Don't Read the Comments
October 12, 2020
My original reaction to the premise of
Don’t Read the Comments by Eric Smith was that the world
didn’t need a gaming/streamer meet cute. After reading it, I can
say I was at least partly wrong. I think the diversity of the
characters and the realistic-ness of their interactions and
dialogue made it worth reading.
It also wasn’t like most other YA meet cutes in which the main
characters don’t know the identity of the person they’re talking
to online. In Don’t Read the Comments, both main characters
knew and had seen the person they’d been talking to. And it wasn’t
just text-based communication, because the played Reclaim the Sun
together, which had voice chat and VR. As opposed to like Tell Me
Three Things, the chats were realistic, which I liked a lot.
This book had some similarity to Geekerella, but it was much
better than Geekerella, of course. Both books revolve around a
(fictional) central theme: for Don’t Read the Comments it’s
the video game Reclaim the Sun and for Geekerella it’s the TV show
Starfield. I think I’m a fair critic because I’m not into
videogames or sci-fi TV, any videogame sounds cooler than a super
old Star-Wars parody.
It was heartbreaking to see Divya’s (or D1V’s) getting doxxed and
even harassed irl. The arguments that these internet trolls (aka
Vox Populi) used to justify themselves for harassing her was also
just complete nonsense. “She’s taking away money and space from
more talented people so we’re going to harass her in real life and
hack all her accounts, so she’s forced to quit”. Like who are they
to say there’s more talented people out there?? And she didn’t
just get a over 100,000 subscribers by chance. Like if you’re
going to be blatantly sexist and racist, don’t try to pretend like
that’s not what you’re doing. Harassment of women in the video
game community isn’t an issue I was engaged with in the past but
after reading Don’t Read the Comments, I’m more likely to
look into it.
This story was set in Philadelphia, which was cool because I
recently lived there for a while. There were some references to
Penn/ cafes near campus that I’ve seen but sadly never been to. I
really liked the diversity of the main characters as well! The
female lead is Indian while the male lead is Palestinian (?) (or
maybe a different place in the Middle East, I forgot). It was kind
of eye opening to me how many of these meet-cute or YA stories
have an all white cast and just a couple of ethnic characters for
diversity. It felt nice to be represented.
The actual meet-cute portion of it was pretty decent too. It
wasn’t overly cute, which is probably a good thing because real
life rarely is. It felt like it could really happen, which I think
is much better than what other meet-cutes portray.