Alright, alright… let’s see how Kirito goes about wielding that dumb sword you see in the screenshot above.

– Yo, is Yui practically an extra party member or what? I don’t think other players have a tiny fairy loli telling them useful things like “He’s going to punch twice again!” I mean, it’s cheating. The developers should’ve banned Kirito and his friends a long time ago.

– The fight is dumb anyway, because you just have a bunch of melee DPS throw themselves at the boss and it somehow works. Whereas Log Horizon will drone on and on about strategy and tactics, SAO is brawn, brawn, and more brawn. That’s putting it nicely, too. To put it meanly, the show’s dumb as shit. But don’t get me wrong. Neither anime gets it right. Log Horizon is as dull as SAO is stupid.

– The boss himself doesn’t fare much better. He’s pretty limited in his moveset. All I’ve seen so far are some punches and ice breaths. SAO might not have a bunch of pointless narration, but it doesn’t have much imagination either. Thrym doesn’t summon any adds or interact with the environment in any way. He doesn’t do anything befitting of a raid’s final boss. He just attacks head-on like the group of adventurers fighting him.

– Kirito gives both Klein and Leafa a look, and they just know what he wants to do. Of course they do! They’re just melees! Unfortunately, when the boss’s attack pattern changes, the frontliners all manage to get themselves frozen in place by an ice breath. Gee, it would’ve been nice if someone had taken one for the team and decided to be a mage, huh? In fact, in most games, melee DPS are at a disadvantage. Everyone wants ranged DPS because they don’t die like idiots. Hell, there’s a recurring joke in Final Fantasy XIV that dragoons do nothing but die. A lot of MMOs try to balance this out by having the melee DPS do more damage, but even then, it’s only worth the trade-off like half of the time.

– I also like how they’re all on one side of the boss. You’d think one of these melees would’ve tried to flank the giant already, since most of his devastating moves are frontal AOE. If he ain’t facing you, he can’t damage you! Not only that, if you draw the boss’s attention, you also draw it away from the rest of the group! But hey, strategy and tactics are, like, difficult, man. Even something as basic as flanking the boss. Kirito’s group of adventurers is supposedly the best of the best, but they’re still dumb as shit.

– Kirito tells Sinon to buy the melees thirty seconds. As a result, we get to see an archer go into melee range of the boss. Come on… Why does kicking Thrym in the face even faze him? He’s a fucking giant. He should just shrug off an archer’s kick. After all, archers shouldn’t be able to kick well! More importantly, I’ve never seen a boss grunt and get knocked back as much as this asshole. In fact, if Kirito’s team was actually smart, it sounds like they could just stunlock the giant into submission.

– Freyja then tells Kirito that Thrym can’t be beaten normally. Instead, they need to utilize her family treasure. But what basically happens is that the rest of the group just stands off to the side in order to have a conversation. What is the boss doing? Shrug. Probably still shaking off the effects of getting kicked by Sinon’s dainty legs.

– Yep, we briefly see Sinon dodging Thrym’s attacks, distracting the giant all by herself. The boss doesn’t even give a fuck about the rest of the group. Now, imagine if one of them had been a tank, and the rest were ranged DPS… but no, we need a golden hammer this big to beat the boss! The funny thing is, it doesn’t even look like Sinon’s having any trouble evading damage. So what the fuck is Freyja talking about with the whole “You can’t beat the boss this way!” Yeah, you can’t because the majority of them are stupid melees.

– Freyja’s family treasure? It’s literally just this amalgamation of gold. Yeah, just one giant mass of gold.

– Here’s Kirito using a lightning skill. And by shocking the treasure, the treasure is now… uh, a darker gold…? Hell, not even. Good job, boys!

– Kirito finds the hammer and chucks it at Freyja. When she catches it, she starts going berserk. Klein’s true love then turns into this bearded giant. Yeah, it’s Thor. And yeah, ain’t nobody allowed to have any hot anime babes except Kirito. The only “girl” to show Klein any attention just happens to be a dude.

– Why are they both crouched like that?

– Sinon: “While Thor has aggro, let’s attack!” Hey look, this show does have the concept of aggro! One of us should play a class that specializes in drawing the enemy’s aggro, thereby allowing the rest of the party to–… Fuck it, let’s all be DPS.

*Asuna steps up*

Whoa, whoa, what are you doing, babe!? I need a healer to cup my balls!

– This is literally the extent of Kirito’s leadership. Throw more dots, everyone! Use your skills! Really? I should use my fucking skills? Are you sure?

– Klein hasn’t quite recovered from the shock of his waifu turning into a man.

– Other than Sinon, everyone attacks the same way. Basically, the rest of them all run in and perform a melee attack. So fucking boring. Hell, Silica supposedly has a pet dragon, but where is it?

– They look like a pair of angry birds.

– Before Thrym dies, he tells the adventurers not to lower their guard around Asgard. Nevertheless, I thought someone said Sinon would do something cool. Turns out it was just bullshit.

– As thanks for being the bottom, Klein gets to have Thor’s golden hammer… I don’t know, maybe it’s a symbol of how Klein got hammered. Just look at the dinky way the hammer is drawn, though. It’s got this tiny-ass handle that looks like it can snap off at any moment. The show does nothing to make the hammer look cool. Hell, it does nothing to make Klein look cool. He receives a new weapon, but it’s done in about the most ho-hum way possible. Why not position the camera below the guy to at least make him seem imposing?

– But wait! We still need to obtain Excaliber so that Kirito can look cool!

– But if you think there’s any sense of urgency here, you’re dead wrong. Look at these guys just staring at a set of stairs. They don’t start moving unless Kirito announces, “Let’s go!” Come on.

– Then they get down the stairs… and stare some more! But look at those tiny stairs. So basically, they had to climb down one-by-one, then spread out in a line. After all, nobody can do anything unless Kirito gives the go-ahead!

– Kirito actually apologizes to Excaliber for not showing up sooner? Haha, okay. By the way, don’t even bother asking why it’s just assumed that Kirito gets the sword. Of course he does.

– Sigh.

– After some awkward grunting, our harem lead finally manages to whip his golden dong out of its prison. Congrats, dude. You’ve totally earned it.

– The entire dungeon falls apart, but Klein still got to embarrass himself one last time before they all ride the platform they’re on down to the ground. It’s like he’s getting punishment for even daring to think he could bag a girl like Freyja.

– Oh shit, we’re in grave danger! I’ll protect you, baby! Yeah, that’s right, he’s cradling Excaliber in his arms, because Excaliber doesn’t have a sharp edge, I guess. Asuna? Who? Oh right, my girlfriend! Well, I’m sure she’s fine…

– Right on cue, Tonkii shows up to save everyone. I mean, who didn’t see this coming as soon as they started falling?

– Kirito suddenly accepts his limitations and throws Excaliber away? Haha, okay. Apparently, he can’t make the jump to Tonkii if he’s cradling his golden dong. I like how bummed out he is about it, though. My e-sword!

– But Sinon wasn’t about to let her man lose his manhood! So she shoots a magical rope at the golden dong, and pulls it back to Kirito. Wow, what a haremette!

– Are you serious? That was the cool shit that Sinon got to do? Talk about lame. At the end of the day, her one “cool” move is just saving Kirito’s fucking penis extension.

– But before she hands it to him, she makes him promise her one thing: “Every time you draw this sword, remember me in your heart.” First of all, groan. As if these girls couldn’t worship the ground that Kirito walks on any harder. Secondly, she says this right in front of Asuna? The blatant disrespect!

– All Kirito can do is look sheepishly at the rest of his harem. And all they can do is frown because they’re haremettes, not real people with real agency!

– Naturally, Kirito can’t do anything about the fact that his harem is unhappy. Oh well, he can do the next best thing: take his rage out on Klein!

– Lisbeth: “That dungeon’s going to disappear just because we completed it once.” What a terrible MMO. Kirito’s group got a world first, and nobody else gets to even try the quest. Even Silica thinks it’s a waste.

– Well, this is Kirito’s world, after all. The idea that he and his friends are playing an MMO is nothing more than a conceit. Nobody else has any impact on this world. Normally, in any given MMO, multiple guilds will be earning achievements left and right, making a name for themselves. Taking down raid bosses, scoring a big win in a PVP battleground, crafting a legendary piece of equipment, etc. These are all things that can happen in any given MMO. But in this world, you never hear about that shit. No one has any impact on the world except Kirito. No one gets to do any meaningful quest except Kirito. Hell, just look at the other assholes! All they do is slaughter monsters over and over! Do Kirito and his band of mindless followers ever run into another group when they’re in a dungeon? Of course not! Now, you can argue that the dungeons are instanced, but even then, do Kirito and his band of mindless followers ever run into other adventurers on their way to a dungeon? Again, of course not. No one gets to do anything meaningful in this world except the Gary Stu. So I can only conclude that it’s not an MMO. This whole thing is just Kirito’s playground.

– Yeah, yeah… the frozen wasteland thaws, and plant life instantly appears. Kirito’s group has managed to change this world permanently. Sucks to be everyone else. You wake up one day and an entire quest zone has disappeared completely on you.

– Tonkii’s kind starts to cry out in happiness. What about the rest of the adventurers? And the rest of the giants? I guess they just said, “Fuck it! Let’s not kill these NPCs anymore!”

– Three NPC sisters show up to give their thanks and officially bestow the Excaliber to Kirito. Yawn.

– Klein stupidly yells out to one of them, asking for an NPC’s contact info. Uh, okay. She pities him by waving back, thereby raining dandruff all over the poor loser. That doesn’t stop Klein from embracing the dandruff anyway, because with Kirito hogging all of the female attention to himself, this is the best he can do.

– And that about does it for this shitty mini-arc. What’s that? Kirito installed a camera in the bar, and this allows Yui to feel like she can fly around in the real world? Well, the idea here is that he’s blurring the line between the real world and MMOs. Yui is becoming more and more like a real daughter everyday! Funny how this one crucial bit of information — something that actually has to do with the theme of taking MMOs seriously — is tucked away at the end of an arc, amounting to a paltry 1% of the story.

– During the credits, Kirito’s haremettes just kiss his ass some more. It’s pathetic. It’s so boring, the black guy in the back would rather just stand there and stare off into space.

– Best part is, Kirito isn’t even sitting next to or across from his waifu.

New arc, you guys. And if this first episode is anything to go by, it’s even worse the previous two.

– Did these girls log into a video game just to do homework? I’m all for the idea that virtual realities will take us to new heights in the future, but some of these scenarios are just downright silly. If anything, it looks like these characters are seriously addicted to these VRMMOs. Log the fuck out. Get some exercise and fresh air. See each other in real life at some other location than that stupid bar.

– Asuna: “Ever since he came back from GGO, it seems he’s been working really hard.” How lovely. The topic quickly turned back to Kirito. Plus, what an absolutely dull way to kick off a new arc. Why on earth do I need to know that they’re studying? Why do I need to know that they’re sleepy? Seriously, who cares? Every scene should be purposeful.

– Even the bartender’s sick of them: “You know, you don’t have to come to a dingy place like this for a date every time.” But he’s right. Kirito and Asuna are in their school uniforms, which means they came straight here after school. They came straight to a real-world bar run by some guy they used to play a VRMMO with. C’mon. I know this is an anime about MMOs, but this can’t be healthy. Every waking moment shouldn’t be about MMOs.

– But of course, Kirito can’t stop talking about VRMMOs because, again, these characters are horribly addicted to this shit: “Compared to your place in Algade, this place is fashionable.”

– Then as this Agil guy tells us his life story, A-1 Pictures lazily pans across still images of the bar. I thought this shit made a ton of money. Did the budget nevertheless get slashed or something?

– Kirito: “Yeah, my desire to return to my family saved me.” Uh, when did that happen?

– Basically, Asuna doesn’t get along with her super-rich parents, and as a result, she didn’t feel as though she fit in anywhere. Then here comes the groooooooan: “But Kirito gave me a home.” You mean that one episode? That one episode out of the entire first season? But that’s the thing. The first season had ample amounts of opportunity to show us exactly why and how spending time with Kirito in Aincrad felt like home to her. But instead, we watched Kirito build up a veritable harem before he even got with Asuna. As such, the “romance” doesn’t really feel authentic. He basically played the field until he settled with the best waifu of them all — the one with the maxed out cooking skill.

– And that’s why the romance here is trash. Even now, Kirito is going around, playing the field and recruiting more babes to his harem. He has agency, and he continues to exercise it. What does Asuna get to do? Nothing… except people’ve been telling me that this arc is all about her… and her right to stay by Kirito’s side.

– So apparently, they can rebuy their stupid log cabin from the first season. Meh.

– We somehow cut to some battleground. Yeah, that’s right, they’re poopsocking on Christmas Eve. You know the animation has gone to shit when you can barely see anything but the characters’ faces. Then colored slashes appear on a black background before you finally see a golem with red scratches all over it. It’s a failure of the imagination through and through. As a series, what does SAO even do well anymore? What is its calling card? It can’t even do action properly.

– Even when Asuna personally enters the fray, she’s poking away at a stationary golem that doesn’t even fight back. It’s so boring. Her triumphant moment is about as good as hitting a training dummy. And the scene has no drama in its composition:

The colors are completely one-note. The background has nothing but some lazy-looking stars for a night sky. I mean, shit, you can’t even make the night sky look nice? Moving on, the worst part is that the framing is terrible. This is just your average David vs. Goliath scenario, but SAO does everything in its power downplay the drama. You never get a monstrous sense of the enemy’s scale, because the show uses such flat, uninteresting angles to approach the fight. Case in point:

Plus, we get a huge dab of Asuna’s ass, and her outfit obscures everything else about her. So not only does the golem look tiny and dinky, you can’t even see the heroine herself!

– Then what happens next? We literally alternate between these two images:

Where’s the drama? Where’s the drama when all I can literally see is the stab point and Asuna’s grimacing face?

– Do we see Asuna go through the golem? No. We see her after she has already gone through it:

Asuna has also pulled the same pose twice, because we saw something similar earlier:

A fight scene is a story, so when the girl repeats the same pose in the same fight scene, it tells me that this is a boring, repetitive story. Hell, there’s even less to look at now. The golem has turned into nothing but indistinct debris trailing behind Asuna. The background is just completely washed out in white. You gotta be kidding me, right?

– Most of all, this is such an amateurish effort; A-1 Pictures isn’t even trying. They’re just going through the motions, because they know people will give every single one of these episodes a high score anyway. Once you win your core fans over, all you have to do is maintain the same SAO feel. So long as that feel is there, no one will care that the budget has been slashed, the parts are now made out of cheap substitutes, and the show has thus become a cheap knock-off of its own self. McDonalds has perfected this art, and it looks as though A-1 Pictures is doing the exact, same thing. They know what they have on their hands: a burgeoning franchise that the studio can milk for all its worth. SAO has already achieved brand loyalty, so who gives a shit about putting in real effort? Even the soundtrack is the same recycled shit we’ve heard over and over.

– And what’s their reward? A generic landscape:

– Ughhhhhhhh:

– PAIED:

This is the height of kitsch. The horribly misspelled word in the background that they’ve kept from the first season. Then out of nowhere, the fucking loli fairy parks her ass in front of the entire image and smiles at you. She can’t even be upright or anything. Your own daughter is on all-fours for God only knows why. She’s just so happy to see her e-parents buy a log cabin. Ahhhh, I’m in hell. This is truly hell, isn’t it?

– Also, in an MMO, there’d be a race against other players to claim these player-owned houses. Good thing SAO has no such competition. We wouldn’t want any of our characters to actually have to break a sweat.

– Everything is overly dramatic as fuck, but they can’t even execute that correctly:

The key to the log cabin literally has to float down from the skies and into Asuna’s hands. But look at the goddamn key. Look at it! It looks like a key for some personal jewelry box, not a house. Even something that’s supposed to look dramatic is done horribly.

– There are so many things the story could’ve done to make this scene feel more meaningful. The fact that the log cabin still exists in its entirety is actually a misstep. All we see is our heroes defeating a golem to reach this area. Like A-1 Pictures, it thus doesn’t feel as if Kirito and company have put in any effort to reclaim their oh-so-special home. Imagine if the log cabin was no longer there. Imagine if our characters had to gather material and actually craft their log cabin like how it’s done in an actual sandbox MMO. Make the characters work for this shit, man. By working for this shit, it actually means something. And in turn, getting their home back will actually mean something. At the moment, it means nothing. They poopsocked through Christmas Eve, floated through some generic forest landscape, and found their log cabin just sitting there, waiting for them. Again, the drama was there for the taking, but the story does its best to downplay it.

– Asuna cries tears of happiness. How does that work? Does the VR headset detect your emotions and somehow translate it to the video game? Or did Asuna literally type out “/happycry?” I hope it’s the latter.

– Lisbeth: “I wonder why looking at that makes me so sleepy.” I concur. Watching this anime makes me more sleepy than any bottle of Nyquil could.

– She then tells Asuna all about Zekken, some awesome duelist. No imagination here. Just exposition straight from Lisbeth’s mouth. This is boring. Next.

– Unfortunately, there’s no next. We’re sticking with this bullshit story. Not only that, we get to see all these generic goobers attempt to court Asuna because she’s a rich girl in high society:

Thankfully, they all approach her in a line, so she can turn them all down at the same time. Her kokoro belongs to Kirito.

– Again, the story doesn’t even try. Right off the bat, we’re led to believe that these guys are assholes. It’s like the story has to allay our insecurities. Don’t worry! Asuna-waifu won’t dare cheat on you! See? They’re all jerks! There’s no threat here!

– There’s snow all around them, but Leafa still wears that shoulder and cleavage-bearing number. Apparently, it’s not so cold after all.

– Generic cake shot to accompany our equally boring talk about this Zekken.

– How can one person bogart a sword skill to himself? Why does it matter if he refuses to teach anyone else how to perform said sword skill? With MMOs, people will eventually figure everything out, including the game’s many damage formulas. More importantly, I doubt this fact will change whatsoever even as MMOs get more and more complex. I thus find it hard to believe how anyone can have a unique skill all to himself.

– And again, this is just a bunch of characters sitting around in a room, going on and on about this Zekken. Their words are accompanied by still shots of half-eaten caeki. This is so dumb. Shit, if you’re going to adapt this in the lamest way possible, I may as well just read the light novel.

– But I won’t. There’s no fucking hell I’d do that.

– Apparently, even Kirito lost to this Zekken. BUT DON’T WORRY! HE TOTALLY WASN’T SERIOUS ABOUT THE FIGHT. The show’s insecure as fuck, basically. Kirito can never lose. If he loses, it just means he is dicking around. In other words, he fought Zekken without his awesome duel-wielding powers, so the results of their duel aren’t even legit. All you Kirito fans out there can rest easy. Don’t fret. Your Gary Stu is still a beast.

– Leafa has a different account of the fight–… ah man, I don’t care. I’m done. Fuck the rest of this episode. Why should I waste my time watching this shit when A-1 Pictures is going to be this lazy? Characters sitting in a room, chatting it up for more than half the episode. What a joke. I’m going back to sleep.

