Ready Player Two (the book) is Also Terrible

Two years ago, I made a short video about the novel *Ready Player One* and, additionally, the movie adaptation, which had just come out around that same time. In that video, I struggled to find words to describe my in-theater experience and how I really viewed the movie. At the end of the day, however, with two years of hindsight, I think I know exactly how to describe what this little franchise really is.

*Ready Player One* is to the 2010s what *Avatar* was to the 2000s. Think about it: both of these films were mainly sold off of being visually captivating, with a core amount of the story featuring CGI settings which would work to build a unique world unlike any other. And both films are, as I said in my first video, Friday night popcorn movies. The less you think about them as you watch them, the more you like them, and they mainly serve a spectacle that distracts you from the stresses of the real world.

But the biggest comparison between these two films is that despite being heavily mainstream at the time of release, today their presence has mostly faded away. There's no re-watch podcasts, no Twitter hashtags, no one begging to hear more of the story, and it seems like most people in the world have entirely forgotten about them and rarely think of them unless it's brought up in conversation.

But despite this, it seems that both films are going to be getting sequels long after they've faded from the public consciousness, with *Avatar 2* scheduled to be released in December 2022, and *Ready Player 1 2* scheduled to be released, well, no one knows, potentially never. You see, this book, the book that I'm holding right now, was written around the release of the first film, and the entire purpose in it being crafted was that if another film is made, this is what will be adapted into it. And so, Ernest Cline heavily collaborated with Steven Spielberg when coming up ideas for this sequel novel. However, Steven Spielberg has also stated that he might not be ready to take another undertaking like *Ready Player One* for another five, ten years. So, legit might be 12 years after the release of the first film that we get a second, just like with *Avatar*.

And then the other possibility is that this book might never be made into a movie because sequel movies, by nature, have to heavily rely on nostalgia for the original property. And as ironic as it is, *Ready Player One*, a franchise about nostalgia, doesn't really seem to have built up a market that has nostalgia for it. I mean, you could pick any Spielberg property in the world, literally anyone, and there's probably more people actively clamoring for a continuation. B-movie, literally B-movie, that I can easily say there are most likely more people that want a B-movie 2 than people who want a movie based on this. I'm making B-movie jokes. It really is 2018 again.

But before we begin, I just want to get one thing out of the way real quick. *Ready Player One* is very obviously trying to be an '80s movie. I mean, you look at any marketing for the first movie and it's like, "Yeah, '80s movie, clearly obvious." So I was shocked and confused when the sequel book comes out and it's called *Ready Player 2*. Honey, no. The universal rule of '80s movies is when the sequel inevitably gets made, you slap a "2" at the end of the title of the first movie, and then, for the sake of conversation and clarification, the title of the first movie now has a "1" at the end. So this book, I will be refusing to call this *Ready Player Two*. The title of this book is *Ready Player One Two*, which can be written like this, or this, and sometimes this, but never this. And meanwhile, this book is retroactively titled *Ready Player One One*. Is everyone on the same page? Good. Let's begin.

The cover of this book makes the autofocus go mad, so I'm just gonna take the sleeve off. So I'm sure that a lot of you guys are clamoring to hear what I have to say about this little novel, especially since my first video was so popular. But, uh, I think a lot of you are going to be disappointed in what I have to say because, um, well, anyways, here's my big hot take about this novel: *Ready Player One Two* is terrible. This video is not clickbait. I'm telling the truth with this title. This is not a good book. However, it's not as bad as Twitter has told you that it is. In fact, it's far improved from the first book, and believe it or not, there is context to a lot of those quotes you've seen that has not necessarily been shown to you. And I think it's important to point that out. And also to say that I think Ernest Cline has improved as an author. Even if he's not good at authoring, he, he's improved. I, I have to be very open about the fact that that's something I, I'm going to be pointing out in this video, and we're going to get into the details of exactly what I'm talking about.

