Sword Art Online: An Informal Review

Ughghgghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Okay. Deep lore time. I didn't watch anime growing up, or really much now. Up to a point—put a pin in it—I didn't play much video games either except Minecraft because my friends had it (and now I'm basically back to just Minecraft and the occasional farming game, although lately I got really into Miitopia for some reason). Most of my interests were things that my friends were interested in, and I'm still like that now to some extent.

I was 13 years old. My friends from my old school told me that Sword Art Online was really good. Some friends from my new school told me that Sword Art Online was really good. This scene girl who wore a fucking cat tail to school told me that Sword Art Online was really good. So I watched it.

I really liked it. Sort of. I skipped the parts I didn't like on rewatches, but otherwise got really into it. I read all the books. I collected all the fan translations and followed their progress each day. I compiled a Google Drive of them and wrote a guide for fans of the show on how to best approach the books (e.g., "You should read it in the order of publication rather than chronologically because that's how the themes develop!"). I cut and arranged the first 14 episodes of the show into a movie-length adaptation the first book, and that became my favorite way of watching it. I read fanfiction. Did forum RP. Everything. It was probably like my #1 interest for two years. And then I just sort of stopped?

What attracted me to Sword Art Online—and this is where the delusion kicks in—was the romance. Again, I didn't play video games. It might have even been Sword Art Online that made me tell my best friend that I wanted to try World of Warcraft because he played it (and that's part of why he liked Sword Art Online). But that's the kicker. It's a story about how this high school kid, who's the best gamer in the world, saves people from being trapped inside an MMO and also get the girl (herself a sort of domesticated Amazon). I did not relate to him at all. Rather, I related to that female protagonist—didn't play video games, got stuck there by accident, and had to rely on being athletic/smart/charismatic to survive an utterly unfamiliar world. And he loved her.

It took a couple years to sort that out.

Once I got new friends, new interests, new crushes, I entirely dropped and forgot all my interest in Sword Art Online. Literally trying to think of what big things took its place. Parks & Recreation for a while. Steven Universe. Evangelion? More lately I had been really into Drag Race, Succession, and Barry. Killing Eve for a while but it makes me flinch sometimes. Random drama shows. A few anime my partner shows me, like Heaven's Design Team which I adore. What else. Red vs. Blue (Grimmons is real!). Minecraft YouTubers.

I forgot about Sword Art Online, only to remember lately how obsessed with it I was. So I decided, for memory's sake, why not revisit it and see what it was like?

Lol.

Sword Art Online: The Show

I rewatched the first 14 episodes minus the harem bits that I pretended weren't there when I was 13.

Oh God. It was not good. I hate this Kirito fucker. The first episode he keeps rolling his eyes and shit because he's such a leet fucking gamer. The show frames him like a total badass. I don't like him.

I feel bad for Asuna. The first episode she's in it's like, oh she's such a badass and also she's a girl. The next two episodes she's in are this snail-paced whodunnit, and for some reason she's introduced as like a stuck-up bitch? She and Kirito fight because on one hand she takes the whole finish-the-game mission (apparently) too seriously, but he's also mad that she's willing to use (respawning, non-intelligent) NPCs as monster bait. Whatever, dude. Fuck yourself.

One of Asuna's early developments was that she finds the food simulation in the game to be a great source of comfort, so she learns how to cook and min-maxes it like a fantastic weird ass. I love when female characters get to be neurotic freaks. But then when the plot kicks up again, she's reintroduced because Kirito got rare meat from killing a special rabbit and she happens to walk into the store where he's talking about it with someone else. Then he's like, "Oh, yeah! You can cook it!" And she's like, "Okay!" It's the kind of thing that would make sense if they were, again, both kind of weird asses, but the show makes it come across like he's taking her for granted. I was just icked.

While at dinner, they talk and Asuna invites Kirito to start a new party with her because, although he's a solo player, they made a good team (though that was really, like, once or twice and I thought he came across like an overconfident asshole). They party up, go to the dungeons, find the boss of that floor. Asuna made sandwiches. They fight the boss with some other friends. Kirito reveals that he has dual-wielding (gasp!) because they all ended up overwhelmed, and even he passes out exhausted after the fight. Asuna holds him and cries. I kind of forgot why she likes him?

Meanwhile there's this insane political situation because, for some reason, Asuna's guild perceives Kirito as scalping her or at least monopolizing her time. It's not entirely clear. She has a bodyguard from the guild who's a total weird ass that ends up trying to kill Kirito later because it turns out he's a player-killer (spooky!). Then, when Asuna and Kirito actually get together and Asuna asks for a leave of absence from the guild, the guild leader (also secretly the creator and final boss of the game) challenges Kirito to a duel for taking away his highest ranking lieutenant.

Like: I don't understand why Asuna's riding Kirito this fucking bad, but what's it to this guy?

The best part, the part that I remember rewatching over and over again, was when they actually get married and move to a log cabin and just hang out there. Asuna sets her morning timer 10 minutes before Kirito so she can watch him wake up (this was a detail from the book that we only see sort-of implied in the show). One day, they find this child faint in the woods, and they take her in and nurse her back to health. Asuna makes sandwiches, and the girl ends up liking them spicy. It's really cute. This intersects with what I can only call an Animal Farm subplot, where the leader of the "Aincrad Liberation Front" guild gets locked in a dungeon while this jerk takes over. Asuna and Kirito, along with the girl, rescue the guy with his partner and their new child. Then it turns out the child is a rogue AI who wanted to be Asuna and Kirito's daughter. At the end of the storyline, the game system deletes her. It's really sad.

