#hideotanaka

OMG so I just finished Wildcard, had my life shook, spent over an hour catatonic (by which I mean reminiscing by looking for nonexistent fanfictions and looking at Marie Lu’s IG posts like the stalker I am). Which culminated into considering what happens between the end of Wildcard and Legend.

Warcross time setting: according to Marie Lu on Twitter, it’s “set *almost* in present day, ie 10 years in the future!”. To make number crunching easier for us, let’s round to 2030.

Based upon that assumption, Hideo (21 years old) was born in 2009 (damn, I feel like a pedophile now that I realize he would only be 9 years old). Emika (18 years old) was born around 2012.

Legend time setting: According to Champion, the Three-Year Flood that eventually caused the formation of the Republic and the Colonies occurred around 2046.

Oof, turns out there’s still quite a bit of action left in our Warcross characters’ lives! By the time the Flood rolls around in 2046, Hideo will only be 37 years old while Emika’s at 34.

Based on the Legend trilogy, a lot of intellectuals and top-thinkers fled for either Antarctica or Africa (the latter if they were from Europe and didn’t live in Norway, France, Spain, Germany, and the British Isles). Considering Emika would have stayed in Japan since she became CEO of Henka Games, and Japan is pretty well known for tsunamis + the fact it’s an island, I think it’s a given that Hideo and Emika must have fled for Antarctica when the Flood hit. By this time, the NeuroLinks must have been well imbedded into the world again after it was reprogrammed, so the question is, what happened to them? The Republic and the Colonies clearly didn’t have them by the time Legend happened, and from how Antarctica is made to sound like this amazing utopia while others pale in comparison, it seems like the other superpowers of the time (China and Africa) also do not have NeuroLinks anymore. Did Hideo/Emika/Henka decide to disconnect or change the link in the process of forming the new government in Antarctica, using NeuroLink as the basis?

And what happened to the Phoenix Riders, Tremaine, Jax, and Sasuke?

Well, let’s see.

Asher Wing — that’s easy. He went back to LA, and then had kids with Hammie (?) or maybe his brother (Daniel) had kids, and then give or take a hundred fifty years, we have Day. Although... that would mean he spent the rest of his days under Republic rule, probably never hearing from his friends again. (I realize this is all a headcannon, but here’s a headcannon of my headcannon: he has an optimized form of NeuroLink ‘cause he’s friends with Emika and Hideo ofc and he can direct link with them and the others!)

Hammie — said she was going back to Houston at the end of Wildcard along with frequent visits to LA. Presuming she and Asher got married and presuming Day descends from Asher’s side of the family and not Daniel’s, she moved to LA to be with him. She also spends the rest of her days suppressed under Republic rule.

Roshan — UK, said he was going back to London at the end of Wildcard. According to Champion, the British Isles still exist, so I’ll assume the UK is going strong. Well, as strong as it can; it’s not considered a superpower anymore.

Tremaine — Presumed to join Roshan in London. We can also assume they got married and adopted kids and then lost touch with everyone after the Flood. Yikes, this is getting depressing real fast.

Jax — Considering her ability to kill, it seems justifiable to say that many people have died by her hand. Thus, as much as it kills me on the inside to say on this, I think Jax ended up with a life sentence at the end of Wildcard, with a parole (since she was basically manipulated into killing) after x amount of years, which we’ll assume never happens, because the Flood happens around 16 years after the events of Warcross. I’m assuming her parole was after 25 years of good behavior. In this case, I foresee two possible outcomes.

THE BAD OUTCOME: Let’s be honest, Japan probably gets flooded real fast because 1) low elevation, 2) ocean!, 3) its a tsunami hotspot. Everyone’s going to be climbing skyscrapers via ninety flights of stairs; no one cares about the prisoners. She drowns.