But first, I want to remind you guys to go down to around the description and make sure you're subscribed. Uh, this year, my big goal was to get to 400,000 subscribers, and at the rate we're growing, it seems like by the time I'm done editing this video, we're going to have hit that goal. So I wanted to once again announce our next stretch goal, which I think a lot of you guys are going to be excited by. If, once again, by December 31st, we can hit 410,000 subscribers, then I'm going to buy every single *Animorphs* book. I'm gonna find them all on eBay, I'm gonna have them all shipped to my house, and I'm gonna read them all and do a full series retrospective. I have never read a single *Animorphs* book, but I'm going to buy them all and read them and make a big video about that. But only if you go down to the description right now and hit subscribe and see if we can, you know, see how far we can get in this journey. You know, how cool would it be if on the final day of December, I check on to my analytics and we have 420,069 subscribers? That's within grasp, but you have to go down the description and make sure you're subscribed. Um, anyways, let's talk about this shitty book.

So the entire point of the first third of *Ready Player One Two* is that Wade Watts has gone from a bratty 17-year-old obsessed with this treasure hunt to the most powerful, rich man in the world, and entirely through solving what was essentially a series of crossword puzzles. And he's become a massive that literally everyone hates. And the thing is, at first, you don't know if the writer is making him unlikable on purpose, because in the first book, he was unlikable on accident. But as it goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that you're supposed to dislike Wade in these opening chapters.

The start of the book takes place directly after the end of the first novel. Wade has just won the competition and has been given access to the Oasis Corporation and everything once owned by Halliday. And one of the first things that happens is he is given a video of Halliday instructing him on how to build a secret piece of experimental technology, which Halliday created and then hid from the world because he wasn't sure if the world was ready yet. This turns out to be a piece of interface technology which can be used as an accessory to the Oasis. He calls it ONI and insists that it be pronounced "O and I." The letters. I'm going to call it the PlayStation Move.

When Wade finally tests the PlayStation Move, he realizes that it truly does revolutionize gameplay, making him feel like he's not pressing buttons or using a console, but as if he's actually really there inside the game. The technology links directly to his brain, overwriting his senses and making him feel like he's actually really there in the console. He can touch, smell, feel his surroundings, even though they've been generated by a computer. And it essentially feels like he's logged out of reality and into a virtual world. And not only can you use this to have a better gaming experience, but you can also record your own sensations and experiences in the real world. So you can open up someone else's memory and feel like you're really there in their body, no matter who they are, no matter what they're doing, as if you're really living that experience. And all this is possible thanks to the advanced, amazing technology of the PlayStation Move.

I played every dot on I file on the list, one after the other, leaping from place to place, from body to body, hoping each time that the next sleep doesn't really say that from body to body and from one experience to another. I stopped when I reached a series of files with names like sex-m-f.oni, sex-f-f.oni, and sex-non-binary.oni. I wasn't ready for any of that. I was still truly, madly, deeply in love with Samantha, and I was still reeling from losing my virginity to her a few days earlier, and I didn't want to be unfaithful to her. I figured that cheating was cheating, whether it was live or with a Memorex. Do you ever have that experience, boys, when you're reeling from losing your virginity?

Now, you probably won't remember, but in the first book, there's a group of five characters called the High Five that includes Wade, who work together to try and solve the Easter egg as quickly as possible. When Wade wins the competition, they all take equal shares in the Oasis Corporation, thus they all vote on every decision the corporation makes. And when they discover this piece of brain probe technology, uh, everyone but one person votes to release it to the public, and thus they do. After this, Wade brags that they have released the greatest piece of technology ever that is going to help humanity in ways unforeseen because it gives people a greater means of escape.

Now, the moment I read this, I immediately put the book down and wrote a little mini-essay about how detached this makes Wade seem. Because if there are two things that widely define the non-video game universe of *Ready Player One*, it's a mass global poverty that affects most of the populations of the planet, and an environmental crisis which is literally threatening to end all life on Earth. This is so bad that the core imagery of the series is the Stacks, a series of trailer parks across the United States which are literally stacked up like Jenga blocks. People's lives are terrible, and in the first book, literally no one is trying to fix anything. And let's be clear about exactly what the Oasis is: the Oasis is a replacement for the internet, and Wade personally is profiting off of every single use of the internet in this post-apocalyptic future. Imagine if every time you logged onto the internet to do anything, one random dude got 50 cents. He would be phenomenally rich. He would be a trillionaire. And it's very clear in the second book that he's even richer than the United States government, but he holds this illogical detachment from everything that's really going on, this nihilism. He's convinced that all of the bad things happening in the world are inevitable, and thus it's a good thing that he instead invests his time in making a profit off of this misery by selling people addictive technology.

