Sword Art Online: The Tyranny of Plot

When you're the only secondary character who's male
and have no choice but to be yaoi bait.

Returning to the topic of Sword Art Online! A couple months ago, I watched the last two seasons of the anime adaptation for the first time since they adapted an arc from the novels that I only read half-way through. I ended up totally hating it, but couldn't put a finger on it. This is my attempt to figure out why.

When you take the original novel as a standalone work—that is, as it was first composed—it’s clearly not very interested in “plot”. Although there is an overarching story as the game is cleared and, more centrally, as the romance develops (culminates?) between Asuna and Kirito, the work is far more fascinated by the characters, their sensations of virtual reality, and their implications for experiencing them as life. Kawahara weighs sword fights equally with cooking, fishing, marriage, murder, and even sex.¹ The plot, both of clearing the game and of the romance between the protagonists, serves to connect those explorations and draw out their significance with respect to the overall work: not “What if computer games were real life?”, but “What is real life but what we experience sensually and emotionally?” This is a very attractive thesis, whether or not you particularly enjoy computer games, and I think it resonated with me personally because it mirrored the deep significance and love I felt in my own relationships at the time, being at the time a few years younger than the characters in the story.

You don't understand. I need him carnally.

Kawahara continually returns to the world of Sword Art Online proper in side stories to explore other dimensions of the game and their implications: from beast-training to blacksmithing to artificial intelligence. These succeed at reinforcing the original novel’s themes and develop them further by deviating from the question of virtual reality per se, in favor of the “virtual reality” of social relations: the loss of a deceased pet, the weight of unrequited love, and the significance of adopting a child. The set of stories that take place in Sword Art Online itself are often called the Aincrad Arc, after the game’s fictional world, because of the erroneous reading (endorsed by the anime adaptation) that each side story is meant to fill the two-year gap in the original novel. However, I think this collection is more properly called a cycle. The stories do not conform to plot or even chronology, but (besides sharing a setting) explore common themes of sensuous reality.

The later novels in the series waver in thematic cohesion and, honestly, in writing quality. The Fairy Dance Arc (“arc” is correct) is a misogynistic disaster which, though it touches on similar themes as the Aincrad Cycle, does so by humiliating its female characters with stupid “not-incest” situations and gratuitous sexual assault. The Phantom Bullet Arc is a fine murder mystery, but it is a better investigation of the relationship between trauma and wish fulfillment as characters constantly and helplessly reenact the circumstances of their own traumatic experiences (very Freudian!). The Mother’s Rosario novel revisits the series’ themes from Asuna’s perspective but mostly serves to expand upon her character, both well-deserved and overdue, as she struggles to explain to her strict businesswoman mother the reality of the games she is seemingly obsessed with. Sword Art Online, despite its flaws (especially in Fairy Dance), stands out for its character-driven storytelling that seeks personal significance in relationships, sensations, and tenderness.

This is where the anime adaptation flounders at first and, later, outright fails. It turns the Aincrad Cycle into the Aincrad Arc, which is on one hand necessary for a serial series, but on the other hand it overemphasizes Kirito as the protagonist of an overarching storyline. This corresponds with a flattening of his character into a bland surrogate for the intended audience of male gamers. The adaptation’s treatment of female characters is more dismal, making them relatively pathetic and implying a harem-like relationship between them and Kirito (the novels are not without fault, since Kawahara had the habit of introducing new female characters, and keeping them around because of their relationship with Kirito, but not developing their relationships with each other or their individual characters besides). The sexual assault scenes in Fairy Dance are made into spectacle, as if to tantalize a male audience, and other scenes are reframed to be sexually embarrassing in the same manner despite not having this connotation in the source material. Despite all this, you could still find some enjoyment watching it. The adaptation’s plot could not (yet) severe itself from the tender character-driven storytelling of the novels.

