The Worst Sci-Fi Novel of 2020 | Ready Player Two Review, Part 2
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- Опубліковано 10 лип 2024
- The OASIS had the perfect creative environment, rivaled only by massive universes like Doctor Who, but it was squandered by a novice author with no idea how to explore it.
0:00- Intro & Recap
2:57- The Second Shard
16:30- The Third Shard
28:44- The Fourth Shard
35:38- Pointless Side Quest
43:11- The Fifth Shard
55:15- The Sixth Shard
1:15:35- The Seventh Shard
1:16:15- The Assassination of James Halliday
1:22:30- The Terrible Climax
1:32:50- L0hengrin
1:36:24- Aftermath & Resolution
1:43:07- Empathy
1:47:21- Closing thoughts
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DISCLAIMER: FAIR USE. Title 17, US Code (Sections 107-118 of the copyright law) All media in this video is used for the purpose of review and commentary under the terms of fair use. All footage, music and images used belong to their respective owners. - Розваги
Krimson siting upon a throne of books, thrashing a bad book, whilst petting his minion cat is a perfect image.
Krimson is obviously the minion here. I mean, the cat goes and comes as it pleases, while Krimson reads shitty books to pay for it's food
Praise lord ash and master leia
Now I need art of this image.
The Internet's Evil Librarian
"Siting"
I named my playlist for this two-parter, “Ready Player Ew” and I’m way more amused by it than I should be.
Better than the actual title.
That's pretty good. Wish I had thought of that.
That's what the book should've been called.
Another good subtle slang pun perfectly describing this book: "Ready Player Deuce"
Oh! That a good name to a parody of this book. Ya know, like how Night Light was a Twilight parody?
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”
As a creepypasta fan...yeah pretty much. I'm in it for the characters and concepts. Not so much the stories themselves.
@@shadow_shine3578 Now I can't stop thinking about the rake. What were yall thinking when you made that one?
@@vanroyal244 I came in well after that came so be so I can't say.
Don't forget the hyper realistic BLOOD!
@@vanroyal244 GARDENING!
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*
Takes one to know one.
Honestly, 99% of the "criticism" of Haliday was just Haliday being autistic and Wade not getting it, despite him being confirmed as a person with Asperger's in the book, and it being HEAVILY implied in the movie. As someone on the spectrum myself, I find Wade's reaction to Haliday (having the knowledge already that he was autistic), incredibly insulting. He was creepy, but he had no way of knowing that until after he had already done some fucked up shit. Most of the time I only realize why something I've done is weird or mean, or socially unacceptable until I reflect for a little bit, or a friend tells me. Having had nobody to teach him how to interact with people, I can totally see why he did the things he did. The whole book just came off as beating up Haliday for something he couldn't control, and Wade being a dick for no damn reason.
@@deerecoyote2040 I also have Asperger's and never once thought movie Halliday was autistic.
@@deerecoyote2040 I know this is an older comment but I also wanted to add that, while it's super common for folks on the spectrum to gravitate to each other/have understandings, it's also super common for folks on the spectrum to be very dismissive of others on the spectrum. I was friends with someone who was on the spectrum and I might be on the spectrum myself. That 'friend' was always rude to others and dismissive of limitations; they once banned someone in their toxic server because they were 'too autistic' and weren't getting some social cues. They, the 'friend', looked down on others who weren't exactly like them.
@@zakle3805 Agreed. Those kinds of dismissive behaviors seem to just exist everywhere.
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.
Speaking truth over here
Such a rookie move
I am (sadly) only knowledgeable of LOTR from cultural osmosis, and even I could have come up with that joke before Cline did.
@@kaemincha
Wait is that why all flying powers are disabled?
"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*
Imagine thinking hanging out with hobbits and thinking that’s a bad thing!
And not being expected to wear shoes! I hate wearing shoes!
I now wish The Green Dragon was real.
@@scottthewaterwarrior Danged foot nudists are everywhere these days!
Literally how can you hate halflings. You physically can't. It's impossible
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.
And on top of that, you eventually come to realize that even *they* had no idea what they were even talking about, and were all just posturing to seem like they fit in.
That's better written than this book 😂
That hits way too close to home.
That's not really nice to autistic people.
Nice profile picture, girl! Love it, so much sass and personality right there, and your comment really shows it especially 😀
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
Beautifully summarized
No, SNL was more restrained than Wade
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.
I essentially just commented the same thing elsewhere on the video. Thanks for speaking up for us man, I really appreciate it. I found RP2 to just be really insulting and sad, considering the first one is one of my favorite books of all time.
I suffer from ASD and I agree.
lmao
“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…
Dammit, you're right!
Oh, the universe is gonna kick my ass for that. XP
Thanks for reminding me. I need to rewatch the Empress Theresa reviews. XD
@@KrimsonRogue It's okay, we'll take on the universe right alongside you!
@@KrimsonRogue
The Forensic Certified Public Accountant and the Cremated 64-SQUARES Financial Statements is getting a sequel,
....and other horror storries to keep yourself up at night
Edit: Actually looked it up as a joke, there are actually other books. "The Forensic Certified Public Accountant and the United States of America Presidential Cabinet"
possibly "Ready Player 50 Shades of Twilight" ?
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."
Wow wow wow… wow.
Cline: (in response to any criticism in this or the previous episode) I need you to get alllllll the way off my back about that.
@@Po4to let me get off of that thing then
Using basic logic is TIGHT!
The silver lining of the Ready Player Two Movie (if it happens, I’m doubtful) is that it will most certainly have a Pitch Meeting…and it will be better written than this book
“That was one of the many things that made navigating Middle Earth difficult.” If Kline discovers real geography, it’s gonna blow his mind.
Istanbul is going to blow his mind.
@@theGhostWolfe what about Constantinople
@@TayDoesStuffnow it's istanbul, not constantinople
He will flip when he learns groundhogs, woodchucks, land beavers, and whistlepigs are all the same animal.
Ready Player One felt like Cline went to the WatchMojo UA-cam 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.
Know what? I'd believe that.
All the while doing coke off the fat butts of "pros...."
Even WatchMojo would've known that Tolkien based the orcs on Mongolians who he described as "least lovely to europeans" or sth.
Tolkien had some issues with racism, but saying "Orcs are black people" without evidence is just... Cline, you know what research is?
@@grandadmiralmitthrawnuruod5011 he said orcs were based on the "to us, least lovely of the Mongoloid types" which says to me he's more a "product of his time" than a racist. He was aware that his Euro-centric ideas weren't the only ones or even necessarily correct, even if he still used it because...easy shorthand.
