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.
Chapters 10-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
After Anorak disappears, Wade has a severe panic attack. Art3mis comforts him, her first sign of affection toward him in years. When Wade calms down, the group debates possible technical solutions to their predicament. But with less than 12 hours to go and a half-billion lives at stake, they see no other choice but to retrieve the Shards, at least until they can formulate a retaliatory plan.
Before joining them on their quest, Art3mis leaves the OASIS so she can parachute out of her Anorak-controlled private jet. But when a rough landing leaves her unconscious, Anorak sends the plane into a nosedive headed straight for her. The plane misses the mark, but its collision with the ground creates a giant fireball that scorches everything in a massive blast radius, leaving Art3mis’s fate unknown.
Chapter 11 Summary
As the group tries to process what happened—they watched the escape attempt on drone camera feeds—they hear Art3mis’s voice tell them she’s okay. She is headed to the hospital to have her burns treated, then she will log back on and help them recover the Shards.
Relieved, Wade, Aech, and Shoto direct their attention to decoding the riddle inscribed on the first Shard. Shoto infers that the first line—“Her paint and her canvas, the one and the zero”—is not about Kira; it’s about Rieko Kodama, one of the first women to design video games and an enormous influence on Kira. He adds that the second line—“The very first heroine, demoted to hero”—refers to Princess Kurumi, the star of a Kodama-designed arcade game called Princess Ninja. When the game was released in the United States on the Sega Master System, developers changed the protagonist into a generic male, Kazamaru.
Having cracked the riddle, the group travels to a shrine honoring Kodama in the Sega quadrant of the OASIS.
Chapter 12 Summary
Wade enters a portal to a sub-world devoted to Princess Ninja. Although Shoto is the Sega expert, as Halliday’s heir, Wade must complete whatever quest awaits him alone. Inside the portal is a replica of Happytime Pizza, a late-’80s arcade and pizza shop in Middletown. Wade sees that he is once again Kira, only this time a teenage version of her.
Wade walks to the Princess Ninja arcade cabinet and plays through the game’s 16 levels as Shoto whispers hints through an earpiece. When typing in his 200,000-point high score, Wade sees he is ranked second to Og, who scored 550,750 points when he recovered the second Shard earlier.
Chapter 13 Summary
When Wade walks away from the game, he sees a 16-year-old Og approach him. Wade realizes this is a recreation of the first time they met, and it feels just as vivid as the moment he experienced of Kira creating her first work of digital art. As Og gushes about Kira’s Princess Ninja performance, a clearly jealous teenage Halliday approaches to beg Og for a ride home. Og refuses, and Halliday slams his foot down, sending all the other NPCs away except himself. Halliday then morphs into a likeness of Kazamaru, the hero from the Americanized version of Princess Ninja, while Wade-as-Kira morphs into Princess Kurumi. The two fight, and Wade easily bests Halliday, causing the Second Shard to appear.
Wade touches the Shard, reverts back to Kira, and experiences the moment when a teenage Og tells Kira he loves her. Wade is then transported outside the portal, where he reunites with Aech and Shoto.
Like before, an inscription appears on the Shard. It reads: “Recast the foul, restore his ending. Andie’s first fate still needs mending” (176). After much debate, Wade figures out it is a reference to Andie Walsh, Molly Ringwald’s character in the 1986 John Hughes movie Pretty in Pink. In the film’s original ending, Andie ends up with Duckie, a social outcast played by Jon Cryer. That ending tested so poorly with audiences, however, that the producers forced Hughes to shoot a new ending in which Andie ends up with her rich love interest, Blane, played by Andrew McCarthy.
Just then, Art3mis returns, which is great timing given her intense John Hughes fandom. On her suggestion, the foursome heads to a planet named after Shermer, Illinois, the fictional suburb where many John Hughes films are set.