Past a certain point, Kawahara and the producers of the anime adaptation significantly diverged in terms of their storytelling priorities. The long-awaited adaptation of the long Alicization Arc debuted in October 2018. I remember liking the Alicization novels for the same reason I liked the series in general and it was still being written and translated when I was reading, so it was exciting not knowing what would happen next. By 2018, however, I was no longer interested, so it took me until a few months ago to finally watch it for the sake of my younger self. Oh my God, I hated it. I totally despised it. It was constantly shit happening and plot progressing and nothing mattering. There were lots of fights with high stakes, apparently, but it was just one after another and you never really get to inhabit the world with the characters. The second half devolves into shonen dogshit about willpower and getting stronger and stupid monologues about nothing. Even worse was that it took the thematic premise of the series very literally, by supposing the existence of virtual humans whose humanity results from their scientific realness rather than their subjective experience. Watching it frustrated me, and reading about it online made me even more frustrated since it was universally hailed as the best arc of the anime series. Evidently, people were interested in Sword Art Online for vastly different reasons than I was.

Meanwhile, in December of that same year, Reki Kawahara apologized to women. This was on the heels of the first entry of Sword Art Online to be written in over ten years,² as well as the fact that the anime was adapting another, more severe sexual assault scene—the second such event in the novels, but probably the fourth in the anime. He thanked the voice actresses and apologized to them specifically, and explained that he wrote these scenes because he was influenced by boys’ literature which often deployed sexual assault as a plot device. He felt that the anime was extreme in adapting these scenes and inventing others (!) but still took responsibility as the original author. I respected and appreciated it for what it's worth on its own.

It's not a harem. It's whatever this is.

Interestingly, though, his apology seems to have informed the composition of the new Sword Art Online books. I never finished the Alicization novels so I was worried that this new arc would tonally and thematically reflect the adaptation, in terms of its shonen approach to storytelling and its superficial understanding of its own themes. Thank God, I was wrong. Kawahara, for one, was seemingly determined to pass that goddamn Bechdel test. All the female characters were developed to have complex relationships with each other outside of Kirito, much to his horror when he realizes they all make fun of him and their various relationships to him behind his back. When Kirito is there, he’s relegated to being something between a purse puppy and a grungler who has plot reasons for being there but is otherwise surrounded by equally (if not more) competent female characters. In one scene, he takes off his armor from another game not realizing that he would be stuck in his underwear,³ so Asuna and Alice (now friends) make fun of him for looking like a caveman while he tries to light a fire. Then he makes caveman sounds. Later, when their armor is about to expire, the novel denies any chance of a peak because they reveal they already made clothes for themselves (but not Kirito because they “didn’t have enough material”, so he sticks around as a caveman for a little longer). Asuna even gets a little robot cat and it's really cute.

She has a baby! I have a baby too!

Between this and the new Aincrad movies which are all from Asuna’s perspective, I’ve been fucking fed. This is good slop. This is slop just for me. Keep it coming, Mr. Kawahara! I've also finally remade an edit of the anime's Aincrad Arc that I did in high school to adapt the first novel, which is nice to have for whatever psychosexual reasons my brain demands it. Just incredible. Good stuff. I accept his apology.

Sorry. I just get like this every couple of months and honestly it's good that I do because it seems like if I don't then bad things happen to my brain and we don't want that. Do we?

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1. I’ll say it: I like the ‘unofficial’ (redacted) sex chapter. It's consistent with the work’s theme (even elevating that theme) of the relationship between sensuous experience and reality. Plus the author, through Kirito, demonstrates an interest in female anatomy and pleasure which is unusual of male wish fulfillment typical of the genre. Specifically, it’s not just penis-in-vagina sex, but an exploration of female erogenous zones and how well the virtual reality sensually—tantalizingly—simulates them. It’s not good but, hey, it’s not bad. ↩︎

2. Most of Sword Art Online up to Alicization was written and published as a web novel from 2001 to 2008, so all of the volumes from 1 to 20 are ultimately just editions of the original web novel. ↩︎

3. The premise is that all the virtual reality games get shoved into one massive game, which is supposed to be based off of ARK Survival (initially I thought it was supposed to be Minecraft, but my partner who watches Twitch streamers explained to me that it was very certainly and specifically a spoof of ARK Survival). ↩︎