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Awaken Online is one of my favourite friends' favourite book series, which is a pretty big recommendation. So of course I didn't want to ever read it. Look, a recommendation that big is pretty serious pressure - what if I didn't like the book? Well, we'll have to find out, because I didn't like the book. I'm sorry Adi!! I've read quite a few of the canonical books of the GameLit genre - Warcross, Snowcrash, and Ready Player One to name a few. Snowcrash is probably the best of the lot, which isn't a great sign when it's one of the originators of the genre; I feel like it's been mostly downhill from there. GameLit seems to appeal to people who like writing power fantasies & Mary Sues of various varieties. Now, Awaken Online is not technically GameLit - it's LitRPG. What does that mean for it? Well, it's like GameLit but worse. What if, as well as reading a book, you also had to read loads and loads of game pop-ups? That truly and genuinely seems to be the only difference to my eyes - LitRPG just brings in additional opportunities to be mind-numbingly repetitive. And let me tell you, Bagwell was already doing well enough without the extra opportunities. I generally feel bad writing overly mean reviews of books, especially ones that are indie/self-published, but Catharsis fits in the category of my other mean reviews where I feel entirely justified because they seem to have such a generally positive set of reviews. I mean, Bagwell's sitting on a 4.39 which is genuinely nigh-on unheard of on Goodreads, so I reckon he'll be ok with one scathing review out of the many. Alright, let's get on to the comprehensive list of things I didn't like:
1. Spelling and grammatical errors: on a surface level, there are frequent enough spelling & grammatical errors that I noticed, including misspelling the same word two different ways in the same sentence! There’s always going to be a few typos you miss but at some point, it crosses a threshold
2. Flat & unnatural characterisation and dialogue: I did not believe that the conversations that happened on the page were conversations that people would ever have in real life. There’s a fair amount of that unfortunate thing in which one character describes an event they both witnessed to another character, and they go, “Hey, remember when…?” It’s just unfortunately really clunky, and that makes it hard for the characters themselves to feel realistic too
3. Painful exposition: This problem of writing engaging/nuanced/varied etc dialogue also extends to the narration & exposition itself. One of my least favourite paragraphs reads, “The lawn at the front of the school was well manicured and dotted with large oaks. This was unusual nowadays. It was now 2076 and urban land was incredibly expensive.”
4. The treatment of women: Yet again, we find ourselves here again. Neatly summed up by dialogue from our protagonist himself, “Did Jerry say “she?” A female caretaker? Jason didn’t consider himself sexist, but this seemed unusual”. Jason may not consider himself sexist, but I sure do! By how much of a deal Jason makes it for one (1) woman to exist in this world and have a job, you will not be surprised that by my count there are only 5 female characters in this whole book, and none of them ever talk to each other. And that’s counting Jason’s teacher, who only exists for him to kill. I didn’t even bother trying to work out if they passed the Bechdel test because none of those 5 characters even show up in the same place spatially, let alone have a conversation. It’s just, disappointing for this to be the state of things. A radical feminist book is not one in which a big deal is made of the fact that women do exist and can play games, but one in which that is normal enough to not comment on.
5. Repetition, repetition, repetition: Kudos to Adi, I was warned that Bagwell has some words he really likes to overuse. Chief of which is the word “chuckled”. I would not like to ever see it again. This is very much true of the plot too – there’s a fair few battles which felt rather repetitive to me (although admittedly I don’t generally go crazy for action sequences in a book), and the previously-referred to issue of game pop-ups appearing on page was really infuriating. These factors together led to me skimming large swathes of text because I found them really boring, and it was clear where it was going to go anyway – I don’t think Jason loses a single battle in this whole book. The pop-ups for his character sheet are especially annoying, they take up a whole page and it’s just a big list of his stats. Useful were I playing him in a game, mind-numbing when you care about characters more as protagonists than tools. It barely even changes anyway because he massively min-maxes his character so most of the stats stay the same. I think Bagwell just liked looking at big numbers
6. Oh? Another 50 points into Willpower? What a surprise!!!!: Sorry, is me bringing up the repetitiveness a third time annoying? I’m so sorry
7. Does he think his audience is stupid?: It seems so. Bagwell does not allow his readers to ever come to their own conclusions, lest it be the incorrect one. Some great lines result from this. “Profit had certainly been one of his motivations for releasing AO. It was certainly what motivated the other board members.” Wow. The first 300 pages of the book in which I watched a company repeatedly ignore all warnings in order to make profit off of this game couldn’t have even slightly suggested this to me. And, an even better line from slightly later in the book, “He had certainly experienced his fair share of abuse at the hands of the wealthy. It was as though a certain amount of money desensitised a person to the consequences of their actions.” To be fair, there are a lot of people who manage, for example, to love Star Wars but think fascists are good, so maybe I’m assuming a little too much reading comprehension from his audience.
