So, without further throat-clearing: Let’s get ready to rumble!Īlex de Campi, Valley Forge: Welcome back to this month’s edition of Simon and Alex Watch Controversial Blockbusters So You Don’t Have To. And this conversation became more like de Campi and Abrams’ real-life post-screening bar-side arguments. But the writers’ feelings about Spielberg got the better of them. It was supposed to be a straightforward series of six 500-word exchanges, three apiece. This month’s conversation did not go as planned. After James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the socially awkward creator of the OASIS, dies, Watts bands together with a group of fellow misfit video-game players - role call: Art3mis (Olivia Cooke)! Aech (Lena Waithe)! Sho (Philip Zhao)! And Daito (Win Morisaki)! - to save the OASIS from being overtaken by evil corporate overlord Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn). Like Cline’s source material, Spielberg’s movie follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a teenager who likes to escape from his futuristic, economically depressed reality into the OASIS, a virtual reality world that’s like the Matrix, only with more 1980s nostalgia. This month’s conversation concerns Ready Player One, director Steven Spielberg’s new adaptation of Ernest Cline’s hyper-popular science-fiction novel.
It feels like he thought, “Here’s a way I can dump a bunch of diversity into my book without having to think about it,” just like he clearly didn’t think about how to represent his Japanese characters.The following is the second monthly installment in a series of conversations between noted comics writer Alex de Campi ( No Mercy, May Day) and agreeable Hollywood Reporter contributor Simon Abrams. But Ernest Cline found the exact wrong way to include a character who is marginalized in multiple ways. I can’t stand the people who complain about representation by saying, “Why not just have a character who’s a disabled autistic trans lesbian black Muslim woman?” as though no one exists who fits that description. And so that other people, like the white guys who are mostly the ones reading your book, can learn that the existence of fat black lesbian women is normal rather than a gimmick. You know what’s better? Having a fat black lesbian woman be represented throughout the entire book so that fat black lesbian women can see themselves in a character for longer than 56 pages.
If it was meant to be some kind of “haha you assumed this character was a white guy just because they were described as a white guy” lesson, it doesn’t work well, and we’re all tired of that.
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