51 pages • 1 hour read
Ernest ClineReady Player Two
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Wade Watts
Protagonist Wade Watts is the 21-year-old CEO of GSS, the company that runs a virtual reality open world, the OASIS. Although he is presented as the narrator for much of the book, the real narrator is an artificial copy of Wade’s consciousness, which casts doubt on the reliability of the narration.
Wade, who grew up in extreme poverty, became a billionaire three years prior to this novel’s events after inheriting GSS from its late founder, James Halliday. After his ascension as GSS’s CEO, Wade grows increasingly reclusive, isolating himself from healthy people in his life, like his romantic partner Art3mis and his friends Og, Aech, and Shoto. He even engages in some of the toxic behavior exhibited by Halliday, like ignoring boundaries and violating L0hengrin’s privacy in an effort to uncover her birth-assigned gender.
As the narrative progresses, Wade’s arc involves distinguishing himself from Halliday by confronting his past trauma, extricating himself from the deceptive nature of nostalgia, and embracing his friends anew. For example, upon visiting Halcydonia for only the second time since his mother’s fatal heroin overdose, Wade allows himself to be vulnerable. While Wade would likely attribute his newfound emotional openness to the supposed empathy-boosting qualities of the OASIS, it is more likely that these bonds of camaraderie were reforged through the intimacy of participating in another world-saving ordeal with his friends.
At the end of the novel, the AI Wade reveals that the real Wade married Art3mis and that they are expecting a child. This reflects even greater maturity on Wade’s part, while also subtly implying a divide between real Wade and digital Wade, whose emotional development is arrested as he floats through the cosmos.
Samantha Cook/Art3mis
Born Samantha Cook, Art3mis is one of the four original gunters who completed Halliday’s Easter egg hunt in Ready Player One. She and Wade became romantically involved after the hunt, but an argument over whether ONI should be released to the public severed their relationship. By the start of the novel’s present action, her interactions with Wade continue to center on this conflict over whether ONI is a source of good in the world, as Wade believes, or an addiction that distracts people from the very real problems afflicting Earth. Unlike her fellow gunters, Art3mis never uses ONI, preferring to enter the OASIS using the old haptic suits that do not recreate sensations. Moreover, as part of her work at a foundation addressing climate change and global poverty, she prefers to travel the world in person rather than rely on virtual means.
Like other characters, Art3mis’s relationship with nostalgia is complex. Although she continues to love the John Hughes movies she watched in her youth, she acknowledges undercurrents of racism and misogyny in those pop culture artifacts.
Aech
Aech is a co-owner of GSS and one of the original gunters who completed the egg quest in Ready Player One. A Black lesbian, Aech used to present as a straight white male in the OASIS, but she eventually began to present as her natural self after she revealed her identity to Wade.
As one of only two non-white characters in the book, Aech often expresses how little pop culture artifacts like Tolkien books or John Hughes movies spoke to her growing up. Much of this stems from issues of representation; for example, while John Hughes films were uncommonly sensitive portraits of adolescence, his characters are overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and straight. Aech also calls out Tolkien’s record on race, embodied by the villainous and dark-skinned orcs and the perceived themes of anti-miscegenation.
Cline further explores the complicated nature of nostalgia by portraying how betrayed Aech felt when her hero Prince became a Jehovah’s Witness and disavowed the LGBTQIA+ community—her community.
Shoto
The fourth gunter and ally to Wade, Shoto is a Japanese teenager who is instrumental in solving the Seven Shards quest. Despite being the youngest, he is arguably the most emotionally mature member of the group at the start of the novel, with a wife named Kiki and a child on the way.
Shoto has an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture with a particular emphasis on early Japanese video games. He uses this knowledge to help Wade win the Second Shard on a planet devoted to gaming pioneer Rieko Kodama.
Unfortunately, Shoto’s appreciation of Prince is lacking, and he is struck down during the Afterworld battle for not showing appropriate respect for the recording artist.
L0hengrin
L0hengrin is the host of a popular YouTube channel devoted to gunters and one of the few influential voices in the OASIS who still supports Wade. Her avatar name is a reference to Wade’s Parzival avatar, which is based on Sir Percival of Arthurian legend; Lohengrin was Percival’s son.
A 19-year-old trans woman living near Dallas, L0hengrin reminds Wade of himself before he became a billionaire. When Wade unethically and illegally spies on L0hengrin, uncovering her assigned-at-birth gender, it is a profound violation that alters the opinion that Wade is a completely good person.
L0hengrin allies with Wade, helping him find both the First Shard and the sword Dorkslayer, which Og uses to strike down Anorak.
Kira Underwood Morrow
Og’s late wife Kira was a game developer and designer who went to high school with Og and Halliday. Deceased in the real world, Kira exists in the OASIS as a digital avatar created without her consent by Halliday—who was in love with her.
Her character is consistently used to provide context and exposition for the events of the novel. She represents an alternative to the extreme Silicon Valley archetypes embodied by Og and Halliday, and she shares key pieces of information, like how the ONI can be used to resurrect people in the OASIS. She is also an avenue for painting James Holliday in a better light, revealing that the two of them agreed that the ONI was too powerful to share with the world.
Anorak/James Halliday
The novel's antagonist, Anorak is an artificial non-player character modeled after James Halliday’s consciousness. Unlike Kira’s artificial consciousness, Anorak is corrupted. In creating this replica, Halliday removed many of his memories and some of his more toxic tendencies—like tricking Kira so he can copy her brain—to ensure the character would be a better version of himself. However, his plan backfired. When those memories and negative emotions flooded back to Anorak, he spiraled into malevolence.
This version of Halliday allows Wade to reexamine his attachment to the real man. Being confronted with these poorer qualities of his hero, Wade sees that he has to change his ways before he becomes just as corrupt.
Ogden “Og” Morrow
Loosely based on Steve Jobs, Og is the charismatic cofounder of GSS and Kira’s widower. From the start, he adamantly opposes Wade’s decision to make ONI public; later the reader learns that this is because he disagreed with Halliday’s decision to replicate Kira’s consciousness. Like Art3mis, Og feels that the ONI and OASIS as a whole keep people from confronting their actual lives.
However, on his deathbed after defeating Anorak, Og reconsiders, telling Art3mis that Wade should resurrect Kira. In the end, Wade also resurrects Og, even though Og did not explicitly instruct him to do so, raising additional questions about data and consent in the information age.
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By Ernest Cline
