The saddest story I know.

Once upon a time, there was a geek.

You know what geeks used to be, right? In the before times, before The Fellowship of the Ring and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, before Dungeons and Dragons went online and you had to share the core books with five or six other people who left cheeto dust on the important pages, when you had to deal with THACO, and the best reading material was to be found in mangled paperbacks with Raistlin and Caramon on the cover…

… it wasn’t cool to be a geek. But- if you were very lucky- you got to find a few of your own kind. Maybe one was in the closet, and another was staying up til 2am to catch their favorite anime, while another was really into the Smiths. And you all accepted each other’s quirks and constant effusions on their own pet topic because that was who you had that could understand how someone could care about what number came up on the die and exploring new worlds on green lined graph paper. Oh, and there was always someone’s mom who you had to hide all the books and maps from, because she was convinced all that stuff led to demon worship cause Tom Hanks was in a movie that said so. (Not even joking here, Mazes and Monsters, two stars on IMDB.com, check it out.)

That’s what it was to be a geek in the before times.

And there was one very special geek who saw it all and found a way to tell the story of those thousands of geeks that had come before. It was a great story, one that winked at you knowingly and reached down into the hearts of all of us that remembered the before time and reminded us of all that we’d shared and loved. It told our favorite kind of tale, too, of the underdog that triumphed over the faceless hordes of evil, the kind that makes us all feel a little more powerful.

And it was… well, fantastic.

So we read it over and over and over, and passed it on to our fellow geeks from the before time. And the after geeks picked it up too, and they also loved it.

And then, that geek that made it all happen decided it needed to be a movie.

Which, as an idea, isn’t inherently terrible, I guess. But did you ever notice, sometimes you have an idea of something simple and pure.. and you share it.. and then everyone’s voice gets mixed up and you lose your own?

Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. This geek got to live the dream of being a part of a world they’d only dreamed of, and started listening to all those voices. And they sat down with their magnum opus…

… and butchered the ever living fuck out of it.

When it was all done, what ended up on the screen didn’t resemble the story so many geeks had loved at all. But, you know, on the whole of it, it wasn’t a bad story, exactly. It just wasn’t the same story. It wasn’t epic or classic, it was a summer blockbuster without the depth and resonance that had made the story real.

And a lot of geeks had to kind of be content with that.

But it wasn’t over.

With all those other voices still ringing in their ears, the geek went on and wrote another story that came after the first one. A story that took the underdog that had us rooting for them and turned them into an asshole. Somehow, all of the things that were done with a wink the first time just fell flat. It turned the characters we’d embraced into flat one note jokes.

It’s the saddest story I know- that someone with the power to bring a lot of people together and catch the flavor of the before time so strongly that even those that came after could relate destroyed it to make something marketable. And utterly forgettable.

What I’m saying here- Ernest Cline brought our Velveteen Rabbit to life then he fucking gutted it on screen, then wrote a sequel in which he spread the stuffing-guts all over while capering with glee all the way to the bank with his big fucking check.

You might say I didn’t like Ready Player Two.