Armada - Ernest Cline **SPOILERS**

I wanted to like Armada. I did, I swear. I like Ready Player One, regardless of the somewhat not quite poor writing. With Armada, I expected to see Cline evolve--and to a certain degree, he did. He wove a semi-decent plot twist, trite as it was, into an unbelievably huge trope of geekdom. Where RP1 was believable, Armada was not. During the entirety of the novel, I was completely unable to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the story. RP1 gave us OASIS and things within it that were completely possible because it was a video game. In essence, I am comparing Armada to Pixels. It is a video game-geek dream come to life for the main character. Wade from RP1 was a more sympathetic character because he's caught in a life of poverty and he was relatively well rounded as a three dimensional character. Zach Lightman, on the other hand... Never grew, never matured. Just continued to be amazingly awesome at video games and that was the entire book. His emotional turmoil never came to a head--he was constantly angry at either his father or the situation, which is understandable given that he thought his father was dead and the situation at hand was the end of the world.

My other big issue with Armada: the use of the manic pixie dream girl. This is by far the most ridiculous and anti-feminist fiction tool there is. I fucking hate it. Zooey Deschanel happens to play them with alarming frequency, much as I love her and her show, New Girl. But I hate that type of stock character--and no, I do not think that Jess is a MPDG. She is quirky and weird and I adore her.

Armada reads more like a conspiracy theory/science fiction nerd celebration than anything else. Not only is Zach's mom a great mom--single widow who put herself through school and raised a child on her own, but she is also gorgeous, and she plays video games. Not only is Zach a super nerd, he is also apparently a total badass, because hey, let's kick the school bully's ass so badly in grade school that it follows me all the way to my senior year in high school. On top of all of this, there is the notion that civilians could possibly fight a war waged with such advanced technology and there be a lack of mass hysteria is beyond ridiculous. Cline paints an overly optimistic view of humanity in the face of a global crisis. Katrina was a disaster, not just because it was a hurricane, but because an entire community went crazy and our government was stupid about it. So, invading aliens and a global attitude of team work? No. Just no.

Suffice to say, I hated it.