It’s interesting that you have to lie down to play these VRMMOs, but not only do you have to lie down, you also have no awareness of the real world. You give yourself completely to the other you. Yeah, with the headset strapped onto your head, you can’t see anything but the VRMMO. But you also can’t hear, smell, taste, or feel anything that’s happening in the real world. If you’re a gamer of any sort, I’m sure you’ve heard about the Oculus Rift. Certainly, the Oculus Rift is nowhere near the SAO‘s headsets in terms of technology, but the idea here’s relatively similar. They’re both about achieving a sort of efficacy with respects to virtual reality. My point is, is it really necessary to render yourself unconscious in order to play a VRMMO? Why can’t you just sit upright in a chair and play one? Why can’t you play a VRMMO without going to sleep? Shouldn’t this be possible? It should be from a practical standpoint. There’s no reason to think you should have to completely deaden yourself in the real world in order to play a VRMMO.

This is the SAO universe, however, so things are different. The nature of the NerveGear is somewhat illogical, because at the end of the day, their function is purely thematic. The subtext here is that you don’t get to live two lives. You symbolically have to kill yourself in one world in order to experience other worlds. Yes, yes, we’ve seen instances where death in the virtual world meant death in the real world. But think about it. As you are playing any of these games, you have no protection whatsoever in the real world. What was supposedly scary about the GGO arc was that the killer knew where Sinon lived. In fact, the killer could’ve been standing over her in real life, and she’d never know because she was so deeply immersed in GGO. And as many commenters have stated over and over before, it can’t be healthy to play games in this fashion. Sitting in a chair for hours on end is one thing, but lying down in bed for hours and hours on end is ludicrous!

When it comes right down to it, this is not a story about realizing how virtual reality can add or enhance our lives. Would I want to play a VRMMO? I wouldn’t want to lie down on a bed for hours and hours, but sure, I’d love it if a game like Final Fantasy XIV had Oculus Rift support. For me, what’s enticing about virtual reality is the potential to experience things I would never be able to experience in the real world. I’ll never be a spoony bard in the real world (I hear it pays poorly). But SAO isn’t just about that. It’s not just about experiencing things you can’t experience in the real world. Rather, it is a story about rejecting the real world entirely. As a result, our characters treat the MMO worlds as if they are real. Look at the way Asuna cries tears of happiness upon buying her virtual house. It’s a fucking virtual house! It has no equity! But it has emotional equity. Because our characters have rejected the real world, the fake suddenly becomes real. But let’s keep going with this logic. What else do our characters do?

They symbolically commit suicide every single day to do mundane things in a video game. Y’see, our heroes are not always raiding. They’re not always achieving world firsts. They’re not always going on grand quests. A lot of the time, they log on just to hang out with each other. Hell, they even log on just to watch e-sports footage from another game. They log in just to study and do homework. Worst of all, these are all activities they could do in real life. The potential of virtual reality captivates most of us because we think it’ll allow us to feel as though we’re in a fantasy world, doing battle with dragons, demons, and whatnot. But we only see this stuff like half of the time in the SAO series. The other half of the time, these characters put their real bodies at great risks to do the same mundane activities they could do in real life. Again, they symbolically kill themselves for hours and hours on end just to do homework in an MMO. The question is why? You would only do such a thing if the real world, to put it plainly, sucked.

It then becomes quite apparent that Asuna is the only fully realized character on the show. If you really, really think about it, she’s the only person who has a reason to commit this sort of ritual suicide day in and day out. She’s a caged bird in the real world. She has no autonomy. She’s a rich girl from high society, so she has to conform to certain standards. This includes marrying herself off to some equally rich suitor just to benefit her family. Hey, we’ve seen this same plot line before. It’s nothing new. But the point is, Asuna actually has a legitimate reason to resent the real world. It’s not a terribly original reason, but she has one. She has a reason to want to kill herself. In an MMO, there are no expectations. She doesn’t have to act in a certain way, she doesn’t have to marry the server’s most accomplished player (though she does so anyway), so on and so forth. Asuna’s character makes sense. Asuna’s character actually has pathos. If I really think about it, she’s the only one with a good reason to reject reality.

As for the other characters, they’re useless by comparison. Kirito’s reason for playing MMOs was what? He felt like an outsider in his own family when he found out he was adopted by his aunt? Whatever, man. That’s nothing. I mean, c’mon, really? It’s not like he had to sleep outside in the cold or eat nothing but gruel. Leafa and her mom treated Kirito as if he was one of their own. Speaking of Leafa, she only started playing VRMMOs to understand her “oniichan” better. So again, she doesn’t really have pathos like Asuna does. You could argue that she kills herself in the real world, because she has the best chance to marry her “oniichan” in an MMO, but even then, it’s weak. As for Lisbeth, Silica, and Klein, we don’t know anything about them. We don’t know why they would put their real bodies at such great risks to do mundane things in a video game. Maybe they have sad stories too, but SAO has not bothered to explore their reasons for wanting to play these VRMMOs.

As for Sinon, we’ve discussed her to death in the GGO arc. Long story short, using an MMO as a form of exposure therapy might have been meaningful, but her story was executed rather poorly for a variety of reasons. In the end, Asuna is the only character who really fits SAO’s twisted narrative. You kill yourself in order to experience another life. You use the death of the body in order to allow your mind to escape. But who here really has a good reason to kill themselves in the real world? It’s Asuna. But therein lies the flaw with the story as a whole: even if Asuna does manage to resolve her issues in the real world, it’s not like she’ll stop playing these video games. She’ll keep killing herself everyday just to do mundane things in a virtual world. I have a hard time believing that her character will grow, and as a result, she’ll move onto bigger and better things. She’ll simply end up being like the rest of her friends, i.e. symbolically killing themselves for no other reason than to have fun.

Now, here comes the battle of competing philosophies. In this week’s episode, Asuna has to pull herself away from the virtual world in order to have an uncomfortable dinner with her mother. At the dinner table, her mother states, “You need to move your own hands when you do [your homework], or you don’t learn anything.” Naturally, nothing can be more meaningful to Asuna’s mother than the real world. There, she’s a lady of high society. She’s rich and likely influential in upper class circles. When Asuna argues that this is the only way for her and her friends to spend time together, her mother adds, “If you’re using that machine, you’re not really meeting them.” It’s true, though. She’s not really meeting the real them. This is reflected in the way that we know almost nothing about these characters in the real world. Most of the time, we see them in an MMO, but even when we see them in the real world, it’s almost always at that bar that never seems to have any other customer.

(Even the bar in Tokyo Ghoul, which served both humans and ghouls, had generic, faceless customers during the day. In other words, even this bar in real life feels unreal. So that’s why our heroes hang out there when they’re forced to interact in the real world. It’s like this safe, secluded spot somehow isolated from the rest of reality. In that case, it may as well be virtual. But I digress.)

The point is, we hardly know anything about these characters and their real life situations and/or problems. We learned a bit about Sinon, but of course, as soon as the GGO arc ended, it’s like it no longer matters what her life is like in the real world. How has she been coping since the scary incident with her “friend?” Has she reconciled with her mother? Is she still facing any bullying at school? No one cares anymore. According to SAO, we can only learn so much about these characters’ real lives. And now, the spotlight is on Asuna, so naturally, Sinon has pretty much all but disappeared entirely from the story. She doesn’t even hang out with them in the virtual world, which is odd, isn’t it? As for the other characters, what they do in real life is almost irrelevant. Hell, Kirito’s the star of the show, and we hardly know what he does in his “spare” time. As a result, Asuna’s mother isn’t wrong. No one really gets to know anyone in the real world.

But again, this is a battle of competing philosophies. For Asuna, who rejects her real world situation, she doesn’t really care to know her friends in the real world either. I mean, she may say she cares, but the proof is in the pudding. No one actually makes any real attempts to hang out in the real world when Japan has one of the most extensive mass transit systems in the world! So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t buy this bullshit: “Everyone lives far away.” No matter what Asuna might claim, her actions say othewise. I mean, really, she and her boyfriend rarely go on dates in the real world, and even when they do, they talk about MMOs. What kind of couple is that? But Asuna has so thoroughly rejected reality that this apparent fact about their relationship never even bothers her. She also didn’t even seem to care all that much when Sinon openly flirted with Kirito in the previous arc. She had a frown on her face, but that’s it. She relegates herself to to being just another haremette when she’s supposed to be his waifu.

Of course, on the surface, this is really just a harem anime, so the audience doesn’t really expect Asuna to complain. Individual members of the audience may say they’re either on Team Asuna or Team Sinon, but deep down, we don’t expect Kirito to really commit to either of these girls. Asuna’s passive acceptance of her fate as a haremette is almost tacit approval of her boyfriend’s behavior. But the subtext here is that this harem fantasy is vastly more preferable to Asuna than the real world. And what does she have in the real world? She can have her own harem! In last week’s episode, we saw three suitors line up to court our heroine. Kirito might have a virtual harem, but Asuna can literally have a real harem of her own. In fact, Asuna’s a bit of a Mary Sue. Here, we have an incredibly rich, intelligent, and beautiful girl. But screw all of that, Asuna basically says. She hates her real life so much that she’ll become a haremette instead. And that’s pretty sad…

As a result, Asuna’s going to challenge this mysterious Zekken person. That sounds silly, doesn’t it? What does some random, virtual swordsman have to do with Asuna’s real life problems? Well, one of her friends suggests that if Asuna wins, her notoriety will return. She can’t help but then stare at Kirito. In any other story, this look could be read in a lot of ways. Asuna used to be a well-known player, but not since she hooked up with Kirito. She used to be a frontliner, but not since she hooked up with Kirito. In any other story, you would think, “Perhaps the girl somewhat blames her current banal existence on her lover.” But this is SAO, so that’s obviously not the case. This is SAO, so Asuna could never blame Kirito for anything. So why does she even pause and give him this somewhat plaintive look? Probably because she feels as though she doesn’t deserve Kirito or something. Probably because she feels she needs to challenge this Zekken person in order to prove her worth to the Gary Stu. After all, he got to go maraud about in both ALO and GGO, and look like a badass without her.

Asuna, on the other hand, is not only powerless in the real world, she’s nothing more than the group’s healer most of the time. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with being a healer, but if you’re all about “Rawr, I’m a strong, independent warrior who can make my own decisions in life,” then most healer characters don’t usually fit that persona. So what we have here is a lot like the Sinon situation: if Asuna can assert herself in the virtual world, then perhaps this’ll translate to the real world as well. But as I’ve discussed above, SAO’s unsettling subtext is that these characters symbolically kills themselves every time they dive. With Asuna specifically, she has plenty of reasons to reject the real world. Unfortunately, unless she can somehow upload her consciousness into an MMO, her mother won’t let Asuna ignore the real world. As such, she has to confront reality, and to make things worse, she’s running out of time. Nevertheless, our heroine is resisting. That’s why Asuna is challenging this Zekken person. This conflict is a stand-in for her real life problems. If she had a real plan for her real life, she wouldn’t be here, wasting her time fighting some random player.

The hope is that she’ll somehow find inspiration in the virtual world, but that’s a lot to ask of simulacra. In any other story, Asuna would perhaps realize there’s no substance to the images around her. But this is SAO, so I’m sure the girl will solve all her problems through an MMO. Hey, it worked for Sinon!

Stray notes & observations:

– As expected, Asuna’s relationship with her mother is cold and frigid. Plus, the color of that wine doesn’t look right. I have never drunk a grey wine. Worst of all, that’s a champagne flute, lady, but you are clearly not drinking champagne. And you call yourself high society! You don’t even use proper stemware!

– Asuna can’t even look her mother in the eye. But I don’t like the cinematography here. It feels strained because they are both not fully in the same picture for some odd reason. The standard thing to do is to just pull the camera back in order to illustrate the impassable gulf between the two characters. But the truth is, they’re not even sitting far away from each other at all, and I don’t know why they’re not. SAO is just not very good with visual metaphors, I guess. Shit, even The Simpsons can accomplish this much, and it’s a comedy TV show. Then you see this shot, and you can’t help but wonder why we didn’t just see it right from the get-go.

– Blah blah blah, her mother wants to put her in another school. She even wants Asuna to graduate and start attending college after just half a school year. Our heroine has no say in her life, et cetera, et cetera. As I’ve discussed above, the subtext here is potentially intriguing, but the actual plot events themselves are pretty unoriginal.

– Asuna: “It doesn’t matter if it takes me another year or two to get into college.” Sorry, but it kinda does. She then says she doesn’t have to attend college. Then what will she do with her life? Yeah, you don’t have to go to college to be successful, but you still need to have a well thought-out plan. Right now, I can sort of see where Asuna’s mother is coming from. Yeah, yeah, I wouldn’t like it either if one of my parents had tried to dictate my life. But Asuna isn’t asserting herself. She doesn’t have a plan that at least says to her mother, “Look, you may not respect me or my decisions, but at least I know what I want to do with my life.” Instead, our heroine literally says she has no clue what she wants to do: “Right now, I don’t have the answer….” Asuna comes across as a lost lamb, so naturally, her mother will try to — as mothers are wont to do — mother her. If you’re going to act like a child, you’ll be treated as one.

– I love the hilariously ominous music that plays when the arranged marriage was brought up. The horror! The horror! The problem here, however, is that she’s only 18. The age of majority in Japan is 20, I believe. Not much Asuna can do, then.

– The music gets even more ominous when her mother reveals she had investigated Kirito’s background as well! B-b-but Kirito’s going to be a great MMO engineer, and his technology will bring e-lolis like Yui to life in the real world! With kawaii-chans like her around in the real world, we’ll never have to commit ritual suicide again! But jokes aside, Asuna finally decides to storm off from the dinner table when Kirito was brought up. That’s how important the Gary Stu is. Honestly, this arc could be deep and interesting, but it’s still bogged down by Kirito’s existence. Case in point, the girl later retires to her room to gaze at a picture of her and the Gary Stu. They’re not even holding hands, embracing each other, or anything. They’re just standing side-by-side, and… that’s it. You can hardly tell that they’re supposed to be the story’s first-rate couple. The sad thing is, this is the guy that Asuna is fighting for.

– Then out of nowhere, Asuna drops this bombshell: “You’re ashamed of my dead grandma and grandpa, aren’t you? You’re angry you weren’t born into a rich, important family, aren’t you?” Aw shiiiit. Family drama! I don’t like this turn of events, though. Asuna’s mother was already unreasonable enough. C’mon, you’re not going to convince very many people that her mother is in the right. But SAO is, like a lot of other anime series, very heavy-handed. As a result, Asuna’s mother has to have a complex. She has to be that unreasonable just in case you didn’t realize that she is wrong to try and dictate our heroine’s life.

– So what do we see next? Asuna returns to the virtual world to spend more boring quality time with Kirito. She has to figure out what to do with her life, but this is what she chooses to do. Even worse, it feels like she’s living in the past: “Hey, do you remember the first time you came to my room in Selmburg?” So of course, Kirito and Asuna then reminisce about that one time he took her e-virginity by pumping copious amounts of e-sperm into her. Actually, I have no clue when this e-sexing took place on the sacred SAO timeline, but since we’re living in the past, I may as well bring it up again. It’s interesting though that Kirito drools over the memory of the stew Asuna had fixed for him, not the part where she basically stripped down to her underwear. Needless to say, Asuna smacks him on the chest and says, “You only remember food, don’t you?” The subtext here is hilarious.

– What did Kirito say to this Zekken person? He said, “You’re totally living in this world, aren’t you?” Totally living in this world. This implies that Zekken is all but dead in the real world. If we consider everything that we’ve discussed thus far, this Zekken person must have a really, really good reason to reject the real world compared to Asuna. And maybe Asuna will get to know this person, and realize that her first-world problems aren’t all that bad. But anyway, what could that reason be? Literally AIDS? I remember commenters repeatedly mentioning something about AIDS. If this is really the case, that’s hilariously over-the-top.

– Ugh, this post is way too long. Let’s wrap this shit up.

– As it turns out, Zekken is a she. And she’s very lame-looking. But why is Asuna surprised to learn that Zekken is a girl? Why would you even assume that it’s a guy? Guys play as female avatars all the time in the real world. Some of the best PVPers in the world have female avatars! But more importantly, even if you can’t play as the opposite sex in the SAO universe, so what?  This is an MMO, so the physical differences between the sexes shouldn’t even come into play. So what is this bullshit where Asuna is actually shocked and surprised to learn that Zekken is a girl?

– Our heroine then wonders if Kirito had gone easy on Zekken because the latter is a cute girl. That’s how much of a womanizer the Gary Stu is. You can thus stop feeling sorry for her, because the subtext here is that Asuna tolerates his philandering to a certain extent.

– So in an MMO with a lot of different magic spells, this Yuuki character — that’s her actual in-game name, apparently — will only rely upon her sword. But even then, she can beat anyone. Look, if she won’t use anything but her sword, that means she can’t erase any status ailments. That means you can CC and enfeeble her in all sorts of ways. So how in the world has Yuuki never been defeated? Well, this is SAO, so you just have to swallow this sort of tripe. Defenders will just say that Yuuki’s super speed allows her to dodge all incoming magic spells or something bullshit like that.

– The duel is pretty fluid. It’s just too bad the camera shakes a bit too much. And like before, we don’t need to see the characters’ life bars.

– Yuuki still wins despite Asuna putting up a decent fight, which is to be expected. So now what? They will now become tomodachis for life, right? Yuuki picks Asuna off the ground, flies our heroine to some secluded spot in the clouds, then says “they” need the latter’s help. Welp.

After meeting Yuuki’s guild, Asuna tries to have a leisurely stroll through a generic MMO town. On the surface, she seems rather happy and pleased with herself. After all, not only did she just make some new friends, she has the golden opportunity to lead a raid group. It’s like she’s gone back in time to the old Asuna — y’know, the one that wasn’t just a waifu. All of a sudden, she is forcibly disconnected from the game. The screenshot above is apparently what this experience looks like. It’s just astounding how lazy A-1 Pictures has become. They don’t even try to do anything cool or trippy with it. You literally just zoom out until white nothingness completely surrounds you. In any case, our heroine wakes up to see her mean, old mother glaring at her. God, stop telling me to get a life and worry about my future! I joke, of course… somewhat. I don’t believe in arranged marriages, but other than this issue, Asuna’s mother isn’t really being unreasonable with her demands. And just look at Asuna’s reaction. She sounds like someone who has just been violated. No, your mom unplugged your game. Moms have been unplugging games, TVs, and computer monitors for a long time now. They’ve done it so much that I don’t even see it as a big deal anymore.

