Of all Shakespeare’s comedies to adapt for a modern audience, Twelfth Night is a terrific one. Playing around with gender and sexual identities plays very well into a comedy about everyone falling in love with the wrong person without it being too weird. And what a genius move it was to use an anonymous MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) space for these relationships to play out in.
Viola “Vi” Reyes is the brash, outspoken, and frankly quite mean VP of her high school’s student body. She plays second string to Jack “Duke” Orsino, the football star slated to earn a coveted college position but who does not make a good student body president. When Jack tears his ACL and has to spend weeks recovering, he gets involved in the popular fantasy MMORPG Twelfth Knight. There, he meets and becomes close to a player named Cesario, who is actually Vi’s avatar in the game…
If you like (or even remember) the 2006 Amanda Bynes comedy She’s the Man, you’ll also like Twelfth Knight. They’re both adaptations of the same story, but Twelfth Knight allows itself more flexibility with gender and sexual identities. Since Vi is only disguised as a man online, and not in her day-to-day life, that allows Olivia, the object of Jack’s affections, to grow close to Vi as a lesbian, not as a woman falling in love with a person she assumes is a man. It’s probably not as funny, but the relationships built among these characters are compelling and sweet.
Plus, Vi, Jack, and all their friends are total nerds and I absolutely love it!
Twelfth Knight goes hand-in-hand with the Dungeons and Dragons-esque game that Vi and her friends play called ConQuest. Vi, as Cesario, bonds with Jack online about their mutual love for fantasy-drama TV shows and Vi even shows Jack the fun of a fantasy comic convention where she cosplays her original ConQuest character. I was not expecting this level of fandom love from this book (I mean, it’s hard to top the Once Upon a Con series on that front) and it endeared me so much to these characters.
Vi and Jack’s relationship is a bit of a slow burn, but their growing relationship is cute. I mean, I can hardly resist good chemistry, but when it’s built on two teenagers being complete nerds with each other? I’m so proud of these two! Admittedly, how their third-act fight plays out couldn’t have been more perfect, and as always, thank God it didn’t last more than a few pages.
I also like what they do with Olivia’s character. She’s more than just a pretty cheerleader this time, being just as much a nerd for fantasy fandom stuff as Vi and Jack. And her friendship with Vi? So sweet! She’s the first person to really bring out Vi’s soft side.
But probably the most important thing with this book is talking about why Vi felt the need to have a male avatar to begin with. Although I have not played on a MMORPG before, I can imagine it is filled with people who would rather bully other players and pretend to be important than just having fun with other like-minded nerds. Vi deals with so much microaggression against her as a female player that it only feels natural to hide her identity, just so she can enjoy an online game. It’s simply become too easy for her to feel put-upon and targeted in the place she loves most.
Even her ConQuest group, at first, is full of people who would rather wrestle command of the game than just hang with their friends and enjoy the story. It’s true that a bunch of microaggressions can add up to make a woman very rightfully angry, especially if she simply wants to be part of something fun without her gender becoming too relevant to it.
I mean, maybe every so often, it feels good to enjoy a quest with an unabashedly happy ending, rather than getting caught up in all the battle and blood and gore. Maybe it’s good to let a man and woman be equal rather than killing off an important female character just to give the male lead a motivation.
This book is jam-packed with commentary on gender norms, but it tells a fun story without bogging everything down. After all, if you’re spending time in a fantasy MMORPG, it’s best to take little bites of hard truths while enjoying the ride all the same.
The Library Key 