I know the widespread online reaction to Ready Player One has been eye-rolling and general sarcasm, but for all that there’s still people on twitter that defend it, saying it’s just an homage, that it’s just a love letter to nostalgia and
I find it hard to articulate what I find so repulsive about this vague non-attempt at an intellectual property
I haven’t read it, but I have seen actual content that includes
Blatant racism
Predictable sexism
Just terribly, terribly written words
And that’s enough. That’s enough to dismiss a thing and demand that the writer tries harder. But it’s not just that. It’s some kind of story about an author avatar who is such a huge, HUGE nerd that he manufactures an ultra-specific situation where that exact thing is the only way to save the world.
And let’s be clear, that is
stupid as fuck
If you’ve been on the internet, if you’re a nerd like the type of person this would appear to be aimed at, if you engage in fandom at all, you’d already know how dime-a-dozen self-insert protagonists are, who represent their author and jump through into the world of a movie/book/game and get to be the hero. It’s been done, it’s been done a hundred million ways, and it’s called fanfiction
I’ve written fanfiction just about all my life, and I’m all for declassifying it as a form of time-wasting. Fanfiction is derided pretty much everywhere as being the product of obsessed losers who don’t have ideas of their own. Fanfiction, to me, is a way to practice a craft without the burden of inventing the ideas first. It’s an entry point, and it’s also a harmless hobby, it can help you understand writing tropes, and it can help you develop your own ideas alongside someone elses – but if not, it’s still okay. Not everything everyone does has to be done for profit or fame. Fanfiction is a labour of passion, made and given freely.
Fanfiction is, and always has been, highly female-associated. The first fanfic writers are known to be mostly women, and it remains aligned that way to this day – and in practice, at least in my experience, I’ve always seen more women and girls active in writing fandom, and fandom in general. We’re here, we do this.
And yet when Gamemaster Anthony here writes himself being the hero to other people’s characters, with actual movie posters that photoshop his face onto The Matrix, this self-insertion is blockbuster-movie-worthy. Apparently.
When a lot of fanfic writers do self-insertion I feel like they at some point, on some level get the idea that they’re doing it for their own fun. It’s personal. “It’s my favourite movie, only I’m in it”, yeah, is only of interest to yourself, pretty much. And that’s fine! Because you’re not exactly pretending it IS interesting to anyone else.
On one hand, you gotta hand it to these posters for capturing exactly what Ready Player One is – so derivative it beggars belief. But the other thing is, we know what these posters are meant to appeal to.
Like the guy who wrote an entire book about how he saved the universe by knowing every line in Blade Runner, there are guys out there who make being a devoted fan their entire identity. Guys who immerse themselves in sci-fi or games or media that appeals to them and know every single thing about it.
Now, I’m not trying to generalise along gender lines here, but the kind of fan that *I* am – I like to see media critically. I like dissecting what makes it work and why. I like reinterpreting stories. I enjoy writing my own, and changing things up, or making my own backstory to explore an underused character, letting my own imagination fill in what was left open for me. We cannot engage with other people’s work without seeing it through our own lens, and I say be proud of it, express yourself in your fandom – because nothing is ever going to be truly objective.
The other kind of fan is the type who sees what they love as static. An idea published in a pure state of being that can’t be changed, shouldn’t be critiqued (if they like it), and so they express fandom by referencing its content. Quotes. Posters. Outside of geek ‘’’culture’’’ I see this in sports fans who learn every single match statistic for their team. It’s the type of person who watches Big Bang Theory because saying ‘it’s like in Game of Thrones’ constitutes a joke. There’s no engagement or introspection about Game of Thrones. It just pointed to a thing they like and somehow it’s funny.
Static fans are more well-known and more easily accepted. Static fans don’t seem to ‘get’ what transformative fans do, which feels like a fundamental disconnect between the mentalities – ‘I value things by learning every aspect about them, and you want to change it?’ A static fan is the type of person who writes Ready Player One, where ‘creativity’ means regurgitating lines and figures out of someone else’s work, and being the best at this, and then everyone praises you for how good it was for you to know these arbitrary things. Ready Player One is a guy who’s absorbed minute details from media he likes but desperately wants to justify knowing them in a world where you don’t get awards for being able to recite somebody else’s script.
The book reaches its nadir in a chapter where the protagonist makes his way through a virtual recreation of the 1983 film WarGames. Instead of simply namedropping the title, Cline unnecessarily and embarrassingly re-narrates the first 15 minutes of the movie, dialogue and all.
This is the dead-end of static fandom. A pretty basic-level dystopia that revolves around pop-culture references painstakingly engineered into making everyone love you. Media builds on other media all the time, one person using inspiration from another to build a vision from their own perspective – incorporating similar tropes, paying homage through iconic shots, camera work, lighting, musical motifs, symbolism or narrative cadence.
This isn’t that. This is the overhyped equivalent of a guy who finds out you enjoy video games and immediately eagerly screams at you “THE CAKE IS A LIE!!!!!!”
Ready Player One is the Emoji Movie, but with films, not apps.
Soards 