SADDO: THE MOVIE (aka READY PLAYER ONE)

omg flappy bird is a sanpaku sock

Emoji sounds far more interesting to me compared to this. they are kind of ambiguous and less over-analyzed cultural symbols, abstract/more and tied to the collective unconscious.

RPO is like, fuck, a Transformer and a Minecraft guy, together, and look, it's Iron Man. its a Target commercial.

I barely remember RPO from long walks with the dog 2 years ago, but there are those sorts of themes. They're common to all YA fiction. What distinguishes them is largely the environment they posit. Harry Potter being a largely benign environment where evil is real and has a personality, His Dark Materials one of oppressive religious institutions, Ready Player One a post-apocalytic world were escapism predominates, Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker/Drowned Cities denying even escapism. They all address loyalty, friendship getting you through tough times, doing what's right, not fitting in....

Perhaps someone else will confirm that the usual YA themes are also present in Hunger Games and Divergent. Lifes too short for me to have bothered with those franchises.

I don't believe RPO was explicitly marketed as a YA book. I believe it was aimed at people who consider themselves adults.

The protagonist is a teen/twenty something. That's enough.

just want to completely ILX this thread up by saying nobody deserves to be a billionaire no matter what. Billionaires are bad for the world.

From what I can tell based on the trailer and reading nothing beyond passages posted itt, RPO feels kinda like the sequel to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hz1UaEVyoo

with a dash of

http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/nintenshows/images/2/2f/VGM-CN_Title_Card.jpeg

and as with cartoon all-stars to the rescue, there's a million wild and wonderful ways to say "no"

teen/twenty something. That's enough

(Having returned from the dogs' walk), well, that and avoiding moral grey areas, politics, explicit sexuality, excess profanity, aging and concerns of older readers. YA literature could be defined by what it doesn't include. Often I suspect the antagonist's motivations would be grist for more adult fiction (for example, there could be sympathetic diary/apologia for Voldemort where more his complex motivations were clarified, but it wouldn't be YA).

Look at RPO as a cartoon for adolescents, that happens to include some cultural signifiers from our own adolescence, and a lot of the disdain evaporates.

Nah it's shit

Adolescents who want this flavor of escapism are better off with Ender's Game or, you know, anything with girls in it, even if they are named Hermione

RPO was never YA if anyone's being honest - this drivel was published on the gamble that a certain 19+ demo wanted to read this kind of drivel, and somebody at the print shop got a big promotion, because humans love shit whenever someone shovels it with both hands and a performative facial expression that they feel connected to

p much everybody I know who's cumming over it is 30-40 years old and seem to be daily depressed that it's not still 1987

the only reason i had heard of rpo before the spielberg attachment was a supernerd acquaintance of mine loaned it to me on spec and claimed it would change my life. he is ~33. the only words of it i read were on the back cover.

RPO was never YA if anyone's being honest...

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, August 8, 2017

does manbaby count?

the only reason i had heard of rpo before the spielberg attachment was a supernerd acquaintance of mine loaned it to me on spec and claimed it would change my life...

― Clay, Tuesday, August 8, 2017

he's right about that. since reading it i now harshly judge anyone who has a kind word for the book or its author, and seek revenge on those who recommended it to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moNHfeBJ81I

it just fails on so many levels. nobody wants to read pages of lists, it's not an enjoyable experience, it's an error as close to being Objectively Bad as you can get to in writing. it has two Japanese characters in it and they both happen to be samurai there to teach the protagonist about honor.

it also fails to juxtapose things in an interesting way. juxtaposition is a technique just like any other and it can be used artfully or it can be clumsily weilded at the reader. hearing that this guy got a Delorean and installed the Knight Rider AI and put the talking mouth from Knight Rider on the front and put Ghostbusters stickers on the doors and got a custom license plate that makes another reference to Ghostbusters is not interesting. visually it sounds like a fucking dumb looking car. it doesn't remind me of Ghostbusters, a snobs-vs-snobs comedy film. it doesn't make me think of the Hasselhoff's suave tech spy. i do not know what this juxtaposition is supposed to do, what kind of reaction he wants from the audience, beyond superficial recognition, the gratification that the audience is a like-minded consumer is all i can get from this. like everything else this book offers, it is interesting on the intellectual level of a 6 yo dumping out a bucket of toys.

some reviewer said something about how ridiculous the number of times watched listed is and i agree, as if watching Raider of the Lost Ark 101 times will reveal anything that the 100th viewing failed to. it's a Consumerist dick measuring contest just like much of the internet. "How best can i demonstrate my superiority as a consumer?"

as for OG material, Captain N and the crew of IP brands also went on fairly interesting adventures but (often to its detriment) it strayed too much from the video games it was supposedly based on. they weren't mindlessly re-creating game sequences they were doing cheesey tropey storylines. Zelda was also about dumb stupid attempts at corny sitcom humor as much as it was about these games. i think there may be something interesting to say about 80s pop culture and the way it turned into sort of weird mutant version of its more traditional sitcom forebears (introducing sitcoms about aliens and robot girls, weird uber-macho-USA videogames emerging from the post-nuke generation of Japan) but yeah not here and not this guy. he is a shitty writer with shitty ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists

Seth MacFarlane is to blame for all of this

Arguably, we've seen depictions of virtual reality "games" based on historical pop-culture since ST:TNG. In RPO's case, the IPs are named.