Not only that, Asuna lost track of time and forgot all about having dinner with her mother. Put yourself in the mother’s shoes, then. You see your daughter — who, I must add, is two years behind most of her peers thanks to the Aincrad incident — spend all of her day playing these VRMMOs. It’s not even like, “Oh, I’ll just park myself in front of a TV and play games all day, but I’ll answer you if you call to me.” No, Asuna becomes completely unaware of the real world when she plays these games. Asuna also has to lie down in order to spend time with her virtual friends. Like I’ve said in the previous post, you hurt your physical body in order to level up or gear out your virtual body. It doesn’t matter what the author intended. I don’t care if his intention is to portray a universe where the virtual world is merely just as important as the real world. Rather, we should pay attention to what he ends up accomplishing. And what he’s accomplished here is a story where these characters necessarily kill themselves in the real world in order to indulge their virtual personas.

Asuna is so addicted to these games that she even forgets to eat. So what would you do if you were in her mother’s shoes? She’s watching her own flesh and blood suffer, so of course, she’d try and take control of her daughter’s life. Asuna’s mother might not be the most affectionate person out there, but man, most mothers’ hearts would ache at the sight of their child just laying there, motionless and reacting to no real world stimuli. And that’s the kicker! If the virtual world is really just as important as the real world, then you wouldn’t have to choose between the two. Instead, you’d be able to balance your responsibilities between the two worlds. But the virtual world is actually more important, because these characters become so wrapped up in it that almost nothing in the real world can even reach them. The only way for Asuna’s mother to get her daughter’s attention is to literally “pull the plug.” Again, forget what the author intended. Focus instead on what he actually accomplishes. I say “almost nothing” in a previous sentence, because you can apparently shake and jostle a VRMMO player, and in doing so, they’ll get some in-game message telling them to log out and check up on the real world. But think about it. Why is this actually preferable? You’d rather your mom shake and jostle you like you’re a dead corpse? Really?

Not only that, according to her mom, the last time this happened, it took Asuna five whole minutes to wake up. Five minutes of vigorous real world stimuli to bring her back to life, so to speak. That’s ludicrous. What if the house is on fire and you’re being choked out by the smoke. Smoke is nowhere near as vigorous as a concerned mother shaking your lifeless body. Would you just die, then? Asuna whines that she has to say goodbye to people and such, and if you pull the plug on her, she can’t do those things! Man, it’s not like we no longer have phones. Oh right, not everyone will know your phone number. But even then, it’s not like we no longer have chat clients. It’s not like we no longer have Skype-like programs. For fuck’s sake, if you want to say goodbye to your friends, you can still do it outside the game. Asuna and a lot of Sword Art Online apologists act as if all these various means of communication have instantly disappeared simply because VRMMOs now exist. Social media will continue to exist even if VRMMOs become a reality. Asuna doesn’t sound like a poor child who has to deal with her uncaring, cruel mother. Instead, she sounds like a addict.

Asuna’s mother then says, “What do you mean, ‘say goodbye’? What takes place in that weird game is more important to you than your real commitments?” The “weird game” comment might be a little insensitive, but she’s not wrong. Again, if the goal is argue that the virtual world is just as important as the real world, SAO’s author hasn’t accomplished this. You still have to eat. You still have to pay the bills. You still have to worry about your health. And to even be crude, you still need to fuck in the real world if you want to have kids — real kids and not magical, expository loli. Until you can one day upload your consciousness into an MMO and live forever in a fantasy world, the real world still matters. All the story has done is say, “Oh, well, you can form meaningful friendships in the virtual world.” Well shit, we’ve known this for a long time now. Ever since the Internet became mainstream, people have been making friends in all sorts of virtual worlds — from MUDs to actual MMOs to just people pathetically flirting with each other on Twitter. If this is the message, then SAO ends up saying nothing new whatsoever. In fact, it used to be that you could die in this anime. In other words, the virtual world actually had real consequences! But that hasn’t been a thing since the very first arc of the very first season. Nowadays, it literally comes down to, “Well, I’ve made a friend.” So again, if the goal is to make the virtual world just as important as the real world, I don’t see it.

Naturally, her mother threatens to confiscate the machine if Asuna screws up again. And you know what? I still think this is reasonable. If you play games so much that you forget to even feed yourself, should you complain if your parents forbid you from playing the X-Box for a week or two? The story wants to make it seem like the mother is this horrible, insensitive ogre, but I don’t see it. I just see a worried parent who just isn’t as affectionate as we expect most mothers to be. But outside that, I can see her legitimate worry for her own daughter: “You lost two years of your life to it. I’d think you wouldn’t want to even see it anymore.” Again, another reasonable statement. I get it. The virtual world is important, so Asuna didn’t really “lose” those two years of her life. She spent those two years with the Gary Stu, so in actuality — in her sad, little heart — those two years were super special. At the same time, however, she almost died because of the NerveGear. She almost got raped because of the NerveGear. She was literally held prisoner by some ridiculous maniac because of the NerveGear. This would’ve been a traumatic experience for most people, but Asuna continues to throw herself back into the VRMMO world. It doesn’t matter if the VR headsets are now safe. Think about how this must look to her mother.

In the end, Asuna petulantly refuses to have dinner anyway. Hilarious. She’s a child through and through. She may be 18, but she’s as immature as a young child who’s throwing a tantrum because her toy has been taken away. Check that. Her toy hasn’t even been taken away yet, and Asuna is already lashing out at her own mother. Again, instead of just stepping up to the plate, and proving to her mother that she can actually be responsible with her life, Asuna opts to play a game all day, lose track of time, and even forget to eat dinner. And why do you suppose the mother pushes her to eat dinner downstairs? Isn’t it because the mother had lost two valuable years as well? Asuna wasn’t the only person who lost two years of her life. Her parents couldn’t spend those two years with their own daughter. Not only is this a significant amount of time, they lost two very important years  as well. You’re supposed to be able to take joy in watching your daughter grow up, especially as she matures into an adult, but Asuna’s mother couldn’t do this. She lost that privilege when Asuna got trapped in Aincrad. This isn’t Asuna’s fault, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t seem like anyone cares how the mother feels. She lost two years of her daughter’s life, too. The whole thing is just sad all around.

Of course, I haven’t forgotten that Asuna is unhappy with her home life. I haven’t forgotten that she feels as though she has no control over her future. But this isn’t a case where she’s a complete victim, and her mother is just picking on her. Our heroine isn’t pulling her own weight either. Hell, if she keeps skipping dinner, she won’t have any weight to pull at all! But what does Asuna do? Does she put her head down and try and find a solution to her problems? Nah. Instead, Asuna merely gets dressed and wanders out to some park. It’s cold and it’s late, and that’s enough to worry any parent. Nevertheless, Asuna continues to run away from reality. At the park, she looks at her phone and notices that she’s had some missed calls. Two of them are from her own mother. Take a note of the setting. Even in the real world, our heroine opts to put herself in a child’s playground.

Stray notes & observations:

– Yuuki drags Asuna to meet her guild face to face. I wonder why. Well, at the end of the day, this is a story about a VRMMO, so they’ll probably just do something like fight a raid boss.

– Even this guild has to be generic in its composition. They all fall into neat, cookie-cutter archetypes. The brash hero, the shy guy, the motherly-sounding girl, the older-looking guy with a square jaw, so on and so forth. We don’t really have to learn any of their names, because outside of Yuuki, none of them will receive any significant characterization anyway.

– Yep, they want to beat a floor’s boss monster. If they wanted help, why wouldn’t they just post a guild recruitment? And if the the candidate has to be someone who can go toe-to-toe with Yuuki, then why did they skip Kirito over? Oh, the nerve of these people! Don’t they realize they just passed up the golden opportunity to work with the Gary Stu? But seriously, if you’re looking for a new member, it seems silly that you would test the extra person on just their ability to duel. Being able to tackle a raid boss requires so much more than just the ability to 1v1 someone.

– The gimmick here is that Yuuki’s guild wants to defeat a raid boss with just seven people. Now, in SAO, a full party is made up of exactly seven people. Seven. Isn’t that such an odd number? More like Kirito’s harem + Klein equals seven people, so they just decided to roll with it. Then they decided to double-down on this stupid idea, because a raid group is made up of a whopping forty-nine people. Yeah, seven groups of seven. It’s just ridiculous.

– Lemme offer some context for the non-MMO readers in the audience. Raids are supposed to be these epic boss fights in MMOs. World of Warcraft‘s old raids used to be 40-man, but they scrapped the idea because it was often a logistical nightmare. WoW is arguably the most successful MMO out there, so it’s not like there’s a lack of players or anything. Recently, Wildstar tried to bring back this hardcore WoW flavor by also doing 40-man raids, but I hear they’ve given up on the idea as well. So as you can see, as much as everyone wants these epic boss encounters to be super epic by having forty people pile onto some poor Olden God, it’s just not realistic. Some MMO veterans with rose-tinted glasses will say that 40-man raids represented the golden days of MMO endgame, but they will often fail to mention that they were likely students with no obligations back then. Few people can really afford to raid for four hours with thirty-nine other people anymore. WoW raids these days are what? 25-man at the highest level? Hell, Final Fantasy XIV raids consist of only eight people. Anyway…

– The idea is that you’re supposed to marvel at Yuuki’s ambition. Wow! Tackling a 49-man raid with just 7 people! That’s insane! Or, y’know, that tells you that the raid is poorly designed. Often times, a raid will require that many people because of the mechanics. There will be adds, tank swaps, so on and so forth. If seven people can do the job of forty-nine, then this raid boss is a joke. But of course, we just saw how boring the previous arc played out. Thrym was supposed to be a raid boss himself, but he was as lame as can be in execution. Anyway, Yuuki’s group has already challenged previous raid bosses with just six, but apparently, another guild keeps beating them to the punch. Well then, we’ll just add one extra person!

– According to one of them, they’ll only be able to play together until the spring. Uh, why’s that? Someone’s going to die or something? Well, Yuuki starts staring solemnly at her drink as Siune states this uncomfortable fact:

Yeah, Yuuki’s terminal. Oh well! If she’s not going to be a part of Kirito’s harem, she may as well have a short shelf life! That’s hilarious, though, isn’t it? Asuna actually has an opportunity to befriend someone outside Kirito’s harem, but it’ll be a limited time affair. Better make good use of your time here, babe. You ain’t befriend anyone again!

– More exposition explains to us that they want their names etched onto some monument on the first floor. For some odd reason, if you defeat the boss as a single party, everyone gets to be immortalized. If you do it with a full raid group, however, only the party leaders are immortalized. Yeah, we’re hard up on space in SAO. Can’t create more room. What? Do you think this is a fantasy word that we can just make up on the spot or something?

– The guild would’ve been happy to reward Asuna with money for her troubles, but our heroine naturally turns it down. Little does she know, dead people don’t need money.

– When Asuna looks at a reflection of herself, she suddenly see her former self: “But I’m still thinking about odds of victory and safety margins.” That’s pretty funny, if you think about it. She’s already eighteen, so she has to worry about soon becoming an adult. Nevertheless, our heroine years to go back in time. Not just any time, mind you. She wants to feel like her old self… the same self that was trapped in a game with 10,000 other people by some madman. And in this game, you could literally die. In the real world, Asuna claims that she wants to be able to make her own choices, but look at her now. There’s nothing about the old Aincrad that should make you think, “Ah, those were the good ol’ days.” Rather, when they finally managed to escape from that hellhole, they should’ve thought, “Man, we now have our lives ahead of us!” Instead, Asuna just wants to look back! If the argument is that the virtual world is just as important as the real world, then I’m not seeing it. Rather, SAO is arguing that the virtual world is better than the real world. So much better that Asuna is running away from her real life responsibilities.

– Asuna’s proportions look a bit off…

– Even Asuna can’t help but wonder why the Gary Stu wasn’t chosen instead. God, my e-husband is so much better than me, and I know it! But seriously, why? Why wasn’t Kirito recruited instead? Is it because Asuna did better? Nah, nothing like that! This is SAO, after all! As such, we still have to suck the Gary Stu’s dick: “He figured out my secret.” So in the end, the story couldn’t help making Kirito sound like a bad ass anyway.

– After Asuna’s dramatic encounter with her mother, it’s almost as if the whole thing didn’t happen. Asuna looks a bit distracted from time to time, but she’s back with Yuuki’s guild and busy preparing their small group of seven for the upcoming raid. When will Asuna take her life seriously? When will Asuna worry about her future? Who knows? She’s got a raid to worry about.

– Ah, I don’t miss this. I love how barren and simple the environments used to be and still are. Here, it’s literally just a straight pathway surrounded by a bunch of concentric rings. All hail the future of gaming!

– Right before they reach the boss room, Asuna’s group encounter a bunch of people hiding out by the entrance. I guess she’s had to do this in the past. The whole act of conjuring up some magical fish then blowing them towards the stealth’d players, however, is pretty convoluted.

– I love how Asuna has to remind them of very basic MMO things like don’t just return to town as soon as you can if you die. Also, they should try and study the boss’s patterns. Christ, Yuuki’s guild have done this before. They’ve even said it themselves. They only recruited Asuna because they needed one extra person for the latest boss. I think they know what to do, but as always, the writer has Asuna prattle on and on about commonsensical things in order to fill the silence.

– Literally just a blank background as a backdrop for our characters. Yes, I know the pathway is white, but just think about it. We’ve reached the final arc of the second season, and there’s no visual imagination here whatsoever. What’s the point of even adapting this to anime if you’re not going to take advantage of the format?

– When they finally enter the boss room, it still looks boring. The outside areas of the battlefield has been set on fire, and you see a few torches here and there. Is that it? Is this really the extent of our imagination?

– The raid boss reveals itself to be a two-headed giant with two hammers. Haha, okay.

– Do we get to see our heroes fight the boss? No, of course not. That’ll be saved until the end when they are finally ready to overcome their trials. Instead, the anime skips right to them returning to town after what sounds like a thorough defeat at the boss’s hands.

– Remember those three players our group had met earlier? They’re spies! Well, not really. Rather, they’re looking to study how other players tackle the boss so that they can relay the same information back to their guild. But wait, doesn’t the door just close behind you, so no one outside the party can see anything? Oh no, you guys! Someone had created a lizard familiar, and it followed our heroes into the battlefield! I’m sorry, but that’s fucking ludicrous.

– In the real world, guilds are very secretive when they are going for world firsts. And as you can expect, there’s no way to just steal secrets this easily. But hey, this is SAO so whatever.

– But don’t worry, you guys, because master poopsocker Asuna’s got this! They have one hour until the large guild can mobilize its players. In the meantime, they can try their best and beat the boss before that happens! So let’s poopsock some more, friends!

– When our heroes get there, there are twenty people already standing there, waiting to fight the boss. Apparently, it’s one of those games where only one group can fight the boss at a time. Yes, the battlefield isn’t instanced, and that’s hilarious. We have the technology to create realistic virtual worlds, but only one raid group can go for the world first at any given time. This sounds like a terrible MMO.

– Yuuki’s solution? Let’s just fight these twenty jackasses! Certainly, seven organized players can beat twenty unorganized players. But these aren’t just twenty unorganized players. These are twenty players from a high-level guild aiming for world firsts. The idea that Yuuki’s group can just kick their ass is not very believable, but again, it’s SAO so logic just goes flying out the window.

– Yuuki tells Asuna that there are some things you can only share by fighting. For some reason, Asuna takes those words to heart and starts thinking about her mother. As a result, she puts away her wand and takes out her sword. What?

– In the distance, the rest of the guild is about to show up and pull a pincer move on our hapless heroes. But here comes the Gaaaarrrrrrry Stuuuuuuuu:

Yes, he’s shown up to hold back the other half of the massive endgame guild. Mai waifu wants to feel important, so y’all gonna have to back it up. BACK. IT. UP!

– In the end, Asuna can’t even accomplish anything in the virtual world for herself without Kirito’s blessing, so it’s just hilarious to think she’s got anything figured out in the real world.

– What? You didn’t think Kirito would just disappear for the rest of the arc, did you? Here’s a parting shot to haunt your dreams.

Alright, alright, you want the virtual world to matter just as much as the real world. That’s why Asuna’s party is fighting so hard to kill the raid boss first. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t really work. After all, downing this raid boss is still a meaningless accomplishment. The simple truth is that the writer has simply overshot himself. Again, in the first arc, dying in-game meant you would also die in real life. Beating a raid boss meant you were one step closer to escaping your virtual prison. Last but certainly not least, because you were separated from your actual family and friends, you had to form real, lasting relationships with the other trapped players. Now, the Aincrad arc didn’t exactly pull any of this shit off with great success, but at least everything made sense thematically. I can see how the virtual world might be as important as the real world. The execution just wasn’t there.

Here, however, the situation’s just fucking ludicrous. Yuuki is likely dying from some terminal disease, and instead of having an actual, meaningful bucket list, she wants to have her name etched onto some shitty virtual monument because her group of friends managed to kill some shitty virtual monster. And this virtual monster stands for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Like I’ve said, killing a raid boss in the first arc was important, because it meant you were one step closer to saving not just yourself but all the other trapped players. That struggle had meaning. Here, we’re just making some dying girl’s wish come true, but of all the things to wish for, it’s downing a raid boss. It’s not even the raid boss. They’re not fighting the equivalent of the Lich King, i.e. the final boss of the game. It’s just some random fucking schmo.

Long story short, this is not how you make the virtual world meaningful. No one’s going to respect this shit. Oh, what did she do before she died? She and her friends downed a raid boss? Wow, awesome! I’m totally quitting Facebook and moving all of my online interactions to VRMMOs!

Stray notes & observations:

– Oh lord, just listen to the sound of Asuna’s voice when Kirito makes his jackass entrance. It’s enough to make you dry heave.

– Some dude: “Even you can’t possibly fight this many people at once, can you?” Your first mistake was even asking!

– All this whining over an MMO boss. All this trouble just because this party of seven people desperately want to have their names on some stupid monument. I mean, I’d be ticked off too if I was the larger guild. You guys only have seven people. Put yourself in raid group’s shoes. You wouldn’t believe in the Sleeping Knights, either. They’re really just wasting your time, because they think it would be cool to try a 49-man raid boss with seven.

– Kirito has to give Asuna that little shit-eating smirk right before those casters attempt to nuke him. It’s like, “Baby, I got this. And I’ll totally give you the spotlight so you can look good after being ignored for more than half a season.” Because why should he care? With Asuna tied up with the raid boss, he has all the free time in the world to flirt with the rest of his harem.

– Those mages spend all that time casting and this is all we get? A-1 Pictures is not going to break a sweat, are they?

– Kirito simply deflects the mages’ spells with his sword. He literally “cut the magic apart.” First, these are not some chump mages. These are mages in a top-tier raiding guild. Nevertheless, they couldn’t even trouble the Gary Stu. Second, he’s a goddamn fighter. A duel-wielding fighter, no less. But do you think that matters? Do you think it’s somehow ridiculous that a fighter also has the defensive capabilities of a tank. Yeah, this is a fair game, you guys.

– Kirito: “Even the fastest magic is slower than an anti-materiel rifle’s bullet.” Yep, “materiel.” Yep, bragging about his exploits in another game.

– Klein shows up to help out, but do you honestly think this story will give the sidekick any of the glory? Hell no.

– This is anime hell.

– This is truly anime hell.

