Darth Walrus posted:

One thing I was thinking about was motivation. If we want Wade to be egg-hunting as a job and slowly, reluctantly fall in love with the nostalgic nerdery he’s immersed in, then we should give him a compelling reason for diving into the hunt in the first place, and for forming his various relationships with the rest of the gang. Luckily, Cline already laid some of the groundwork for us, and I’ve got a few ideas.

When Wade was a child, his father told him stories of the man he’d been named after. Like him, he’d been born dirt-poor on an Oklahoma mountainside, dehumanised and belittled by the rich white folks who couldn’t be bothered to give him a real place in their world. He told little Wade about the time the original Wade Watts had gone round to a white friend’s house and been served a meal, only to discover he’d been eating out of the dog’s bowl. More often, though, he told him about what Wade Watts had become - a man who stared down the Klan, reintegrated public schools, and had audiences with presidents. They were nice stories, and Wade liked to remember them when things got bad.

Wade grew up in the stacks, the trailer-park labyrinths created after the first of the great economic crashes, along with thousands upon thousands of others who America didn’t have room for any more - or, at least, that was how the party in government put it at the time. The first white face he saw in person was when an IOI security team broke in a neighbour’s door for running an unlicensed haptic rig. He’d been raised by his aunt and uncle. His father had died during a food riot when he was ten, and he never knew his mother, only her photographs - a pretty white girl with dark, empty eyes. His father had told him that she went into the OASIS one day and never came back. His aunt and uncle were kind enough to him, but he wasn’t theirs, only another mouth to feed that they could barely afford, and they all knew it.

Like nearly all of his generation, Wade spent much of his life in the OASIS, when he wasn’t running errands for his family or playing football with the other kids from his neighbourhood. He’d been smart enough and lucky enough to get a scholarship to a good online school, and he applied himself well to his studies, but he never felt like there was much a place for him there - his fellow pupils weren’t terribly inclined to socialise with a kid from the stacks. His only real online friend was Aech, a boy in the same year who’d been the first to walk up and say hi when he transferred in. Aech was a cheerfully unabashed nerd, a disciple of the OASIS’s eccentric creator James Halliday with a sincere love of the ancient pop-culture the massive virtual universe was built on. He called himself a ‘gunter’, a quester for the holy grail Halliday had supposedly hidden somewhere within the OASIS’s depths. Wade didn’t honestly have much interest in all that quasi-mystical rubbish, only in getting the grades he needed to get one of the few decent jobs still going, but Aech’s sheer enthusiasm made him fun to be around.

Then the posters went up.

Stacks were questionably legal and definitely eyesores, which meant that when a company wanted to build over them, they didn’t have much difficulty. Wade’s neighbourhood was up in the hills, and IOI wanted to take advantage of the stunning views of the valley below for a new executive resort. The residents fought the impending demolition as hard as they could, even attracting the endorsement of the OASIS celebrity and social-justice campaigner Art3mis, but Wade knew that it would be only a matter of time until the megacorp got its way. Several of his neighbours had been relocated before, and he’d heard their stories. He knew that there were folks in his stacks who were too old or sick to survive it.

He obsessed over ways to save his neighbourhood, to get revenge on IOI, to stop this hellish system altogether, but kept coming back to one - the Easter egg, the prize left by a madman in a maze of children’s toys that was rumoured to have the power to upend the world. One day, he bottled up his courage placed a few orders on OASIS’s online marketplace, and sent a message to his best friend.

“Hey, Aech. What was all that you were telling me about the Tomb of Horrors?”

Ottermotive Insanity posted:

Isn't making Artemis trans effectively making her another "Wade accept her regardless of her real world self?" Whether she's handicapped, overweight, had a birthmark, or is trans, it's all the same, plotwise. Artemis doesn't accept herself, doesn't think anyone will, but Wade falls for her regardless.

The reader needs to question if they themselves could look actually look past whatever issue Artemis has. Current readers ridicule that her issue is a birthmark, and probably would do the same with weight.

And maybe it's lovely of me, but I think having Artemis be trans, along with Aech being a lesbian or trans would make this rewrite be more of an LGBT niche story.

chitoryu12 posted:

Do we want to keep the stacks the stacks, or do we want a more traditional shantytown or trailer park sprawl?

I talked to a friend about this project and she suggested inspiration from shipping containers converted into vertical apartments in Europe if we wanted to stick with unusual vertical housing without having people just piling Airstream trailers and cars on top of each other.

Darth Walrus posted:

I think that being trans is a bit different because it signals an aspiration she’s also working on in real life. It’s not a flaw she’s hiding, it’s a new life she’s embracing. It’s not uncommon for someone to practice living as the opposite sex by presenting as one online. It marks a striking contrast to Aech, who actually is hiding herself in an unhealthy way because she fears being ostracised and rejected. I like it because it covers a broader range of the online experience, rather than giving us two characters with pretty much the same problem. It also lets us pull away a little from the whole ‘Wade accepts her despite her flaws’ thing and turn it into another expression of her drive and ambition (and serves as an obvious point of tension with the folks who want to shut down the OASIS, because it’s been very positive and helpful for her and people like her in this regard).