No fan of MacFarlane, but his success is a symptom of a larger malaise.

talking more about the whole "here's a thing you might remember. there's no joke here and it doesn't affect the plot, but here's a thing."

Dennis Miller was doing that for a couple decades before Family Guy debuted.

ok so I read this book and it wasn't nearly as terrible as I was expecting. obv that guy's poem is dumb but I think there is something to the book re: the endless recapitulation of references, etc; it doesn't make as big a deal about it as maybe it should, but the implication by the end is definitely that there's something hollow, and sad about this world where new culture has stopped and all we have is an obsessive compulsive relationship with the past. I think the movie could shed an interesting light on this aspect, if it wants.

"what critique of capitalism does it have in it? how the whole thing of the text i have read has been about fetishizing corporate IPs."

the bad guys of the book are a corporation and the entire point of the quest is to defeat the capitalist enterprise and keep the virtual world in the hands of the people.

the virtual world which is... full of corporate creations

ok so I read this book and it wasn't nearly as terrible as I was expecting. obv that guy's poem is dumb but I think there is something to the book re: the endless recapitulation of references, etc; it doesn't make as big a deal about it as maybe it should, but the implication by the end is definitely that there's something hollow, and sad about this world where new culture has stopped and all we have is an obsessive compulsive relationship with the past. I think the movie could shed an interesting light on this aspect, if it wants.

― akm, Saturday, November 18, 2017

nope nope nope

just bc you're smart doesn't mean this book is

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--HcFzXgEX--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/ob7pz9ekwo0djwo14ggz.png

I think there is something to the book re: the endless recapitulation of references, etc; it doesn't make as big a deal about it as maybe it should, but the implication by the end is definitely that there's something hollow, and sad about this world where new culture has stopped and all we have is an obsessive compulsive relationship with the past. I think the movie could shed an interesting light on this aspect, if it wants.

wouldn't have subjected myself to the book but glad for this report and yeah what was a technical possibility upthread on grounds of the holy jurassic park is now what i'm actually hoping the movie is about. chapo guys were loling about patton oswalt having said "it's like jaws but the shark is nostalgia" like it was the perfect burn, but like wouldn't that be... good

plus the mere presence of spielberg totally changes the thing's scope (b/c personally responsible for the originals of so many of the reprocessed images), automatically on a metatextual level but i hope on a textual one too (as in JP when spielberg's POV hijacks the hammond char)

on the other hand, that the book was presumably all fair-use yet could not legally be adapted without further enriching "ernie cline" is enough to make u wish for direct corporate rule

READY PLAYER ONE (2018)

DP: Janusz Kaminski
Director: Steven Spielberg pic.twitter.com/CXXTTxoGY2

— Christmas Duckman (@bobservo) December 10, 2017

What....what the fuck?!

https://i.imgur.com/gQQlUfD.png

this appears to be some blurry CGI, hth

That’s not helping!

Also, it’s the inclusion of a particular character or two I’m questioning

Is Overwatch timeless enough for the prominence of that character's inclusion to not be hilariously dated in 5 years? I honestly don't know.

Venerable IPs worth protecting were probably beyond the budget. IIRC, there really isn't much in the book extending into the 1990s, much less our present decade.

Alas, 40somethings aren't a great target demographic (cf Blade Runner 2049's box office). Compromises were made.

Venerable IPs worth protecting were probably beyond the budget.

― Sanpaku, Thursday, December 14, 2017

if only

How much post 80s shit shows up in the original book? There are Firefly refs in there, for example

https://nerdist.com/ready-player-one-trailer-25-easter-eggs-nerdist-news/

Four (!) "Street Fighter" characters, Joker and Harley Quinn, Overwatch (why didn't they use lol Roadhog), Akira, tons more.

https://i.redd.it/59ktxnd5vkbz.jpg

good luck to Speilberg working w this genius

I for one am excited that Stephen Spielberg is adapting Kingdom Hearts for the silver screen.

Sorry, 'Stephen Spielberb'

this seems to resemble the Keillor/Altman divide of years ago

btw i don't know who any of these 'characters' you guys mentioned are, so i will be able to watch this OBJECTIVELY (if at all)

lol

sorry AB I gotta FP you for that

This is a pretty thorough tear-down of the book, from the point of view of "reference-heavy culture can be good": https://www.heypoorplayer.com/2017/07/28/second-opinion-ready-player-one-worst-thing-nerd-culture-ever-produced/

The thread of excerpts is enough to give me hives though:

Thankfully goodreads kept all my choice RPO notes handy so anything that annoyed the fuck out of me is right here. pic.twitter.com/E6G9uEigVJ

— N. Cat (@naricat) July 24, 2017

man that is brutal. kinda thought "this could not possibly be as bad as everyone's saying it is" and holy shit it's actually a lot worse

You guys should check out my upcoming novel which is literally just a list of pop cultural ephemera accented with occasional punctuation and indentations to make it look like a story rather than something I c+p-ed from Wikipedia. You should also check out all of the zeroes in the dollar figure on my advance check.