There's a lot of horrible quotes in these opening chapters, but this one specifically jumps out at me: "The O and I made the lives of impoverished people all around the world a lot more bearable and enjoyable. People didn't mind subsisting on dried seaweed and soy protein when they could log on to the O and I net and download a delicious five-course meal any time they pleased." Just, just feed people in the real world. He also brags that no other corporation had been able to figure out how to duplicate this technology, stating, and this is a real quote, "This let us maintain our monopoly on what was rapidly becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the history of the world." That is, that is not a quote from a protagonist.

This is all shockingly different when compared to how his ex-girlfriend Samantha is presented in these exact same segments. When she first learns about this brain-scanning, game-linking technology, she storms into their HQ and flips. "I am never going to let one of these things take control of my brain, not ever." "How can you form an educated opinion when you haven't even tried it?" Art asks quietly. "I've never tried sniffing paint thinner either," Samantha snaps back. "I don't know why I can't make you guys understand. This is the last thing humanity needs right now. Can't you see that the world is a complete mess right now? Half the world already spends every waking moment ignoring reality inside the Oasis. We already peddled the opiate of the masses, and now you want to up the dosage?" "Did you just quote Karl Marx in a *Ready Player One* book?" "Christ, haven't any of you re-watched *The Matrix* lately, or *Sword Art Online*? Plugging your brain and your nervous system directly into a computer simulation is never a good idea. We're talking about giving complete control of our minds to a machine, turning ourselves into cyborgs." "Did you just quote Karl Marx in a *Ready Player One* book and immediately followed it up by name-dropping *Sword Art Online*? Isn't this book set in like 2052? Who is, who is re-watching *Sword Art Online* in the year 2052?"

So while Wade is trying to innovate video game technology, Samantha is creating social programs to help stop the conditions which led to the Stacks. She takes over the buildings which were used for slave labor in the first book and turns them into housing for the homeless, effectively ending homelessness in the United States. She then travels the world trying to understand the total plight of humanity around the globe so she can have a hand in actually fixing the situation. What is Wade doing during this time? He buys the rights to a bunch of films from the '80s and then starts shooting fan-fiction CGI movies. "GSS already owned the media companies that own the movie studios that held the rights to *Back to the Future*, *Ghostbusters*, *Knight Rider*, and *The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai*. And by paying hefty licensing fees to the estates of Christopher Lloyd, David Hasselhoff, Peter Weller, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray, I was able to cast computer-generated actors of each of them in my film. This allowed me to finally bring my long-standing fanboy dream to life: an epic crossover film about Dr. Emmett Brown and Dr. Buckaroo Banzai teaming up with Knight Industries to create a unique interdimensional time vehicle for the Ghostbusters, who must use it to save all ten known dimensions from the Four Crew." What? I can't even read this.

After this fails, he gets jealous of all the successful charity projects that his ex has been setting up, and he tries to set up his own charity. But it's, let me just read it: "I founded the Parcel Release Organization, a non-profit that provided free food, electricity, internet access, and ONI headsets to orphaned and impoverished kids." You, what? Yeah, so my ex-girlfriend is ending homelessness and traveling around the world, but me? I'm doing something better. I'm selling crack cocaine to children and teaching them how to flip it for a profit.

And as a final note of arrogance, he gets all this money from selling this overtly evil technology, and guess what he does with it? He builds a space station so when the environmental crisis happens and everyone on the planet dies, he can take all of his rich friends and blast off into space and find somewhere else to live.

And I know you guys see these subsections and presume that Ernest Cline is some sort of Rick Sanchez person that believes this sort of ambivalence is simply logical and the correct choice to make. But it's important to point out that at this stage in the novel, everyone in the world hates Wade Watts. His ex-girlfriend is treated like a saint who is trying to save the world because that's literally what she is. And even among his own fans, he is treated as this eccentric billionaire who has not adapted well to suddenly being one of the richest and most important people on the planet.

