to. His long term friends/enemies/frienemies eventually find it somewhat endearing but even they admit it's something of an acquired taste. Those who don't fit in either category think he's an immature jackass who doesn't understand the gravity of the situations he's frequently in the middle of because, to someone who's not seeing inside his head, that's exactly what it seems like he is in a situation that is serious for them. Harry, the character, knows this and keeps doing it because, psychologically, it's more gratifying to him than being thought of as serious. If my long, ranting, written-while-chopping-trees-for-botany-in-FFXIV diatribe here is to impart any meaning whatsoever, let it be this: If a character does something constantly, HAVE A POINT WITH IT. Not just this "ohohoho, I need this knowledge to win the contest ohohoho", that is not sufficient for it to be interesting to the audience because it is waved in the audience's face even when the contest is not at stake. That's like saying mentioning Bob's breathing constantly is interesting because he needs it to defeat his nemesis Oxygen. There is no point where I'm left feeling the character Wade nor the author Cline have the closest measurement to an iota of passion for "nerd" culture beyond when the next check clears. It sounds like a listical or wikipedia page because that's all it is: a regurgitation of events and properties. It means nothing to the character in truth beyond what the story needs, it leaves no impact on the world around him beyond the progression of the plot. There is less I can say about it compared to a CHARACTER QUIRK OF A FUNNY WIZARD MAN. And an entire book supposedly about empathy inspires less in me than fifteen heartrending words. And that's not getting into the ten words from Battlegrounds that somehow hit harder than that. In short, thank you for coming to my TED talk, yes this only made the grinding marginally less tedious, and I need to touch grass. EDIT: Also, yes- the Dresden Files show is terrible. Not the worst adaptation ever put to screen but it comes nowhere close to justice and the changes... WHY!?

Dedicated raiders are so amazing. In Final Fanatasy XIV there's a boss that in the final phase just floods the place with AOEs. Some people have managed to figure out that if you stand in one specific spot none of them hit you and you can still attack. It's a pixel perfect stop and I have no idea how people were able to figure it out

Literally, the only difference between RPT and SAO is there’s a time limit.

I audibly lost it when you went over how Wade went actual Kirito on the werewolf in the LOTR world. I just can't

The Prince Fight scene was so bad that while I was listening to Krimson talk about it I realized he has *The Last Dragon Chronicles* behind him and I got excited because oh my god I remember loving those books. Also your kitty cat has SOCKS . . . so adorable!!!

I think what pisses me off the most is when people don’t do research. This book just sounds like a mess of weird trivia questions and unthought of research

Would've been a fun twist if, instead of an Oni-user going comatose when they 'die', they just wake up instead and are perfectly fine irl. Then you have a b-plot where part of the team is chasing down other users and murdering them to save them instead of prancing off to the Prince Planet

As someone trying to create a story and someone who has autism, I find this not only a waste of creative writing and an inventive setting but insulting, to say the least; having the author saying people who have autism in such a vulgar manner and not understanding what he wrote is quite revealing.

God that tarrasque part really felt like Cline just wanted to interest the D&D nerds and then he goes ahead and claims you can speedrun the monster that literally ends the world if it wakes up. You can't even permanently kill these things.

"Look at my book there's a trans character in it! Isn't it great?" From a trans person, no it fucking isn't if there's just nothing about it other than showing them off that they're trans, DOUBLY SO if it's as side as a character can be

43:23 "This feels like it was written more to show off Cline's cursory knowledge of the subject rather than deepen the story." Not a bad tl/dr for the whole book, from the sound of it.

"He only managed to land one or two hits before I knocked his life-meter down to nothing, with a steady barrage of throwing knifes" sounds scarily like one of the fight scenes in one of Onision's books (cant be bothered to remember which one) i don't think writing action like Onision is a good thing.

1:01:20 If Wade thinks that two or three different languages having different names for the same thing is confusing, wait'l he hears about real life.

