The worlds Cline crafts in Ready Player One and Ready Player Two betray the author’s deep, nostalgic love for pop culture—particularly music and film from the 1980s and content inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Whenever Cline’s characters step into the OASIS—where roughly 90 percent of the book takes place—they are bombarded by imagery related to Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings, the Smiths, Prince, Dungeons & Dragons, and John Hughes movies. Cline is on record as having written Halliday as a generational peer to himself, allowing him to create the OASIS in a way that reflects his own cultural obsessions.

Though steeped in nostalgia, the narrative posits that a life lived with such intimate connections to pop culture can be painful. One example comes early in the text, when Wade feels compelled to block all references to the song “Space Age Love Song” by A Flock of Seagulls because it reminds him of Art3mis. Later, this dynamic has potentially grievous consequences for Wade’s hopes of collecting the Seven Shards, when he finds himself woefully unprepared to solve Tolkien-based puzzles on Arda I because Tolkien is Art3mis’s favorite author.