In chapter 7, when he meets one of his most diehard fans, who is a VTuber and also trans, this is the exchange that they have: "But please, do all your die-hard fans like me a favor and don't do anything else to embarrass us, okay?" Before I could respond, she held up both hands, gave me a sheepish grin, and kept right on talking at a rapid-fire pace. "I say that with all due respect, of course, because I do respect you and everything you've accomplished. You've just lost your way a little bit, which makes sense. You suddenly became rich and famous. You know what Bill Murray said about that? When you become famous, you've got like a year or two where you, you act like an idiot. You can't help yourself. It happens to everybody. You got like two years to pull together, or it's permanent." I frowned at her. "I've been famous for well over three years now."

Passages like this in the book make, make it feel like Ernest is reaching through the text and grabbing you by the lapel and saying, "Yeah, I know, I know Wade sucks. You guys told me for 10 years that Wade sucks. This time, I'm doing it on purpose." Oh yeah.

But we haven't gotten around to actually discussing the real plot of the book, and I imagine we're already like 20 minutes in, so we should probably do that real quick. Anyways, they start selling the PlayStation Move, and it sells like crazy. And at some point in the middle of it selling really well, a second Easter egg hunt appears in the game. This one is inviting the heir to search for shards hidden across the Oasis. This freaks everyone at the Oasis Corporation out because no one knew that there was ever going to be a second hunt, and no one knows what it actually entails. The only thing anyone can piece together is that it has something to do with the dead wife of Halliday's best friend. Remember that plot? You know, that subplot in the movie? The one part that everyone unanimously agreed was kind of stupid? Well, that's the rest of the book. It's, it's more of that.

So for some time, Wade Watts wallows in this depressive state where he's caught between thinking about his superhero ex and this final competition that he just can't figure out at all. But suddenly, he's able to solve the first part of the competition thanks to his trans VTuber biggest fan. But after solving that first piece, he logs out for the night because, as you'll remember, you can only play the game for 12 hours a day, or else it will literally kill you.

One thing I want to point out is that throughout the book, characters continue to directly name-drop *Sword Art Online*, and it's really weird whenever it happens because that's certainly outside of the usual pantheon of 1985 that Ernest Cline typically pulls from. But then about halfway through the book, it all starts to make sense. *Ready Player 1 2* is a direct and hyper-apologetic knockoff of *Sword Art Online*. And, uh, here's the thing: you know how at the start of the video I mentioned that Steven Spielberg came up with a lot of the ideas for this book? Well, it's my hypothesis that all of these things are his ideas because they're all set up in the first movie, but not the first novel. So what I think happened is that Ernest Cline went to Steven Spielberg, asked him what he would like to see in the second novel, and Steven Spielberg said, "Well, I think the plot should head in this direction, and we should do this, and this, and this. And to add stakes, we'll, we'll do this." And Ernest Cline went, "That's *Sword Art Online*. You just described the plot to *Sword Art Online*." But not wanting to upset his childhood idol, he decided to put it in the novel and just hang a lampshade on it by having characters joke about how similar the plot is to *Sword Art Online*.

Anyways, let's get into the real plot of this book. About a decade before Halliday died, he used an experimental version of the PlayStation Move to upload his consciousness onto the Oasis. However, he found this copy to be heavily corrupted, insecure, and evil. So he erased many of his core memories and then reprogrammed him to be an AI wandering through the game and helping players with the first Halliday quest. His programming stated that he was supposed to help someone finish the Halliday quest and then delete himself from the Oasis. However, due to a glitch, he instead regained all of his lost memories and continued to secretly exist.

So when Wade and his friends use the PlayStation Move to log on to the Oasis, they discover that this evil Halliday is waiting in their digital boardroom. This evil copy of the creator has removed the ability of users to remove their headsets, meaning that they are permanently logged in and trapped in this virtual reality. Wade has to solve a series of quests in order to escape from the game, or else he, his friends, and millions of other users currently logged on will inevitably die.