Ottermotive Insanity posted:

Isn't making Artemis trans effectively making her another "Wade accept her regardless of her real world self?" Whether she's handicapped, overweight, had a birthmark, or is trans, it's all the same, plotwise. Artemis doesn't accept herself, doesn't think anyone will, but Wade falls for her regardless.

Ottermotive Insanity posted:

The reader needs to question if they themselves could look actually look past whatever issue Artemis has. Current readers ridicule that her issue is a birthmark, and probably would do the same with weight.

chitoryu12 posted:

I’m not sure on Aech as a trans woman with a masculine avatar. As someone who knows a ton of trans people (including my brother), the avatar would have been the first thing to change.

Powered Descent posted:

I think the stacks should stay at least partially an ad-hoc engineering effort using whatever was around. Containers could certainly be a good chunk of it, but If they make up the whole thing, then that would imply that it was designed and built instead of just kind of grew as personal transport became more and more infeasible. The mix of trailers and prefabs from all eras literally crammed in on top of each other is one of the book's most striking visuals (there's a reason they put it on the movie poster with long-leg boy, after all) and I don't see any reason to throw that away.



That said, the feasibility can be improved by shortening the stacks a bit. Twenty-story skyscrapers made of trailers would blow over in the first good wind that came along, if they didn't collapse under their own weight first. Three or four high, with occasional "towers" or five or six, would be plenty.

Ottermotive Insanity posted:

This would make sense if Artemis was the main character of the novel. How Artemis relates to herself is secondary to how Wade relates to her, though, because this is a story about Wade Watts. The big reveal, the core of it is that Wade accepts Artemis for who she is in the end, even though it may be unconventional, and in the re-write probably should be uncomfortable for the reader. The core of it is: Artemis likes Wade, Wade likes Artemis, but Artemis is afraid Wade will reject her IRL, Wade's character evolves from a superficial whiny wiener boy into the character who cares for Artemis regardless of who she is outside of the OASIS.

Cline didn't have that arc though. Wade is pretty accepting of everyone from the beginning... and I think the book would have been better if Wade had been a mouth-breather when we met him, and he became more open as the book went on. Cline had the groundwork of this: Aech's reveal, Halliday being socially inept, and not really that cool IRL, and finally Artemis's skin condition. All of that would lead Wade to realize his preconceived notions about people he meets and sees everyday may not be who they really are.

chitoryu12 posted:

Do we want to keep the stacks the stacks, or do we want a more traditional shantytown or trailer park sprawl?

I talked to a friend about this project and she suggested inspiration from shipping containers converted into vertical apartments in Europe if we wanted to stick with unusual vertical housing without having people just piling Airstream trailers and cars on top of each other.

chitoryu12 posted:

Also in the canon bible, I tried to work out some of the discrepancies Cline created and make the world a little less mind-blowingly awful. For one, multiple cities have not been destroyed by nuclear bombs.

The flight from rural to urban areas is already well documented, so it's not unreasonable to assume this trend continuing by 2095 if there's a recession for a long period of time that kills jobs in poor rural towns. Since we're expanding the timeline by 50 years, there's no longer a need for stacks to grow in such a haphazard way by having people pile up ridiculous junk towers over a 20 year period. Modern solutions like shantytowns, trailer parks, and vertical apartments made from converted shipping containers are a lot more understandable and not at risk of toppling over like dominoes.

Because so much of rural America has been left abandoned, the government and major agricultural corporations like Monsanto have tons of land to convert to automated farms. Self-driving trucks and farm equipment means agriculture requires a relative skeleton crew to keep operating, so you can still have cheap government-subsidized food while most of the world is loving around in OASIS.

Renewable energy can also be reasonably assumed to have advanced tremendously 80 years from now, so you've got huge solar farms, wind farms, and hydroelectric dams supplemented by individual solar panels on homes. Cars are mostly electric or hydrogen fuel cells, but people still don't get out as much as they used to because of the relative lack of wealth.

Tunicate posted:

Consider that people are already suffering from body image insecurities due to photoshopped magazines.


Now assume that the baseline for the Oasis is inhumanly sculpted avatars

Tunicate posted:

Consider that people are already suffering from body image insecurities due to photoshopped magazines.

Now assume that the baseline for the Oasis is inhumanly sculpted avatars

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Wouldn't it just be easier to write the story instead of crowd-sourcing characterization? Art demands creative vision, not creative consensus. Just decide yourself.