8. Concession to realities of self-published books of this nature: As I reach the half-way point on this list, I must take a quick pause to acknowledge What Sort of Book This Is, and The Genre Conventions That Come With It. Bagwell does not have a whole team behind him as far as I know, and likely did not have an editor in the same way a traditionally-published author would (in fact, they would generally have multiple). Self-publishing often requires quantity in order for you to make any money, and that means hooking your audience and selling a lot of books to them (this series has 14 books). Of course, that’s going to result in a slightly lower quality, a more watered-down plot, and could affect some of the other issues I’ve mentioned.
9. Nothing that happens in this book matters: When your book mostly takes place inside of a video game, you have a difficult balancing act to carry out – how do you make the impacts of the events on the protagonist clear? Unfortunately, I don’t think Bagwell hit the balance. There’s just too much focus on the in-game plot for the out-of-game plot to go anywhere. If the story was about a character taking control of a corrupt city and turning it into something both powerful and terrifying, that could be interesting. But a story about a random guy doing that in a video game is boring as hell. Just about all that happens to actual Jason is he moves out and then lies down for ages playing the game. I think Bagwell could’ve done well to spend a bit more time focusing on the guy behind the character – it would’ve helped a lot with the character motivations too, I think. A lot of the main plot of the book follows Jason taking over The Twilight Throne and then defending against an attack from another army. It’s unclear to me why I should particularly care about this – if he loses, he just respawns in the game. A great example of there being too much separation between character and player is the line, “Digital tears full of helplessness and frustration flowed freely down Riley’s cheeks.” I think this would’ve been a great moment to pull out from the game and show the impact on Riley herself, maybe sitting alone in her room. But instead, all we get is digital tears.
10. Unfortunate lack of nuance: Both characters & themes are left somewhat devoid of anything other than black or white. Especially Alex, who plays the role of the antagonist, is cast as completely evil, apparently from birth, for no particular reason. He bullies Jason for unclear reasons, apparently kills animals for fun (??), and blackmails Riley because he finds it fun to see her look sad. I also just wish there was more exploration of the themes of this novel, or maybe just that there were more themes? A lot of things happen, but not a lot of thought seems to have been put in about what that actually means for the narrative, or for the reader. Is Jason getting bullied at school for being poor a commentary on social class, and the ineffectiveness of scholarships in correcting economic disparity? Nope! Just a thing that exists so he can feel angry. Will his parents being environmental lawyers who neglect their child explore the way people put causes before people, preferring to fight the good fight than engage with small, tangible change? Not really. I don’t even really know why that’s the case at all honestly.
11. Unwillingness to engage with the world created: This seems to be pretty common in this genre of book, whether following in the footsteps of Snowcrash or for another reason, I’m not quite sure – they’re always set in dystopian near-futures. And then, they don’t engage with the dystopia at all, other than to give the characters an excuse to play VR games all the time. The beginning of the book sets up that this is a world that is environmentally fraught, barely any fresh food, that does still have the infrastructure to provide free internet to every citizen… and then it just doesn’t do anything with that. The whole book is escapism from the world Bagwell himself created! Clearly genuinely and truly I am not the target audience of the book, but I can’t help asking deeper questions. Why is this the case? Are other countries similar to the US or are they doing better? What is the government doing about this?
12. Jason is a Mary Sue, I’m Sorry: He never fails at everything, always has the perfect plan, and somehow is the first guy in the world to consider min-maxing his character or doing guerrilla tactics. Everyone else is stupid, follows rules, and Jason immediately becomes infamous and is contacted by the game developers for being such a special little boy. As I said, power fantasy
13. Finally, who the hell is this book targeted towards?: Ok, fine, yes, the answer is probably 13 year old edgy boys who are being forced to read books between games of COD or something. But seriously, it is odd to me that this book has such a simple plot & treats its readers like they’re stupid, but equally proudly states that it’s “Mature”, and should be read with caution (and constantly makes dick jokes….). It’s just a bit confused to me, it seems to desperately want to be a very adult book, but it just doesn’t seem to be complex or well-written enough to be targeted towards adults. Very odd.