As all of the characters realize that he's right, that they can't log out of the game, evil Halliday announces, "You guys really should have listened to your friend Samantha here. She was right. You guys all watched both *Sword Art Online* and *The Matrix* films, and yet you still thought it was a good idea to hand over the control of your brain to a computer." So already, that's an amazing line. But it's immediately followed up with, "Guys, I'm about to lose my..." "Over here," Shoto said, as he began to shake his head vigorously from side to side. "Interact just with Sonic.exe on us." This is so bad. And that is just because there's no better way to sum up what this franchise really is than a character who is ripping off *Sword Art Online* exclaiming, "Haha, you guys should have watched *Sword Art Online*!" and then a second character going, "Oh, this is like Sonic.exe."

So the characters go on this hunt to find the seven shards in this second quest. And I'll admit that there is some stuff in this stage of this book that, that's pretty clever, and I really enjoyed when I was reading it. For instance, the clue they're given for the second part of the puzzle is "Her paint and her canvas, the one in the zero, the very first heroin demoted to hero." And it turns out that this is a reference to the video game *Princess Ninja*, which was a Japanese game about a princess whose kingdom is stolen from her, who then becomes a ninja to take it back and fight the thugs who have taken it over. She was the very first female video game protagonist. But when the game was imported to America, Sega thought little boys wouldn't want to play as a female character, so they changed the game to instead feature a generic blue male ninja. And, you know, reading that, I was like, "This is pretty cool. I didn't know this about video game history." And if it was in like a Steven Spielberg movie, I'd be like, "Yeah, this is kick-ass. What a cool scene in the movie."

But a lot of the other stuff in this part is just boring. A lot of it resembles stuff from the movie, which again makes me think that these were ideas suggested by Spielberg. But while these would possibly make interesting cinematic sequences, in text, they're just dull. For instance, one of the planets that they go to in the Oasis is a planet where every John Hughes movie is happening at once. So you stand in one spot and you can see a certain scene from a certain John Hughes movie play out, and you run down the street and a different scene is taking place in a different movie. And the idea is they have to run back and forth between different John Hughes movies and sort of change the events in very subtle ways to change the ending of one of the movies. It's, uh, very complex, and I'm sure it would be interesting in a film, but I just, I just wasn't feeling it when I was reading the book.

And after this, they go to the planet and they have to fight seven clones of Prince. Like, there are seven different copies of Prince on this planet, and they're all like bosses in a video game. And they try and kill them, and it was just like, "These are just words, man. It's like, I, I, it's empty space. I don't know what any of this means."

Okay, so here's the big twist of the book. You remember how Halliday used an experimental version of the PlayStation Move to upload his own consciousness into the Oasis? Well, after fixing the few small bugs which had caused his own copy to turn evil, Halliday convinces Kira, who you'll remember is the woman that he's in love with and the soon-to-be dead wife of his best friend, to test the PlayStation Move. And thus, he created an AI copy of Kira in the Oasis without her consent. Halliday, the real Halliday, mind you, hoped that he could spend his remaining years with this artificial Kira in the Oasis, convincing her to love him. However, the digital Kira was the same woman and still loved her husband, and not Halliday. Halliday eventually came to realize that this was all a massive mistake, but also realized that to delete the digital Kira would essentially be murder. So he and the digital Kira came up with a plan: they would split her coding into seven different pieces and hide it across the Oasis, with the intention that her husband would eventually be the person to bring her back to life.

And this is why evil Halliday, relatively more evil Halliday, wants the seven shards because he wants to combine them, resurrect Kira, and then brainwash her into loving him, even if that means completely rewiring her personal memories. Now, this whole sequence is supposed to be really up. And the whole point is that it's Wade going through this process of changing how he looks at this man that he spent his entire life nostalgically worshiping. Directly after learning about this, Wade states, "Certainly, I felt closer to Kira now, more aware of her as a human being and an artist, and I saw James Donovan Halliday far more clearly, too. He had undeniably been a genius, but until just one day ago, I had viewed him as a benevolent one whose brilliance and inventiveness had only elevated humanity. Now, it was impossible to deny that he had also been a profoundly up human being, immoral, disturbed, emotionally detached, a techno-hermit who had betrayed the trust of his two best friends in the world. My days of lionizing him were at an end. Of course, there was still a good chance that all of my days were about to end, but still."