THE GOOD OUTCOME: No one cares about the prisoners (by which I mean only Jax) except Sasuke and Emika. I foresee Sasuke hacking the codes and breaking her out of prison while alerting Emika to pick her up. Jax goes to Antarctica with Emika and Hideo. So I guess the Flood is a blessing; I don’t think I can bear thinking about Jax spending her entire life behind bars.

Sasuke — seems to be the only person who I’m not sure where he went... he’s literally data, the Internet, a worm, right? So theoretically, as long as the Web exists, he does, too. Of course, the NeuroLink was destroyed/disappeared somewhere along the line in pretty much the entire world. Perhaps the connections of computers between nations were also similarly severed, no longer allowing Sasuke to access every single piece of online information.

Perhaps he is the part of the algorithm behind the NeuroLink seen as a part of life and society in Antarctica in Champion. When June wonders how exactly an action is determined as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, maybe he has a hand in deciding.

Or perhaps, he can access all the computers in the world, and that’s why Antarctica has so much information stored in those cylindrical simulation booths of theirs.

Wow!! I just finished reading WarCross by Marie Lu, and oh my gosh it really took me by surprised. I’ve read a couple of her other books, mainly the Legend series, but I was still wary going into this one. I think it was because it deals a lot with science fiction, and sometimes that can be a bit dense in my experience, but it was super easy to fall into this book. 

I must admit, I was reading this book for longer than I had planned. That was probably my fault as I kind of fell out of the reading mood for a little bit just cause I was so tired from work. I was stuck somewhere between pages 40-50 for about a week, only picking it up when I had seconds to spare and not reading often. But this past weekend I pushed myself to read and kept going and I’m so happy I did. Once you get into the book, everything gets knocked up a level. Whenever my friends have asked me about the book, all I can say is that it’s wild (haha get it, it’s wild like a wild card) - you’ll get my dumb joke if you’ve read the book. 

I'm going to attempt to describe this book as briefly and coherently as possible, so bear with me. This universe is one that relies heavily on the influence of technology, specifically a device known as the Neuro-Link, which is basically a pair of glasses that once on submerges the wearer in virtual reality. In this universe a game known as WarCross is ridiculously popular, everyone plays it. This story follows a young woman named Emika Chen, and when the story starts she is working on completing a bounty hunt, that’s her job (I know super badass), and she’s trying to avoid being evicted from her apartment. Emika is a special girl - she’s incredible at hacking, but because of a crime committed when she was a kid, no-one will give her a job involving tech. Everything about her is off the grid, most of her stuff is old, used, and probably hacked. After a stunt she pulls, to make some money, she ends up on the radar of the creator of both the Neuro-Link and WarCross game, Hideo Tanaka, who asks her to work for him. I think that’s about as much information I can give before I start to reveal anything about the story, but believe me it takes so many turns and is definitely worth the read. 

What I really appreciated about Marie Lu’s writing is that she made it easy to follow this story, one that’s heavily incorporating technology, without feeling dumb or overwhelmed with terminology. I mean the book centers around this brain interface and a video game that relies on it, she had to create and explain a game which has several moving parts in a way that wouldn’t lose her readers along the way. She artfully constructed this world, where people live completely different lives than we do, while simultaneously building the virtual reality which seamlessly overlaps it. Their world and what they were seeing was described so beautifully, she effectively painted quite the picture. 

I wanted to quickly touch on the romance elements in this book ~ don’t read past this area if you haven’t read the book yet ~ I found the love involved to be perfectly placed and timed, and not something that felt forced. Maybe it’s because I’m a hopeless romantic but every interaction between Hideo and Emika made me wanna keep reading, and their intimate scenes together were delivered flawlessly. As one of my friends would say, the romance was A+

As you can probably tell I really enjoyed this book, I’m super excited to read the next one. I just have to knock another books off my list before I pick that one up. It ended with a cliffhanger of sorts, but mostly it was the anticipation of “how’re the characters going to get out of this, while still maintaining their relationships??” and boy I can’t wait to find out how the story continues.