Admittedly I’m forming an opinion solely on the basis of excerpts from the books, but my attitude toward RP1 is largely the same. From an external view, it’s about a character who thinks having an encyclopedic knowledge of 80s pop culture is a serviceable replacement for a personality, written by someone who seems to think that having an encyclopedic knowledge of 80s pop culture is a serviceable replacement for a personality. It doesn’t seem to want to engage with the nostalgia of its references or examine the media that comprise them, it just wants you to know that the character, and by extension the author, knows about them, and that because knowing about them is essential to the plot of winning the big puzzle game, they’re the best. It’s Scary Movie 4, not Scream. Or perhaps Gatekeeping: The Novel: The Movie: The Game: The Novel.
The movie seems to have a similar problem, just with a modified repertoire of media to reference. Any narrative that thinks it’s fine to unironically turn The Iron Giant back into a gun doesn’t have its head screwed on straight. (And because this constantly gets brought up whenever I or anyone else complain about this on Twitter, I know it’s a character in the movie that opts to use The Iron Giant as an avatar, but that doesn’t really change the underlying fact that the film is engaging in what is effectively nostalgia click-bait without comprehending or even touching on the problematic nature of such uninformed media appropriation on either a narrative or meta-textual level.)