– Then all we see is the Gary Stu disappearing into a cloud of flames. In other words, we don’t have to animate anything, because a convenient, sight-obscuring explosion has shown up! You know what? I want to disappear into a cloud of flames right about now.

– Then of course, Asuna’s group takes on the other twenty. The problem is, the other twenty don’t even put up a fight. Are you sure these are raiders? Are you sure these are some of the game’s best players? Give me a break. This is not just the writer’s problem. This is A-1 Pictures’ problem. They’re lazy, because they know they can get away with it. This fight scene completely sucks. Some guy with a spear literally just stabs two people simultaneously. Why were they just standing there? Why isn’t anyone even trying to fight back? I could buy this if Asuna’s group was actually ganking a bunch of low level players. But these are supposed to be the best raiders, man. The best. They may not be as good at the game as Asuna’s buddies, but shit, they shouldn’t be this useless. Unfortunately, having the raiders fight back would require some additional work on A-1 Pictures end, and they just don’t give a shit.

– We finally see some fighters half-heartedly try to fight back against Yuuki, but it’s too late. The entire scene is a complete farce. There’s nothing here that makes me think we’re watching an MMO come to life. The raiders don’t use any skills to resist our heroes. No one can cast crowd-control spells, apparently. Good luck raiding without CC. No one is even casting spells from the back line. Again this is a raid group. I don’t care if this was written back in 2002. Even Final Fantasy XI had the most basic MMO mechanics that SAO utterly lacks.

– Yuuki then has the audacity to bitch that the raid group is healing themselves up. Asuna thus takes it upon herself to take out the enemy healers all by her lonesome. In an actual game, the raid group would do everything in their power to peel for their healers. ‘Cause, y’know, they’re a coordinated raid group and they should know this shit. They should know these very basic shit that any MMO player knows by the time they’ve reached level twenty in any given game. Here, however, Asuna just has to needlessly backflip a billion times, stick her ass in the camera, then… then…

…sigh. Somehow, she becomes a human torpedo that simply blows the entire raid group away.

– And look at how her head contorts as she announces her intention to assassinate the healers:

What is wrong with her? Is she having a seizure? It’s just bizarre.

– What are you guys doing?

– Seriously, what are you guys even doing?

– Holy fuck, she’s a demon! Then she goes from that position…

– …to this position…

– …then she executes a forward flip in the air without her feet ever touching the ground. Cool. This is just very cool. In a busier scene, it would be unfair of me to break the animation down like this. But look at these screenshots. Just look at them. There’s just a single character on the screen, and it’s Asuna. And the background is completely and utterly featureless. You thus can’t fucking whine that I’m being unfair to the animation. A-1 Pictures had nothing to animate and they still couldn’t get it done!

– Oh, okay.

– One last look at the badass Gary Stu before we engage the raid boss in a fight, ’cause his approval just means the world to Asuna. You go get it, girl! This is your time after a billion of me times!

– Asuna: “Everyone, use potions to max your HP and MP.” People, swing your weapons to damage the enemy! People, put one feet before the other in order to advance forward! People, don’t forget to breathe!

– Asuna then thanks Yuuki for teaching her that “there are things that can be shared only by fighting.” Right, right. And now, Asuna will solve all of her real world problems with that nugget of wisdom, huh?

“You’re two years behind everyone!”

I’m fighting!

“You’re going to marry a deadbeat who plays video games all day and flirts with other girls!”

I’m fighting!

“You have no clue what you want to do with your life!”

Maaaaaahm, I said I’m fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiighting!

– Remember the last raid boss encounter that we saw? At least Kirito’s group actually had Sinon as a backline DPS. Here, it’s literally just two healers and five melee damage dealers. Well, Asuna throws out an offensive spell every now and then, but that’s about it. The fact that they’ve neglected to have a dedicated ranged DPS is ridiculous. Even if this was written over a decade ago, MMOs back then had a lot more depth than this. And even if they didn’t, A-1 Pictures can certainly take the liberty to make this fight seem more interesting. But instead, you’re just watching five melee characters throw themselves at the boss repeatedly. We’ve simply replaced the Gary Stu with tragic action girl, and the Gary Stu’s friends with equally unimportant side characters.

– But you also pass up on a golden opportunity to add characterization to these characters. We don’t have much time to flesh them out, right? Guess what? Their individual classes can help out with this. Maybe a rogue is fiendish. Maybe a mage is nerdy. I mean, these are stereotypes, but at least they’re something. Right now, Yuuki’s friends are completely indistinct, and that’s because they all do the same thing in any given battle. Right off the bat, the story doesn’t even give itself a chance.

– Only now do these characters realize that there’s a giant ass crystal on the boss’s chest. Holy shit, have they never played video games before? Anyway, Asuna smartly realizes that perhaps they should target that crystal. She thus summons a bunch of ice shards to attack the boss’s weak point. Unfortunately, the weak point is too high up for most melee characters to reach. What? You mean it would be useful to have a mage DPS of some sort? No way!

– It’s a fucking VRMMO. Why can’t you just have Asuna hand her healing partner those mana potions? Why do need to see this stupid message?

– We can do massive damage!

– Even without Asuna’s brilliant strategy, these characters are just dumb as hell. They randomly run up to the boss just to hack at its well-protected hands. Guys, I’m helping!

– Anyway, tragic action girl launches herself off of a teammate’s head in order to reach the boss’s weak point. The sad part is, they’ve been at this boss for quite some time now. But simply having the heroine attack the weak point once is all you need. They’ve done it. The boss dies just like that. But more specifically, Yuuki’s done it. The rest of her team didn’t do shit. Talk about a weird way for a raid boss to go down.

– I wonder what the two-timing Kirito will think of this.

– Let’s have a party! Should we have it at a fancy restaurant? Nah, let’s have it at Asuna’s shitty log cabin instead!

– Unfortunately, it’s time for Yuuki’s tragic story to kick in. It’s going to get real tear-jerky in here.

– Generic party scenes follow. People are eating. People are drinking. Actually, I kind of like Yuuki’s stories. She’s talking about the worst MMO she ever played. Apparently, it was a bug-themed MMO. She was an ant, and Siune was a goddamn caterpillar. Dude, that sounds fucking awesome. Enough of this wish-fulfillment crap. Let’s watch these hot anime babes turn into bugs.

– Oh shit, that’s just Terra Formars! I’VE BEEN LIED TO.

– Unfortunately, the rest of the scene puts me to sleep. You’ve played a lot of MMO, huh? Durr, I sure have! Man, this house is comfortable!

– C’mon, Asuna’s mom. Pull the plug on your daughter’s game, and force her to face the real world. Do it. You’re my only hope to end this horrible scene.

– Asuna asks if she could join Yuuki’s guild, but obviously, tragic girl’s about to get tragic. She tells our heroine that Sleeping Knights will disband soon. Oh man, how heartbreaking. Too bad the show has been heavily hinting right from the get-go that there is something wrong with Yuuki, so as a result, this scene has no emotional impact on me! Ah well!

– Asuna thus quickly changes the subject by suggesting that they visit the monument that they had worked so hard to deface.

– We’re immortalized, boys! Shirking our real life responsibilities to help some strangers get their name on an e-monument was worth it after all! Wait till Mom hears about this! She won’t make me go to college now!

– After realizing that she had been referring to Asuna as “nee-chan” over and over, Yuuki logs out in tears. I guess her real sister is… dead. DUN DUN DUN. Tune in next week for some sad girls in the virtual snow.

– There probably won’t be any snow.

Here comes the waterworks…

– Asuna’s pretty worked up about a girl she barely knows or has spent any time with. It’s not like they were ever close friends. Hell, it’s not like they were even friends. They did a single raid together, and… honestly, that was it. That was really it. Nevertheless, Asuna currently shows more passion about this than, y’know, fixing her messed up life in the real world.

– Oops, silly me forgot that VRMMOs are the equivalent of Facebook. And beating a raid boss with a friend must be like Farmville or something! And likewise, you would care a lot about that one girl you spent one day playing Farmville wit–… wait, no, that doesn’t make sense either. Darn!

– Haha, look at Asuna’s passive-aggressive bullshit: “If I’m a bother to you, I’ll leave you alone.” I always have to roll my eyes when I hear this sort of thing.

– But to be fair, Yuuki and her friends didn’t handle this very well either. Disappearing without saying a word is just immature and inviting drama for the sake of drama. I’m sure Asuna wishes Yuuki could just open up to her. When you care about someone — when you are truly concerned about them — you just want to know how they’re feeling, if they’re okay, if they are coping, etc. I mean, just look! Just look at Asuna! She’s all torn up over this, and it’s all because her supposed friends has decided to disappear without saying a word! Thank God Yuuki is just some internet friend. Could you imagine how much worse Asuna would feel if Yuuki was like… a daughter? Could you imagine if Asuna had known Yuuki for like… oh, I don’t know… eighteen years and the girl just decided to disappear on her? Disappearing without a word really tears the other person up, because not only do they not get closure, they have to live in fear and uncertainty. It’s just so unfair to Asuna that this has to happen to her.

– Back in the real world…!

– Asuna comes down and sees her parents eating at the dinner table. She decides to “disappear” from the house without even saying a word to either of them. Oh, I’m sure they don’t need to know a damn thing about their daughter anyway. And how long have they been together? All of Asuna’s life? Uh, that’s just real life, okay? Her mom barely even knows her! It’s not like they’ve ever done a raid together, pfft. Her mom doesn’t care about Asuna or her future anyway! If she did, she’d totally approve of Asuna getting with that cute boi in all black clothes. Most of all, I doubt her mom is even torn up about any of this. It’s not like she’s a grown woman or anything, so she has full control of her emotions. Yeah, Asuna! Just leave without saying a word! Stick it to your parents!

– Meanwhile, Kirito’s busy playing with his daughter. Isn’t she cute?

– Somehow, the Gary Stu knows how to locate Yuuki in the real world. Even then, isn’t this a violation of her privacy? If she really wants to keep Asuna away, maybe Kirito should mind his damn business.

– Asuna: “Even so, I want to see Yuuki and talk to her again, no matter what.” Sorry, but this reaction from her just doesn’t make any goddamn sense. If they had spent more time together — if they had actually been friends for a long time — I could understand this. But they did one raid, man. One raid. How do we go from one raid and one party to “I NEED TO TALK TO HER AGAIN NO MATTER WHAT!!!” She’s acting as if she just got dumped.

– Kirito then hands Asuna a note that will supposedly lead the girl right Yuuki… in the real world. First, wow, what a small world! Second, holy shit, how did the Gary Stu even manage to stumble upon this information? Wait, I don’t want to know. Just go back to playing with your virtual daughter.

– On a more serious note, the anime implies that our Gary Stu had put two and two together, and thus came to the conclusion that Yuuki is undergoing some clinical trials for something called “Medicuboid.” But is this honestly more believable than the idea that Kirito is some weirdo pervert who stalks every cute girl he sees?

– Asuna shows up to this place, and a doctor simply reveals all sorts of personal information about Yuuki to our heroine, including his patient’s family name. But it’s okay! He hasn’t violated any sort of patient-doctor confidentiality agreement! Y’see, Yuuki just knew that Asuna would track her down somehow in the real world. I mean, that is some creepy-ass shit right there, but since Asuna was going to locate her anyway, Yuuki was like, “Yo, if this stalker of mine shows up, just tell her everything.”

– Why? Why can’t I see her?!@!@!!!@ Um, you’re a smart girl, right? Haven’t you noticed that you’re talking to a doctor? Haven’t you noticed that the girl is undergoing clinical trials? Psst, she’s dying…

– Awwwww yeeeeeeeah, exposition about the Medicube-thingamajig! That’s what I watch Sword Art Online for! Exposition about made-up technology!

– Metal Gear Boring, take 1:

“It is the first Medical Full Dive System!”
“Medical Full Dive System?!”
“Give it a rest, Snake. Do you have to repeat everything I say in a question?”

– The doctor says all this weird, inhuman stuff, and Asuna’s initial response is, “That sounds like a true dream machine!” Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, I sure would love to have a machine hooked up to every single section of my nervous system.

– Metal Gear Boring, take 2:

It’s only good for terminal care.
Terminal care?!
Dammit, Snake!

– Man, if these two characters are just going to sit in a room and talk for the rest of the episode, I’ll just do the same thing for this post.

Somewhere in a deluded mind far, far away…

Thought process no.1: We make her terminally ill!

Thought process no.2: Hm, nah, that’s not sad enough. How do we make this even sadder? I want sadness porn, man. I want dirty, raunchy sadness porn!

1: …

2: …

1: …what if we give her AIDS?

2: Oooh… wait. Just look at Magic Johnson. He’s doing just fine with AIDS!

1: He’s super rich, though.

2: We’re in the future, buddy. They probably expect drugs in the future to do a better job combating AIDS.

1: Fine, let’s give her a drug-resistant variant of HIV!

2: Hm, maybe. I don’t know, though… I just don’t know. Is this really sad enough? I mean, I really want to jerk peoples tears. I really want to make them feel so sad, they’ll be too numb to criticize anything.

1: …

2: …

1: Okay, what if we say this… her mother even thought about aborting her children at one point!

2: Children? You mean Yuuki has a sibling?

1: Yeah, why else would she keep referring to Asuna as her sis? But get this. She doesn’t just have a sibling. She has a sick elder twin! Yeah, elder twin.

2: That means…

1:  Yuuki is the sick imouto!

2: Mmm… mmmm…! Sorry, just thinking of a sick imouto made me wet myself a little. But seriously, why didn’t I think of putting a sick imouto into the story earlier?!

1: Sick imoutos don’t usually have large racks.

2: Oh yeah. And Leafa’s the designated big-boobed girl of the harem. What a waste. She could’ve been the sick imouto.

1: We could still give Kirito a long lost sister one day.

2: Yeah, probably, but let’s get back to Yuuki for now. Tell me more about her.

1: …

2: …

1: Let’s say she had to take a lot of drugs as a kid…

2: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

1: …and oh, the kids at school totally bullied her! For having AIDS!

2: Kids can be so cruel…

1: I know. But still, the sick imouto had hope! That’s what you do! You give them hope–…

2: …then you crush it!

1: Exactly! But despite everything–…

2: …the sick imouto kept smiling!

1: And she decided to become a test subject, because virtual reality is just so cool. You can have sex in it and every–

2: We probably shouldn’t talk about sex with the sick imouto, though. Just leave that up to the doujins.

1: Yeah. They’ll take care of that for us. They’ll probably come up with some stupid plot like, “Oh, you don’t know what sex is like, so the Gary Stu can show you!”

2: Well, I mean, it is a doujin.

1: Anyway, since then, Yuuki has spent 99% of her time in the virtual world.

2: Well, who would blame her! Her real world sucks!

1: It’s like this, basically. Asuna and her idiot friends were only trapped in Aincrad because of some murderous idio–…

2: Tsk tsk, did you forget that we decided to make Kayaba into an inspiring figure?

1: Oh, yeah, you’re right. Trapping 10,000 people in a game was totally the right move.

2: But yeah, go on with what you were saying.

1: Yuuki traps herself in the virtual world on purpose. She has to. It’s by necessity.

2: Damn, that’s deep.

1: I know. And this entire time, Yuuki is watching Asuna from the virtual world.

2: Oh?

1: She wants to know what Asuna’s reaction will be.

2: Why’s that?

1: Yuuki wants to know how Asuna would cope with this tragedy, ’cause get this: the rest of her family are already dead.

2: So she’s all alone?

1: Yep. That’s why she fears rejection. Hey, what are you doing?

2: I’m already storyboarding the scene. During it, we’ll keep cutting back to Yuuki’s skeletal body. It’ll really drive home the sadness porn.

1: Good idea.

2: Then Asuna will cry, right? ‘Cause at some point, it just gets so sad…

1: I’m a little disturbed that you have a hard-on as you say that.

2: But dude, it’s so sad!

1: Yeah, it’s sad.

2: And then Yuuki jumps in and cheers Asuna up! She’ll just talk through the speakers or something. We’ll flash the words “Talking” onscreen for the people who are too slow to catch on.

1: Yuuki really is a tough cookie, huh?

2: Then Asuna will hurriedly log into ALO to talk to Yuuki.

1: How?

2: The doctor has a computer nearby. How else would he interact with her?

1: Ah, duh. I’m just stupid.

2: But like I was saying, this is what it’s all about. We’re giving our heroine a reason to embrace the virtual world no matter what her mother says.

1: Oh, I get where you’re going with this! This totally gives Asuna a great reason to keep doing what she’s doing. If her mom is ever like, “Asuna, when are you going to take your life seriously?!” Asuna can come back with, “Mom, I’m helping someone who has AIDS. Did you hear that? AIDS. I don’t have time to deal with your bullshit right now! Literally AIDS. Ugh, I can’t even!”

2: Haha, yeah, Asuna’s mom totally needs to check her privilege.

1: So what happens after Asuna logs in?

2: Asuna gets that determined look on her face, right? And she’ll take off flying so that she can meet Yuuki.

1: That’s some touching Titanic shit right there.

2: And when she gets there, Asuna will find out that the other members of the guild will die too.

1: Gotta keep driving up that sadness factor.

2: Yep. Then Yuuki will reveal to Asuna her one true wish.

1: Oh yeah?

2: She’ll want to go to school. Every dumbass anime character wants to go to school.

1: You’re right! No matter what story it is, these characters will always wish to have a shining high school life!

2: It’s just hard to move on from those years. Being an adult sucks, so we just want to go back to when times were simpler.

1: Yeah, especially if your high school years were especially bad. Anime is like… a second chance at it.

2: Yep. This time, you’re the popular kid who gets all the hot chicks.

1: Yeah…

2: Oh, and this entire time, there won’t be an evil mom around to pull the plug! There’s just the nice doctor on the outside.

1: Well, he is in charge of this cutting edge technology, after all.

2: Hey, you know who else is working on cutting edge technology?

1: …the Gary Stu!

2: The doctor helps terminal patients live full lives in the virtual world…

1: …and now, the Gary Stu will help these terminal patients experience the real world with that creepy thing he’s doing with his e-daughter!

2: Man, it all comes back to the Gary Stu in the end.

1: Well, it has to.

2: So in a way, the doctor is just a glimpse into what Kirito will become?

1: Basically.

2: And Asuna’s mom is…

1: …obviously what Asuna will become if she doesn’t stand up to her mom.

2: Heh, men rules…

1: …and women drools.

2: Y-you know me so well!

1: It’s ’cause I’m you, silly!

2: We’re both hack writers…

1: …together!

2: Wait, we just spent the rest of this post talking in a room.

1: It’s okay. They’re too busy crying to notice anyway.

2: That’s why we call it emotionally manipulative!

1: Haha, yeah, this shit lets us get away with anything.

2: And if we act as though we know ahead of time what sort of criticism they’ll lob at us…

1: …we can then pretend that the criticism has been invalidated!

2: Genius!

What a sad episode.

