For examples from the 2018 film adaptation, go here.
- Alternate Character Interpretation:
- James Halliday is a reclusive, antisocial nerd who spends his entire adult life pining after Kira, his best friend's wife, even after he becomes the richest, most famous man in the world. Some view his behavior as stalkerish at best and outright misogynistic at worst. Others believe James suffered from severe social anxiety that prevented him from revealing his feelings to his best female friend. The fact his best male friend Ogden (who married Kira) remembered him fondly post-mortem implies we're supposed to view it as the latter. There's also the question of whether he intended to warp the entire fabric of human entertainment over the course of a decade to become nothing but a collection of 80s nostalgia. While he certainly wanted people to like and appreciate his childhood, it's questionable he would want seemingly all new ideas replaced with a recycling of John Hughes, Star Wars, and Transformers. Or maybe he did.
- Andy Weir, author of The Martian, has one for a character in his (declared canon by Ernest Cline) RPO fanfic "Lacero".
. Nolan Sorrento's true goal is to destroy the OASIS as revenge against GSS, as his sister was an OASIS addict who ended up dying due to her obsession. - Is Wade Watts a Wish-Fulfillment figure who improbably gets a famous beautiful love interest and billions of dollars, all because of his obsessive love of 80s pop culture and trivia? Or is he a character who undergoes an arc from starting as a selfish nerd to become a better, more heroic person, which is what helps bring about his triumph instead?
- Is Art3mis a Manic Pixie Dream Girl and Wade's Satellite Love Interest as some readers argue, or is she the Deuteragonist who has a much better grasp of what the stakes are for the game, given she actually breaks up with Wade because of his selfishness and devotion to their relationship over the game? The movie puts front and center her goal of destroying IOI, which she calls a revolution in her first real-world sentence to Wade.
- Aluminum Christmas Trees: Cline did not come up with the culture and other elements out of nothing, he did research in the closest thing available pre-2011: Second Life. The pop culture avatars and items, the dance parties, and the shops where you also can buy magic items and moves will all be familiar to anyone who has played that massively-multiplayer online sandbox game.
- Anvilicious:
- Early on, Wade goes on a rant for a page and a half about how we've all been lied to, primarily centering on God and religion. This is especially jarring, since there's zero indication that he was raised in any religion, and very little suggestion of religious influence anywhere around him. In fact the only religious character in the whole book, Mrs. G, is also just about the only adult who's kind to him and the person whose death most impacts him when his home is attacked.
- Wade's reaction to the discovery his best friend is an African American lesbian rather than a white boy that she presented herself as leads to a lecture on tolerance. Understandable given she was homeless for a time because of parental rejection.
- The Anti-Escapism Aesop strikes some readers as this, although it might be mitigated by the conflicted stance the book seems to take on the OASIS' role in society.
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The (probably tongue-in-cheek) passage written by Halliday about the virtues of masturbation among an otherwise depressing chapter in the book is viewed as this.
- Condemned by History: In The New '20s, it seems that many now view the novel as a symbol of everything wrong with late 2000s/early 2010s geek culture: between the plot coming across as a juvenile Power Fantasy, use of nostalgia as a substitute for actual quality, and seeming glorification of arrested development, nerd elitism, franchise consumerism, and retreating from reality into a fantasy world, very few will admit to being a fan nowadays. The author's follow-up novels laying the original's mistakes bare by repeating them without improving on them and the various real-world scandals involving said culture (see Harsher in Hindsight below) did not help matters. To quote Constance Grady, writing for Vox:A time traveler from 2011 could be forgiven for being deeply confused by [the backlash]. In 2011, Ready Player One was beloved. It was "a guaranteed pleasure." It was "witty." It was not only "a simple bit of fun" but also "a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own." What gives? How did the consensus on a single book go from "exuberant and meaningful fun!" to "everything that is wrong with the internet!" over the span of seven years?
- Critical Dissonance: The book received rave reviews, but audience reactions were a lot frostier. This intensified with time, as critics came to turn on the title too and retrospective reviews of the book after the announcement of its film and sequel led to a fresh look on its negative aspects.
- Franchise Original Sin:
- Everything people have complained about in Ernest Cline's later novels (unlikable, arrogant, entitled, show-off protagonists who hold onto petty grudges, overusing pop-culture references to nostalgia-bait the audience, generally clunky plotting) is present to one degree or another in Ready Player One. But unlike most of them, at the start of the novel Wade is an underdog whose resentment is at least understandable, rather than one of the most powerful and important people in the world, and the argument could be made that the story is at least kind of about him growing beyond his flaws and becoming less selfish before the sequel shows he really hasn't. Zack Lightman, meanwhile, doubles down on the Wish-Fulfillment aspects of Wade's character to such an extent that his lack of humility and delight in petty revenge and one-upsmanship are thrown into stark relief pretty quickly, with a story that fast-tracks him to the place of comfort and power that Wade has to work for and mostly keeps him there, enjoying his genetically optimized gamer weed and other luxuries while cracking jokes and pop-culture references with his fellow pilots, despite the extreme stakes of his situation. It all serves to make him less fundamentally relatable, and therefore undermines the Wish-Fulfillment.