Chapter 14 Summary
Once on Shermer, Art3mis moves quickly to carry out her plan. In addition to restoring the original ending, in which Andie and Duckie end up together, she believes she must replace the Duckie played by Jon Cryer—whom audiences found so grating—with Robert Downey, Jr., Hughes’s original choice for the character. As played by Cryer, Art3mis argues, Duckie is as toxic and misogynistic as a bully character played by James Spader, who pursued Andie and then sabotaged her relationship with Blane after she rejected his advances.
Chapter 15 Summary
To carry out her plan, Art3mis tracks down Duckie in the halls of Shermer High School and beheads him with her sword. She takes his trademark shoes and tie, then instructs the group to split up so they can find Ian, Robert Downey Jr.’s character from the 1985 John Hughes film Weird Science.
Chapter 16 Summary
Art3mis tracks down Ian and, by bribing him with marijuana, convinces him to put on Duckie’s shoes and tie. Convinced that the chemistry between Ringwald and Downey, Jr. will restore the ending and satisfy the riddle, Art3mis deposits Ian outside the Shermer High prom, where Andie reunited with Blane. Meanwhile, Wade comes across numerous Hughes characters, including Long Duk Dong, Gedde Watanabe’s notoriously racist Asian American stereotype from Sixteen Candles.
Chapter 17 Summary
Outside the prom, Ian refuses to go in, unsure of what to say to Andie. On Wade’s suggestion, they track down John Hughes himself so they can procure an earlier draft of the screenplay and convince Ian to read it. In Hughes’s office, Wade sees what he believes to be a clue left by Og: a typewriter with the K, I, R, and A keys missing, spelling out KIRA. Certain that Og must have left a clue on the planet where he found the First Shard, Wade texts L0hengrin and asks her to search for anything out of the ordinary.
At the prom, Andie and the re-cast Duckie hit it off, and the Third Shard appears before Wade. When he touches it, he is transported to a cottage outside London, where Og helps Kira pack so she can escape her abusive, alcoholic stepfather.
Suddenly, Wade is back on the Shermer planet next to Art3mis. Instead of an inscription, the Third Shard bears an insignia made up of complicated mathematical symbols. Wade says it belongs to Queen Itsalot of Halcydonia, an educational planet he visited frequently as a refuge from his tumultuous upbringing.
Chapter 18 Summary
Being back on Halcydonia brings up enormously painful memories for Wade. He and his mother, who died of a heroin overdose when Wade was 11, would frequently visit Halcydonia to play its free games and cavort with characters from Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and other educational children’s classics. Wade only returned to Halcydonia one other time after his mother’s death, and when he did, he had a nervous breakdown.
Surrounded by his friends, Wade is able to maintain his composure as they track down Queen Itsalot. Just outside the Queen’s gate, Wade notices something incongruous to the fairy tale surroundings: NPCs of Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman’s characters, Charlie and Raymond Babbitt from the 1988 film Rain Man. Wade makes a note of this and moves on.
Queen Itsalot immediately grants Wade the Fourth Shard when he makes it to her throne room because he earned every Halcydonia Wearit-Merit Badge when he was an adolescent. Upon touching the Shard, he is transported to Kira’s office, where she and Og put the finishing touches on the Halcydonia Interactive company logo. Given that Halcydonia was a pet project of the two developers, Wade reflects on the fact that Kira and Og are like surrogate parents to him.
Back on Halcydonia, the clue inscribed on the Fourth Shard is the Love symbol adopted by the musician Prince in 1993. As one of the biggest Prince fans in the world, Aech is ecstatic to travel to the OASIS’s Prince planet, known as The Afterworld. First, however, the group must return to GSS’s virtual boardroom, where Faisal has more bad news to share.