As someone who actually read this book to see how bad it is, my fandom-specific rage moment came when Wade talked about looking up Sailor Moon as one of Kira’s beloved IPs and having fantasies about dressing as Tuxedo Mask. 1) Assuming men in any kind of “feminine” fandom are in it for sexual purposes is something we should have left behind after the brony era ended. Not only is this concept incredibly sexist, but it also assumes the worst of many fans, collectors, and content creators simply for their assigned gender. 2) This sexist idea is especially egregious to the Sailor Moon fandom since many OG male Moonies grew up watching the show with their sister, which contributed to the show’s success with both gender demographics in America and probably made it a treasured family memory for many rather than anything sexual. And 3) You can totally just cosplay Tuxedo Mask at a con or something without people thinking anything of it as long as you don’t make it weird. Not only do adult Tuxedo Mask costumes exist, but you can find pictures of tiny, adorable Tuxedo Masks, too! In fact, you may even need to see a few pictures of baby Tuxedo Masks so you can bleach your mind of Wade’s weird fantasies!

As someone who is on the Autism spectrum, I loved the way Halliday was described in the first book I related to how he was talked as a person, and loved that he was seen as a good man, despite his difficulties with relating to others And the fact that he was so brutally assassinated in this book infuriates me. Because Wade learns about the bad things he did, and bases his viewpoint of Halliday on those things and completely ignores his previous views. He doesn't have any conflict within himself, trying to rationalize what he's learning, at least from what I can gather. And the fact that we as the readers are funnelled into his line of thinking from the first person perspective just makes it feel worse. Because it comes off as, we as the readers aren't allowed to form our own conclusions. We're supposed to absorb Wade' point of view like brainless sponges, and that becomes clear when Wade starts slandering Halliday and decides "let's destroy OASIS" Sorry if my explanation to my opinion seems unorganized and choppy, I tried to word it the best way I could

I just went to look up a playthrough of Ninja Princess to see if I would recognize it by the visuals... it's a top down shooter, not a fighting game as the scene set up...

That “some focus on her body” was so much more tastefully done than anything Cline’s ever written

I've already had this idea for a while now, but seeing the "Trapped in hyper-immersive VR" trope done so badly here makes me want to write my own book out of spite, just to prove the concept itself isn't irreparably fucked lmao.

Does Cline not realise that like most if not ALL of the main LOTR books (including the silmarillion) came with MAPS!? He even knew what the places where called, why not just follow those or maps the people who made the planet made? Edit: I think you meant to say Angband with the Morgoth raid, not Angmar. Edit: Anduril (orginally Narsil) is a Dwarven made sword, and never glowed blue (not even in the movies)

That Ninth Circle reference also irked the hell out of me (pun entirely intended). Lucifer is literally trapped at the bottom with his waist and below underneath ice. EDIT: I JUST realized, why the hell would Oni users even be suggested to be down there? The ninth circle is meant for traitors and stuff (Judas, Lucifer, etc.). As far as I know Oni users are at worst greedy or gluttonous, so most likely they’d go as far as the third circle.

Now that I've finished the video I can give some more constructive thoughts as a trans guy. Lo being trans is definitely tokenism and Cline uses it as a way to show that his protagonist isn't bigoted. But it feels fake to me because I've read the excerpts from when he found out. He's making being trans solely into a sexual experience. Instead of mentioning Wade knows how crushing dysphoria is or how euphoria makes you feel he makes it about sex. "I've had sex with trans people so I'm not transphobic!" is something a lot of transphobes like to trot out. It completely ignores chasers and how people reduce trans people to their bodies and nothing more.

What's so sad about it is the potential of some of the ideas. Off the top of my head you could rework the ONI from being a weird thing to make his crush immortal, into a device Halliday makes in an attempt to better understand and connect with others, but instead becomes addicted to memories and realising it's only made him more isolated, locks it away to stop it's misuse. But then Cline wouldn't be able to write as much about how his self insert got laid so it is what it is.

"Please someone ask Cline what he was thinking when he wrote this." My brain, in the voice of Mister Crabs: "Money!"