- Many readers opine that while Ready Player One could be shallow and silly at times, with underdeveloped characters, it was also a straight-forward adventure story that wasn't too difficult to understand and had a logical, satisfying conclusion the plot had built up to. Armada tried for a more complicated story and was generally seen as handling it poorly. Ready Player Two has a near-identical premise but its story is a lot more convoluted and contrived, with an abrupt ending that raises more questions than it answers. The poorer plotting and weak endings compared to the first novel makes their other flaws harder to overlook and the books more difficult to enjoy even as light escapism.
- All three novels are filled to the brim with 1980s pop culture references, which was more enjoyable in the first book as many of the references were to things even the average person would likely be familiar with, while also including a few more obscure references for fans of those works; while some readers found it a bit much, it was generally tolerated. Armada and the sequel have far more obscure references that few people outside their niche fanbases are likely to understand and to make matters worse, Ready Player Two even gets some of these references factually wrong, making it harder for anyone to appreciate. Armada's explanation for why Zack Lightman is so obsessed with the 80's, trying to form some kind of connection with his Disappeared Dad, is also seen as an excuse to recycle Ready Player One's schtick with a much weaker plot justification, while Ready Player Two just recycles the first book's plot outright.
- Friendly Fandoms: The book complements Cory Doctorow's Little Brother very well. Those who like one book usually end up liking the other.
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- A few years after this book was written, several high-profile harassment movements exposed a nasty streak of toxicity and gatekeeping running through much of geek culture. This helped contribute to the ongoing backlash towards it, since the fun nerd power fantasy no longer looked like innocent fun.
- The villain of the book and movie is IOI Corp. Several years down the line, a real life IOI Corp in Malaysia actually came under fire not only for inhumane treatment of wild animals and destruction of forest areas in Borneo to establish new palm oil estates, but also for violation of human rights when it comes to treatment of their employees. note
- A few years after this book was written, several high-profile harassment movements exposed a nasty streak of toxicity and gatekeeping running through much of geek culture. This helped contribute
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- The Take That! towards Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull becomes this with Steven Spielberg directing The Film of the Book.
- Tye Sheridan wearing tech goggles for a large portion of the movie once again.
- By 2021, there's a Brazilian metaverse app called OASIS. But the premise of the book is literally about a metaverse with the same name.
- The Take That! towards Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull becomes this with Steven Spielberg directing
- Hype Backlash: While the book was highly praised upon its initial release, over the following years, it began to attract a considerable backlash. The most common criticisms are that it is cliche and heavily derivative of other works, overuses pop culture references to disguise that it has little to no identity of its own, embraces a soulless consumption-as-identity model of nerd culture, doesn't feature enough black icons from the 80s, and is an amateurish first novel besides. This also ties into the Harsher in Hindsight entry more than a little bit.
- Jerkass Woobie: The aforementioned declared as canon by Ernest Cline himself fanfic reveals Sorrento to be this of all people. He wanted to destroy OASIS because his sister got so addicted to the Hunt for the Egg that she started taking meth to stay awake, later dying from an overdose.
- Just Here for Godzilla: The ISO-9000 standard "YA teen dystopia" plot is pretty much there to justify the massive bounty of 80s and 90s pop-culture references, which in turn are the main reason most of the story's audience exists.
- Memetic Mutation:
- "People who live in glass houses should shut the fuck up."
- "Dead Man's Party" by Oingo Boingo received something of a musical revival due to its use in James Halliday's video will.
- After the announcement of the film adaptation, it became a minor meme to mock the novel's purportedly clunky prose and dialogue and endless litany of 80s nerd culture references through the quotation of certain passages.
- Moral Event Horizon: IOI's desire to control the OASIS makes perfect sense; not only is it the single most profitable enterprise in human history, but its online credits are the de facto Global Currency. It's as if Reagan-era POTUS-For-Life was up for grabs, so the lengths they're willing to go should have been expected. But there's really no glossing over the fact that IOI engaged in bribery, racketeering, premeditated murder and terrorism just to win a contest.
- Narm: The book's copious use of Leet Lingo and the word "noob" hasn't aged terribly well, being seen as a kind of nerdy Totally Radical by some detractors. It was especially egregious considering the book was published in 2011, long after such early 2000s internet slang had fallen out of style.
- Not So Crazy Anymore: Cline was mostly describing his dream online game when he envisioned the OASIS back in 2011 — but a number of elements have already become reality.