@Potato King Maybe mushrooms?
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).
Completely agree with you. Its disrespectful
I completely agree. The entire section felt really tasteless to me.
Would have been way more fun if Prince planet was just Minnesota with Paisley Park in it. If you are going to do something that dumb, at least make it fun dumb.
It honestly confused me to the point for thinking someone couldn't possibly after done this, but was referring some fantasy/SciFi I wasn't aware of...I really wish it was the case and not this guy having the audacity to disrespect Price like this
*looks at that one gatcha game and that one anime which turned early 20th century/late 19th century authors into pretty boys*
But yeah, I know nothing of Prince and even I felt a bit uncomfortable with that segment. If there had to be a battle, it’s a music world, why not make it a rhythm game? Like, the players find themselves on this big stage in front of an ocean of fans, and they have to play the instrumentals to his songs and even recreate the extreme stunts Prince was known to do to keep up with the beat as they perform alongside a virtual recreation of Prince and big epic effects happen. Like Guitar Hero but hardcore. I can imagine some guitar smashing would be involved. That or it’s some kind of dancing game where you are challenged to a dance-off by the virtual recreation of Prince.
There’s generally so much potential in the concept of a world based around something as abstract as music (trippy visuals based on album covers and lyrics, aesthetic based on the era, more extreme rhythm and dancing games, giant records used as platforms and transport, riddles being based on historical context if any, etc), but _this_ is what he did with it?
"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.
Iirc glamdring and sting were the two blades known for glowing in orc presence
Ffs Anduril/Narsil only glowed in the bloody lego game
Actually, Glamdring glowed white, not blue.
@@thegreyjedi2372 It's been a fair bit since I've read the original books, but after a little bit of digging, I did find a passage that mentions it glowing white, so I stand corrected. Though it is a bit of a strange thing, really, as there's a passage in one of the books saying that it glowed like blue flame; so I wonder if that particular instance was just comparison, or a metaphor.
@@Mr_Wulff I think it was. I was just trying to correct an error. The rest of your comment was right, though; Glamdring and Sting do indeed only glow when Orcs are close, which includes Uruks and anything that is a corrupted Elf originally.
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
“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.
For me,it is anime. Some may say anime is not as same as real world,but the value that I learn from it truly can be applied in my life. Also, for some reason, anime characters play human better than human themselves.
@@chem9773 anime isn't real
@@turtleboy1188 but then again what is?
@@prisma6799 taxes
@@chem9773 Let's hope you watch One Piece and not Elfen Lied... Anime fans are either super chill, or full of self pity.
Wait a minute... are you telling me the climatic final blow of the book... is the "*teleports behind you*" meme????
I did expect Krimson to add a 'nuthin personnel kid' there.
Og: お前はもう死んでいる。
Anorak: 何
"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.
If cline really wanted to get gamer points he would've mentioned the head of vecna
@@TheBonkleFox The Head of Veca should be in the Dread Gazebo, guarded by an orc with a pie
I can think of weirder ones. Ever heard of the Caliosteo Pipsqueak?
Sam Sykes: "the fewer words a magic sword’s name has, the more dangerous it is
you don’t want to be on the wrong end of Dark King Grûtmore’s Edge of Annihilation, don’t get me wrong
but you FOR SURE don’t want to be on the wrong end of something called The Throngler"
To quote a wise person, "you definitely don't wanna be in the wrong end of the Throngler"
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.
That's what I love about Krim's videos: they really give you the needed confidence to keep writing.
All I need to do to get me writing is to remember that Joanne Rowling wrote an anti-semitic series of books that are about as original as the average fanfic and is hailed as a genius.
Honestly, these videos do the same thing for me. If something as bad as some of these books can be published then I am sure I'll be fine in the end. If I can do better than Hoover or Wendig and so I'm good.
"hello fellow gamers haha wow vibeo ganes amirite"
~ cline
Your profile picture matches that comment way too well.
Vidya Gaem
I love bideo james!
@@ScarsOfTheFallen me too love bindo geim haha maybe i should read book about veto bames ??
I love vibeo ganes 😎
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
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"
There's an interview where he literally says the Dwarves are allegories for Jews.
It's generally agreed upon in academic circles that the opinion of the author has little bearing on reality. Tolkien probably didn't sit down to write a WW1 allegory but that doesn't change the fact he wrote one. The intention does not matter.
@@mikyto7313That's not how allegories work. Allegories are intentional. Whatever your view on the death of an author, that part's not correct. It may be a high fantasy WWI, but that doesn't make it an allegory.
@@mikyto7313Sure, but definitions change over time. The second-edition foreword to LOTR where Tolkein says 'This story isn't an allegory' was published before Barthes's "Death of the Author".
Not to mention, in that foreword, Tolkein clarifies what he means when he says 'allegory': "I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author." And in context, he's responding to people who think that everything in his story has a 1:1 equivalent with the real world. The fact that some people define 'allegory' to include accidental similarities is irrelevant to what he's actually saying.
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.
wait how does being obsessed with the egg hunt lead to hard drug addiction though..? wouldn't she just continue to be obsessed with the OASIS??
That would have been a better book then this watching serento get revenge and Wade trying to stop him and realizing the danger of this world
@@cultchic Maybe she didn’t have access to it anymore and tried to cope by replacing one addiction with another.
Or this was her way to cope with the real world, because the OASIS and the hunt basically destroyed her.
I find both possibilities quite realistic. 😌
@@cultchic haven’t read it, but I’m thinking she took meth to have energy to stay awake and “online” for longer
That’s insane that wasn’t called back on. Did Cline just…forget? Missed potential.
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.
SAME
I would assume the only in-universe reason he didn't is that (according to a section quoted in the previous video) he already experienced all the multi-POV VR porn he could want.
a least in a story like that it's their own body so there's no questionable morals there... if he started groping 'himself' it would just be groping Kira and that raises a lot of concerns
Like Fred does when he’s in Daphni’s body in the live action scooby doo movie?
Or a good genderbend story. Why would that be bad? You find yourself in a new body, you're not curious?
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
This!!!
Not really. Like Catholic priests being caught diddling kids large amounts of male feminists are sexist abusers.
Predator like blending in with their prey
@@gimzod76 Yeah yeah, he's specimen #1 of the misogynist larping as a feminist sterotype
@@CM-ne9ej Have you read the first book? Wade is upset that Aech looks different than they do in real life, when he does the same exact thing. Hell, the book literally says he feels betrayed.