All in all, I genuinely applaud Catharsis for being an intriguing enough book that I sat down, planned out, and wrote over 2,000 words about it. It was really interesting to pick it apart and find why exactly it didn’t work for me, and how I think the book could have been improved. Had it been merely boring, or badly-written, or mediocre, I would’ve just stopped reading and done something else. However, it had just enough good stuff, and enough fascinatingly bad stuff, that I couldn’t help reading until the end, and then rotating it around in my head to find all the jagged little edges. So, I think that’s good?
1. Spelling and grammatical errors: on a surface level, there are frequent enough spelling & grammatical errors that I noticed, including misspelling the same word two different ways in the same sentence! There’s always going to be a few typos you miss but at some point, it crosses a threshold
2. Flat & unnatural characterisation and dialogue: I did not believe that the conversations that happened on the page were conversations that people would ever have in real life. There’s a fair amount of that unfortunate thing in which one character describes an event they both witnessed to another character, and they go, “Hey, remember when…?” It’s just unfortunately really clunky, and that makes it hard for the characters themselves to feel realistic too
3. Painful exposition: This problem of writing engaging/nuanced/varied etc dialogue also extends to the narration & exposition itself. One of my least favourite paragraphs reads, “The lawn at the front of the school was well manicured and dotted with large oaks. This was unusual nowadays. It was now 2076 and urban land was incredibly expensive.”
4. The treatment of women: Yet again, we find ourselves here again. Neatly summed up by dialogue from our protagonist himself, “Did Jerry say “she?” A female caretaker? Jason didn’t consider himself sexist, but this seemed unusual”. Jason may not consider himself sexist, but I sure do! By how much of a deal Jason makes it for one (1) woman to exist in this world and have a job, you will not be surprised that by my count there are only 5 female characters in this whole book, and none of them ever talk to each other. And that’s counting Jason’s teacher, who only exists for him to kill. I didn’t even bother trying to work out if they passed the Bechdel test because none of those 5 characters even show up in the same place spatially, let alone have a conversation. It’s just, disappointing for this to be the state of things. A radical feminist book is not one in which a big deal is made of the fact that women do exist and can play games, but one in which that is normal enough to not comment on.
5. Repetition, repetition, repetition: Kudos to Adi, I was warned that Bagwell has some words he really likes to overuse. Chief of which is the word “chuckled”. I would not like to ever see it again. This is very much true of the plot too – there’s a fair few battles which felt rather repetitive to me (although admittedly I don’t generally go crazy for action sequences in a book), and the previously-referred to issue of game pop-ups appearing on page was really infuriating. These factors together led to me skimming large swathes of text because I found them really boring, and it was clear where it was going to go anyway – I don’t think Jason loses a single battle in this whole book. The pop-ups for his character sheet are especially annoying, they take up a whole page and it’s just a big list of his stats. Useful were I playing him in a game, mind-numbing when you care about characters more as protagonists than tools. It barely even changes anyway because he massively min-maxes his character so most of the stats stay the same. I think Bagwell just liked looking at big numbers
6. Oh? Another 50 points into Willpower? What a surprise!!!!: Sorry, is me bringing up the repetitiveness a third time annoying? I’m so sorry
7. Does he think his audience is stupid?: It seems so. Bagwell does not allow his readers to ever come to their own conclusions, lest it be the incorrect one. Some great lines result from this. “Profit had certainly been one of his motivations for releasing AO. It was certainly what motivated the other board members.” Wow. The first 300 pages of the book in which I watched a company repeatedly ignore all warnings in order to make profit off of this game couldn’t have even slightly suggested this to me. And, an even better line from slightly later in the book, “He had certainly experienced his fair share of abuse at the hands of the wealthy. It was as though a certain amount of money desensitised a person to the consequences of their actions.” To be fair, there are a lot of people who manage, for example, to love Star Wars but think fascists are good, so maybe I’m assuming a little too much reading comprehension from his audience.