- Some fans found it incredulous that people would be using characters from established franchises as 3D avatars for OASIS. Cue a little something called VR Chat, and more often than not you'll see exactly that happening.
- OASIS credits becoming more valuable than any other currency is downright prescient in light of Bitcoin value shooting up to over sixteen thousand dollars in 2017.
- The fight against the Corrupt Corporate Executive villains seeking to monetize the OASIS has gained a real-world parallel in the movement to maintain Net Neutrality along with safeguarding online privacy from marketing purposes.
- A horrifying one due to recent reports that Sony filed a patent for VR based ad displaying (including one that brings to mind the film's Pure O2/"80 percent of the visual field" pitch), the ads being based on a users eye tracking information.
- Even worse with Facebook wanting to place ads in games through the Oculus store for the Quest 2, similar to how IOI wanted to do so.
- Some questioned how copyright laws apparently have gotten so lax in the future that just about every media franchise has a playable skin in the OASIS. Fortnite, a popular online game, would start regularly having tie-in skins for franchises such as Star Wars, Marvel, DC Comics, Street Fighter, and Naruto just to name a few.
- Some fans found it incredulous that people would be using characters from established franchises as 3D avatars for OASIS. Cue a little something called VR Chat, and more often than not you'll see exactly that
- Paranoia Fuel: The Cataclyst has the power to kill hundreds of characters with no known countermeasure, and nobody knows where it is. It ends up getting used during the largest player gathering in the history of the OASIS, killing all but one of them.
- So Bad, It's Good: Among the Broken Base, there's a substantial portion of fans among nerddom who like the book due to how over-the-top it is in its celebration of 80s nostalgia, minimalist writing style, and general cheese factor. Mike Nelson and Conor Lastowka of RiffTrax actually made the podcast, 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back, dissecting the book based around this premise.
- Slow-Paced Beginning: The first several chapters explain the state of the world and the importance of OASIS. The actual quest for the key doesn't begin until Wade discovers the Tomb of Horrors and the Copper Key.
- Spiritual Successor: Could be considered one to Conor Kostick's 2004 novel Epic, as both follow a very similar plot and themes: in a post-apocalyptic Crapsack World where the entire world plays a virtual reality MMO and your station in life is most likely dependent upon your in-game prowess, a poor boy and his friends pursue the game's ultimate quest, become rich and famous along the way by noticing things others don't, and end up as enemies of a powerful Corrupt Corporate Executive who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- The book is famous for its heavy focus on properties from the 1980s and 1990s despite in taking place in 2044. It could've had commentary about effects of reboot culture, the current obsession with nostalgia and how future society is still focused on the same entertainments from over half a century prior, but instead it fully embraces that sterile obsession with nostalgia and only talks about how awesome old shows and movies are. It also could have talked about the shallow nature of nostalgia, that the only reason old properties remain popular in 2044 isn't because people naturally like it but because it's the key to winning Halliday's fortune and control of the OASIS.
- The real world is in shambles with a global energy crisis leading to frequent blackouts in all major cities, extreme climate change causing famines, constant wars between nations, the stacks being plagued by gun violence…and none of it has any relevance to the plot. Nor is it ever explored how the world is impacted by having millions of people, particularly the rich and privileged, spending all day completely ignoring these problems by being in virtual reality.
- Unintentional Period Piece: Even though the story is set several decades in the future, the plot is so heavily dependent on Pop Culture of the past (both In-Universe and within the real-world timeframe of when the book was published), that this trope has come into effect as several long-running franchises and fandoms have continued past the point of the book's publication. Among the references that are already dated as of 2018:
- Wade claims to have watched ALL the Star Wars movies, "the original and the prequels". No reference is made to the Sequel Trilogy (The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker), the Anthology Series (Rogue One, Solo), the live action series (The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, etc), nor any of the animated series (The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels, etc).
- Similarly Wade also boasts that he watched "all" of Star Trek, specifically mentioning Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise, but not Star Trek: Discovery or Star Trek: Picard.
- It is noted that a Posthumous Character had set the world record by playing a perfect game of Pac-Man in "just under four hours". Less than a year after the book was published, the world record was actually set 3 hours, 33 minutes.
- Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Wade holds people who call in to the tech support hotlines where he works (first voluntarily, later as an indent) in searing contempt, seeing them as lazy incompetents who should Read the Freaking Manual. While this is likely to strike a chord with anyone who's ever worked in tech support, it comes across a bit differently to people who are more used to being on the other side of the equation - feeling frustrated and confused by some user-unfriendly piece of technology and then having to subject themselves to an equally demoralizing tech support process. There is also the fact that Wade is literally getting paid to sit there and answer those inane questions — if everyone adopted the do-it-yourself values that he holds to, he'd be out of a job!