Have you read his "poem"?
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.*
Furthermore, Lord of the Rings is early medieval, based upon the type of armour and weapons you see used in the books. It is low magic with a soft magic system that fits it.
DnD is late medieval/early renaissance minus the early firearms. It is high magic, and has a hard magic system that fits the high magic setting and balance of the game.
They are very different in tone, setting, and goals.
To be fair I'm playing a LOtR campaign rn lmao
that like compare WARHAMMER to shrek!
Ready Player Two being disregarded as "failed SAO clone" already shows how terrible it is.
Ready player two is bad fabrication of both SAO (which is bad fanfiction of .HACK),and itself,which is mediocre fanfiction of the EPIC trilogy
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.
God, the fact that SAO can be referenced positively in the context of this makes my stomach churn.
The sad part is SAO did have a time limit it's just not one that the author managed to write into the story well enough to be memorable (the short version is their bodies in the real world were decaying due to minimization of brain signals to the body while using the helmets and thus they were guaranteed to die even with proper care and treatment under a doctor)
@@sunn7615 and that time limit was arguably way better because it was several years long and the players knew that they couldn't just stay here forever, but didn't know exactly how long they had which motivated them to work as quickly as possible. I hate sao, but they at least made that understandable
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.
I heard you got her half of R'lyeh in the devorce.
@@AspenBrightsoul indeed. And she also got custody of the larvae.
I think Cline is referencing that D&d used a lot of Lord of the Rings content in First Edition including orcs and hobbits, the latter the D&d creator had to rename to halflings after a lawsuit.
@@NobodyHere951Ya but even then the representation of it is important especially for a book being presented for nerds. Like the fact that The White Box didn't use D20s it was a D6 system.
@@AspenBrightsoul I'm guessing his target audience is the growing number of people who claim to be nerds now that we've somehow become cool... But who still believe in their hearts of hearts that learning the crew size of each class of Star Wars Imperial spaceship is too much work to actually be cool. Pseudo-nerds, let's call them.
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).
Hell if I was writing this I'd make it Wades son who has to do this no father help make him like a tony stark a cocky dick but stuck in this world no resources from Daddy and has to figure out how to escape make friends become a better person. Maybe learn you can't be the best
From the title “Ready Player Two”, it should’ve been Samantha’s story of realizing her boyfriend is the worst person in the world and she needs to stop him
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.
It gets even worse; in the time when book LOTR came out people argued who the Orcs are. Tolkien was not pointing fingers but contemporaries have asked him about it, which he shrugged. They've been equated to "industrial men" like Americans, nazis and soviets; Ottomans from his own war experience; or Anglicans. As an atheist I think he's probably making fun of both Nazis and Anglicans.
However, William Lind, actual fascist, really pushed for the "urban blacks are Orcs" insult.
I think it's even more surface level than that, I think he's just seen the films and is basing it on the casting and the fact that the orcs were painted black
@@teslasharkWhat? Where did you heard that Tolkien was atheist?
@@Another_Hibiki No, I said critics thought Orcs are based on atheists.
@@teslashark Oh, sorry, got confused with the wording (probably because english isn't really my main language).
As a priest in the Church of the Algorithm, I bless this video with a comment.
Thank you for the blessing! XD
As one of the heads of the church of asexual platypus, I also bless this video
Goliath100 do you believe in gravity?
The Church of the Algorithm is probably a sect of the Adaptus Mechanicus.
+
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!
SAME! I was finishing watching the handbook for mortals review and was like "I could really use another book review by a cat-loving throne-bound nerd" and well, huzzah
I was too. I checked on his channel a day or two ago to make sure I hadn't been unsubscribed.
My kids are waiting for him to finish off the Twilight series
I decided to search for Ready Player Two reviews today and found these. Last time I watched him was when he roasted Empress Theresa and Onision's 3 books.
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.
Bisexuality: I'm gonna destroy this man's whole career
Reminds me of the movement of people insisting rainbow dash was straight.
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???
"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.
I couldn't make past RPO's first hundred pages. Cline just showboats his useless knowledge of everything 80s. The characters are at best empty, at worst loathesome. The book makes it clear that should you not "get it", you're worthless. I grew up in the 80s, I got almost every reference. I was bored by the writing.
Tbh... that's the _most_ sincere love letter imo. That stuff isn't loved for deep litcrit reasons, it's loved for pure nostalgia. Doing deep litcrit on them is how all those videos about ruining your childhood and whatnot happen. They can't actually stand up to it. You think about the ethical situations of Back to the Future and the odd relationship between Doc and Marty and the end result is the creation of Rick and Morty and the accidental prediction of 2016 - 2020. You try to analyze He-Man and the end result is just "wow, some folks had some hardcore repressed homosexuality back then". You think seriously about GI Joe and it's just post-9/11 America. You think about Rambo and you realize that America rehabilitated its image after mountains of war crimes leaving millions of men psychologically broken by making up fictitious concepts to excuse it retroactively (like the myth of thousands of American soldiers still being POWs in Vietnam after the war being the central plot of First Blood Part 2). Indiana Jones is a cultural pillager only excused by fighting worse cultural pillagers trying to use magic to take over the world (oddly, they did actually try many forms of magic irl in their quest for world domination). Red Dawn led to the militia movement and now they're actual friggin domestic terrorists. You can't write a love letter to the 80s and 90s without it being devoid of thought. If you give that era thought, all you can write is a Dear John letter. The only stuff that even manages to reach morality are punks and some Doctor Who serials (off the top of my head, The Happiness Patrol).
@@PosthumanHeresy No, I didn't mean "This isn't a super in-depth look at the critical themes of Transformers or Back to the Future". Like, Wade doesn't even do anything as basic as say WHY he loves this 80s stuff, it's just taken as assumed. The most we see of them expressing enjoyment of one of the topics is dropping one-liners and aggressively gatekeeping because as we all know, True Fandom is Rote Memorization and Regurgitation. "Remember: Only a TRUE fan will be able to recite EVERY line in War Games, and THEN you can pass through the first Gate" and doesn't even seem to get something as basic as "The only winning move is not to play" is referring to the LITERAL threat of global thermonuclear war.
And it doesn't even go THAT far. It's just... A fucking list. There's no passion in the characters, there's no enjoyment in the characters, it's just "Hey, remember that Star Wars existed?" You can do passionate love letters to a lot of really fucking dumb and goofy properties, but you need to inject SOME kind of passion. If you don't have passion in what you do, most people can tell.
