Ready Player One | Jade Key Crispy Treats

Welcome back to another, very belated, #DISHTOPIA post. If you’re just joining me, this past month I hosted Fandom Foodies‘ recipe link-up inspired by works of dystopian fiction, films, and video games. So far I’ve shared recipes from Dishonored and Fallout: New Vegas. This week I’m serving up a new take on a retro classic in honor of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One: Jade Key Crispy Treats!

Click here to jump to the recipe for Jade Key Crispy Treats!

Ready Player One

To start this whole post out I will outright admit that I have not seen the film adaptation of Ready Player One yet. I have, however, read the book. For those who have not yet done either, here is a short premise.

It is the year 2044 in a world devastated by global warming, overpopulation, and the energy crises. To escape the bleak landscape of gray skies and stacked trailers people live, play, and work in an internet-linked holodeck known as the OASIS. When James Halliday, creator of the OASIS passes, though, he changes the entire world with a scavenger hunt for an Easter Egg worth his entire fortune and corporation.

And I’m not kidding when I say the whole world changes. James Halliday grew up in the 1980s and movies and video games during that time were his own personal oasis before he founded his company. After his death, his obsession becomes the world’s obsession — seekers of the “egg” tirelessly research and adopt details of Halliday’s life and loves in hope that it would help them find the keys to the proverbial and literal castle.

Paradise or Prison?

An ongoing theme in Ready Player One is that of escapism through nostalgia. In the book, the OASIS acts as a way to cope and be anybody you want to be — an equalizer even if only virtually. The trouble is, though, that society stagnates by ignoring everything outside of its completely customized paradise.

We see this in the archaic attitudes towards women, LGBT people and minorities, and less than ideal body-types that people in Ready Player One’s world have even in the year 2044. Why learn to be accepting of others when everyone can emulate society’s preferred appearance? We also see it in the world’s income disparity, lack of public assistance or environmental support unless it involves something in the OASIS. The money goes where the people are, and the people are all online, living in a world that can never exist beyond the wires.

Welcome to the bread-filled circus that inadvertently quells the masses into accepting the status quo.

The Jade Key to the Castle

So with this idea of escapism through nostalgia, I wanted to make a dessert that reminds us of our childhood while using elements from Ready Player One.

It takes three keys and three gates to open the OASIS’s Easter Egg. Spoilers, but main character Wade Wyatt finds the second, the Jade key, inside a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal. We also see him eating him eating “Fruity Rocks” cereal in an earlier chapter. I decided to combine both into a take on something from everyone’s childhood: Rice Krispie Treats!

To give this technicolor pixelated treat a greenish hue I mixed pistachio pudding mix into its molten marshmallow binding. You could use key lime gelatin mix, but I feel that pistachio plays better with the flavors present. Also, the nice thing I find about pudding mix is that it keeps the bars moister without sacrificing their structural integrity. This supposedly makes them last longer. I wouldn’t know, though. They lasted a whole two days in my house before being eaten by a grue.

So here it is, a gaming snack that screams the eighties — simple, sugar-coated, and horrendously colorful. If you liked this recipe and wanted to check out more ways to eat at the end of the world, check out my and Fandom Foodies‘ #DISHTOPIA link up here!

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