372 Pages We ll Never Get Back
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Ep 93 - Ready Player 2 - Rolling our Locked Wide Eyes
🕑 Added 2021-01-20 22:19:34 +0000 UTCErnest Cline's runaway best seller continues to disgust and annoy us, even as it approaches the home stretch. In this episode we wrap up the seemingly endless John Hughes quest by meeting an actual John Hughes NPC (not actually John Hughes). Then we're off to Halcydonia, where we all try to pretend that Zoobilee Zoo wasn't a terrifying TV show. Then it's off to the Prince Planet, where our characters alternate between weeping about their abusive childhoods and trying to go hump things at virtual strip clubs. It's just great.
All this plus the long-awaited merging of the High Five and the Low Five, Fanfic or Real, and Dumb Dumb Dumb Sentences.
For next time, read thru Chapter 26. And yeah, Conor's audio is a bit lower fidelity than it should be, he was recording on a remote rig that was only a heckuva a rig, not a hell of a. It will be fixed going forward.
Comments
372 Pages We'll Never Get Back
Well put. Things like the "Rouge NPCs" are mentioned when it serves the "plot" and then immediately forgotten about. And it happens over and over again.
Chaos Shadow
Listening to this, one thing that keeps bothering me is the time limit. It's good to have a clock just so you understand there are stakes, but there's a double-whammy of not only establishing that the ONI will start causing mental damage if used too long, but then Anorak makes it a hard limitation. Why not just have introduced Anorak saying they would be stuck in the OASIS until the shards were collected? This softens the time limit (because brain damage probably doesn't set in right at twelve hours, but you'd still have people suffering the effects of extended ONI time once you hit the limit) and you'd still have a possibly good moment where the Five tell Anorak they can't remain logged on that long without dying and Anorak just says something to the effect of "Better get started, then." But as I thought about that, it just occurred to me that the time limit is also... really stupid. Anorak needs Wade to collect the Shards because he (and Ogden) are the only ones who can actually do so, by the programming of the game. So if they die, the shards are permanently lost. So putting them both in a death game means Anorak is setting himself up for permanent failure. Wade should be untouchable because of what Anorak needs from him. Instead we have a situation where the stakes are arbitrary, nobody is taking them seriously, and even when they escalate (the NPCs going rogue and attacking people, which might matter if it were clear if this actually kills the user in real life or they just respawn their avatar and lose some progress) the main characters are completely unaffected by it. You'd think going to the Prince planet that's filled with period-appropriate NPCs watching concerts would have them all IMMEDIATELY turn on them and maybe even hold the other characters hostage while forcing Wade to do his thing (and depriving him of his Prince knowledge base so he'd actually have to think for once) but no. This whole book definitely reads like it was a first draft. That's not the only problem but it's definitely one that's annoying me.
Chaos Shadow
I get what you're saying, but Cline is definitely a bad storyteller. A good storyteller -- even if a mediocre writer -- will take a story premise and be able to tell it in such a way as to be engaging, even if the premise itself simply isn't. Cline, meanwhile, can take a lot of interesting premises and then just fail to actually tell a story with them. It's not even that he's a good idea man,, either. Most of what he introduces are tropes from better works shoehorned into his story without actually thinking about them. It's kind of the basis of his entire writing style-- he's alluding to things that are much better than his actual work to prompt a vicarious response in the reader. "Oh, I've read about that in better books, that's interesting!" says the hypothetical reader, and hopefully their positive association bleeds over to Cline's work. Stripped of that, it's all empty.
Shawn Furniss
Having gone through to the end of the audiobook I have to say. Ernest Cline is a brilliant storyteller but an intensely lazy writer. In first couple of chapters and the final he brought up some great story ideas that should have been the focus of the book but then he waved them away in favor of retreading RP1 and sprinkling in a pretty derivative hostage "thriller" instead. It's pretty clear to me that he went with one draft of his story and called it good.