@@PosthumanHeresy >if you give that era thought, all you can write is a dear John letter.
God damn dude, are you trying to be pretentious? Writing tasteful praise for past era's positives or nostalgic media doesn't _have_ to be vapid trash simply because there were terrible things happening in that era that said media may contain.
Because you can do this with every era in human history.
By your standard, you can't adapt any medieval myth or legend without it either being
A.) Vapid fantasy with nothing of value to offer
Or
B.) A scathing critique of the feudal system, and how society was driven entirely by classist oppression.
I dunno if you realize this, but you can use the media and imagery of the past to explore other themes and ideas that aren't specific only to the eras that media came from.
That's something the Ready Player books could have done, but failed to.
The first book was passable if you turn off your brain that is. Not even trying this one.
To desperately ignore the “Orcs are black people” cringe, why would someone not want to hang out with hobbits?
hobbits are irish people
Right? Hobbits know how to party.
Especially since Tolkein himself said that he based the Orcs on the descriptions he found of Mongolians.
Didn't David Ayer do that in Bright? Why copy David Ayer?
@@chungusbooper Technically Shadowrun did it first (and better)
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.
Already a much more interesting and humanizing hook for a character who is apparently richer than most governments.
If you’re an aspiring writer, you’re probably going to do fine. The standards for publishing are really this low. Don’t worry.
I swear, every time I read something like this, my confidence in my own writing goes up.
A side effect is that you'll also be drowned out by this kind of garbage :(
That’s a thing about mainstream publishing I don’t like. If you pander to whatever is popular almost guaranteed you’ll get picked up despite the quality of the work, but if you make something that is not pandering or doesn’t fit what is popular, have fun waiting about a decade to get picked up.
I have nothing but respect for those who wait it out and get their books traditionally published. But the very low standards set out just put me off. Indie stuff has low standards too but at least they’re unique and weird (in good and bad ways).
@@Moony1568 Well, that kinda goes for everything. Like "Freedom Phones" that are "free" not because they have physical kill switches and use FOSS software, but because they have Parler in their app store...
Yeah. I write fanfic as a sort of practice so if one day i do have a story i really want to publish, i've got a hang on at least the basics on storytelling. I'm starting to wonder if i need the practice at all if i have to go against stephanie "abuse is the new sexy" meyer and ernest "everything here is just lists of references" cline...
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
If I was RDJ and this movie was actually getting made I'd demand an exorbitant pay for essentially forcing me to be cast in a shit story, and have my lawyers on watch for likeness lawsuits if they decline the pay.
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.
"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
General rule for trans characters in media: They not only have to be trans, they also need to be a character.
This is Cline, though. It's probably for the best that he didn't even try. He wants his protagonist to be likeable and Wade is utterly detestable.
As another trans person, hi-five.
It's always insulting when they think we can't like media or characters unless that character shares a shallow 'identity' trait with us. I'm not even that interested in seeing a trans character - let me look at hot guys' asses!
This same thing happens in things like "The Cyborg Tinkerer", too, and it's like they demand butt-pats from us for being downright insultingly shallow.
I don't have trans people characters in my books because I don't know anything about them and add one would be "look I can make you part of my book (even if I don't meet you in the real world)", I don't go outside much that I did before covid, I don't like noisy places and stay in home and read is all that I did in my free time after class, I don't have a job and I try to get it, but now I'm hikikomori (people who don't go outside voluntarily), I'm writing a book that I want to publish in the future and I prefer to not add people that I don't know anything because is easy to hurt people with my ignorance (I don't want that I want make people happy), I prefer to have characters that someone can imagine the appearance different that I imagine, the main character is me, but maybe can be you I don't know, I like to think that people can imagine a representation of their culture or themselves in the book, is only me wanted to make happy the people who are going to read me.
@@wmarch88 I can help you out. Throw away everything Twitter tells you about trans people.
I'm probably way more like you than anything they would ever describe me as. I like Final Fantasy 7, I talk to my friends about games and anime and manga and books, I'm into a specialized field of transcribing braille, and I like roleplaying and cosplaying.
The fact that I'm transsexual only ever even comes up when something like this addresses it in the first place. Talking about how I'm trans is about as exciting as it would be for five men to meet up and talk about how they're men. It's a thing these extremist ideologies do - they solely talk about shallow identity traits instead of having actual depth of character.
So, if you ever do make a trans character, make them a character first who just so happens to be trans. And if Twitter hates it, you probably did it right.
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…
Yes thank you
Oof!
dam totally forgot he was a thing
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?
Is it the hit 80s classic Sword Art Online?
Dark Souls 2.
Hard Boiled...
@@QuickQuips Give him a gun and he's superman. Give him two and he's god.
@@Sidharthavicious Give him three, and we've got ourselves an elder god.
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!?
I actually really enjoyed this TED talk, I need to pick up the Dresden Files again because I didn't finish the series and got distracted by something else, I don't remember what. Thanks for reminding me of how much I enjoyed it!
And by all means, touch some grass, but do so cautiously if such an action will deprive us of this analysis. Maybe bring a book with you. :)
If you're not doing it for hq mats just use gathering yield-increasing skills
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!”
"Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!" was truly the peak of confrontational dialogue
All I think of was from Metal Gear Rising Revengeance with Senator Armstrong.
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
Because KND was not in the 1980’s and therefore not considered good pop culture by Cline?
I agree though. Building your own KND treehouse would be fuckin’ awesome!
@@Imagigirl Neither was Grand Theft Auto, but that still got a shoutout!
With how small and almost pointless it was, It really dosen't mean much...was probab,y only for him to go "see! I'm hip with the times!" Probably hasn't even seen anything even related to it except a cover or poster.
@@Imagigirl wow you really proved me wrong it's not like before the fact that he mentioned the Star Wars Treehouse thing he literally mentions GTA and shit but okay
@@theprobigdady5656 I didn’t mean to offend there, friend. My sarcasm was more towards Cline. I mean, he thinks SAO is worthy of the honor of being mentioned in his novel as well. I’m not sure what his criteria are, tbh.
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.
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.
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)
Now, if you had to do some sort of rhythm/musical challenge against Prince, that could have worked. But you're right, fighting him was a waste.
@@KrimsonRogue KRIMSON! PLEASE!
Please cover the Books of
Yudkowsky!
At least the one where HARRY POTTER DEBUNKS MAGIC WITH (REAL BAD) LOGIC!
