At last, the end is here. I know it’s been a very long time since I posted the review of the previous chapter. But don’t chalk this up to my listless and procrastinatory nature: I just couldn’t bear to say goodbye to all these dear friends that I’ve made along the way. They’re each so richly developed and their dialogue so sharp, it was impossible not to fall in love.



As the previous chapter left off, Wade has won the Egg Hunt, Nathan Sorrento is in captivity and the OASIS is at peace. But that’s all secondary to our hero at this point, he’s logged out of the digital world in order to claim the real prize. Art3mis is waiting for their destined in-person meetup. Naturally, Wade has to navigate a video game-inspired hedge maze to get there because God forbid this last tiny chapter be allowed to finish with a blank reference count for once.

Wade finds his crush near a fountain, which is also based on a video game. He recognizes her instantly because he had previously taken an invasive peek at her personal information right before he slid into her DMs with a classic “Girl, you’re so beautiful.”

She looked just as she had in the photo I’d seen. She had the same Rubenesque body. The same pale, freckled skin. The same hazel eyes and raven hair. The same beautiful round face, with the same reddish birthmark. But unlike in that photo, she wasn’t trying to hide the birthmark with a sweep of her hair. She had her hair brushed back, so I could see it. I waited in silence. But she still wouldn’t look up at me. “You look just like I always pictured you,” I said. “Beautiful.” “Really?” she said softly. Slowly, she turned to face me, taking in my appearance a little at a time, starting with my feet and then gradually working her way up to my face. When our eyes fi nally met, she smiled at me nervously. “Well, what do you know? You look just like I always thought you would too,” she said. “Butt ugly.

She’s joking but I wouldn’t blame her. Only enough time has transpired since Wade was a complete and utter smoothboy that he’s, at best, a fuzzy boy now. He must look like a sentient pear. Once real names are exchanged, Wade states his love for Art3mis aka Samantha. Owing to the couple finally meeting face to face and Wade not recoiling in disgust at her birthmark, this time his declaration is met immediately with joyous tears rather than the angry rejection Art3mis dealt him about 200 pages ago. You’ve got the girl and you’re both rich as hell, Wade. What are you going to do next?

I smiled. “We’re going to use all of the moolah we just won to feed everyone on the planet. We’re going to make the world a better place, right?”

At last, Wade’s character arc has concluded for no discernable reason: he no longer detests the wretched poor. Thankfully, these newly-minted billionaires have vague altruistic leanings and plan to dole out some fraction of their vast wealth to feed the poor. However, this is already something we were told the governments of the world provide, as food vouchers were referenced in the very early chapters. Maybe ending the material conditions that allow legal slavery, wasteland marauders and the funneling of the funds collected from all online interactions into the account of an unaccountable corporate megalith would be a better goal. But, true to his actual character, Wade can’t even hold to this weak notion of philantropy:

She grinned. “Don’t you want to build a huge interstellar spaceship, load it full of videogames, junk food, and comfy couches, and then get the hell out of here?” “I’m up for that, too,” I said. “If it means I get to spend the rest of my life with you.

“That thing I said literally right before this sentence? Yeah, that was all bullshit. I just wanna smash. We can do whatever with the money as I long as I can get up in those guts. Naturally, our fucking will be synced to the sex scene in The Terminator.” He fooled me good. For just a second, I had accepted that some combination of his recent experiences opened his eyes to the suffering of those around him. Don’t I feel stupid now?

The two verbally commit their lives to one another and sit together for a while. They kiss, it owns as hard as all Wade’s favorite love songs told him it would. The last line of the book is thus:

It occurred to me then that for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had absolutely no desire to log back into the OASIS.

Yep, the ultimate moral of this story, spelled out here but obviously so evident throughout the overall text, is “Log off.” The digital ghost of James Halliday already said it but I’m glad it got underlined here so that we can really grasp it. It’s certainly a lot easier on both the reader and the author to just come out and state the lesson at the end rather than build and develop it over time via, like, themes and events and characterization. Obviously, I’m joking and this is goddamn stupid. It feels exactly like the sort of tacked-on moral Cline would write to provide cover for having written the previous 371 pages of VR-fetishizing drivel. I don’t believe for a second that Wade won’t be logging back into the OASIS within the day to reign as King of Online. After all, giving up The OASIS forever would make it pretty hard to do the world-changing he was just talking. Not to mention that his dead aunt would be pretty pissed at him quitting now since his not-quitting before got her and hundreds of other people blown up.

I guess we’ll find out soon what the future holds for Wade, as “Ready Player Two” is already slouching towards the publisher to be born as I write this. Even the misguided fans of this book are less receptive to his second book and wholesale “The Last Starfighter” ripoff, Armada. We’ll see how they respond to “Ready Player One Again But Now Wade Probably Has A Daughter.” As for me, I still have to watch the damn movie.

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Adventure II