The male equivalent of Twilight: a poorly written, ill-conceived juvenile fantasy that not only accepts, but actually celebrates some of the dumbest and most harmful of society’s gender role stereotypes. This is masculinity idealized as incompetence, feminity as nagging, skill as luck. It leans heavily on the reader’s familiarity with the most boring norms of video game design rather than creating anything substantively new or interesting. Yet somehow the book manages to spend large portions on direct explanatory exposition; the author’s philosophy seems to be “why show The Reader, when you can just tell them.” The only (small) bright spots are the quietly cynical treatments of capitalism and bureaucracy.
The narrator’s voicing of the main character is aggressively stupid, which fits, and he does decent world accents, but listening to a guttural dumb-bro mumble in confusion for hours on end is absolutely grating.
I hate this book and what its popularity says about society.