It wouldve made so much more sense if you won the shard in the Prince planet by challenging to a music battle or something. Play better than him or charm the crowd more than him in all his eras and you win the shard; not that shoddily made Creepypasta × Scott Pilgrim fanfic tier fight scene
The Prince section murdered my interest initially,I just couldn’t continue halfway through it and threw in the towel
The answer was clear to me the instant he said Prince planet: you get the shard if you beat Prince at basketball.
"This is using a reference for the sake of using a reference."
Pretty much sums up all of the two books right there
Did you ever notice how references were used as shorthands instead of proper descriptions? You can't write like that, it kills all the immersion. Sure I tend to overdescribe my stuff (mostly dragons) and that's a problem too. Another note is the combat. You want to be blunt but precise, rather than vague and/or flowery. If you have a longsword in a high guard and overswing with a diagonal cut, that will leave your side exposed. You can imagine that in your head, but that one snippet of "combat" Krimson had us read sounded more like a post-mission report.
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.
Almost part of me thinks that Cline is stupid to not realize that he has written Halliday as someone of the spectrum (in other words, unintentionally wrote him as autistic), but then again, who knows what was going on in his head.
@@TravisBroski He did say in the first book that Halliday was probably on the spectrum. This was intentional
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.
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.
I'm a DND noob, but inst the tarrasqye only long term beatable if you somehow throw it in space??
@@notmocka Pretty much, its closer to a force of nature as opposed to a singular creature, so much so that chucking it into an alternate dimension is SIGNIFICANTLY easier than killing it, and that's saying something
Only tarrasque i know that's beatable is the ffxiv boss.
I mean, yeah, you can't kill a Terrasque, but that doesn't mean you can't beat it. 3rd Edition's Terrasque was notable for having a major weakness: It had no ranged attacks, so if you were flying 20 feet above it, plinking it with your longbow, you could take it out without too much risk. *Especially* if you get creative and hire like 40-80 mercenaries and equip them with high-end bows, arrows and a way of flying and just pelt it down faster than it can heal.
@@brendaneichler52445es is immune to: Fire, poison, and any nonmagical attack. Flying 20 feet above it does nothing when you cant shoot it with anything.
Also it has 700 health.
Its also resistant to spells, and immune to spell attacks.
In 5e they made it so you basically COULDN'T kill it
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.
But see, it's not a comic book from the 80s, so I doubt Cline has ever read Dante's Inferno
@@dannylamb456 Then why the FUCK reference it? Though now that I think about it: how has Dante’s Inferno NOT been a comic?
@@TravisBroski
Because that's how Cline writes. Armada does the same thing, but somehow worse.
It's incredibly funny to read the reviews of RP1 and Armada basically praising and then critiquing the exact same thing (references to nerdshit) respectively.
@@TravisBroski I felt there are plenty of stories that take inspiration from it.
@Vixen Lunastra yeah and it plays extremely similar to God of War did back in the ps3 era.
Literally, the only difference between RPT and SAO is there’s a time limit.
SAO was good, i like it didnt pander to different fanbases and just created its own world
@@bayardkyyako7427 I feel like you and I didn't watch the same SAO
@@spawnglance6720 I feel like you set your expectations too high
@@spawnglance6720 What fanbases was SAO pandering to?
@@bayardkyyako7427 But I had none; I didn't know what it was until it popped up in my netflix reccomendations back in 2014/15ish
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*
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
theory: clive put the star wars holiday special treehouse in the movie so spielberg has to recreate it on the movie adaptation
George Lucas needs to be in that scene randomly.
It's like poetry. It rhymes
Since Ready Player One is a Warner Bros. movie, there might be issues with that.
I audibly lost it when you went over how Wade went actual Kirito on the werewolf in the LOTR world. I just can't
When Cline went into detail about him basically one-shoting THE Tarrasque, and then talking about how some werewolf was somehow stronger than a world-breaking creature I actually yelled “Fuck off!” To the dishes I was washing.
@@KlutzyNinjaKitty dude. Don’t hurt your dishes feelings :(
@@KlutzyNinjaKitty hahah I was doing the same thing while listening!
@@KlutzyNinjaKitty Either Cline is just putting it to look cool, or my DM has been lying to me. I'm willing to bet it's the former.
@@rizkyanandita8227 - It's 100% Cline being a try-hard. From my understanding, the Terrasque is basically like an even deadlier version of Godzilla where the only thing that can actually fight it is something as equally strong as itself, but there's no such creature. It's a world ender. And you're not supposed to be able to kill it even at the highest levels. So Cline saying that he managed (because Wade is a self-insert and is just Cline) to kill the Terrasque is bullshit. Now, if he, let's say, easily killed Strahd or was able to speed-run the Tomb of Horrors, _MAYBE_ it'd feel less cheap.
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!!!
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.
Heck, even stuff in my native language can have multiple names, in on language! Plus what ever these are called in russian, greek and any other Language.
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
23:04 I know you meant 2048, but honestly I would love to see Wade make references to 1940s pop culture.
Damn, I missed that one. XP
Nazi shooting gallery? Sign me up.
Virtual reality escapism after the worst conflict ever? Imagine.
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
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!
And it makes taxedo mask who is actually a fanservice character, but he is mesnt mor romantic, as destined husband thingy perfect husband. Not erotic, and its creepy that he does go there fast.
And kira likes cosplaying sailormoon , not being her, maybe she hates taxedo mask hr doesnt know.
Reminds me of when Chris Chan used to use a poster of Sailor Moon and Chibi Moon to "stay on the straight path". And he only got into that anime initially to impress this girl named Megan Shroeder, who got so creeped out by him she distanced herself from him. He became so obssessed with her he made a knockoff Senshi in his comic named Sailor Megtune and failed to dye his hair like Neptune.
But... Isn't that the same assumption (that is sadly frequently right) that people do with girls in male oriented media?
@@thatitalianlameguy2235 Doesn't make it any less of a stereotype. Just because it's rooted in some truth doesn't mean it isn't harmful to just assume so. And where's your source for this anyway? How many women are telling you that they are actually into Transformers and Mutant Ninja Turtles because they find the characters sexy?
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
Idk, man Halliday in the first book was still a raging creeper "nice guy" toward Kira...I was side-eyeing him the whole time...
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
Holy crap, that would've been SUCH a better plot point to have the side-team doing instead of being Wade's go-fers for One thing and then never again!
Then you have a twist that, when a player dies, their account gets deleted and shredded. Then you have a millions who are too attached to die in-game, millions who are willing to kill everyone in-game to save them irl, and a team at the head of this in-game "death cult" leading the massacre.