– Welp, here is Kirito being a genius and everything. This is supposed to be Asuna’s story, but Kirito still has to Gary Stu it up. Here’s the thing, though. If you remove him from the story, the sad truth is that Asuna would have accomplished nothing!

• Beat the raid boss first? Nah. She needed Kirito to heroically show up at the last minute and hold off half of a raid by himself. Otherwise, Asuna and her friends would have been shit out of luck.
• Find Yuuki in the real world? Nah. Asuna wouldn’t have had a single clue where to start looking. She didn’t even suspect that Yuuki was a terminally ill patient. Yuuki would reject Asuna in ALO like usual, and that would’ve been that. That would’ve been the end of the story. Our heroine would never find Yuuki, and as a result, we’d never hear the girl’s sob story about AIDS and all that tearjerking nonsense.
• Help Yuuki experience life at school? Nah. Asuna wouldn’t be able to say anything but, “Man, that’s too bad. I wish I could help!” But thanks to her boyfriend’s mere presence in this story — in her story, she can actually give Yuuki the thing that she wants most!

So y’see, Asuna’s story would have been an unmitigated disaster without Kirito’s presence. But what would happen if you could somehow reverse the situation? If you could somehow delete Asuna from the GGO arc, would this have changed the outcome of Kirito’s story one bit? Not a chance. And that’s when you know that this story is chauvinist as fuck.

– Try not to make sudden movements, Kirito says. So what does Asuna do? She immediately snaps up in her seat. Yeah, she’s not a college girl. I think her mom should just cut her losses and get a new kid to inherit the family wealth. Hey, Grisaia no Kajitsu makes it sound so easy!

– As a reminder, Asuna promised to help Yuuki experience a shining high school life. Yep, it’s cliche as hell. Anime has this weird perception that high school is as good as it’ll ever get in a person’s life. Frankly, it’s a little pathetic. It’s like these stories are all written by Uncle Ricos.

– Anyway, to get the job done, Kirito has mounted a camera on Asuna’s shoulder, and this will allow Yuuki to see what Asuna sees. But y’know, in a world full of terrible VR technology, I’m surprised there isn’t a VR simulation that tries to emulate that shining high school life that these characters so desperately yearn for.

– In fact, this is what I find hilarious about last week’s episode. So these patients are terminal, right? And we use VR technology to not only reduce their pain, but also let them play games, right? So how come we haven’t created a high school simulation to also educate them? Do they even get any education? Why would you develop that level of technology just to let them poopsock an MMO? And don’t even start with the whole “They’re terminal patients, so they don’t need education!” ‘Cause look at Yuuki now.

– Oh boy, what a big courtyard you have (not really)!

– Oh boy, what amazing Japanese literature you have!

– Oh boy… this episode is just really boring as Asuna takes Yuuki to see more things, including the girl’s old home.

– There is, however, one interesting bit of conversation. Somehow, the topic of love and marriage comes up, and Yuuki has this to say about Kirito: “You have to be careful. I get the feeling that he lives outside reality in a different way than I do.” Asuna just laughs nervously, but that’s because she’s running away from her own reality, too. Hehehe… Plus, she knows she can’t anger the harem lead, because he can easily replace her with any of the other girls.

– We then learn more about Yuuki, but I don’t care about Yuuki.

– Asuna: “I haven’t been able to hear my mother’s voice for a long time, either.” Pfft, whose fault is that?

– She then adds, “And she doesn’t hear what I’m saying,” That’s because you have nothing to say. People think I’m on the mother’s side, but the truth is, I’m on nobody’s side. I don’t like overbearing parents either. I know all about bossy, know-it-all Asian parents who think they know best. But you know what? If you want to be heard and if you want to be treated with respect, you have to stop acting like a child. You have to have a concrete plan that will at least give your goddamn parents some goddamn peace of mind. Like I’ve said over and over in my previous posts, Asuna’s mother is taking control of her life because the girl doesn’t have control over her own life.

You can’t forget the fact that Asuna’s already eighteen years old. And thanks to Aincrad, she’s also two years behind most people her age. But what does Asuna do with all her time? She just hangs out with her e-boyfriend in ALO and acts all lovey-dovey. And here’s the sad part! Even Kirito takes the real world more seriously than Asuna! Far more seriously, in fact. For one, he’s actually worked for the government, so he has connections. And what is he doing now? Oh yeah, he’s developing his engineering skills in a field that he loves. He knows what he wants to be when he grows up. Look, I’ve ragged on the Gary Stu all season, but fair’s fair. And the fact of the matter is, the guy is at least doing something to forge his own future.

What has Asuna done? Nothing. Kirito was no different from Asuna, too. They were both stuck in that shitty game, but somehow, one person is already miles ahead of the other person. And that’s all it is. If you were Asuna’s parents, you’d be concerned, too. Of course, Asuna’s mother is not without her faults. She’s portrayed as the stereotypical Asian parent, so she’s overbearing, and worst of all, she has a hard time communicating her feelings. If she was good at talking to her own daughter, she would just sit the girl down, and calmly explain the problem as she sees it. It would probably go something along the lines of this:

“Look, you’re about to be an adult, and yet, you have no direction in life. I’m just concerned for you, and I want to take life a little more seriously. You need to play these games a little less. I know they’re important to you, but so is life. So is earning a living. So is having money to put food on the table. We can’t take care of you forever. I want you to come up with a plan for the next five years, so I at least know you have some direction in life.”

But like most Asian parents, Asuna’s mother immediately tries to take control of Asuna’s life. It’s their natural instinct. And while I will readily admit that this is bad, this is actually not the core problem. Rather, it is merely a symptom of the real issue, and that is that Asuna won’t face her real life issues head on. Asuna’s mother isn’t going about it the right way, but let’s not pretend that she’s the villain here. No, it’s Asuna. She’s simultaneously the protagonist and the antagonist of her own story. The girl is her own worst enemy. Every chance she gets, she runs away to some made-up, fantasy world. Hell, even when she’s sad in the real world, where does she go? She runs to a playground, i.e. a crude simulacrum of a fantasy world for kids.

I guarantee you that if you come up with a solid plan and act with confidence, someone like Asuna’s mother would back off. If you continue to throw tantrums and act like a child, however, then this is what you get and, quite frankly, deserve. You won’t get any respect if you don’t act like someone who deserves respect. If you continue to act like a kid, then your parents will obviously treat you like their kid. People who think I’m just siding with Asuna’s mother simply can’t grasp nuance… much like Asuna herself.

– Ah, what would we do without corny ass lines like this one: “It was because, even when I ran, you tried your hardest to catch me.”

– Oh boy, Asuna is going to confront her mom! She has lots to say, but wait… wait! We have to do it… in the online world! Why? Asuna explains, “Right here, I can’t tell you what I’m thinking and what I feel.” So I need the online world as a crutch. Sweet!

– Asuna: “I want you to see my world!” No, the real world is your world, too. They’re all important, but y’know, the one where you can actually feed yourself might just actually be more important. Crazy, huh?

– Aw yeah, still gotta give Asuna’s mom big boobs in the online world! You just hope Kirito doesn’t log in and see this! Hoo boy, his harem is large enough!

– Haha, weight jokes! Girls being girls, am I right, fellas?! This writer totally gets women!

– Oh great, the cedar woods behind Asuna’s e-house looks like the woods surrounding her late grandparents’ house. Very profound. Much poignant.

– Asuna: “I want to live in a way that makes all the people around me happy. I want to live in a way that lets me support those around me when they get tired. And for that, I want to keep doing my best with my studies and other things at the school I love!” That’s not a plan. That doesn’t say anything. It’s just a bunch of cheap platitudes. All we’ve done is turn up the feels, but Asuna has literally said nothing that makes me think she’s going to change and approach her weaknesses in life with any sort of maturity. She’s said nothing to make me think she still won’t be a child who runs to a fake fantasy world every chance she gets. But this is SAO in a nutshell, and as such, it’s full of cheap bullshit that won’t really explore the real consequences and implications behind virtual reality.

SAO just wants to pretend that virtual reality can be just as important as our actual reality without doing any of the work — without taking any responsibility whatsoever. I’m not even saying that Asuna can’t attend her school. There’s nothing inherently wrong with attending her school. She just doesn’t have a plan. She’s not really addressing any of the actual problems that her mother had raised in previous episodes. She just wants to do it because it makes… it makes people happy? Give me a break. The real world doesn’t run on happiness alone. But apparently, if you bombard the audience with enough feels, you can convince them to buy into your bullshit. Hey, it’s working on Asuna’s mother!

– Apparently, if you feel like crying in a VRMMO, you must cry. You can’t hold it back. What a shitty world.

– The next day, Asuna’s mother still feels the need to remind Asuna that the latter has to go to university. Whoops, all those feels and still no concrete plans! Good thing we have an Asian mother to rectify that!

– Nevertheless, Asuna’s mother relents. And she relents all because of feels. Even worse, she’s like, “You’re prepared to support someone for the rest of your life, aren’t you?” How said is that? This entire arc boils down to one thing: preparing Asuna to support the Gary Stu for the rest of her sad, pathetic existence. If he was Jesus, I might understand throwing her life away for one guy. But he’s not Jesus. He’s just Kirito.

– Anyway, now that we’ve taken care of that, all that’s left is to kill off Yuuki’s character. Boy, I can’t wait!

Ughhhh, do I have to? Do I really, really have to? You know what? After two full seasons of Sword Art Online, I think I deserve to pull it back a bit. I think I have written enough words on this accursed series. Hell, I think I’ve written enough to fill a small book! Thank god I have no interest in cover the light novels too! And if you ask my detractors, these posts have apparently gotten generic. Ah well, you can’t win them all. But I need a break. I need to just sit back… and uh… not enjoy the show? Anyway…

Obligatory party scene, people! Anime loves parties!

I-Is that Recon? He’s still around? The answer is apparently yes. And all he’s good for is stalking Leafa. Y’know, just in case you guys need some ideas for your doujins. I sure am glad they dragged out this worthless character just for that!

Oh look, a raid boss! Hey, remember how this is an anime about MMOs? Yeah, me neither.

‘Cause we all know it’s really a harem. Here’s the one thing Leafa is good for.

Sinon’s still alive too? After the past few weeks, who would’ve guessed!

We then see Yuuki kick the Gary Stu’s ass one last time. But c’mon, what is he supposed to do? Lose to a little girl with AIDS? He’s just being nice!

Speaking of wrapping things up, Asuna’s mom shows up one last time, and it’s just to look disappointed. Does she now regret capitulating to Asuna’s childish demands? I sure would!

Nevertheless, the girl gets to go on a vacation with her friends–… Whoa whoa whoa! A vacation in… the real world? You mean there are things in the real world that are worth seeing? You mean a dying patient should probably want to experience other things besides a shining high school life? Word?

But don’t get your hopes up, boys! Here comes the tragedy!

Run, girl, run! Run to that hospital with all your might! Wait, where have I seen this before?

It rhymes. Like poetry.

Uguu, she’s so moe~ The best part is when Asuna’s like, “Yuuki won’t lose, right? Because you’re Zekken! The strongest swordsman!” No, Asuna, no. This is the real world. In other words, she’s gon’die.

Thanks, doc. I wasn’t quite sure what I should do.

Asuna suddenly realizes that they should meet each other in ALO once more. Once more… with feeling! But why? What’s so important?!

Of course! The sword skill! What better way to remember a close friend but by inheriting her sword skill! No, Yuuki doesn’t have anything touching to leave behind like maybe a book that she’s written, a painting that she’s drawn, or whatever. Nah, a sword skill is way more personal than those pieces of junk! And guess what the sword skill is called. That’s right. “Mother’s Rosario.” HEY DATS DA TITLE!!!

And one by one, people who barely even knew Yuuki stops by to pay their respects. Even the Gary Stu to bless her journey across the River Styx.

And by people, I really mean everyone.

But wait, there’s more!

I’m sorry, but they look like fucking gnats in the sky.

Look how solemn everyone is, though. C’mon, this is the internet we’re talking about here. Assholes would troll the fuck out of something this pretentious.

Yuuki and Asuna proceed to share some touching words, but I’m not really paying attention. I’m too busy staring at Asuna’s fucked up head.

Uh, we’ll throw Yuuki a bone, I guess. She sees her dead sister when she gazes at Asuna. How poignant.

A funeral online and a funeral offline. We can’t stop! We won’t stop!

Uh, we end up learning a bit about Miune’s character. Who’s Miune, you wonder? I know, right? Let’s just fast forward a bit…

…until we hit this major revelation…

Fuuuuuuuucking hilarious. Let’s never stop sucking Kayaba’s dick. Even in a story about Asuna’s empowerment or Yuuki’s AIDS-ridden body, it nevertheless comes full circle back to that creepy fucker who decided to trap 10,000 poor souls in a video game, including little children. ‘Cause you see, he and Kirito are really just two halves of the same person. Kirito is who a certain someone wants to be. On the other hand, Kayaba is, well, literally who that certain someone really is. Kayaba created Aincrad and trapped 10,000 people in it, right? Isn’t that kind of like a certain someone creating this story, and “trapping” his characters in these hilariously overwrought scenarios? That’s why we can’t condemn Kayaba’s actions. In fact, we’re supposed to, like, respect the guy! He’s a revolutionary! He’s a genius! He created SAO, people!!!!

Wow, rude! Anyway… I’m officially done with Sword Art Online II. That’s all, folks. Go home. It’s over.

When did the first anime adaptation come out? 2012? Christ, kids can literally say that they grew up with this show. 

— I don’t even know what this third season is going to be about. With the second season, you kinda got the gist from the name alone. Gun Gale Online = gonna play some dumb MMO about guns. But Alicization? What the hell is that supposed to mean?

— At the moment, Kirito’s a kid, and he and his best friend are busy trying to cut down a tree. Well, it figures that a new arc would start with a whole new game. What’s peculiar, however, is that this Kirito doesn’t seem to have any knowledge about his real world self.

— Boys bein’ boys.

— Eventually, we are introduced to Alice, who will probably be one of the main characters for this arc.

— Needless to say, all of the old faces — other than Kirito, of course — are nowhere to be found. Where’s Asuna? Where’s Leafa? Where’s Sinon? Where’s Klein? We’ll just have to sit tight, I guess. They’ll eventually show up, but Kirito always gains a new set of friends at the start of every story.

— Look, if past behavior is indicative of future behavior, then I have no reason to believe that generic anime waifu no. 29472 won’t also fall heads over heels in love with Kirito. I’m not saying it’s guaranteed to happen, but the odds are good.

— This is so exciting. Talking about preventing food spoilage really gets me going.

— Let’s go get ice so we can keep our food cold. Quest get!

— But wait, we can’t violate the Taboo Index! What’s the Taboo Index? A bunch of rules that you must never ever break. Or else what?

— What’s readily apparent is that Kirito is the trouble-maker. Kirito is the one who comes with the idea to go fetch ice. Basically, he’s a bad influence on these kids. Alice goes along with it, and Eugeo is too much of a wimp to prevent his friends from sticking their heads where they don’t belong.

— We’re going through the motions of getting to know everyone, learning about the new world, learning about its laws and customs, blah blah blah. This is just so slow and boring. Couldn’t this wait? SAO II at least had the courtesy to open with someone dying. Despite being a side story, even SAO Alternative gave us action. Meanwhile, I’m watching a trio of kids walking along a peaceful stream, trying their best to disguise the story’s weak attempts at world-building as small talk. Yawn. We’re already nine minutes into the episode!

— Wait a minute, this episode is 48 minutes long?! Goddamn, they must really think they have an important story to tell.

— No choice?

— The kids eventually stumble upon the skeleton of a dead dragon. Which is bad, apparently. ‘Cause the dragon protects humanity or something. After milling around for a while — and playing with a sword that’s far too heavy for them to carry out — the kids finally fill up their basket full of ice and are ready to head home. Unfortunately, they seem to have picked the wrong path out and are thus greeted with this desolate landscape. Apparently, you have a tiny patch of habitable land surrounded by a ring of mountains. Then after walking a tiny bit through a cave, you’ll end up in the lazily-named “Dark Territory.”

— Honestly, I’m just waiting for something — anything — to happen. When shows decide to open with a double-length episode, you rarely ever get twice as much excitement. Instead, the pacing is simply left out to die. I’m fifteen minutes into this episode, and so far, all I’ve seen is some tree-cutting, a picnic, boring chatter about world-building, and exploring a boring cave. Fantastic.

— Finally, some action… kinda. We get dragon-on-dragon action that doesn’t really last very long nor look all that impressive. Y’know, I’d watch an anime adaptation of Drakengard. Too bad SAO ain’t Drakengard. Not even close.

— Oh no, Alice crossed over into… the DARK TERRITORY… which is clearly delineated by the differently-colored soil! Nice!

— And just like that, a report is made about Alice breaking the rules. She’ll be punished later, which is a bit weird. This is a game, right? So… why not just warp her away now? They have the ability to do so, right? I mean, the weird bald dude literally tore a whole through the fabric of the game’s reality in order to “write” Alice up. Why even bother wasting time? Ah well…

— We immediately jump right back to the kids returning to the village. I guess they had no trouble finding their way back home.

— Famous last words.

— The next morning, we see Kirito hacking away at that tree again. *whistles*

— Suddenly, an Integrity Knight shows up to the village to take Alice away. She’ll be questioned and eventually executed, he says. All for sticking her fingers where the sun don’t shine. Tsk tsk. Kids never learn.

— Tying a little girl up like this seems a bit much.

— So of course, Kirito won’t stand for this, but it’s not like there’s anything they can do anyway. One look from the Integrity Knight is enough to send Kirito flying. Mr. Badass Hero from the first two seasons will have to climb back up from the very bottom.

— Kirito begs Eugeo to help, but the latter looks like he’s literally prevented from breaking the rules. His whole body shudders at the thought of disobeying even if it would mean saving their friend. Odd.

— And just like that, Kirito wakes up back in the real world. Huh.

— So in the second half of this extra long episode, we see all of the old characters. Sinon, Klein, I forget this chick’s name, blah blah blah. They’re all side waifus. Yes, even Klein. And of course, our couple of the century. They’re all still friends, they’re all still playing shitty VRMMOs.

— Man, these guys love bullet-on-bullet action.

— Focus on my studies to make up for all that lost time in SAO? Naw, I’m too busy playing games with my boyfriend, MOM!

— So Kirito’s gang is up against a bunch of PKers, which is common in MMOs. Nothing to be concerned about here… or is there?! DUN DUN DUN, DEATH GUN IS BACK. Oy vey.

— But really, we’re still setting the stage, so there’s not much to talk about yet. Honestly, this episode has been pretty boring.

— Well, it’s about to get a whole lot more boring, ’cause here comes the goddamn exposition. First, Sinon invites Kirito and Asuna to participate in the next BoB tournament, but we’re not really here for that. No one cares about that anymore. GGO is so last year. After they get that out of the way, we finally find out what Kirito has been up to. Well, he’s been doing a lot of part-time work lately, which is tiring him out. Good thing his side waifus are always there to prop him up.

