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Sarah's Reviews > In Real Life
In Real Life
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I got this book via Net Galley and my feelings on it are very mixed, but lean towards the negative.
Pros:
- The art is really good, particularly at making the main character Anda's avatar show emotions with her face
- It's about a girl gamer which is awesome and is in the context of encouraging more girl gamers
- And it's a chubby girl!
Cons
- Fundamentally this is a book about how white people who try to play 'savior' to people of color when they don't know anything about the culture in question..... that ends when the white person is able to play savior to the people of color. I feel like the take home message was extremely mixed. In the interest of giving the story a happy ending, the authors end up undermining the entire message they were trying to make. In reality Anda probably would have never seen Raymond again.
- I was also a bit uncomfortable by the way the Chinese gold harvesters were shown with these generic and creepy avatars that made them all look alike. I don't know anything about gold harvesting in MMORGs but any time I see people of color shown in a way so they are generic and interchangeable, it raises my hackles.
Pros:
- The art is really good, particularly at making the main character Anda's avatar show emotions with her face
- It's about a girl gamer which is awesome and is in the context of encouraging more girl gamers
- And it's a chubby girl!
Cons
- Fundamentally this is a book about how white people who try to play 'savior' to people of color when they don't know anything about the culture in question..... that ends when the white person is able to play savior to the people of color. I feel like the take home message was extremely mixed. In the interest of giving the story a happy ending, the authors end up undermining the entire message they were trying to make. In reality Anda probably would have never seen Raymond again.
- I was also a bit uncomfortable by the way the Chinese gold harvesters were shown with these generic and creepy avatars that made them all look alike. I don't know anything about gold harvesting in MMORGs but any time I see people of color shown in a way so they are generic and interchangeable, it raises my hackles.
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In Real Life.
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
March 10, 2014
–
Finished Reading
March 11, 2014
– Shelved
March 11, 2014
– Shelved as:
graphic-novels
March 11, 2014
– Shelved as:
contemporary
April 3, 2017
– Shelved as:
fat
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by
Yoomi
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rated it 4 stars
May 03, 2014 04:58AM
Actually, I think the avatars of the gold harvesters were the generic ones that everyone had to start out with. And they were stuck with it because they weren't fighting and leveling up. They were just there to farm gold. That's why when Anda creates a new account, one of the girls asks why she's a "noob all of a sudden". My guess is her original account was better because she was invited into a guild from the start.
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Right - if all you're there for is to farm gold, you don't care what your avatar looks like so you just leave the default one.
Just chiming in as an avid MMORPG player - gold farmers traditionally travel in packs of 2-5 of all the same basic avatar, usually because one "live" farmer is running several versions of the game at once with each avatar following each other. Its easy to forget that behind these "faceless" avatars, made more so because they are exactly the same, there is a real person playing the game.
Dunno why the people commenting seems to be picking with one details from what you said about avatars, but you main point , wow I'm so gld you said it. I'm chinese and I feel disgusted after reading the book for the exact reason you said. The social problems and the struggles of Chinese workers only served the character arch of this white character, and wtf the ending with the Prince Charming reference??? I'm so angry and grossed out, and I'm glad you brought it up. It's horrifying that a lot of people seem to not see this.
Take a look at Cory Doctorow's YA novel For the Win, dealing with pretty much the identical premise, but in a more complex and intense way. It's like he wanted to do a graphic novel version here but, maybe because of the format or the audience opted for an unsatisfyingly pat happy ending.
They made them faceless and helpless at the beginning intentionally, how hard is it to understand. That helps to depict how people dehumanize others in real life. In the end Raymond gets a new human looking avatar 'cause Anda got her lesson. She sees him as real human with his real life and real problems now not a bunch of stereotypes.
The white/first-world guilt in this book is absolutely overwhelming and disgusting. So happy someone else mentioned it. This is way too complex an issue to discuss and solve in 200 pages. Like sure, an entire company changed their policies because one white girl on the internet told those poor, uneducated Chinese kids to stand up for themselves (/sarcasm).