@@trygveplaustrum4634 leading to a revolution that breaks people out of the 'our whole economy is based on digital assests, *that* was a smart idea' and end up leading real lives outside of the Oasis
@@slenders1ckn3ss Hey, what do you know, the two of us just made a plot that is not only better BUT ALSO truer to the message of the original. Under normal situations, that would be staggeringly impressive!
@@trygveplaustrum4634 *in JJJamison voice* now get me that book!
This whole book is just the author announcing "I KNOW ABOUT OUTDATED POP CULTURE!!"
(Which he barely knows anything about)
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
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.
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)
@@wren1024 Wasn't Anduril given to Aragorn in Rivendell?
@@kamikazoo6599 The sword was reforged in Rivendell and given the name Anduril. Before that it was a broken Narsil.
So yeah, it did exist for a part of Fellowship, but not in the movies, afair.
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.
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.
How so?
@@Demonetization_Symbol cause it’s not like everyone logged in right before this happened. There are people who were just about to be forcefully logged out by the system when they got locked in. Someone died one minute into this process, and in waves thereafter. Honestly everyone except those who had just logged in that moment when they got locked in would be dead by the end of the twelve hours.
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.
You say this as if Cline understands anything about computers aside from playing games on them.
For example: After the AI pulls a Sword Art Online and Wade is asking his employees if they can fix it, the secretary replies with "Nope, the AI went and rewrote the update in a brand new language so our engineers have no idea what to do."
Yup. Just fucking compile a live program with a totally separate and new language that doesn't crash the whole damn thing. Easy as that lmao.
"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.
it’s worse
it’s a Jojo reference
@@zafool4997 god damn it you beat me to it. I was going to try to fit in a “MUDA MUDA MUDA!”
Literally greg in the second book going "Alright, go ahead" before switching badass mode on
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.
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.
I've got a side project going that's a light novel that uses the "stuck in a vrmmo" trope and if I do it right it's going to be a psychological horror-thriller so I wish you the best of luck
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...
How do you miss that?! I'm a big Sega fan-boy, and even I've never heard of Ninja Princess. No shame in not knowing about something that obscure. There's no need to pretend. Or if you ARE going to reference that then do enough research to prperly represent the thing.
You know if Cline REALLY wanted that, there are a pair of characters that were originally from an 80s top down shooter game that became fighting game staples later on and that's fricken Ralf and Clark from Ikari Warriors/King of Fighters!!
If Cline wanted to, the riddle could be referencing on how they were originally recolors or maybe ask who is Paul and Vince or something (that was their original localized names but KOF even in localizations kept their original Japanese names), go to the pizza arcade and tah-dah.
@@angelsartandgaming Hell they eventually became side scrolling shooter characters in Metal Slug 6 and beyond while also keeping some call backs to their fighting game incarnations with Clark keeping his signature Argentine Backbreaker and Ralf having the Vulcan Punch. Those guys got around!
@@Zelinkokitsune Heck yeah they do. That's why I said if Cline wanted to, they could have been the riddle.
1. originally 80s top down shooting arcade game characters turned fighting game characters. Could have nicely gone with the theme of change I THINK the book was going for?? Well it could have gone with the fighting game style it was trying to go for.
2. Like with what Ninja Princess was TRYING to go for... I think... if it was trivia of Japanese vs English localization, the quiz could be something like "They've been through change and been through trial much like one's journey through life. Defeat Paul and Vince and the second shard shall be gifted" and they have to find out WHO that is because the game they're playing obviously doesn't have a Paul and Vince in it. Right?
3. And maybe to keep with the 80s theme and the theme of change over the years, they find out there is no Paul and Vince... that was just localized names. They have to fight Ralf and Clark.
4. Add in maybe a heartwarming scene with Lo.
Lo: I feel like... I relate to those two.
Wade: How so?
Lo: The English version of Ikari Warriors changed their names to Paul and Vince. But that wasn't never their names at all. But then SNK gave them another chance to shine and the English version gave them their real names back. They ARE Ralf and Clark they became beloved by so many people. I felt forgotten my whole life. Like some obscure 80s game or movie that Halladay liked. I felt like I needed to be something I wasn't just to appease to social norms... or maybe society itself changed me just to fit in. I HAD to be a Paul and Vince. But then I realized all along, I am not my old name. I am Lo. I am a girl. I WAS ALWAYS a Ralf and Clark. And I hope to be just as loved as they are one day.
To which Wade could point out she IS loved because of her massive fan following and by her newfound friends.
I know it's cheesy but it gives her something. Maybe she was the one who solved the puzzle!! Then it's not a reference to be a reference, it's a legit way to get the characters to express how they feel or discover something about themselves and it becomes a theme of acceptance. Maybe it teaches Wade to be more open minded about Lo as a PERSON. And like Ralf and Clark, she too has been through change and been through trial much like one's journey through life. A Riddle book end. Second Shard found.
5. And because AVGN played Ikari Warriors at one point, there would be quite a few fans of AVGN who might be like "OH HECK!! I know this!!" or even KOF fans who are like "OH HECK! I know this." So it's not as obscure but could be obscure trivia to some. That's the point of riddles, right? But along with Lo discovering it, so could the readers.
The Angry Video Game has a great pair of videos where he talks about Ninja Princess in one of them by reviewing the Taito Legends collection on PS2.
"Please someone ask Cline what he was thinking when he wrote this."
My brain, in the voice of Mister Crabs: "Money!"
So... Halliday was a bad guy for violating privacy with one brain scan, but our dear hero stalking people, breaking into confidential records, and ruining the lives of randos with his admin powers is just totes cool? Right, right. Gotcha.
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.
Basically, Cline is world building by name dropping.
He's the Tahani of authors.
So to explain the history of the Elric Saga and the Witcher: The guy who translated the Elric saga into polish is the guy who later wrote the Witcher. A lot of plot points, character descriptions, and story beats were completely lifted from the Elric saga. Michael Moorecock knew about it and never took action. So, you can decide if it was inspiration or plagiarism.