— Quick side note: Sinon is not so scared of guns anymore. Great. Exposure therapy works… kinda. Also, she tells us that her almost rapist is doing okay. We care about the bad guy because…?

— When Asuna shows up, she whips out some sort of health monitor. She can literally track her boyfriend’s vital signs. Yeesh, talk about a lack of privacy. I also can’t wait to see her worriedly stare at her phone as he nears death at some point. You know it’s coming.

— In any case, Kirito tells us all about what he’s been doing. Kinda. The problem is that he doesn’t really quite know what he’s been doing. He’s helping a mysterious company — aren’t they always mysterious? — test out new VR technology, but he’s not allowed to remember anything that he experiences within this new VR world (dubbed “Underworld” because, like Alice, it is inspired by Lewis Carroll’s novel).

— Then he starts getting into something about souls and clusters of lights. Something about a certain photon existing in our brain cells, and when it forms a cluster with other photons, this makes up our goddamn soul. What apparently makes this experimental technology special is that it connects directly to your soul. All of the other devices sent data to your brain in order to make you experience a virtual world. But this is sending data to your soul. As a result, you’re getting mnemonic visuals. You’re feeling memories instead of just seeing a fake image. Even Mr. “Expert in VRMMO” is like, “Golly, this sure looks real!” Yeah, all this pseudo-science sounds batshit crazy to me too.

— I’ll be honest — as soon as Kirito even said the word soul, I wrote the concept off completely. Maybe back in 2014, when I was full of pep and spirit (lolsoul), I would’ve written another thousand words on all the exposition that our hero is spewing at us here — maybe even sprinkle in some talk about mind-body dualism — but I literally don’t care anymore.

— What is somewhat interesting is that time passes at a different rate in Underworld. Kirito’s part-time job only took three days, but from what we saw in the first half of the episode, it sure seemed like he was there for an entire childhood. But what was he there for? Just to test new technology? That seems too simple.

— And even though he’s not supposed to remember anything during his time in Underworld, the first mention of the name Alice is enough to make the guy pause and wonder. Welp.

— After everyone leaves at the end of the day, Kirito confesses to Asuna that he wants to go to America. Why? Because the cutting edge of VR whatever is over there, and he wants to see where it all goes. But of course, he can’t live without her, so he wants her to follow him. Asuna readily accepts, which isn’t a surprise. Since she’s already in this deep, she may as well go all the way. This is as close as a marriage proposal as you’re gonna get… until the actual marriage proposal if this damn franchise will ever end.

— Kirito sounds like he’s done with the experiment. Well, he can’t be. He’s gotta go save Alice! Still, he was referred to the job by that government guy from the previous season, so it must be an experiment for the government. Probably military bullshit. When in doubt, just tie it all back to the military-industrial complex.

— Anyways, the two kids kiss, there’s a mysterious shadow when a car passes by, blah blah blah. Wait, what? Mysterious shadow?

— The two continue to talk some more. Something about Heathcliff. We can never forget about that guy, sadly. Hell, Asuna still refers to him as Commander.

— All of a sudden, this baddie approaches Kirito and Asuna, and he reveals himself to be the last surviving member of that stupid PK group back in SAO. God, don’t these losers have anything better to do?

— Better yet, he has a syringe full of dangerous stuff. It’s probably the bad stuff from SAO II, but hey, it’s been four years. You can’t expect me to remember what the syringe is filled with.

— Of course, Kirito pushes Asuna to safety and takes the syringe right to the chest. And with that, our episode ends on a cliffhanger. Seems fitting enough.

— So… lemme guess. Kirito’s gonna be almost dead, right? So they’ll have to hook him up to the experiment to keep him alive, huh? I mean, I have no goddamn clue how that’ll work, but probably souls or some shit. We probably gotta protect his soul from dying, so let’s stick him in the VR world!

— But still, if this is an experiment, are there other people in the experiment with him? That wouldn’t make much logistical sense, would it? I mean, the village in Underworld was full of people. I have to imagine that there are even bigger cities in there. I can’t imagine all of those people actually being based on someone who is hooked up to a machine in the real world. I thus wonder if Eugeo and Alice are even real. Or are they just AI with such realistic clusters of photons that they seem as though they have souls. But then if we accept the idea that human consciousness can even be created and quantified, then I guess they are as real as you or me!

— Whatever. There’s nothing here that is as bad as the original series at its worst, but give it some time. Just give it some time. The bigger problem is that this episode was just super boring. Terrible pacing and way too much exposition in the second half.

You wanna know what I’m thankful for? I’m thankful for the fact that this isn’t a double-length episode. Unfortunately, it still somehow manages to be even more boring than last week’s exposition-laden entry.

— So Kirito wakes up and finds himself back in Underworld, but this time, he’s all grown up. In the real world, they probably had to hook him up to Rath’s VR tech in order to keep him alive, because of course that’s a thing. I now expect the story to try and justify why he needs to go on an MMO adventure if he wants to survive in the real world. What’s particularly concerning is that I don’t even think the people in Underworld are real. The story will likely argue that they have real souls — artificial souls, but souls nonetheless — but eh, that’s a hard sell.

— This time, Kirito keeps his memory of the real world. Slowly but surely, he’ll eventually remember his childhood friends from this universe. That sounds as silly as it looks on paper, but I mean, there ya go. In a single three-day weekend, Kirito experience a childhood with Alice and Eugeo.

— Our hero quickly learns that there’s no menu! There’s no log out function! This is like the real thing, baby!

— From a storytelling standpoint, however, I just don’t get why you would always create a whole new life and a whole new cast of friends for the hero every single time there’s a new novel. We did it with Sinon and GGO, and we’re doing it again here. Even assuming that I’m an SAO fan — and I’m obviously not — wouldn’t I want the series to continue following Kirito and Asuna? Wouldn’t I want to see their exploits as a couple? Wouldn’t I want to see them continue growing up together? But that’s not what we get. Look, I’m not suggesting that Asuna won’t have a role to play in this arc. I’m sure she will.

— And I get that this premise allows our hero to explore all sorts of MMO worlds, and the story is trying to take advantage of that. I’m just saying that the setup seems curious. I’m just saying that I don’t get why he has to ditch his old friends every single time he goes on a new quest. Kirito gets to go on all sorts of grand adventures. Meanwhile, Asuna is just like the ol’ ball-and-chain that keeps him anchored to the real world. She’s like a reminder that while he gets to have his fun, Kirito needs to remember that he has to come home every now and then.

— To put it another way, imagine reading a Harry Potter novel where the eponymous protagonist finds himself in a new magical kingdom and thus starts hanging out with Not-Hermione and Not-Ron at Not-Hogwarts. If I’m a fan of the series, why would I want that? Do we just get bored of our close friends that easily? “Bro, I hung out with you in the last novel! Give me some space, bro!”

— Shh, I think SAO Alternative‘s “Ryusei” was a better OP.

— And speaking of exploring all sorts of MMO worlds, we’re right back to another generic fantasy universe. We got brown and bland GGO, and now we have sword and magic. Not exactly being as imaginative as we can, huh?

— Oh boy, I’ve already written 500 words and I’m only four minutes into the episode. Alright, time to pick this up a bit.

— Great, it’s that dumb tree again.

— For some reason, Kirito and Eugeo don’t recognize each other. Well, going by in-game logic, they probably haven’t seen each other in years. But there’s probably another explanation for this.

— There’s apparently lore in Underworld to explain why outsiders keep popping up. It’s a fully-realized universe with its own set of customs and beliefs… too bad it’s all just a simulation for some military project. But I guess we have the same existential concerns, don’t we. Oooooh, maybe we’re just a simulation within a simulation~~

— Kirito keeps going on and on about how this world feels too real. Likewise, the person he’s talking to also feels too real. But dude, he just forcefed exposition down my throat last week all about how the STL allows you to experience a world that is super duper realistic thanks to SOULS, so c’mon, man, don’t play dumb now.

— Eugeo says he can only buy bread early in the day, so there are only leftovers from the day before? Don’t bakers bake new bread early in the morning before the sun comes up?

— Even though we just watched last week’s episode, we have to sit here and listen to Eugeo tell his sob story about how Alice had been taken away all those years ago. Like literally minutes after minutes wasted on what we’ve already seen. SAO‘s pacing still sucks.

— It’s funny, however, how history has been rewritten so that Kirito no longer exists. He was like a foreign agent sent in to corrupt these artificial souls in just three real life days. For what purpose, who knows? All that’s certain is that Rath quickly scrubbed the world of his presence as soon as the part-time job was over. All that remains are the consequences of his actions, i.e. Alice being taken away and forced to become one of those Integrity Knights. That’s not much of a spoiler, since you can tell as much from just the OP alone. It’s all but certain that Kirito and Eugeo will go on some quest to save their friend, but how this plays a crucial role in saving our hero’s actual life in the real world remains to be seen.

— Eugeo whines that it would take a week for him to reach the central city from his village. That’s it? You care so much about your childhood friend, but you can’t set aside a week to look for her? What a wimp.

— Oh right, the Taboo Index. The people in this universe have some weird inability to disobey their orders. And this is where Kirito comes in, I suppose. He’s the corrupter of souls.

— Even in this fantasy, made-up universe, our hero has to be a teenager. VR worlds basically ensure that Kirito never has to grow up.

— Eugeo’s job is to hack away at the same dumb tree for years and years. Assuming I’m right about him being an artificial soul, it’s curious how he’s never once questioned his pointless existence. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know — the system prevents him from disobeying.

— I don’t know why we’re now learning about a dumb tree and its related lore. This dumb tree better play a crucial role in the rest of the story.

— Kirito thus offers to lend Eugeo a hand with the dumb tree, but like before, it’s no use. Sorry Kirito, but you’re not overpowered in Underworld… not yet, probably.

— Dude, what am I watching? First, I got dumb tree lore, and now, I’m getting tips on how to chop down said dumb tree? Why? All this just so Kirito can remind himself how to play VR games?

— Lots of trees are invincible in games. Remember the trees in GTA?

— Our hero proceeds to hack away at the tree for hours. Time just flies when you’re having fun. Amazing storytelling.

— Look, Eugeo starts talking about his Calling at about the 12-minute mark. We don’t see these two go home until around 16:30. That’s four and a half minutes spent on chopping down a tree.

— When they get back to the village, some jerk starts picking on Eugeo, so Kirito tries to stand up to the bully. I thought we would get like a quick swordfight or something, y’know. Just a little action to spice up this dull episode, but nope. All we get is Kirito hacking away at a log.

— We soon see that he still has his precious sword skills. So when do we start dual-wielding again?

— When they go to the church. they bump into a girl by the name of Selka. Eugeo quickly looks away as if he’s ashamed. I’m going to guess that maybe the girl is related to Alice in some fashion.

— Later that night, Kirito continues to wrack his brain some more over his current situation. All of the information has already been provided to us in last week’s episode, though. No one here is an NPC, because they’re all artificial souls. I don’t know why we’re belaboring the point.

— Finally, our hero comes to the same conclusion. Finally. Only took all episode.

— So they copied souls of newborn babies and stuck them into Underworld. For what purpose, though? To see how humans would react to a world bound by strict rules and regulations? And what was the point of sending Kirito into the world as a tester? To see if he could corrupt them into breaking the law?

— After Kirito goes to bed, we suddenly cut to a naked lady sleeping in a tall tower. Um, okay.

— But yeah, that’s the, uh, second episode for you. Literally nothing happened. Our hero woke up back in Underworld, listened to Eugeo talk about the past, listened to Eugeo talk about a tree, and… yep. All this just for our hero to conclude that he’s surrounded by artificial souls. Good ol’ SAO storytelling strikes again.

And a kidnapped young maiden? Boy, I know where this is going. 

— A groggy Kirito thinks he’s looking at Suguha, but it’s just another cute anime babe. Darn. This guy never has any luck with the hot babes!

— So what exciting things are we doing in SAO this week? Futilely whacking away at a tree again? Great. Just like the first two episodes then. Nothing boring about that.

— God, I feel like I’m just watching the same scenes over and over.

— And now Kirito is learning about Alice again.

— We finally get to hear about something new: goblins have been attacking and abducting peo–… oh goddammit, that’s not new!

— More pointless babble about this fake universe that’s probably nothing more than a military experiment to breed soldiers powered by artificially produced souls. I get the thought process. I get it: we’ll do all the boring world-building now, so we can save the exciting stuff for later. But you run the risk of losing casual viewers completely. If someone’s not already invested in SAO and everything SAO-related, why would they waste their time sitting through these back-to-back-to-back slow-moving episodes. The first episode was mostly exposition! The second episode was all exposition! And right now, the third episode looks to be guilty of the exact same storytelling sin!

— The sad thing is that you can see the money being thrown at this show. Every scene screams money. Even when the characters are doing nothing but talking about boring nonsense, A-1 Pictures is doing its damndest to make this show look cash money. Too bad the foundation is just so bad that it won’t even matter. What a waste of effort.

— When Kirito wonders if they have anything better to use — YO FELLAS, YOU GOT ANYTHING BETTER THAN AN AXE FOR CUTTING DOWN TREES?! — Eugeo leaves and returns with an immensely heavy package. It’s probably that dumb sword that Kirito couldn’t lift in the first episode.

— Yep, it is.

— We’re still bringing up Alice’s abduction and Eugeo’s feelings. Sigh.

— That’s right! Nearly ten minutes into the third episode of the series, we’re still trying to cut down a tree. Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?!

— Yay, you get a trophy for denting it.

— And now I get to watch Kirito give Eugeo tips on how to swing a sword. Haha, this must be a competition between Goblin Slayer and SAO to see which show could bore me more. This is unbelievable. The episode is halfway over, and I’m just watching a pair of fun boys swinging away at a tree — the same tree they were beating at in the first two episodes.

— Later that day, Kirito thinks about how Eugeo would never shirk his Calling, but man, it would be really helpful! He’s such a bad influence. Six years ago, he made Alice break the rules, and now, he’s trying to corrupt Eugeo. Kirito is nothing more than a malicious virus.

— Interesting angle.

— Yay, more exposition. This time, Kirito asks Selka about Alice, her big sister. We get to learn how Eugeo has been depressed ever since his friend was taken away by an Integrity Knight! Y’know, something that the anime could’ve shown us instead! But it’s cool, because we all love boring conversations while the “camera” pans across furniture!

— Welp, while they talk about crying, I’m going to check on some college football scores.

— Selka has never been told why her sister was taken away, so she asks Kirito to tell her the truth. The guy doesn’t pause to consider whether this might be a good idea or not. He just answers the question like it’s no big deal. Man, I bet Selka will now decide to head for the End Mountains. Way to go Kirito! Corrupting yet another young maiden! Not only that, Selka is supposed to be a sister in training!

— What’s that? Selka has gone missing?!

— Kirito quickly realizes the error of his ways, so he and Eugeo hurry to the End Mountains. Welp, we may as well retrace our steps from the first episode but with a different sister this time!

— Our hero then boldly claims that even if Selka commits the same sin as her big sister, they can protect her! Dude, you can’t even cut down a tree. Get outta here. This ain’t Aincrad! You ain’t that strong no more!

— All of a sudden, a certain “Kyaaaah~” rings out. All anime girls scream the same way.

— The two boys quickly stumble upon a room full of goblins. More importantly, Selka is all tied up. Eugeo stupidly yells out her name and thus alerts the goblins to their presence. Smart kid. No wonder they assigned him to cutting down a tree.

— Then as the goblins slowly advance upon Kirito and Eugeo, the latter can’t do anything but shake in his boots. Way to go, man. You’re about to let down two sisters in one lifetime.

— But yeah, this is where the episode comes to an end. It took us all episode just to get to this point, because we spent all episode jerking off to a tree.

It only took four episodes for them to leave the first town. 

— Somehow, the goblins here look worse than the ones in Goblin Slayer. Actually, everything here looks kinda like plastic.

— Eugeo is scared stiff, but I have to cut him some slack. After all, this is real life to him. He truly believes that he can die (and he probably can). On the other hand, it’s easy for Kirito to come up with a plan when it’s all just fun and games.

— Even when Kirito knocks out the torches, the room doesn’t get any darker. What is the light source here? Are the crystals naturally emitting light?

— Apparently, the goblins are afraid of a lil’ magic.

— Goblin Slayer approved…

— …whoops, maybe not. Little kids should probably leave the goblin slayin’ jobs to the adults.

— The action’s not bad, I guess. I just can’t shake the feeling that this is all pointless. Kirito can tell us over and over how real this VRMMO feels, but that just means the technology has gotten even better. But when you really pause and reflect, isn’t this all just a waste of time? Well, I’ll expand on this at the end of the post.

— Anyways, Eugeo has had years to reflect on his inability to save Alice, and as a result, he doesn’t want to make the same mistake again. The kid is determined to do what he can to help Kirito this time around.

— Ah, Kirito legitimately fears for his life.

— Due to his size, I thought that the goblin’s swing would send Eugeo, an untrained fighter, flying. But since this is all made up anyways… eh.

— I also thought that a blow like this one would cleave Eugeo in half, but apparently not. To be fair, he is bleeding quite profusely.

— Wait, when did Eugeo get his memories of Kirito back? Well, the latter now gets his memories of their shared childhood back as well. So even though only three days had passed in the real world, Kirito can’t help but feel as though he’s spent years growing up with Eugeo and Alice. I don’t suppose this sort of thing would have psychological side effects, would it?

— If this arc really wants to be different, it should try and really mess with our perception of time. Imagine seeing a wizened, 300-year-old Kirito still trying to save Alice or something. Too bad the story will insist on keeping him and Eugeo looking like teenagers.

— So Kirito clashes once more with the goblin leader. During the fight, he briefly ponders whether or not his enemy is also an artificial soul. That may very well be the case, but we don’t really know where these souls go when they die in the Underworld, huh? It wouldn’t be very efficient for the mysterious company behind everything to just continually dispose of these souls if they can somehow reuse them.

— Okay, now Goblin Slayer approves…

— …but Kirito then allows the rest of the goblins to run away, so maybe not. What’s worse is that they’ll just find a new leader and continue kidnapping people.

— Amazing. Despite all that loss of blood, Eugeo is still clinging to life.

— Selka slept through all that ruckus, but as soon as Kirito tells her to wake up, she does. Hilarious.

— There’s something wrong with the girl, because Kirito had to beg her to use her Sacred Arts on Eugeo. Yeah, sure, she might truly believe that it’s too late to save the guy, but wouldn’t you at least try? What’s the worst that could happen?

— What’s even worse is that Kirito had to remind Selka that Eugeo came to save her and not Alice? Like c’mon…

— Apparently, she has to cast a high-level spell. If she fails, both she and Kirito might die. Why? Because this is still a game, so everything has durability (HP). If Eugeo is running low on durability, let’s just give him some of ours! I take nothing back, though. I still think the girl should’ve felt the urgency to save Eugeo.

— So this is dangerous, right? It’s okay! Some angelic presence is helping Kirito! You are always in the Lord’s hands!

