#at some point i might just make a solo Kirito blog

[foraltruism]

I wonder if i should slightly (greatly) expand on the idea of Kirito being traumatized over having actual blood on his hands for killing people in SAO. Albeit it was to reduce the number of player killers and to subjugate Laughing Coffin, but i don't think this was explored enough nor has as much of an effect as it seems to on his mental state outside of facing Death Gun and PoH in GGO and Alicization

[natsubeatsrock]

So, I’ve been watching Sword Art Online: Abridged Parody, and...

I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to say that SAO Abridged has become the gold standard for what a good abridged series can do. While Team Four Star took 3 legendary IPs, Final Fantasy VII, Hellsing Ultimate, Dragon Ball Z are all generally considered to be fairly decent as stories. As much as people complain about DBZ’s random power ups, it’s not as if it was incoherent. Things make a decent amount of sense and that was the worst of the bunch.

Sword Art Online is notoriously problematic. No doubt I’m not the first person to say that. Plenty of people have said as much all over Tumblr and Youtube. In abridging SAO, Something Witty Entertainment managed to improve on what happened originally.

Now, I want to do something incredibly nerdy. (As if I haven’t done nerdy things on this blog before.) One of my favorite things about SAO Abridged is its insane sense of connections between episodes. Things are referenced that don’t matter until much later and jokes are often built on previous events long before the present episode. Two of the big plot points of the current arc are built on information we learned in a few previous episodes. I want to argue that episode 2 is the most important episode of the first arc because of its connections to every other episode in the arc.

To start, the narrator in the cold open connects this episode to the one before it by saying that a number of players died after being idiots. Notably some jumped into fire. If you remember, Klein struggled to kill a pig and named his avatar Ballsdeep69. In episode 2, this is shown in this episode in that players haven’t read the manual compiled by beta testers.

Though, it’s not as if that;s  the only reason they’d fail. In episode 3, the leader of the Black Cats took some of the tutorial NPCs from missions. Kayaba blames this as a factor in people failing miserably in the season finale. But we’ll get to him soon enough.

The intro plays and we’re in a meeting of players who are trying to beat a boss. The idea is that people will strategize to beat a boss by working together. This doesn’t pan out well throughout the series. Kirito is able to tank hits from seven lower level players in episode 4. In episode 5, the meeting to beat Sheeptar happens after 7 people. When they go after the meeting, 5 more died.

Now Kibaou makes his only appearance in the series. I don’t want to make too many “this character makes their debut here” connections. Asuna and Tiffany make their debut and are important characters in this series, but I’m not talking about them in this way. Kibaou is minor enough that I can mention him here. His stupid entrance makes his takeover of the Aincrad Liberation Front in episode 10 seem like a negative statement about them more than a positive one for him.

Though, episode 8 shows a bit of their incompetence on their own. While Corbax thinks his strategy of “group up and hit it till it dies” is revolutionary, it’s about as revolutionary as he is Hispanic. The strategy’s true origin is episode 2, as an alternative to Kirito’s “final solution”. That doesn’t work well and Kibaou starts to take power as a result of Corvax dying.

We then get Asuna’s troubles with menus. She’s not the only one with these issues, considering we learn Yoko has issues with the menu in episode 6. However, this is one of many clever ways to hint at Asuna’s ineptitude with the game early on. While she’s shown to have a lot of innate skill in this episode, that’s despite her inexperience. For all the changes made from the original, this was best shown in both versions by Asuna using her real name as her avatar name in the final episode of the arc.

Something I didn’t pick up on right away was that the setup for Laughing Coffin comes from episode 2. One player receives messages he believed to be from Jesus. At the end of the fight, he gets the command to kill them all and the end card is preluded with a creepy version of “Jesus Loves Me”. They come up in episodes 6 and 9. In episode 4, it comes up that other groups like Titan’s Hand have come up.

But the big thing that you see from this episode is a theme that runs through the first arc of this show. Kirito sees this game as an alternative to the real world. It would be easiest to make this the only real connection to this episode, but that would be lazy. (Clearly, this was written before I realized how crazy this “one post a day” idea was.)

Kirito mentions that he has power he didn’t in the real world in episode 1. While that may have felt like a throwaway line at the time. In episode 2, he uses that power to tell off the idiots around him, just like he wishes he could have done in real life. And to be honest, he might not be right about being able to solo the boss, but he’s definitely better than most everyone else in the boss room. Asuna might be on par with him skillwise, but he has more experience than her.