Can we just take a step back, ladies and gentlemen, and give a round of applause? You did it, Ernest. You did it, man. You wrote themes into a book. I legitimately didn't think you could do it. While this is going on, there's a bunch of stuff going on in the real world. Honestly, if you're that invested, go read the Wikipedia description. The whole point is that it turns out that Ogden, uh, you know, Halliday's best friend, who is now a very old man, is the only person in the world whose character model in the Oasis has the capabilities of killing someone like the evil Halliday clone. So despite the fact that he gets shot in the real world, in the plot, he manages to log into the game, find the one sword that can do this, and he kills the evil Halliday persona, then promptly dies in the real world himself. But his final wish is that the digital Kira should be allowed to be resurrected.

And so they bring the digital Kira back to life and explain everything to her, and she gives them a magical wand that can resurrect anyone who's ever used the PlayStation Move. Because here's where it gets stupid: it turns out anyone who's ever used the PlayStation Move has actually also had their brain backed up on the Oasis. So literally anyone who's ever used the console can be brought back to life by re-uploading and animating the copy of their brain from the last time they played the console. And so Wade just starts zapping people back to life without any thought. Boom, Ogden's back to life. Hey, your grandma's dead? She used this game once. Boom, there's your grandma. Your grandma's back to life. Boom, boom, boom. Everyone gets immortality. And it's overwhelmingly written like this is a very good thing, and not really, really, really up.

Because think about that for a moment: the biggest corporation in the world now essentially owns files of almost every human being to live on the Earth during the lifetime of this console. Imagine if, like, Amazon had copies of all of the brains of any person who had ever used the site. They would start, like, copyrighting your brain, right? Surely that would be the first move. So, like, if George Lucas dies tomorrow, or Taylor Swift, then are they going to start bringing celebrities back to life to try and, like, copyright their digital thoughts inside the Oasis? Furthermore, the novel emphatically brags that this is both the first cases of artificial intelligence and also immortality. But you can't have both things. I call this the Mechagenius Conundrum. When you do something like this, you're not really making yourself immortal. You're taking an already immortal robot and convincing it that they are you. You're still going to die. Now there's just this robot who is really confused about its identity. By the way, I feel the same way about, like, the paintings in Harry Potter. Like, who convinced this sentient GIF that he's Dumbledore?

So in the final few chapters, everyone, including Samantha, unanimously agree that this whole fiasco of the Oasis secretly backing up the brains of every single user to ever turn the console on is actually a very, very good thing. And you remember that spaceship that Wade builds in the first third so he can escape the Earth if everyone dies? Well, it turns out that spaceship has its own miniature virtual reality system, which you can upload things from the Oasis onto. And the group elects to upload all of the currently alive virtual reality clones onto the spaceship, along with clones of themselves. And then they blast that ship into space.

And in the final epilogue, we find out that the entire book has actually been written by the AI clone of Wade who is on this space station. And as they continue to blast off into space, boldly going in one direction, vaguely forever, artificial Wade reflects on the very little contact he's had with the real Wade back on Earth. The real Wade has become a very grounded person, focused on fixing the real world with his wife Samantha, and he's raising several kids with his wife and hoping that they can turn humanity around. And the artificial Wade is 19 forever in a spaceship, just going that way until the end of time. This is presented like it's overwhelmingly like a romantic, good thing when it's not. It's horrifying. I mean, think about being the person in the ship in the bottle. I mean, you're out there in the middle of nowhere, it's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere, you're all alone, more or less, and you're just like a kid forever. And meanwhile, you're getting called by, like, the real you who's like, "Yo dude, you wouldn't believe what my daughter did the other day. I'm 45." That would, like, be a horrible experience to live through.

And, you know, I'm tempted, I'm tempted to say that this is accidentally a really smart character bit because in the first book and parts of the second book, we begin to realize that Wade essentially has two lives. He has the life that he leads in the real world, which he has been avoiding because he's fearful of all the horrible things going on in the world, and he has the life that he lives in the video game. And all the portions in the video game feel like they're totally detached from the real world. So it feels like, in order for Wade to evolve as a person, he had to literally take the second aspect of his life and wrap it in bubble wrap and shoot it into space. And so this character at the end, who's supposed to be a romantic, you know, uh, depiction of immortality being realized, is actually really sad and pathetic because he's a representation of all the parts of Wade that he comes to outgrow that we dislike. But that wasn't probably on purpose.