Wwhhhhhaaaa? Sources? I need to read the og books too. The Witcher books are alright. I'd love to read something better.
i read his name as 'michael morecock' an dim not sure whether to laugh or slap myself
@@ps1hagridoufofcharacter I mean, it's pronounced that way
So I just looked it up, and tbf, _everything_ is stealing from Moorecock's multiverse. Weirdly enough, to the point that Doctor Who is canotically a part of Moorecock's multiverse by Moorecock's own hand when he got contracted to do a Doctor Who book in 2010. The Eternal Champion concept was lifted directly by Bethesda for the protagonists of The Elder Scrolls. It was also lifted by Bungie in-between Halo and Marathon with the Cortana Letters, with Chief being the reincarnation of the cyborg marine from Marathon (and likewise, Cortana as Durandal), and Marathon had already lifted from it before in regards to the marine and Durandal. The fall of Prince Arthas in Warcraft lore steals from it. Marvel Comics lifted from Moorecock for Adam Warlock which led to Thanos the Mad Titan which led to the Infinity Gauntlet and Infinity War which everyone on Earth knows what those comics led to. Warhammer (and 40k) lifted its entire central conflict from Moorecock. That concept was _also_ lifted by Bethesda for the entire plot of The Shivering Isles. Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns both lifted from the lore for the metatextual commentary around Superman in Final Crisis and Doomsday Clock respectively. Heck, since he's a known fan, there's a good chance Neil Gaiman's design of Dream of the Endless from The Sandman is a riff on Elric's look. Especially since Daniel-Dream is even more visually identical. Doctor Fate from DC Comics also is directly lifting the same lore Warhammer and Shivering Isles use. That lore is also connected to the heroes Hawk and Dove. Oh, and Daniel-Dream's dad even comes back from the dead (and this is not the first time he did that) to be Doctor Fate at one point. The Witcher is about as unique with its lifting as everyone has been.
@@PosthumanHeresy *Holy fucking shit*
Krimson, there is a huge difference between 'chaotic good' and 'chaotic stupid'. Please do not confuse the two and sully 'chaotic good's name.
Edit: Wade seems to be 'chaotic stupid'.
In the first book, he was actually pretty good. He probably suffered SOS several times and just didn't want to admit it, because that man's neurons are more fried than a mouse who just snorted 30 metric fuck-tons of cocaine.
And Im not sure about the chotic part. Maybe he's just stupid.
"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."
You know this book is bad when the new Space Jam movie is a better Ready Player One sequel.
Awww.. I’m sad now. I heard it’s terrible.
@@leileyaravencroft from what I heard, it's just advertisement for Lebron James and Warner Bros media.
@@leileyaravencroft I'm not surprised judging from some of the trailers.
That movie has awesome 2d animation and weird science fiction elements. The space jam movie series is cartoon live action comedy sports science fiction, I want them to make more movies staring other basketball players and new science fiction elements like clones or time travel.
@schiggy2319 Lego Batman the movie
19:56 kitty alert! Leia’s doing a derp face and I love it!
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...
Yeah. That's how normal people think. And more to the point, the people who complain also forget that you can't just invent new cultures from nothing. Any fantasy culture needs to take notes from existing ones - and on that note, all these "negative stereotypes of black people" the wokies complain about... aren't. Like, shaman stuff. That's ancient civilisation stuff. There were shamans in ancient Europe, we did all the same things as orcs. If one wanted to do "orcs are X race" discussions we could sit here all day and point out just about every group under the sun who, at some point, was pre-civilisation. Hell why stop at human ethnicities and not jump to Neanderthals instead?
It's so inherently flawed to make those connections in the first place.
I think that almost every fictional race that happen to be/look barbaric and tribe-like, there are always people that will say “Ah, black people.”
@@TravisBroski which is funny because there's a lot of record evidence of White tribes of people having the same exact "Orc traits" that (I'll be real let's just call them what they are,racists) ascribe to black people. Like one of the Cesars of Rome labeled the Gauls (ancient irish/scottish/british tribe) as ogres and cannibals and art of the Gauls presents them in arms and armor comparable to what we dress orcs in (skulls, leather, axes)
@@TravisBroski internalized racism. They lack self-awarenes to notice it in themselves so they blame others of what they're guilty
I swear the ONLY people who say this are white people, haven’t seen a POC saying this shit
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.
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!!
What are some other examples of vowel shift? Or some comparable real world examples? Not being a dick, just genuinely curious!
@@FalonGrey Not coming off as a dick, don't worry ^-^ First, just as a heads-up, linguistics is not my strongest suit. My main fields of study are medieval studies and literature and culture studies. Just for full disclosure.
So, vowel shifts are really important for the development of a language - English itself had two big vowel shifts, one marks the difference between Old English and Middle English (among a lot of other things, of course), and another one between Middle English and Early Modern, which is why for example Chaucer's English and Shakespeare's English are so vastly different (take the nomenclature of "Great Vowel Shift" with a grain of salt, however, because even if they are used in this diachronic way to differentiate the phases of the language, vowel shifts happen all the time). In English, vowel shifts are part of the reason why you spell great, meat and threat mostly the same but pronounce the diphthong "ea" differently each time.
I want to give you a hands-on example to illustrate the process. I am, however, not gonna use English for that. I'm gonna use German. The German word for 'apple' is 'Apfel' - easy to see, right? Looks similar enough? English and German are closely related, after all! Anyway, in Middle High German (so, roughly between 1050 and 1350, not considering restrictions, dialects and other stuff - those are messy and we tend to ignore those because of that) the word for 'apple' is 'apfuli'. First of all, 'apfuli' is a delightfully hilarious word (pronounced roughly "up-foolee" (note the long "ee" at the end, that's important!). Now, what happens to that word over time to turn into 'Apfel'? The last syllable loses its vowel, the i, because speakers are lazy and losing bits of words happens all the time, too, especially to simplify words or even grammar (it's why English has no noticeable declination apart from the genitive " 's" and pronouns). Without the i, we've got 'apful'. But now, the word only has two syllables instead of three, so contraction happens. Slightly simplified, that means the last syllable is pronounced way shorter because it ends on a consonant now. So instead of "up-fool", which takes more effort to say, it turns into "up-full" or "up-fill" (which are both as close as I can approximate the pronounciation), which is way easier. It just gets slurred, so to say. But it sticks. So, 'apful' turns into 'apfel'.
And that! That last bit? Is exactly what happens with Angband and Ered Engrin, only the reason for the contraction of the vowel is slightly different. We've got Angband. Pretty straightforward. But with Engrin, we mustn't forget that it is preceeded by Ered. And in Sindarin and Quenya, you have a melodic flowing pronounciation, often linking the words together. So, let's assume we start with Angrin. Now put Ered in front of it. Ered Angrin. Pronounced Eredangrin. But the 'a' vowel is short because now it's preceeded by other syllables and especially preceeded directly by a consonant. So it gets slurred because clearly pronouncing the "a" takes effort, and it changes into an 'e' because Eredengrin takes way less energy to say.