I almost called this section of connections “Kirito is better than those around him.” While he’s not the strongest player in SAO, as we end up learning, he’s certainly better than most of the people he’s playing alongside. This ego serves as fuel for tagging with Silica in episode 4 under the supposed threat of Laughing Coffin. It’s why we get the formation of “The Kirito is Always Right Foundation” in episodes 5 and 6. It’s why he challenges Heathcliff in episodes 9 and 11.

But something happens.

In episode 3, he unwittingly joins a guild because he’s such an amazing player. However, that wasn’t enough to save his guild mates from dying. Sadly, he had just decided to open up to people and the ordeal closed him off to people and even emotions according to episode 4. In episodes 4, 5, 7, and 8 we get the sense that this event had a serious emotional impact on him.

However, through these events he learns to open up to people more. Going on missions and teaming up with othes, he starts to open up to people. This obviously leads to a relationship with Asuna and Yui original. As stupid as he still feels the people around him are, he still has respect for him.

In episode 2, he tells the people, “Shoot for the stars. It will make it more fun when I kick you back into the dirt.” In episode 8, we see a change in his epic rant, which happens to be my favorite moment in the series. On humans he says, “They are without question a complete write-off as a species. And how dare you make me care about them!” And when Kayaba goes on a similar rant to Kirito’s after his identity is revealed, Kirito plays defense for them, lukewarm as it is.

And wouldn’t you know? Kirito is told that he could have served as a leader and inspiration to the people in SAO because he is better than so many of them. Sure, Kayaba bring the idea up that same episode and a few episodes earlier in trying to recruit him for the Knights of the Blood Oath. However, the idea first came up in episode 2.

[swans-anime-ramblings]

In defense of SAO

I recently watched SAO for the third time? I think?  and I’ve decided that I should write a blog about why I love this show, and why I don’t think it deserves all the hate it continually gets. A lot of my friends, who are lit majors, writers and other kinds of storytellers love this anime. We love talking about it, too. Contrary to many hater’s viewpoints, loving SAO doesn’t mean you have bad taste in anime. This is a great show and it’s one of my personal favorites. So, let’s talk SAO!

Let me start by staying that even though I think SAO is a great show, I don’t think it’s the best anime I’ve ever watched. If I were to rank the anime I’ve seen objectively, it wouldn’t even make my top 10. So for anyone thinking I’m going to make a case that “this is the best anime ever”, I’m not. 

One of people’s biggest complaints about SAO is that Kirito’s super strong. “He’s so OP!” and he gets this way “without much effort”. Long-time anime fans expect SAO to play out like a typical battle shonen with the whole “starting at the bottom, train, beat foe, triumph, train, get stronger, beat foe, triumph” cycle. SAO is a shonen anime, but is NOT a battle shonen. Battle shonen stories are about the main character getting stronger to achieve some kind of personal goal with aforementioned cycle. For some heroes, their goal is to be the strongest. For others, it’s to be King of the Pirates or Hokage. As you can plainly see, SAO doesn’t belong in this category. 

So let’s knock-out this idea that Kirito is “OP without much effort”, because that is absolutely not true. As a solo player, Kirito is constantly grinding to become strong enough to simply survive. When Kirito joins the Black Cats guild, one of the members looks around for him and doesn’t find him. The next scene shows Kirito fighting monsters alone at night before he runs into Kline. Kirito’s strength isn’t just because he’s “good”. Yeah, Kirito is obviously a very skilled gamer and is above average (as are all shonen heroes, I might add), but he’s CONSTANTLY working to level-up so he can stay alive. The anime just doesn’t show you this. Why? Because as every RPGer knows, grinding is boring AF.

Seriously, nobody wants to watch an anime of a guy grinding to level-up. As a gamer, I don’t want to see Kirito constantly grinding because hell, I don’t want to grind my own characters. Kirito talks about how he’s constantly having to “fight monsters to level-up” because he’s a solo player, and comments on his grinding throughout the anime. Kirito also talks about how leveling systems in RPG’s are unfair…aka, if he constantly grinds, he can be strong. “Strength in an MMO RPG is just an illusion,” Kirito says. So, it’s not as if the show doesn’t address how he gets his power, it’s just not in your face.