— And the Lord is apparently Alice.

— All of a sudden, we cut to Eugeo hacking away at that tree again. I knew the show couldn’t resist. We should just spend every episode on this dumb tree.

— Kirito asks Eugeo about memories of their childhood, but the latter is now back to being skeptical. He also didn’t hear Alice’s voice at all during the whole healing incident. As a result, our hero decides to keep it to himself for now. Yeah, yeah, I know. You guys are bored too, so let’s get back to the exciting stuff like chopping down this tree!

— After just one battle against a bunch of goblins, Kirito is suddenly strong again. Welp.

— But he’s not the only one. Dude, if I knew goblins gave this much XP, I’d never stop farming them in my games.

— As an aside, you do spend a lot of time leveling up on goblins in FFXI.

— Eugeo now begs Kirito to teach him how to wield a sword, because he’s determined to save Alice. He’s determined to right the wrongs from six years ago. I wish I could feel anything for him, but I don’t. More on this at the end of the post.

— Time for a training montage. I can only wonder how much time has elapsed within this virtual world.

— Oh no, the tree is quickly running out of durability! If we cut the tree down, what are we going to do with the rest of the series?!

— Welp, they had to go and do it. Now we’re going to have to find a bigger tree! I hope you boys are happy!

— Later that night, there’s a huge party for cutting down a dumb tree. Also, Selka and Kirito have a private chat, but there’s nothing interesting here. Sure, we learn a thing or two about the girl, but think about it… Kirito and Eugeo are about to embark on a quest to save Alice. Are we really going to see Selka that much anymore? Probably not. Plus, she’s boring character anyways. She doesn’t have much of a personality.

— When did he scoot closer to her?

— Alice’s dad doesn’t look like he’s aged one bit.

— Meanwhile, Eugeo gets to pick his next Calling, so in front of the entire village, he announces that he’ll become a swordsman. Ho-hum.

— The next morning, right before he departs, Eugeo informs Selka of his intentions. Again, just wrapping up some loose ends.

–After three major arcs and some silly dalliance with a sick girl, why contrive yet another scenario in which our hero engages in yet another generic high fantasy concept with knights, goblins, and dragons? Like is this the truly the extent of your creativity as a writer?

— So as I was watching this episode, I just kept asking myself why any of this matters. Why bother with Eugeo and Selka? Why bother with Alice? Does any of this really matter? I guess that’s the story’s job, isn’t it? The show has to convince me that I should care about Kirito’s virtual adventures when he’s probably strapped down in a hospital in real life, fighting to survive while Asuna cries next to him. And oh yeah, that Death Gun jerk is still out there somewhere. And so far, I can’t say that SAO is doing a really good job.

— Yeah, sure, you could argue that Eugeo and Alice have souls. But is this really all that functionally different from a hypothetical intelligent AI that can think and feel? I suspect that we’re tossing the word “soul” around because it has a certain cachet attached to it. And as such, I’m supposed to just accept at face-value that Eugeo and Alice have lives that are much more meaningful. Unfortunately, I just can’t shake the fact this whole scenario has been concocted to further some company’s mysterious goals. As a result, Eugeo and Alice need to be saved from the outside.

— I’m not saying that Eugeo and Alice can’t suffer. It’s clear that they can. It’s clear that they have thoughts and feelings of their own. But if we want to improve their “lives,” we know what needs to be done. What I mean is that — as lame as this sounds — Kirito has the potential to have god like powers over this virtual world. Yeah, sure, we can go on a quest to save Alice within the game. Or we could somehow extricate ourselves from this MMO and insist that the creators stop messing around with these souls.

— To put it another way, I play a game like, say, Dragon Quest XI from start to finish, because it’s just a game. But if the characters within the game actually had actual souls, I wouldn’t actually play the game, now would I? Why wouldn’t I just go directly to Square Enix and demand the company to stop acting like such jerks? Once you pull back the curtain and reveal that it is all a conceit, there’s no going back.

— Show’s still pretty boring. It doesn’t even have a decent set-up like its predecessors. The first arc was all about being trapped in a game and figuring out how to escape from it. The second arc was all about saving Asuna. The third arc was about figuring out how Death Gun was killing people. Since then, however, the show has lost all sense of urgency.

This is why you spend the first two seasons gathering all these haremettes, folks. The girls are now pulling out all the stops to help save Kirito’s soul. But seriously, wouldn’t it be hilarious if Asuna and company eventually have to gather around his body and pray for his soul? These five girls make up the Lament Configuration of Kirito’s Former Warrior Princesses Turned Moe Blobs. Only together can they open a portal into an MMO and summon forth the Dark Lord of Harems into our world. Hell, the MMO is even called the Underworld. It all adds up!

— Oh hey, the episode opens with a blast from the past. Y’see, Death Gun tried to kill Asuna in the same exact way again, and in both occasions, Kirito had to save her. It’s like poetry. It rhymes.

— So we finally get to see what had happened after the attack. Kirito was rushed to the hospital, and all Asuna could do was wait. I’m guessing that at the end of every chapter, we’ll take an intermission and pay the real world a visit.

— See? She jinxed him. If she hadn’t bothered to get this heart rate monitor, nothing bad would’ve happened to the guy! Her punishment is to now stare at the heart rate monitor with a concerned look on her face for the rest of this arc !

— We’re then told that although Kirito is no longer in critical condition, he now has brain damage. Pfft, tell me something I don’t already know, doc.

— He may never even regain consciousness! Pull the plug, Asuna! Just pull the plug! I can’t bear to see our great hero Kirito like this! He deserves to leave this world in a dignified manner!

— A guy in a suit eventually shows up and tells Kirito’s family and Asuna that they must put Kirito’s life in his hands. In other words, the government’s hands. Is the show going to try and seriously tell me that sticking Kirito in an MMO is the only way to prevent brain damage? Really? Really?

— And as a result of Kirito being strapped into an MMO, no one can see him. His aunt was just outside parking her car, right? So she couldn’t see him either? They basically signed away their rights to the guy completely? Welp.

— We soon cut to Asuna and Suguha meeting up with the rest of Kirito’s haremettes. I almost thought Sinon wasn’t in attendance, but I forget that she looks considerably lamer outside of GGO. This is what happens when a tough, self-sufficient girl falls in love with Kirito. They just get to sit on the sidelines and worry like the moeblobs that they are.

— Oh no, what a conspiracy — Suguha tells the rest of the harem that the ambulance carrying Kirito never even made it to the next hospital. Where did they take him? Where could he be?!

— Girls, girls… the guy just needs a break from his harem, aight? We all need a break from hot anime babes every now and then. Hell, it’s even No Nut November right now. Kirito’s just in an MMO gaming marathon, munching on pizza and drinking Mountain Dew. Relax!

— It doesn’t take Sinon long to put two and two together: Kirito must be hooked up to that soul thingamajig. What a smart girl. Is she the smartest girl in Kirito’s Harem? She also has gun powers.

— Having said that, I think it’s pretty sad that a bunch of civilians could sit around and pretty much sniff out Kirito’s location. Way to cover your tracks, secret government dudes.

— Also, Asuna can use the heart rate monitor to track her boyfriend’s location. That’s hilarious. We’re literally uncovering government’s secrets by being a clingy girlfriend.

— Oh lord, she’s back. The magical MMO loli is back.

— Pfft, she’s pinpointing her daddy’s location, she says. I totally forgot that she thinks of Kirito and Asuna as her parents. My sides… fucking RIP.

— Kowalski, analysis!

— Kirito’s life signals disappeared around Minato Ward, so that’s exactly where Asuna is headed. Good thing our hero has a trusty male sidekick that his haremettes can rely on.

— Meanwhile, the other girls apparently having nothing better to do, so they’re going to sniff around Roppongi.

— Suguha tells us that they couldn’t dig up any information about the soul thingamajig. I’m shocked! Why wouldn’t the government officially patent its super secret technology!

— The other group eventually checks in and informs Asuna that Roppongi is a dead end. So is Kirito’s lifeless husk of a body hidden somewhere here? Not so fast, my friends! Yui tells her “momma” that a helicopter might have carried her “daddy” away.

— The characters wonder if Kirito might have been taken overseas, but I doubt he’s in another country entirely. A helicopter doesn’t have that kind of range. He’s probably stuck in a mysterious government base just some distance away from the Japanese islands. Still, Klein’s right. If the haremettes need to fly just to get to Kirito, then they’re outta luck.

— Welp, time to pray for his soul! Oh Dark Lord of Harems, First of all Gary Stus…

— Yui reminds Asuna to never give up, ’cause he never gave up on her! Sure, he might have taken his sweet time rescuing his girlfriend from her would-be rapist, but hey, she never got raped, did she? Yeah, I didn’t think so! And now it’s her turn to rescue him from getting ra–… wait…

— It all comes back to the bastard who created SAO. It’s like we’re playing Six Degrees of Akihiko Kayaba.

— Basically, a woman by the name of Rinko used to work closely with Kayaba (probably his lover or something). Kirito’s Harem might not be able to come anywhere close to this mysterious government facility, but maybe this lady can.

— Department of Microwave Engineering? C’mon…

— We soon cut to Rinko sitting in her home, looking over her emails. That shady dude in a suit had reached out to her, so this basically guarantees that this lady will be able to help Kirito’s Harem out. Again, the government does an amazing job at covering its tracks. It’s telling that only the Lament Configuration of Kirito’s Moe Blobs and their magical MMO loli could possibly crack this case.

— Oh lord, I was just joking about the lover thing, but she and Kayaba were in a relationship. She’s not over him either. Well, maybe she can find his digital ghost somewhere in all these dumb MMOs that have spawned as a result of his “World Seed.” Yeah, that’s also what I call my semen.

— I’m also still pretty ticked that people continue to idolize this dude. He trapped a bunch of kids in a game! He’s an accomplice to murder! This guy is a monster!

— I love it when pillow talk is about MMOs. Mmm, tell me more, daddy! Tell me how many children are going to die in your virtual death dungeon!

— So what does Asuna do? She sends Rinko an email. Please, ma’am… please help me resurrect the Dark Lord of Harems.

— And just like that, Rinko is in a helicopter to go see Kirito.

— So, uh, this is the secret facility where all the crazy MMO shenanigans are happening. Why does it have to look like that?

— Whoa, I thought the blonde lady was a new character, but she sounds like Asuna. I guess we’re going undercover, which is of course ridiculous. Normally, when you have a top secret government base out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you do an extensive background check on every single person who steps foot onto said base. You don’t just go, “Oh, who’s this new person you got there? Oh yeah, your assistant? WELL COME ON ABOARD! IT’S ALL GOOD. MI CASA ES SU CASA!”

— Not only that, Asuna is able to fool some device that can totally verify your identity. I bet she relied on the powers of her magical MMO loli. The government is so good at covering its tracks.

— So what are we doing here at this top secret government base in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? We’re playing an MMO. Dope, right?! I bet y’all are so jealous! Well, make yourself at home! Pizza and Mountain Dew are in the back.

— Asuna doesn’t waste any time either. She immediately reveals herself before even bothering to verify that Kirito is here. I mean, sure, there’s a 99% chance he’s here. But she could’ve waited and see what would happen next!

— Oh lord, it turns out that they did do a background check on Rinko’s assistant, but not a very good one. For instance, all they did was grab a photo of the actual assistant off of her university’s database, which — unbeknownst to these brilliant government dudes — had already been replaced with a photo of Asuna. Not only that, Asuna’s face didn’t trigger an alert for her actual identity or anything? Amazing. Amazing job, government dudes.

— The episode finally ends with Asuna demanding to know where Kirito is. But why would they bother to help her? Now that they know she’s here, why wouldn’t they just instantly remove her from the base? What is she going to do? Pull out her sword and attack then? Pfft.

— But honestly, this episode definitely feels like the old, stupid SAO that we all know and love. The tree-chopping nonsense from the last few episodes is just so boring by comparison. On the other hand, patented SAO idiocy is second to none.

Oh boy, time for an episode that is drier than a Wikipedia article. 

— Basically, Kirito suffered brain dam–… uh, even more brain damage, and as a result, modern medicine can’t cure his stupidity. But maybe — just maybe! — we can heal his soul… by playing video games! SEE MOM? I’M NOT WASTING MY LIFE AWAY IN WoW. I’M HEALING MY SOUL!

— Well, that was easy.

— Kikuoka then proceeds to spill the beans behind this entire top secret government project to some random civilian girl. Like… why? Isn’t it enough for her to know that Kirito is safe? Oh right, right… we can’t tell a proper SAO story without mountains and mountains of exposition.

— So as predicted, they’re trying to create super AI… but from the “bottom-up.” And somehow, sticking artificial souls into a hyper-realistic MMO is just the way to do that. ‘Cause you see, you don’t want to just give them knowledge and experience. They have to earn it themselves… via a video game!

— This isn’t really developing AI in the traditional sense, though. If characters like Alice and Eugeo are just artificial souls, then sure, I suppose you could pedantically argue that they have intelligence that has been artificially created. But c’mon, they’re essentially humans. These researchers scanned a human soul and created copies, so they have human cognitive processes. Sure, they’re not humans born from flesh and blood like you or me, but they’re still humans. This isn’t the same as actual intelligence somehow emerging from just bits of programming code cobbled together. This is different.

— I guess some people would argue that the brain is just like a computer, but that’s a vast oversimplification. But anyways…

— …more exposition. Sweet.

— So we have the age-old problem of a clone mistaking itself for the original, but this time, we’re dealing with souls in a machine. Kinda like brains in a vat, too. Higa, one of the researchers, proceeds to talk to a copy of himself. Obviously, there’s something very inhuman about this.

— Direct copies don’t see themselves as copies. Again, they see themselves as the real deal, and when confronted by this incongruity, their souls eventually fall apart. They become incapable of rational thought. From start to finish, we see a direct copy of a soul deteriorate in just over a minute. I guess we find this disturbing, because we accept that these are legitimate human souls trapped in a machine — legitimate humans souls born to be experimented on and eventually implode, because our human psychology — we speculate — wouldn’t be able to cope with such a situation.

— So how has Kikuoka gotten around this problem? By copying the souls of babies and raising them within a video game. In doing so, you essentially create a whole new person, since nurture now plays a crucial role in shaping them.

— As a result, Rath has raised a batch of good artificial souls. Too good, you might say.

— Yep, unlike us shitty humans, artificial souls like Eugeo are incapable of breaking the law. Or rather, they won’t normally do so. So this world is, um, a paradise? Well, that’s no good! Y’see, these straight-edge losers keep refusing to murder each other, but we all know that soldiers are born to kill!

— Yay, exposition within a currently existing exposition: Kikuoka now tells us that his dastardly plan has been in the making since the very start of the series. God, this episode is almost half over, and we’re still stuck listening to this guy go on and on about this project and his involvement in it. SAO‘s storytelling has not evolved one bit over the years.

— Higa’s reasoning for being here is stupid. His friend died in a war, so he wants to aid a project that will send artificial souls to war instead. They’re still humans, jackass. You can pretend that they’re artificial intelligence all you want, but you’re still copying human souls and raising them. As a result, they can still feel pain and anguish. They can still despair. So what’s the goddamn difference? You’re just creating an arbitrary distinction between humans being created via an organic process (s-s-s-s-sex!) and humans being created via a machine.

— But I suppose this opens up a larger discussion vis-a-vis actual artificial intelligence. Let’s say we develop robots that can rival humans in intelligence. Would it be unethical to send robots to war? Well, there’s a crucial difference here: our notions of robots don’t typically involve human feelings or anything analogous to them. They can only feel pain if you give them that capability. The simple solution? Don’t program them to feel pain! That’s why people don’t have any qualms about sending robots to war! Horror stories like the Terminator series usually involve an AI somehow attaining self-awareness and thus logically concluding that it must do whatever it takes in order to achieve self-preservation, but this still isn’t quite the same as having human pain and emotions. On the other hand, you can’t exactly do the same with artificial human souls, can you? You can’t exactly copy a baby’s soul and then scrub it of the ability to feel pain. They’re still human souls!

— Asuna argues that this is all wrong, because AI have rights. I don’t necessarily disagree with her. It’s just that I don’t really see individuals like Alice and Eugeo as AI. They’re just humans that have somehow been digitized and created inorganically. They’re still humans through and though, and obviously, humans have rights.

— But again, I guess you could argue that it’s just semantics. I guess you could argue that since these souls are artificially created, then they also have intelligence that have been artificially created. But no one talks like that. When a woman gives birth, I don’t go, “Hurr, she’s created natural intelligence!”

— This is ultimately pointless, because Kikuoka wouldn’t be spearheading this project if he cared about artificial souls. He simply doesn’t. They’re his babies, and he couldn’t care less.

— Finally, we get to the reason why Rath needs Kirito. They wanted to see if they reverted Kirito to a child and stuck him into their crappy MMO, would he also behave like the other artificial souls? And who’s a better candidate for this job than our harem lord! In other words, our harem lord was sent into the Underworld in order to corrupt cute anime babes like Alice the same way he corrupted all of his order haremettes.

— And just like that, we now cut to the second ever conference of Kirito’s Harem. I’m sure Asuna is still on that stupid base, though. It’s not like she needs to leave it in order to meet up with the rest of the waifus.

— Don’t think for a second, however, that the exposition is over, though. It’s just that it’s now Asuna’s turn to explain everything to the other waifus. In fact, we still get to listen to Kikuoka prattle on and on.

— So Alice achieved the results that Rath wanted, but the Axiom Church went and corrected her Fluctlights. Way to go, researchers. You guys barely even have any control over your own simulation.

— Asuna eventually gets to “see” Kirito. Isn’t this so romantic? Him strapped to a VR machine like always, and her staring at him while looking all concerned. Why, it’s just like the GGO arc! It’s like poetry. It rhymes.

— And like before, there’s a hot nurse to watch over him. All nurses are hot, says anime. Wait, is this the same fucking nurse as before? Holy hell, it is the same nurse! Lame.

— Aki then assures Asuna that the harem lord will eventually return and grace them with his presence one day. How does she know? Because he’s the hero! Excuse me while I go throw up.

— Apparently, Rinko was never charged with any crimes despite her involvement in the SAO incident. Both she and Kayaba pretended that he would’ve blown her up with the bomb in her chest if she had refused to follow his orders. In reality, she could’ve stopped him, but she didn’t. Rinko just fell to her knees uselessly and cried. Asuna tells the woman that neither she nor Kirito will blame her for the incident, but I will. She’s just as complicit. She’s just a dirtbag like him. Thousands of people died in that game. Not only that, children were separated from their parents and forced to fend for themselves. She’s just as evil as her dead boyfriend. A few pathetic tears aren’t going to change my mind.

— Sadly but also predictably, Asuna reveals that she doesn’t have any ill-feelings towards Kayaba either. Yeah, must have been nice to have survived. Must have been nice to have been in his guild so you had protection unlike all the other suckers, huh?