Chapters 10-18 Analysis
These chapters cover roughly half of the protagonists’ quest to find the Seven Shards—a quest that brings them into contact with countless pop culture artifacts from the 1980s. Aside from being a way for Cline to pay tribute to his favorite creators and works, the various pop culture environments serve to question representation in media. For example, the Second Shard is located in a world devoted to the works of Rieko Kodama, one of the first female video game artists in the industry’s history, who contributed artwork to classic Sega games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Phantasy Star, and Altered Beast. Kodama is an illustrative example of the importance of bringing underrepresented voices into overly homogenous, male-dominated industries. In a 2004 interview, Kodama says she brings her experience as a woman to bear on her work, writing and designing female characters who break the traditional mold of princesses in need of rescue. (Almaci, Hasan Ali, and Heidi Kemps. “Interview: Rieko Kodama.” The Next Level, 13 Dec. 2004, web.archive.org/web/20171217053227/http://www.the-nextlevel.com/feature/interview-rieko-kodama/2.)
Issues of representation become far muddier when the group visits the Shermer planet, which mashes together various characters and sets from the films of American director John Hughes. Like many popular films of the era, the characters in Hughes’ films are predominantly white, and non-white characters tend toward tokenism or outright racism. The most notorious example is Long Duk Dong in 1984’s Sixteen Candles. Dong makes an appearance on the Shermer planet only long enough for Wade to mention the character’s infamy. Eric Nakamura, founder of the magazine Giant Bomb, recalls facing ridicule as an Asian American high schooler because of the film, writing, “You're being portrayed as a guy who just came off a boat and who's out of control. It’s like every bad stereotype possible, loaded into one character” (MacAdam, Alison. “Long Duk Dong: Last of the Hollywood Stereotypes?” NPR, 24 Mar. 2008, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88591800.)
These questions bubble under the surface of the text without ever being explicitly addressed and complicate Art3mis’s nostalgic adoration for Hughes’s films. For example, she says she can no longer watch Sixteen Candles, though she never explains why. Elsewhere, Aech takes one look about the Shermer planet and simply says, “I hate this place. It’s like being stuck in the Matrix. With the Brat Pack” (192). Although she never elaborates, it is telling that Aech and Shoto, the only two non-White characters in the book, suddenly disappear for the remaining duration of the group’s time on Shermer.
Art3mis points to other elements of John Hughes’s films she believes aged poorly. Though ostensibly the romantic lead of Pretty in Pink—not to mention a self-anointed nice guy—Duckie is capable of staggering misogyny. When Shoto says, “Poor Duckie,” in response to his relationship with Andie, Art3mis replies:
Poor Duckie? Don’t you mean poor Andie? She takes pity on the guy because she knows he’s struggling with his own sexual identity, and that he doesn’t have any other friends. And how does Duckie repay her sympathy and kindness? By ignoring her boundaries, hounding her twenty-four-seven, and humiliating her in public every chance he gets. And check out how he treats other women when Andie isn’t around (196).
Art3mis’s ambivalent attitude toward the films she loved growing up reflects a tricky balance between art, nostalgia, and representation. In his time and today, Hughes is acknowledged for painting relatively detailed, mature, and sensitive portraits of teenagers in an era when they were often depicted as horny, amoral children. Yet, as Catherine Driscoll writes in her book Teen Film: A Critical Introduction, “[H]is is a very partial picture of adolescence. The Hughes teen is white, suburban, and normatively middle-class [...] non-white characters appear in the background or are crass caricatures […].” (Driscoll, Catherine. Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Bloomsbury, 2011.)
When Art3mis violently cuts off Duckie’s head and replaces him with Robert Downey, Jr.’s less misogynistic—though still white—character Ian, it reads as her engaging in a form of restorative fan fiction, revising these bits of nostalgia to be less problematic in a modern sense.
Finally, these chapters see Wade grapple with his emotions in a new way. Up until now, his idea of mental health is filtered through layers of pop culture and nostalgia, reflected in his decision to see Robin Williams’s therapist character from Good Will Hunting rather than an actual human. On Halcydonia, however, he is forced to face the trauma of his mother’s death. He collapses into Art3mis’s arms in tears — the first show of true emotion in the book and likely his first in years. This shows Wade has a chance to avoid turning into Halliday, whose heroic status diminishes with each chapter.
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By Ernest Cline