If SAO isn’t about a dude getting stronger like a typical battle shonen, what’s it’s about? There’s a couple themes. One theme is about Kirito’s journey as a selfish player to becoming someone who’d risk everything for the people around him. SAO abridged turns up Kirito’s obnoxiousness to an 11, but it isn’t baseless. Level 1 Kirito is awkward. He doesn’t want to make friends and he doesn’t want to help Kline and his friends. Instead of acknowledging that his skills could help a small group of people survive; Kirito simply leaves Kline behind. During the level 1 boss fight, Kirito reflects on his selfish choices.

It’s not that Kirito’s a bad person per-say, but he doesn’t want to be responsible for anyone else (hence the reason he’s a solo player). As SAO progresses, Kirito begins to open up by helping people, joining a guild, clamming up after everyone is killed, until his character development culminates with him falling in love with Asuna and putting his life on the line. It isn’t about Kirito winning through the power of friendship or the whole “nakama” plot point. Love is the most vulnerable relationship, so if Kirito’s character arc is about him making real connections, it makes sense that’s where his arc ends. Every encounter Kirito has in the Aincrad arc is to move him forward on this trajectory.

SAO’s larger arc which goes beyond Aincrad is about how technology affects our world. The good, the bad, and the ugly. This is why Kayaba himself is such an interesting character. He creates a death game, yet later we find out his technology was given to hospitals to be explored with patients who are suffering. There’s always this interesting balance between the positive and negative effects of advancement. In SAO’s latest arc which just concluded in the light novels, a “bottom-up AI” is developed, true artificial intelligence. There’s positives and negatives to artificial intelligence. 

Asuna and Kirito’s relationship is one of the best in all of anime, and as a female character, Asuna is written very well. In SAO, she’s the second-best player in the entire game, just behind Kirito (Heathcliff doesn’t count since he’s the GM). Some of her skills are better than Kirito’s as well, which Kirito talks about fondly in a later arc. Their relationship is based on mutual confidence and trust. After they’ve gotten together, Asuna says, “don’t worry Kirito. I’ll do everything I can to protect you. Make sure you protect me too, okay?” That’s the basis of a healthy relationship, and in my opinion, a way better ship than most others. 

Where SAO falls short

Earlier I talked about how as much as I love SAO, it doesn’t make my top ten best anime I’ve ever watched list. Because even though I think it’s a great anime, it has shortcomings which prevent it from ranking it among the best.

The first and biggest problem, is the way in which the story was created. Despite this information being readily available, it isn’t something many people know: SAO was written by Reki Kawahara for a contest. While writing, he went over the page limit so instead of submitting it, he published it online under a pseudo name. Later he submitted Accel World, won the contest, and his work was officially published. The publishing company then requested SAO and he took it offline. In some ways, this scenario is a writer’s dream. You write-up a story for a competition, and suddenly, a publisher comes to you and wants to publish your work. I’m salivating just thinking about it. But because of the competition, Kawahara wrote his novel in an a-typical fashion. And as much as I love SAO, it hurt the story to be written this way.

There’s this frustrating sense that SAO should be much better than it is. Kawahara knows a lot about gaming. There’s so many jokes and callbacks specific to gaming and the premise of SAO as a game is awesome. I want this game to be real (minus the whole death part). I want to play it. I wanted to watch what happens in Aincrad for much longer than I did. I think everyone is agreed; the anime moves too fast.

I think Kawahara himself understands and recognizes this, and that’s the reason he’s writing SAO Progressive. In this series, Kawahara’s re-writing the story of Aincrad floor by floor. But he’s also changed the story a bit, because Asuna and Kirito don’t end their party after level one. Instead, they continue traveling together. And he made the change because the story would be boring otherwise.

SAO also has that harem thing going on, and it’s really annoying. Kirito collects women. Some are more interesting than others, but at the end of the day, it just feels…blech. It feels cheap, and it’s a terrible trope. Can you tell I hate it? Haha.

There’s also the bit that comes after Aincrad, Alfheim Online, and that arc just…well, it’s not good. Asuna becoming the damsel in distress sucks. I don’t think I’d mind it as much if she managed to log-out the other players who were being held captive before being re-captured, but sadly that’s not the case. Asuna, the Lightning Flash and badass of SAO does so little and it was disappointing.

So yeah, SAO has some issues, but this anime is still great. It’s got a wonderful story, an awesome romance, and at the end of the day, it definitely doesn’t deserve all the hate. I think that it’s trendy to dislike popular things. There’s a reason SAO is popular, and that reason means no matter how many anime I watch, SAO will always be one of my favorites. 

Hope you enjoyed 😊