Another thing on "everything is confusing because of the two-to-three different made-up languages": Since the languages were exactly the point of his work, they were *the* thing Tolkien was passionate about *and he knew his shit*, they are incredibly organic. From Cline's own example? Angband and Ered Engrin - let's analyse this. Ered appears several times throughout LotR and all things Middle Earth, so anyone who's spent at least some time with the material would know that it means mountain(s). But the interesting thing for the point I'm trying to make is ANGband and ENGrin. Ang and Eng are very close, very similar - they are both the "iron" part in Iron Prison and Iron Mountains (just as Angmar means Iron Home, just as a fun fact). The a->e is a vowel shift and that is one of the most common things languages do! Anyone with a lick of linguistic intuition can tell that Angband and Engrin are very likely related, perhaps even close to each other due to that relation. Tolkien's languages *make sense*. They *work*. They are consistent and have inner rules they follow to a t, and they adhere to real-world-linguistics-rules. Then again, for such "a massive geek like" him, he's never been that deep in his knowledge of relevant topics if it wasn't just reciting movie/TV lines or playing arcade video games. I mean for frick's sake, this is the guy who beat the first dungeon in RPO - the infamous Tomb of Horrors - by downloading the freaking module and cheating his way through it with that (in ways that would not be possible if it were an accurate recreation), so idk what else I should have expected about the other pillar-of-fantasy-fandom in this. Sorry for the rant, but I'm almost done getting my language Bachelor's and this just...made me unreasonably angry. Idk, maybe this helps with what felt so weird about casual fans finding the names confusing, too. Thanks for picking this trash apart so thoroughly!!

I just nocticed another thing about that twelve hour time limit and the brain damage thing. People could and probably would drop dead at every minute because of time zones and different sleep scedules and not just after twelve hours all at once. So the urgency and stress should be mind numbingly strong.

Bold of Wade to vilify Halliday for making a duplicate girlfriend after all that time he spent cyberstalking his ex. A better writer could have drawn an ironic parallel there.

19:56 kitty alert! Leia’s doing a derp face and I love it!

“Well, that's just lazy writing.” - the Wade I respect

Always a good sign when a character is killed off in a trippy af fight scene involving seven clones of a real life musician Edit: Even better sign when it's revealed that no one really died, actually

I always thought the argument of Orcs being blackcoded is weird since, usually with black-coded characters you can look at them and go 'oh ok that's supposed to represent a black person' but at NO POINT, during reading the books or watching the movies, I thought that while looking at the Orcs or Uruk-hai. They were monsters and didn't remind me of humans of any kind at all. If you see a black person in an Orc, you might be the problem...

It's as if someone turned 'how do you do fellow kids' into a book.

Your Leia-cat is so damn presh, Krimson, oh my GOD. I got just as distracted as she made you. GOOD GIRL

This whole book is just the author announcing "I KNOW ABOUT OUTDATED POP CULTURE!!"

I'm so confused, since when was the dominant discussion that Tolkien orcs might have been pulled from black people? I always heard that Tolkien might have pulled inspiration from Mongols and in general East Asia, not in an allegorical way. But in maybe unintentional coding. Was that the discussion he was trying to mimic in an attempt to be woke? Note: I don't read Tolkien, I just read people talking about it because rabbit holes and passionate fans are fun.

The Magic Treehouse was my first thought on an alternate treehouse, too. I haven't read any of the books in years, but I remember them being great.

I was so shocked and distracted by how bizarre the writing and world building was, that I literally forgot the main character’s name was Wade

"this person attacked and then this person attacked back, so third person attacked from the sky which fourth person countered with a sonic-shield-guitar-blaster-gun ! i, being the protagonist, got the final blow... it was awesome, i swear. you just had to be there."

I feel like it would have been very simple to improve the math planet section. Wade already mentioned that he spent a lot of time with his mom there, and it became hard to go there after she died. I've never played that game but I imagine there's some form of difficulty curve, write it so that he collected most of the merit badges as an activity with his mom but hadn't gotten to the last, most difficult ones yet when she died. You get both the intellectual challenge of solving the most difficult problems AND the emotional challenge of being forced to come to terms with his mother's death

My favorite part of the star wars holiday special reference is that the same treehouse design was used in episode 3, which people actually saw.

Morgoth taking something that already existed and made it worse is a good pretty allegory for what the author of ready player two did with everything he referenced.

As a lover od D&D the Terrasque thing REALLY irritated me; one of the only stated ways to "Defeat" a Terrasque is to use a Wish Spell (Gotta be near max level to get this one) to literally WISH it out of existence. And EVEN THEN there is a chance it will not work. The damn thing was created with the express intent of being the Gods' delete button.

For Lo (I hope I spelled her name right) could have been an interesting look into how the OASIS can help those struggling with their identity and physical appearance through their avatars.