And that is basically how vowel shift and contraction work, two of the most important basics of how language changes over time ^-^ Sorry for the really long wall of text but I hope you found it interesting and maybe even learned a little bit from it (I also hope it's understandable even using a non-English example, but I've had more linguistics courses about German than about English)
@@howlingnerdwolf6971 That's really cool, I love learning about stuff like this, so I liked the wall of text! It always blows my mind of how much work went into language, and how few people consider it a technology that evolves constantly, like engines, and powered flight do! When I enter college, I'm gonna see if there are any linguistics courses, because it seems like language itself is the gateway to complex civilization, meaning it's incredibly well established, and simple, but can be INCREDIBLY complex. Thanks for the info!
@@howlingnerdwolf6971 Just as the forces of erosion slowly change mountains and coastlines over time, so too do the forces of human laziness change our language over time. Lol.
Thanks for leaving that comment. That was an interesting read.
@@howlingnerdwolf6971 That was a super interesting read. Thanks for explaining that stuff!
It's as if someone turned 'how do you do fellow kids' into a book.
Except those kids are like 35-40
Its horrible bc i don't know 80% of the references, but the ones i do know are treated like huge mysteries, like the sonic ones
@@notmocka It's funny how Cline decides to give a explanation to sonic, a character that everyone knows, and not Prince, someone who has fallen out of the public eye and whom many younger readers don't know.
That “some focus on her body” was so much more tastefully done than anything Cline’s ever written
There's so much wrong with this book - but the thing is, the character assassination of Halliday had so, so much more potential, by revealing it that this was something that *Anorak* was making about him, and making it clear early on that Anorak is the part of Halliday that *hated* himself, and everything he created. On some level, Halliday thought he was horrible, so Anorak, naturally, wants to show that it was true, no matter how much he has to warp about his life.
Could also make good antagonist/protagonist dichotomy, as Anorak lambasts Wade for being everything Halliday feared the Oasis would do to people, and choosing to bury themselves away in stale culture rather than fix things at all, while Wade comes to understand where he went wrong, and becomes the embodiment of the Oasis' ability to connect people.
If you think the concept of people trapped online in a hyper-realistic virtual world with a quest to complete has a heap of potential, then read the Otherland series by Tad Williams.
They're huge, epic tomes set in a beautifully polished, realistic and well-built world with a huge and diverse cast of amazing characters.
Adding to my list now, thank ya!
Can’t wait to read the rare well done version of this concept
Those books are so good. I found them through a short story set after the end. The paperbacks are like bricks which honestly I don't always have the attention span for (love short story collections) but I have read through them a couple of times.
If I may recommend an ongoing VRMMO webnovel:
The Blue Path by CoolDragonZae
While the MC becomes reasonably OP, he still has to actually work for his goals and personal skill, rather than have them served to him on a blood-stained silver platter. The MMO world at large as well is equally OP, so the MC isn't just curbstomping everything. The storyline also heavily emphasizes the relationship the MMO in question has with reality in a very believable way, that relationship being very overt, rather than some edgy shadow-war between people who take a video game too seriously.
I started reading the first one after josh strife hayes' series on the MMO. I've even played a bit of the game and like.... I actually can't hate it. It genuinely looks like what I'd envision the titular Otherlands to look like.
Honestly, this sounds like a worse version of Sword Art Online.
HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE!?
The Aincrad arc of sao was pretty good even if Kirito has the character of wet cardboard. I also hear that the newer series are good but I haven't watched since gun gale.
@@kyara7032 i hear alicisation (i think that's what it was called) was decent except for the ending.
@@darkpixel1128 yeah, it was decent because they litteraly put kirito in koma sent him in a different world and deleted his memory. That made it decent again.
Sword art online for all the criticism, has a vision and passion behind it, that not
Everytime you think you reached the bottom, some other hack writer reveals himself and sends you even deeper.
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.
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.
Its that in the story the orcs are the evil minions and not much fleshed our as wild eastern coded and black(because symbolism that evil corrupted them, but also black)
Yes he did, and did ignore that tolkien was more progressive than most brits of his time
As someone who respects Tolkien's work, I'll try my best to answer. There are people online who are butthurt that black people aren't in these stories, so they've taken to going online and claiming that Orcs are black people since they're close enough, I guess. He did, base them on the behavior of the Mongol's which makes sense because the Mongols created war strategies that were super advanced for the time, and some strategies are still used to this day. That said, he erased physical comparison by describing the Orcs as "corrupted versions of Men and Elves."
Something about Tolkien's work that needs to be clear is that Tolkien took direct inspiration from German, Celtic, Finnish, Slavic and Greek mythological stories. Tolkien's work is best described as "a backwards game of Telephone" where the modern day mythological tales we hear now are altered versions lost to time and Tolkien is here to tell the true story of what actually happened. The reason I bring up what directly inspired Tolkien is the same reason people defend the fact that there are not black people in The Witcher: there were hardly any black people living in said culture at the time of the creation of the books.
TL;DR people are mad that a world inspired by mythologies from white countries, doesn't have black people in it and are reaching.
@@chloemarlowe3817 also there's literally nothing in Tolkiens work that indicates there's no black people. Like as unlikely as it is, there is a possibility for black citizens of Rohan, because the race of man was a fusion of all the real world races into one generic stand in.
@@darkpuppetlordful that's true, actually. I know Tolkien's world has an asian-inspired race called Easterlings. Problem is that in a high fantasy setting that doesn't have a lot in terms of technology and is a dangerous world, they'd have to explain how and why an Easterling is here. It isn't like they could book an airplane and be where they want to be in 5 hours which is the estimated flight time from California to New York. They'd have to go by horseback which would take months.
Edit: they'd also have to sail for months to cross the Sea of Rhûn.
But yeah, they exist in Tolkien's work.
It isn't Tolkien specifically, it's orcs as a whole. As in if you write a story including a race of people called orcs you will get this complaint. The reason they are considered racist (And attributed to black people) is because in most fantasies you have the stupid, violent, dumb orcs out in the woods somewhere who just want to pillage and rape or whatever the humans who are usually depicted as white.
You can make some comparisons to the old racist anti black propaganda if you wish.
You could also go back to the roman empire and compare them to the Goths who were depicted in largely the same way.
Or as Chloe here mentions, the Mongols.