Young Freud posted:

I would also feel that Wade's reaction to Aech should be left in. I would want him to have internalized the latent and sometimes obvious homophobia, transphobia, racism, and sexism found in a lot of '80s media. I want him to be cringing to IRL Aech and mixing up his pronouns and poo poo, until Aech gives him the "look motherfucker" speech about how all this stuff is a relic of it's time; that, like her, he has to be aware of those deeper meanings and not take it at face value; and he can still find value and fun out of them but they're not something to be building a worldview on. It's 204X not 1985, Wade, get with the times.

Darth Walrus posted:

I think I prefer Aech being a cis lesbian because I don’t like the assumption that having masculine hobbies and being into ladies necessarily means you’re trans. Seems a bit... uhh... Iranian. ‘Sides, I legit can’t remember the last time I saw a positively-portrayed butch lesbian in a story who made it to the end without dying unpleasantly.

Art3mis being trans is an interesting idea, but I’m not wedded to it if we wanna skip it.

chitoryu12 posted:

My problem with this is that it risks adding an unlikable element to Wade, especially toward the end of the book when he's supposed to be at the zenith of his character development. It's even worse in Cline's book because he never really improves at all so it just underscores Wade being an unlikable dick from start to finish, but I don't want his self-improvement to start taking steps backward.

Proteus Jones posted:

Heroes are defined by their flaws and how they overcome them.

Proteus Jones posted:

Heroes are defined by their flaws and how they overcome them.

chitoryu12 posted:

Okay, I'm going to think on the Aech and Art3mis thing. I do think it's plausible to have one of them be transgender, but I think if we can't figure out a good way to move forward with that idea we should just stick with the book characterization and try to improve on that. Shoto being female is still up in the air, since only one person seems to really be advocating for that change.

Does anyone have any commentary or suggestions on the plot outline?

nine-gear crow posted:

Also, I am going to be That Guy and agree with this sentiment--TO AN EXTENT. Soliciting ideas and discussion from the thread is good, but putting major elements like this up to a committee vote is fraught with peril. There, I said it. You can all go back to ignoring him now until he says something worth listening to again.

chitoryu12 posted:

While I'm maintaining the ability to just pick something and move on if there's no consensus, I do want to make something that people will like. Something like making a character trans is a pretty big, potentially controversial change that needs to be treated with caution.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

You could actually make money off that.

Clipperton posted:

Regarding Art3mis: I think that by 2044, when according to the book everyone is online all the time and 99% of all person-person interactions are mediated by the Oasis, people's reactions to meeing someone IRL they only know online (and vice versa) are going to evolve a bit. I mean pretty much every gunter out there would have been born after Catfish came out.

I don't think someone being of a different gender to their avatar is going to shock anyone anymore; I don't even think someone being ugly or overweight IRL is going to be seen as a "betrayal", even to someone as shallow as Wade in the novel. (Pretty much everyone must be obese IRL anyway, if they're just sitting around with their visors on and their diet is anything like Americans' today.)

Also, I think porn is going to be even slicker and less realistic. Airbrushing out pimples and love-handles in real time. Entirely virtual actors/actresses with bodies built by algorithm to light up the porn receptors in the average person's brain - big hips and boobs on women, symmetrical faces etc etc. As a teenage guy I would imagine Wade would be whacking it to this stuff constantly.

So here's an idea: Wade is perfectly fine with the idea of the IRL Art3mis being overweight, or birthmarked, or even masc-presenting. When he meets her, though: she's a knockout. She's won the genetic lottery of sexiness, she's a dead ringer for all the actresses in Wade's imaginary porn harem. Which is a problem, because Wade's utterly objectified all those real and virtual women to such an extent that he just can't relate to her naturally at all. He's awkward as gently caress, gets all self-loathing and body-dysmorphic, or he turns into a Cat Person-style creepo when they get together. That's his flaw, that's what he has to overcome to be in a relationship with her.

Clipperton posted:

@ captain bourgie over here

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

nine-gear crow posted:

Well then go make a thread that fixes all the problems you have with this thread and charge people money to post in it to feed your hungry family and gently caress off from this one.

nine-gear crow posted:

Well then go make a thread that fixes all the problems you have with this thread and charge people money to post in it to feed your hungry family and gently caress off from this one.

Samizdata posted:

And, due to his self-loathing, becomes a horribly jealous creeper that watches over her at all time.

chitoryu12 posted:

Wade's #1 problem in Cline's writing is that he's extremely unlikable. While you can make a protagonist with severe flaws (even bad enough to be an antagonist) that you still want to root for, it's difficult.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

A protagonist does not need to be a character you "want to root for".

Characters don't need to be anything. How a reader approaches them is completely up to them.

chitoryu12 posted:

If you make your protagonist a goony rear end in a top hat that nobody likes, who's going to want to keep reading about their misadventures in stalking women?

A human heart posted:

*banging knife and fork on table* what style are you going to write the book in? what style are you going to write the book in?

chitoryu12 posted:

If you make your protagonist a goony rear end in a top hat that nobody likes, who's going to want to keep reading about their misadventures in stalking women?