Quick side note before today’s post. Google AdSense is one of our ad services we use, and I noticed yesterday that it put some Donald Trump ads on our blog. I’ve blocked them. Let me know if you’re still seeing any. Fuck Donald Trump.
Armada: Chapter 14
Very much not in trouble for anything whatsoever, Zack is now on his way to the EDA’s secret moon base. As he approaches the shuttle, he overhears conversation, and it becomes pretty obvious we’re about to meet the rest of the top ten Armada players (save for the ones who are already recruited into the EDA, like Zack’s dad aka RedJive).
Thus far in this book, our characters have been a geeky white male teenager, a geeky white female teenager, a geeky white middle-aged male, and one of the aforementioned characters’ moms. So… we could do with a little diversity. What are the odds that rest of the top Armada players in the world are mostly American?
“Why does everyone always automatically assume that RedJive is a man?” a woman asked in a thick, Fargo-esque accent. “That’s pretty damn sexist, if you ask me.”
Good lord, I hope the bar for well-developed female characters in this novel isn’t just “woman who points out that things are sexist”. And having just written that, I’m completely certain that’s where the bar is.
And since this vaguely-characterizing-but-mostly-stock-character-establishing statement could only be said in the middle of an argument, I’m guessing that one of the other characters we’ll be spending a lot of time with for the rest of the book is an asshole men’s rights activist type.
“People assume RedJive is a guy because Red Five was a guy,” a male voice replied.
Oh fuck.
“Just like Maverick, Goose, Iceman, and every other ace fighter pilot in history.”
“You’re aware that those are all fictional characters, right?” [a] younger woman asked, talking over the man’s chuckling. “For your information, there have been female fighter pilots for over a hundred years now.” […]
After a pregnant pause, the male voice responded with an annoyed “Yeah, whatever.”
So on a surface level, this is a scene where some new characters point out that someone’s a sexist douche, and it’s hard to complain about that. It’s truthfully pretty promising that Cline wanted to introduce these characters getting all Feminist 101 on some asshole. It’s a nice starting point, but I can’t help but think that…
- It does feel very… basic? This could be fine, but it does ring a little hollow? This honestly might be a little beyond me (a male critic talking about feminism! on the internet! everyone’s favorite!) to criticize, so I’m gonna instead defer to an excerpt from Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist that kind of gets at my vague concerns about this: “Discussions about gender are often framed as either/or propositions. [Many books do] little to productively reframe the cultural conversation about gender. Instead, these books offered rather narrow insights into women and men and were, at times, disappointing for the opportunities they missed to bring nuance to how we think about gender.” I guess my concern at this early stage is that Armada‘s never gonna get less narrow than it is right now.
- This story’s totally going to want us to like the sexist character. I have no interest in that. Not that stories can’t be about people with a mess of good and bad qualities and challenge the reader to find the sympathy in the complexity of the human condition. (Roxane Gay again, “This is fiction, and if people cannot be flawed in fiction there’s no place left for us to be human.”) But it’s pretty clear by now that Armada isn’t a story with that grasp on nuance.
Zack enters the ship and meets the whole crew, who consist of a middle-aged white woman, a teenage African-American woman, a twentysomething Chinese man. Yay, diversity! Although, of course, there’s also the aforementioned…
“That’s Milo,” she said, gesturing to the bear-like man to her left, who was still staring at me with open hostility.
Huh. So. The caustic asshole man who was introduced into this story arguing that something that was sexist wasn’t actually sexist is named Milo. Sort of like… you know… gee, are there any well-known caustic asshole sexist men named Milo?
But seriously. Given how Armada is a story drowning in pop culture references without a shred of original thought, I think it’s fair to wonder if the sexist man whose name is Milo is actually named after an infamously sexist man whose name is Milo. Which if it is, and since I’m pretty sure this is a character we’re eventually supposed to kinda like, it comes off as a little… not very thought through…
ANYWAY, wow, we’ve talked about kind of a lot of social justice stuff and we’re like four pages into this chapter. Let’s get cracking! What actually happens?
- We learn everyone’s names and where they’re from. Milo is from Philadelphia, Debbie is a librarian from Minnesota, Lila/Whoadie is from New Orleans, and Jiang Chen is from China. What a crazy coincidence that these top five players are mostly Americ- NOPE. I’VE SAID A LOT ABOUT REPRESENTATION TODAY ALREADY. I NEED TO ACTUALLY SUMMARIZE THIS BOOK.
- Debbie’s handle in the game is “AtomicMom”. She actually explains that this is an “atomic bomb” pun. However this story ends, just remember that Armada felt the need to explain this pun to us.