There's basically one more episode where Kirito and Asuna (the focus is back on Kirito again) hang out by the lake before being called to action because the vanguard players found the boss of the next floor. They help their friends fight the boss. Kirito realizes that Asuna's guild leader is the creator of the game. Then that guy paralyzes everyone, does an evil laugh, and reveals that he is both the game's creator and its final boss. Kirito fights him and the creator almost deals a killing blow, but Asuna resists her paralysis to get in the way and sacrifice herself for Kirito (!!!). This is long after Asuna saved Kirito's life from the weird ass earlier, and Kirito said he owed him his life. What the fuck was this, then?

I was so mad. My delusional projections onto the show prevented me from seeing it for what it was. Bad. Maybe I just have more self-respect now. Just pissed off that the show is basically, "Everyone wants Asuna, but Asuna wants Kirito for some strange fucking reason." I guess you had to be there? I don't know.

Sword Art Online Progressive: The Movie

The first episode in which Asuna appeared in the show wasn't actually from the mainline books, but from the first in the spinoff series called Sword Art Online: Progressive. The idea was that the author was rewriting the original arc of Sword Art Online, in a more chronological and long-form fashion. This movie was an adaptation of the same book as that episode. But it was more than that.

It was retold from Asuna's perspective. You see with her family at home and with her friends at school. She has this girl best friend (invented for the movie) with purple hair that, I realized, actually has a lot of Kirito's original characterization. This made me like, woah, what's up with that? That's interesting. Her friend's a gamer really excited for Sword Art Online, so on the game's release day Asuna borrows her brother's VR headset to surprise her purple hair friend. There's a fun bit where Asuna makes her avatar look exactly like herself, but her friend made her own avatar a big fucking guy. Later, when the death game officially starts and everyone's true appearance is revealed, Asuna looks the same. I was going totally insane about this. That's my bitch! She's so fucking real. She's authentically herself.

What happens is that Asuna and the purple hair girl get separated in a big fight, and the purple hair girl sees Asuna's hit points go so low that she thinks she's about to die. So the purple hair girl leaves the party because she can't stand to watch what she thinks is about to happen, and flees. Then, as Asuna thinks she's about to die, she's saved by a new Kirito who's a timid weird ass that initially can't look her in the eyes. Remember how I said the purple hair girl was a lot like Kirito from the show? This felt like a new Kirito, one that is an actual character, to match Asuna who is also now an actual character. This new Kirito seemed to be the one I (falsely) remembered. I was basically squealing.

I have one complaint. There is one gratuitous ass shot. One. Of Asuna. It really frustrated me because this was supposed to be a new approach to the story, one that was interested in her as a female character uniquely impacted by the premise. This was especially disconcerting because there's even a bath scene that does not at all focus on her body, and it's really lovely because all you get is just her realizing she can bathe in the game and enjoying it. The ass shot was out of nowhere, early in the movie, and it hampered my enjoyment of it to the extent that I barely want to recommend it. And she's 15. This made me so upset and frustrated, and all I can tell myself is I should have expected less.

Sword Art Online: The Novel

This is where it all began. I used to reread this all the time, especially in between releases of the fan translation (this was around the time Alicization was being published, and so the last one I read start-to-finish must have been volume 14). This was straight-up my comfort book. It covers the very first day of the game, and time-skips to when Kirito reconnects with Asuna over the rabbit meat. Minus the AI child arc. Maybe you can see why I thought of Sword Art Online as a romance: this first book was entirely centered on the insane ride-or-die relationship between Asuna and Kirito, how they get married and enjoy life despite being trapped in a death game. But it's also about how Kirito is an epic leet gamer that saves the day. What was it like to reread?

Here's what happened: it was late at night after I spent like five hours driving to my partner's place with my cat, she was passed out, and I was laying in bed wishing that my copy of SAO arrived that day instead of two days later. So I found a copy for my phone and read it in bed. The problem with light novels is that they're light reading. I finished that shit in like two hours and loved every second of it. Unfortunately.

It doesn't necessarily improve the core storyline—in fact, the whole thing is rendered even more arbitrary and stupid because all the bits that the show inserted in the two-year time gap were just not there—but that was indirectly to its own betterment? The characters come across as a lot more mentally ill than their show counterparts, more obviously impacted by the premise. Kirito, the voice of the novel, is a self-inflicted loner who craves human connection. Asuna is similar in that she is surrounded by people (gamers) with whom she cannot relate and also idolize her to an uncomfortable degree. I almost got the impression that Asuna became infatuated with Kirito because he didn't treat her like an idol, although his inner monologue betrays that? They're still pretty 2D static characters, and it's taken for granted that the two end up together rather than that romance developing over the course of the book.

I feel like my feelings are complicated and contradictory. Maybe it's because I don't want to like it, but I do. Kirito and Asuna are barely characters, but their ride-or-die relationship mirrors so closely the ones I have had or fantasized about that I fill their gaps with my own.

Conclusion

Sword Art Online is not good. It's too bad that I haven't been able to stop thinking about it for the last week. It's less like nostalgia per se, than it is like performing archaeology on my brain and finding a missing puzzle piece. It's recognizing myself in something from which I have, consciously or unconsciously, distanced myself for years. In hindsight, it's funny to have come to this thing from an angle that most watchers or readers did not, and then to come back to it and realize it was my first exposure to everything that it figured the reader would already understand. A work lacking significance and context from my perspective, perfect for me to latch onto and derive from it my own significance. My SAO isn't real.

Now that's all out of the way!