8. Concession to realities of self-published books of this nature: As I reach the half-way point on this list, I must take a quick pause to acknowledge What Sort of Book This Is, and The Genre Conventions That Come With It. Bagwell does not have a whole team behind him as far as I know, and likely did not have an editor in the same way a traditionally-published author would (in fact, they would generally have multiple). Self-publishing often requires quantity in order for you to make any money, and that means hooking your audience and selling a lot of books to them (this series has 14 books). Of course, that’s going to result in a slightly lower quality, a more watered-down plot, and could affect some of the other issues I’ve mentioned.
9. Nothing that happens in this book matters: When your book mostly takes place inside of a video game, you have a difficult balancing act to carry out – how do you make the impacts of the events on the protagonist clear? Unfortunately, I don’t think Bagwell hit the balance. There’s just too much focus on the in-game plot for the out-of-game plot to go anywhere. If the story was about a character taking control of a corrupt city and turning it into something both powerful and terrifying, that could be interesting. But a story about a random guy doing that in a video game is boring as hell. Just about all that happens to actual Jason is he moves out and then lies down for ages playing the game. I think Bagwell could’ve done well to spend a bit more time focusing on the guy behind the character – it would’ve helped a lot with the character motivations too, I think. A lot of the main plot of the book follows Jason taking over The Twilight Throne and then defending against an attack from another army. It’s unclear to me why I should particularly care about this – if he loses, he just respawns in the game. A great example of there being too much separation between character and player is the line, “Digital tears full of helplessness and frustration flowed freely down Riley’s cheeks.” I think this would’ve been a great moment to pull out from the game and show the impact on Riley herself, maybe sitting alone in her room. But instead, all we get is digital tears.
10. Unfortunate lack of nuance: Both characters & themes are left somewhat devoid of anything other than black or white. Especially Alex, who plays the role of the antagonist, is cast as completely evil, apparently from birth, for no particular reason. He bullies Jason for unclear reasons, apparently kills animals for fun (??), and blackmails Riley because he finds it fun to see her look sad. I also just wish there was more exploration of the themes of this novel, or maybe just that there were more themes? A lot of things happen, but not a lot of thought seems to have been put in about what that actually means for the narrative, or for the reader. Is Jason getting bullied at school for being poor a commentary on social class, and the ineffectiveness of scholarships in correcting economic disparity? Nope! Just a thing that exists so he can feel angry. Will his parents being environmental lawyers who neglect their child explore the way people put causes before people, preferring to fight the good fight than engage with small, tangible change? Not really. I don’t even really know why that’s the case at all honestly.
11. Unwillingness to engage with the world created: This seems to be pretty common in this genre of book, whether following in the footsteps of Snowcrash or for another reason, I’m not quite sure – they’re always set in dystopian near-futures. And then, they don’t engage with the dystopia at all, other than to give the characters an excuse to play VR games all the time. The beginning of the book sets up that this is a world that is environmentally fraught, barely any fresh food, that does still have the infrastructure to provide free internet to every citizen… and then it just doesn’t do anything with that. The whole book is escapism from the world Bagwell himself created! Clearly genuinely and truly I am not the target audience of the book, but I can’t help asking deeper questions. Why is this the case? Are other countries similar to the US or are they doing better? What is the government doing about this?
12. Jason is a Mary Sue, I’m Sorry: He never fails at everything, always has the perfect plan, and somehow is the first guy in the world to consider min-maxing his character or doing guerrilla tactics. Everyone else is stupid, follows rules, and Jason immediately becomes infamous and is contacted by the game developers for being such a special little boy. As I said, power fantasy
13. Finally, who the hell is this book targeted towards?: Ok, fine, yes, the answer is probably 13 year old edgy boys who are being forced to read books between games of COD or something. But seriously, it is odd to me that this book has such a simple plot & treats its readers like they’re stupid, but equally proudly states that it’s “Mature”, and should be read with caution (and constantly makes dick jokes….). It’s just a bit confused to me, it seems to desperately want to be a very adult book, but it just doesn’t seem to be complex or well-written enough to be targeted towards adults. Very odd.
All in all, I genuinely applaud Catharsis for being an intriguing enough book that I sat down, planned out, and wrote over 2,000 words about it. It was really interesting to pick it apart and find why exactly it didn’t work for me, and how I think the book could have been improved. Had it been merely boring, or badly-written, or mediocre, I would’ve just stopped reading and done something else. However, it had just enough good stuff, and enough fascinatingly bad stuff, that I couldn’t help reading until the end, and then rotating it around in my head to find all the jagged little edges. So, I think that’s good?