This book sucks, but, you know, I really do feel like I have to defend this book at least a little. Because while there are a lot of, like, cringy moments and lines and passages reminiscent of the first book, which are, by the way, as you can see, mostly in the first third, the biggest problem with the novel, at least to me, is that it feels like a horse designed by committee. It really feels like Warner Brothers went up to Ernest Cline and this, and they said, "Hey, look, there's a 40% chance we're gonna make a second movie, you know, write a second book and put these things in." And then Steven Spielberg came up and he said, "Hey, look, there's a 15% chance we're gonna make another movie here, here's some ideas, put this into the book." And meanwhile, he's also like grappling with the real faults of the novel that he's heard constantly for ten years, that he's probably actually come to accept. So it really feels like four or five drafts, almost written by different people, which have been stapled together at points. It feels like the characters are also split up that way. You could, you could analyze Samantha from chapter one to chapter seven, and then chapter seven to the end, as if they're two completely separate entities, and you really imagine them almost as played by different actresses when the novel is visualized in your head. And there's a lot of little issues like that.

And while the first third of the book is funny and embarrassing and quotable on social media, the middle part nearly convinces you that it's going to be a good book, and then the lot, the final third is boring, and then stupid. And, you know, as I record this, all I can find myself thinking about is all of the things I said in my first review about this book. I said that the novel introduces a lot of really interesting ideas without finding anything to do or say about them. I said that Wade Watts is a horrible human being, but it's unclear if that is on purpose or on accident, and that it seems overwhelmingly like he's simply a stand-in for this author in particular. I said that Halliday is a figure that is really messed up and could be interesting, but it's never analyzed, and that there are no themes in the book and no thesis statements made about Halliday or nostalgia or the hunt in particular at all. And I said, most of all, that Wade is a Gary Stu who doesn't need help from his friends because he immediately knows the answers to each and every situation.

And the biggest thing I'm taking away from *Ready Player One Two* is I can't say any of those things about this book. Like, honestly, my biggest hot take about the novel is that even though it's not great, and I wouldn't recommend it, and it's a little cringy, it is far, far improved from the first novel. And it's almost as if he wrote it entirely to justify the choices and mistakes he made back in 2011. I'm honestly surprised for him to go from someone who wasn't trying and made a bad piece of media to someone who was trying really hard and still didn't quite hit the mark. It's an improvement in character from the perspective of the author, even if his writing hasn't necessarily improved. And that is, like, the number one thing I'm walking away from the book with.

I didn't write an end to this video, I kind of forgot, and the script just kind of stops on page 11. Here's an outro where I react to hitting 400,000 subscribers. I, I look like garbage because it's the day after Thanksgiving, and I just took a shower, I'm not dressed yet or anything, but we're so close, and this is all I've wanted for two years. YouTube does this horrible thing where it just sporadically updates this randomly, so I never know, I never know. We could have hit it by now, for all I know. I feel confident that we've got there, and I'm, I'm kind of annoyed because it seems to me, seems to me the numbers definitely gone up, and YouTube just doesn't feel like time. Two years, two and a half goddamn years, man. Now I can quit and get a real job. I wish I could have more waterworks, but I'm, I just want to say I'm grateful. And I guess I'll stick this at the end of *Ready Player One Two*. And I also want to say, I guess, uh, uh, you know, the general stuff. I mean, I want to keep this up. I want to see if we get to 500 next year, you know? Uh, and I want to see how far we can get this year. So, um, you know, again, if you want, we've got *iCarly* is in the bag. We're going to do that next year. We're going to do that in 2021. If you want *Animorphs* as well, then make sure you're subscribed. Help us keep this momentum going. It doesn't feel real. Uh, but yeah, this room's on fire again, so I gotta get going. But make sure to click one of these videos to check out more stuff on the channel. And once again, remember to subscribe. And I've been Quitting Reviews, and that's all I've ever needed.