- Milo’s handle is Kushmaster5000, which I am posting here without comment.
- Chen doesn’t speak English, but his QComm can provide imperfect translations in real time.
“I am not liking RedJive also,” Chen’s translator went on to declare loudly in its uninflected monotone. “He is an asshole total!”
Whoadie laughed an mimicked the translator’s voice while she made stiff robotic motions with her arms. “Yes!” she intoned. “The Baron is complete face-fuck!”
The others laughed
Is… is this racist? The butt of the joke is the translator, but it’s not not also targeted at the way the guy who can’t speak English and how he speaks. And it definitely does Other him, which is racist. Is this racist? Is this a kind of future racism we haven’t even invented yet?
Oh my god. So much is just slightly off about this chapter! Ok. Focus. Back to summarizing, Matthew. You can do this.
- Another character from the Armada video game, Finn Argobast, is revealed to be a real person. I already don’t remember who this is.
- Milo asks where RedJive, the top-ranked player is. Finn informs them that RedJive is General Xavier Lightman, who was recruited decades ago. Everyone makes the connection, forcing Zack to make an awkward confession that he grew up believing that his dad was dead and only found out otherwise a few hours ago. Finn does not seem to find any of this weird.
- We learn that Debbie had to leave her husband and three teenage children behind without saying goodbye. It’s heavily implied that Whoadie’s entire family died in Hurricane Katrina. We learn that Milo had a shitty, soul-crushing office job and is actually pretty pumped about not doing that anymore. Did I mention Chen is from China? Because, uh, that’s all we get about the non-American for some reason.
- Debbie prays and Milo acts like a dick about it. We get it, Milo. You’re the worst.
They weirdly have a rather long conversation this, complete with Whoadie quoting entire Bible verses about the beast in the pit in response to Milo joking, “in what part of the Bible did Jesus warn us about this alien invasion”. I honestly don’t know if this is symbolism/foreshadowing, but if the aliens turn out to be beasts in pits, everyone just pretend to be very surprised.
The book already starts going in the “we’re probably supposed to like Milo” direction I was worried about:
“[My sons] all play Terra Firma together every night, while their mom is playing Armada.” […]
“Fucking-A!” Milo shouted. “We’re gonna have AtomicMom’s boys whipping ass for our team, too?” He smiled at Debbie. “Those alien dipshits won’t stand a chance.”
To my surprise, Debbie returned his smile, and I found myself reconsidering my first impression of Milo. His Rocky Balboa-esque method of speaking somehow made his cocky enthusiasm seem endearing.
Yeah, I’m not there yet.
They get to the moon base, and there waiting for them, right in the hangar bay, is Zack’s dad. Can’t wait to see how this goes.
I feel like it would have been funnier/more clearly a joke making fun of how crappy the translator is (get it together, advanced future) if she’d been like “fuck-face complete” since the translator had said “asshole total”. Hers came off more as a standard LOL YOUR ENGLISH IS POOR.
If it hadn’t been like ‘the others laughed’ and Chen was also amused by it, it’s fine and actually is pretty amusing (who doesn’t love laughing at Google Translate’s strange translations?), but it comes across more mean here.
Christ. I am going to give Cline every benefit of the doubt and hope that he didn’t actually mean for Milo to be THAT Milo because…well…it’s not like Cline could have predicted recent events, but he probably could have made a very educated guess that Milo Y. was not just a harmless “provocateur”, even a year ago.
Oh good, the black person is from New Orleans and the wholesome white mom is from the Midwest. Why didn’t he go all out and make the Chinese guy from San Francisco?
I get the feeling that this was written hastily, to capitalize on the smash popularity of Ready Player One. Everything is so basic and stock and slapdash that I’m having a hard time believing that an editor looked at it for longer than it took to fix commas and throw it out the door.
I mean, it’s probably not SUPPOSED to be that Milo, and there’s no point really speculating. It’s more like… this book is steeped in reference, so it’s fair to wonder if this was a very tasteless reference
The translator thing also bothers me because we apparently have, like, spaceships which can be piloted by teenagers, and yet we apparently don’t have translators that include tone or even put words in the right order? It’s as if Cline realized that mocking the Chinese guy for not speaking English was bad, but instead of just not doing that he constructed a device so he could do it without looking racist.
Ugh, I don’t want to talk about how tired the whole “mistranslating translator” trope is. The onus of understanding English perfectly falls on the “Other”, but as soon it’s the other way around it’s “lol, this person can’t English good, but learning a second language is for chumps!”
I’d like to have seen Chen laugh at the terrible English-to-Chinese translation for himself, because who doesn’t love the terribleness of literal and direct translations?