Articles with the Tag Ernest Cline

Why Peter Parker is the better nerd

Comix, Fandom, science fiction
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I. Coleman has a point, comparing the hero of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One with Peter Parker:

If you want a geek hero, look at Peter Parker. He likes Star Wars and obsesses over superheroes. He’s a nerd. He gets bullied for being a nerd. But his fondness for LEGOs isn’t what makes him a hero – that would be his heroism. His goodness. The fact that he’ll go out of his way to help an old lady cross the street. He knows what it’s like to get picked on, and instead of picking on others in turn, he chooses to stand up for the little guy no matter how hard it is. Peter Parker is what geek culture needs to strive to be every day. When we write an article or a videogame or a book, we should think “Would Peter Parker write this? Would he agree with what we’re saying?”

And conversely, I propose we should also ask “would Wade Watts like this?” And if the answer is yes, you should delete your draft, burn your script, drown the thing in white-out and start over. And it’s this test, more than anything else, that Ready Player One so catastrophically fails. Yes, it’s boring, poorly-written, and literally contains a ten-page list of titles of things the author likes. But it also fails the basic test of humanity, creating a character and a world so repugnant that I feel more than justified in saying it represents the absolute worst of nerd culture.

Peter Parker: science nerd

But there’s another way in which Peter Parker and Wade Watts differ, one that’s just as important as the one Coleman points out: what kind of nerd they are. It’s this difference that at least partially explains their moral differences as well. As we all know, Peter Parker got bitten by a radioactive spider that turned him into Spider-Man, but the reason he was bitten by that spider was because he went to a scientific exhibition, because Peter Parker was the kind of nerd who was really into science, who was studying to become a scientist. That’s why he was bullied, at a time when being a brainiac was not a good thing. There’s more than a hint of classism in the bullying, what with his principal tormentor being the popular, rich jock who could afford to tool around in a sports car, while Parker wore handme down clothes and thick nerd glasses. And that’s why he was bullied: he looked poor, he was a brainiac, he didn’t share the interests of the cool people nor felt the need to imitate them.

Wade Watts on the other hand is the worst possible sort of nerd, the one that thinks his (excessive) love of Star Wars and knowledge of eighties nerd trivia makes him special, gets him persecuted. He doesn’t create, he just consumes, never does anything original. He has a persecution complex but nobody’s persecuting him. His type is widespread among fandom, usually white men who’ve never had much hardship in their lives, but who’ve convinced themselves that a light spot of bullying during high school means the entire world is against them because of their brilliance. These are usually the same people who want to exclude anybody not like them — LGBT, women, PoC — from fandom, that only they are true fans though they never contribute anything. That’s the kind of fan who eat up flattering trash like Ready Player One.

Snowcrash as written by Reddit

Fandom, science fiction
Published on 1 Comment on Snowcrash as written by Reddit

MetaFilter has fun kicking around Ernest Cline’s latest nerd pandering novel. To be fair, it does sound awful:

We’re also told the government has been tracking the habits of its elite players, and when they arrive at their virtual battle stations, they find their favorite snacks waiting for them, their favorite songs queued up to accompany their virtual space fights, not to mention a “special strain of weed that helps people focus and enhances their ability to play videogames” that’s been cultivated just for them. In one revealing moment, Zack calls his mom in midst of the alien invasion and says the words that burn in the heart of every gamer who has ever felt demeaned for the hours they lavish on their favorite hobby: “All those years I spent playing videogames weren’t wasted after all, eh?”

Ugh.

But what struck me the most was this:

Armada is a book designed entirely around getting the reference—high-fiving the readers who recognize its shoutouts while leaving everyone else trapped behind a nerd-culture velvet rope of catchphrases and codes.

Now that’s, as both the MeFi discussion and the original article acknowledge, something that’s deeply ingrained in nerd culture, but Cline’s use feels off. It’s not just that he has contemporary teenagers (or future ones, as in his first novel) obsessed with the pop culture, all the pop culture, of their fathers and grandfathers (mothers not featuring so much), it’s the way in which they do so. Cline’s protagonists are consuming pop culture, not creating it, taking pride in collecting it and showing off their skills in doing so by constant name checking and referencing it.

It’s a very pre-internet view of geekdom, from a time when such knowledge was hard to come by, when it was sometimes genuinely difficult to find a piece of pop culture ephemera if you hadn’t picked it up or seen it when it first came out. This is no longer the case and hasn’t been for at least a decade or two, so that attitude in people who supposedly grew up in the internet age jars. Not only their obsessions are too old for them, but the ways in which they express them are too. Ultimately this is what makes Cline a bad writer, this simple failure to understand that 21st century teenagers wouldn’t have the same hangups as him.

(Title courtesy of Artw.)