— Seriously, what is this scene even trying to accomplish? Are we supposed to just accept Rinko and her involvement for the rest of this story because Asuna forgives her? Sorry, but Asuna is not the official arbiter of the SAO incident. Why don’t we go and ask how the families of those thousands of dead people feel?

— YEAH SURE THOUSANDS DIED BUT LULZ MUH TRUE LUV

— Maybe she wouldn’t mind being trapped in an MMO again with Kirito. Maybe…

— The scene then just ends with a meaningless platitude. Great.

— Later that night, Rinko dreams about Kayaba again… but what if it’s his ghost visiting her?!

— Anyways, after an entire episode of exposition, it’s nigh time we check up on Kirito. Next episode will likely plunge us back into the Underworld. Yay…

Yeah… you got that right. 

— The episode opens with Eugeo dragging Kirito out of bed. They’re at some swordcraft academy — literally a giant school just for swordcraft? — and it looks like they’ve been doing this for quite some time now. Two years, in fact. Two in-game years since they’ve left their dinky starter village! But it’s okay, because barely any time has passed in the real world! The flow of time is not quite convoluted. Just sped up.

— Still, do you suppose there are hardcore fans out there doing hour-long lore videos on this series? “In the Age of Aincrad, there were four haremettes who distinguished themselves above all others… please like, follow, and subscribe. I’ll see you next time.”

— Imagine that, though. Imagine watching two episodes of non-stop exposition just to justify sticking Kirito in yet another generic high fantasy MMORPG. But this time, he’ll get to spend years in it. Like gosh, what adventures should my main character go on this time? I know! Let’s do the same thing we’ve been doing since the start of the series! Aincrad was cool, right? You guys liked Aincrad, right?! Let’s try to recapture lightning in a bottle! But Kirito is already so strong, and the mean people keep saying he’s overpowered! I know, let’s start him out as a baby, so he’ll have to redevelop his sword skills! But then how can he spend years in the MMORPG? Doesn’t he have a real life to worry about? Doesn’t he still have his waifu to care for? I know, just make time flow faster here! All this effort to hit the reset button on Kirito when the writer could’ve just come up with a whole new story with a whole new protagonist.

— There’s something odd about the animation in this show. The way the characters stand out against the background, it almost feels like I’m watching a super high-quality Flash animation.

— Oh, you thought the exposition was over? Lemme tell you what we’ve been doing in the past two years!

— They don’t look much older despite having aged two years.

— I’ll be honest: they’re talking to a Liena-senpai, but I’m not listening to a thing they’re saying. Who cares? I do like how it feels as though Kirito is in no rush to escape from the Underworld. Sure, time has barely passed at all in the real world, but from his perspective, he hasn’t seen or talked to Asuna in two years. That’s not how it works. It would tear me up inside if I couldn’t talk to my loved ones for that long. Forget two years, because who can go a week without their loved ones and not miss them? But do we ever see Kirito bury his head in his hands late at night, wondering if he’ll ever get to return to the real world someday? Pfft, it looks like he’s been sleeping soundly.

— It just feels weird, man. It feels weird to be having this carefree conversation. Maybe Kirito just feels no sense of urgency.

— God, they’re still standing around and talking. Even after she leaves, Kirito and Eugeo stand around and talk some more about their super awesome senpai!

— Then after Eugeo goes to bed later that night, Kirito stays up to talk more about the MMO’s mechanics. So what do we see? We see that damn tree again. Sigh. All you need to know is that you need to believe in yourself. No, really. Whatever. Let’s get this over with so I can start watching SSSS.GRIDMAN.

— The next day, we see Kirito spar against Liena, who fights with both a sword and a whip. She eventually beats him, so I guess he doesn’t have enough confidence in himself.

— They then proceed to talk how he can’t beat her, but she can’t beat some guy by the name of Volo. This sure is riveting.

— Like what is even the plot? Save Alice, right? And somehow this will repair Kirito’s soul so that he can come out of his coma in the real world? That’s where you’re wrong, buddy! The true plot is power ranking these swordsmen!

— Confidence, man. Confidence is all you need. Basically, stupid people who delude themselves are the most powerful individuals in this world. Trust me, no one is more confident than whack jobs.

— Apparently, Kirito’s been holding back, so the lady insists that he show her his true strength! But that’ll have to wait, because, uh… curfew. Well, I guess we’ve never stuck Kirito in a bland academy setting, so this is the perfect opportunity to do so!

— And like every generic academy ever, Kirito and Eugeo have to deal with elitists who look down on commoners. Yawn.

— Now we’re visiting Kirito’s garden?

— Don’t write checks you can’t cash, Kirito. At some point, he’ll have to depart from this game and return to Asuna in the real world. I just wonder if he’ll even have the guts to tell Eugeo and Alice the truth about their existence. Oh hey, you guys are just artificial souls for some massive military experiment, but don’t let that break your minds or anything!

— Well, maybe Kirito won’t have to. Maybe these two will die before he even gets the chance. Still, I can’t imagine Rath not having backups of these characters’ data. Can you really die in the Underworld? Can’t you just be restored? In fact, Rath should be taking periodic snapshots of these characters’ data as time goes by. Why wouldn’t they? Every database has backups.

— Eugeo is pouring his heart out about how he’s weak without Kirito, blah blah blah. He couldn’t have gotten anywhere without Kirito! This is supposed to establish their bond, but I’m not remotely interested in his character. Eugeo’s just so boring. It feels like his only purpose at the moment is to serve as a contrast and make his buddy seem cool.

— Oh no, the mean elitist jerks are plotting something!

— The next day, Kirito and Eugeo drop by a blacksmith to pick up a custom order they had placed. Apparently, they took a part of the giant tree, and asked the blacksmith to turn it into a sword.

— Does this sword look familiar or something? Quick, someone look up a lore video!

— For some reason, the blacksmith won’t even charge Kirito for the sword. As long as our hero can swing it, the sword will be free. Geez, at least pay him in exposure!

— Apparently, Kirito can’t be overpowered with a wooden sword, but maybe things will be different with this sword made from a tree! Er, wait…

— At some point, our hero attracts Volo’s attention, so he’s been observing intently from the side. When Kirito attempts to pull off another move, he accidentally gets dirt on Volo’s uniform. Oh no! Swordsmen never get their outfits dirty!

— So even though it’s a day of rest, Kirito is force to spar against the guy. Does that not count as a violation of the rule? I guess not.

— A bunch of people have dropped by just to watch the top swordsmen at the academy face off against a trainee. Nothing better to do, I guess. Naturally, Liena takes exception to this duel. Volo wants to fight with real swords, so Liena is worried. As far as she knows, he’s never fought with real swords! Ah, whatever. Her words will fall on deaf ears, because we’re going to get a fight no matter what.

— Cocky Kirito ain’t gonna back down now. You’ll just have to wait till next week’s episode to see the duel, because we had to talk about, uh, gardening or whatever.

Being separated from all his waifus have finally gotten to him. Don’t you feel sorry for Kirito? 

— Everyone is here to watch some dude beat up on a trainee. I guess there’s not much in terms of entertainment in Underworld.

— It somehow feels like the animation quality has taken a small hit. Nothing major, but the characters don’t look as polished as they used to? Oh well.

— The characters here have such small frames, so their heads end up looking too big for their bodies.

— So again, belief and imagination is everything in this dumb game. Why is Volo strong? He’s strong because he wholeheartedly believes in his family’s motto. And why will Kirito be strong? Because he’s the harem lord. But seriously, all it takes to be strong is believing that you’re the main character.

— Liena tells Kirito that she believes in him… and yet, she doesn’t believe in herself to defeat Volo. Odd, huh?

— I still feel like this is a waste of time. Kirito has his old life to get back to. He has his waifu waiting for him by his bedside. Hell, he still has the sub-objective of rescuing Alice. So what are we doing right now? We’re watching him spar against a nobody as if this is the start of some new anime series about cadets at a military academy. Sure, we’re told that Volo is strong, but that’s not what I’m referring to. In the grand scheme of things to come, Volo is a nobody. Liena is a nobody. This is all waste of time.

— It just feels like the author had the itch to do this kind of story, but at the same time, he wanted to take advantage of SAO‘s popularity. As a result, he contrived some stupid scenario in which Kirito would end up becoming enrolling in a school. What’s next? A tournament arc?

— Will the story let Kirito win? Probably not. But will it let him lose? Probably not as well. I bet you someone’s going to interrupt this fight, but not before the harem lord earns everyone’s respect for his swordsmanship. Barf.

— The audience even gasps when Volo unsheathes his sword. C’mon. Are you people that bored?

— Kirito’s sword is black because black is cool!

— What a mouthful.

— I’m now watching these characters assume their stances in painful slow-motion. Even the sweat drops are in slow-motion.

— Looks cool, bro.

— I love that Kirito has time to twirl in the middle of his attack.

— Wow, such amazing animation for your flagship series, A-1 Pictures!

— This is the power of imagination, yo!

— Every time the animation zooms out, it just looks so lame and small. Kirito and Volo are supposed to be engaged in this epic duel, but it just looks so pathetic on the outside. Like, look at his tiny and short left arm!

— Insert lame joke here.

— And because the harem lord’s confidence is so strong, his phallu–… I mean, his sword not only starts bulging with golden power, it even grows in length! I mean… we all know that size matters.

— More juvenile jokes. I can’t help it. This duel is just ridiculous.

— Eventually, it looks like both combatants are about to really hurt each other, so right on cue, someone stops the fight. Too predictable.

— These character designs are so plain.

— The action lines show that the crowd is excited!

— One last joke for the road.

— What’s truly annoying is that the author so obviously wants Kirito to seem god-like, but at the same time, the characterization calls for him to be annoyingly humble. Like he can’t even be brash and cool. He’s just another boring anime protagonist who goes “Aw shucks!” at the fact that he dueled the first-ranked swordsman to a draw.

— Whoa now! I’ve got an actual waifu in real life, lady! Well, maybe nobody’s watching me right now…

— Oh nevermind…

— Aw, the bullies are so mad!

— We still haven’t moved onto any important plot matters. Instead, these characters are now talking about the backstory regarding their sword skills or whatever. Who the hell cares?

— And now she’s just praising Kirito some more. Wake me up when something interesting happens.

— Later that night, the bullies try to teach Kirito a lesson. So what did they do? They cut up his flowers. Oh no, not my flowers!

— So, uh, this feels like the first time Kirito has gotten emotional over the fact that he’s stuck in this world. And as a result, he identifies with these flowers, because like him, they don’t belong here. I dunno, man. This just doesn’t feel authentic. Like he’s been here for what feels like two whole years, and yet he only starts sobbing because of some flowers. The show is trying too hard to be dramatically poignant.

— Well, out of nowhere, a disembodied voice tells Kirito to believe. Not only that, the other flowers in this garden wants to help save his flowers. As a result, they start to glow, and when Kirito borrows their “power,” he manages to save his own. Now this is just pure mumbo-jumbo.

— These flowers have thoughts? The person who created this MMO programmed flowers that have thoughts and feelings? Is that what you want me to believe? You want to tell me that the humans in this game have actual souls? Sure. But everything else is just data. Everything else is just inorganic data that has to be coded by somebody. As a result, I can only infer that Underworld’s programmers gave flowers the ability to feel bad when its own kind has been murdered. What?

— The next day (or whatever day it is), we see Liena and Volo engaged in a duel for all the marbles, but this time, she emerges victorious. Aw, her trainee gave the wonderful power of belief.

— And as a result of last night’s shenanigans, Kirito is able to give Liena a bouquet of flowers from her own homeland or whatever. Great. Truly riveting story development.

— Afterwards, he and Eugeo become Elite Disciples, which means they get to boss around trainees of their own. Needless to say, Eugeo wants to hog Kirito to himself. Typical waifu behavior.

— Then finally, after all that boring nonsense, the two boys remind themselves that they still have a certain somebody to rescue from her ivory tower. Ugh.

— In previous series, I could at least draw some enjoyment from the fact that I used to be huge into MMOs, so I understood some of the overpowered silliness that the story was throwing at me. Remember when Kirito’s passive healing-over-time was so high that gankers couldn’t even hope to kill him?

As silly as this scene was, at least its heart was rooted in actual MMO mechanics. With Underworld, we’re just making things up as we go along. Believe in yourself! The power of imagination! Yeah, okay.

No adventures, no MMO questing, no nothing. Instead, imagine living in a stupid society, so you have to teach yourself to break unjust laws. That’s basically this arc in a nutshell.

— The episode starts with Eugeo listening to Kirito giving him a dry explanation on how to become stronger. Y’know, believe in yourself. Use the power of your imagination.

— So while training one day, those two bullies drop by to talk down to Eugeo. They’re literally just generic nobles that you can find in every anime series ever, so I’m not even going to bother learning their names. You know the drill. They’re from the upper class. Eugeo is from the lower class. They think he doesn’t deserve to breathe the same air as them. Yawn.

— Thinking back to his discussion with Kirito, Eugeo remembers that these two bullies are probably strong because they believe wholeheartedly in their innate superiority to others. So even though Eugeo should’ve walked away, he accepts a duel against of them.

— Um, yeah…

— That looks like a dumb sword stance. C’mon, you can’t fight like that.

— So y’know, more SAO-esque swordfighting. Not much to say here. Once you’ve seen one fight, you’ve seen them all.

— After it’s clear that Eugeo won’t lose, the bully standing on the sidelines immediately puts an end to the match and calls it a draw. He probably doesn’t want his friend to lose, but a draw is humiliating enough. Nevertheless, the two jerks threaten Eugeo before leaving the room.

— Afterwards, Eugeo and Kirito are sitting in a posh room, drinking either tea or coffee. Imagine that. In Aincrad, our hero had to beat a generic fantasy MMO in order to free himself and all of the trapped players. As a result, he went on adventures and completed quests! In that stupid fairy MMO, he had to journey to that giant tree in order to save his waifu. As a result, he went on adventures and completed quests. There weren’t really adventures in GGO, but he competed in one big battle royale in order to investigate the true identity of Death Gun! And look at us now. Just look. We’re watching Kirito and his male waifu sit in a posh room, drinking coffee or tea. Good lord, this series has lost sight of its original spirit.

— It’s amusing how you can’t even commit thought crimes in this stupid MMO, but it’s totally A-OK for the upper class to treat the lower class like dirt.

— Here comes the adventur–… haha, just joshing ya. Nah, we’re having a picnic with our pages! Yay! I love picnics! Those are fun!

— We proceed to listen to Tiese, the red head, go on and on about how the nobles are even further stratified. You wanna know what’s funny? Compared to SAO, that stupid Subaru show about the girl who can see the future is probably gonna be the best MMO-related series this year.

— Tiese further explains that lower-ranked nobles are subjected to the judgment of the higher-ranked nobles. What does that even mean? So if they tell you to jump, you ask them how high?

— Aw snap, someone’s blushing. Someone’s in love with a dirty commoner!

— Meanwhile, our black swordsman geeks out about swordsmanship. At least he isn’t cheating on Asuka!

— Anyways, the two girls open up about how one of their friends, a fellow page, is being humiliated by the same bully that had dueled Eugeo just earlier in this episode. What’s up with all these male disciples having female pages? What’s up with the fact that the poor girl can’t just change her disciple? What a stupid goddamn society.

— So Kirito ends up giving some speech about how you must learn to obey unwritten rules and disobey unjust laws. Y’know, forge your own justice or whatever. Look, Kirito’s only here to corrupt these digital souls. Make them break bad. His goal is to turn Eugeo into a bad boy so they can finally go and finally save Alice, that bad, bad girl for daring to touch the bad, bad dirt. All this just so Japan can create super soldiers or whatever.

— Near the end of the day, we see Kirito and Eugeo confront the bullies in their… uh, rather opulent room. Again, this school is so damn posh. Even commoners like Kirito and Eugeo have swanky rooms to live in. And everyone gets a female slave to boss around. No wonder he’s in no rush to escape Underworld.

— Eventually, we learn that the bully felt bad that he couldn’t beat Eugeo in a duel, so he started sexually harassing his page. Seriously. Again, you can’t touch bad, bad dirt, but I bet you anything that this guy can just treat his page like a sex slave.

— Eugeo ends up getting so mad that he would’ve pulled his sword out against them if he had it with him. But he didn’t, and afterwards, Kirito speculates that this might have been a trap to get Eugeo to act out.

— Remember when Kirito got dirt on that jackass’s uniform, so he was basically forced into a duel with real swords? So if the nobles want to punish you, they can just make you do anything? Anything? Man, whatever.

— Afterwards, Tiese goes to meet Eugeo privately, and she tells him that she’s afraid that she’ll end up having to marry some jerk noble one day. Welp, that’s just how the cookie crumbles!

— But the girl has a plan! She wants Eugeo to do so well that he’ll become an aristocrat himself! As a result, she can just marry him! What a plot, you guys. What a plot. What an episode, too. No adventures, no MMO questing, no nothing. We went from chopping down a giant tree for multiple episodes to now a bunch of rubes at an academy.

Anyways, what an odd warning for this series. Lemme guess… those upper class bullies are going to attack Tiese and Ronie, huh? Sigh. Let’s get this over with. 

— So it’s raining hard and thundering outside, but our boys are just polishing their swords. Nothing weird here!

— Well, there is something weird: Tiese and Ronie haven’t returned yet, and the boys are worried. After all, in last week’s episode, Kirito and Eugeo just picked a fight with Raios and Humbert, the two upper class jerks. Our heroes worry that something might have happened to the two girls.

— After Kirito leaves to look for the girls, Frenica shows up. If you don’t remember who she is, she’s Humbert’s page. Her friends are just trying to protect her. Unfortunately, they’ve gone to talk to Humbert in person. Kinda stupid if you ask me. I mean, they had just asked for Kirito and Eugeo’s help in last week’s episode. Why not go back to the boys with this latest bit of information? Why go and plead with Humbert yourself when you already know how the hierarchies work in this stupid universe?

— So Eugeo rushes over to the bad guys’ room, and they’re just waiting for him. Raios even licks his lips like a generic creepy anime villain. Seriously, have you ever seen any bad guy lick their lips like this outside of anime?

— Raios and Humbert then lead Eugeo to their bedroom, and the blond kid finds both Tiese and Ronie all tied up. Okay, okay, bear with me for a second. This is apparently how it works. Because the two girls were merely disrespectful, Raios and Humbert apparently have the authority to punish the girls. Because they’re nobles. And whatever punishment they come up with goes! So what’s the punishment?

RAPE.

I’m not even joking. I know Underworld isn’t the real world. I know Underworld is designed in a specific way to help the government breed super soldiers or whatever. But what kind of asinine setup is this? Disrespecting nobles? Bad. Preventing a rape? Bad. Raping two girls as punishment? GO HOG WILD BOYS!

— Oh yeah, did I mention that Eugeo can’t prevent Raios and Humbert from raping the two pages? I mean, he can, but it’s technically illegal. Hilariously illegal. The poor girls are begging for him to save them, but some sort of programming is literally preventing him from doing so. The same thing that stopped him from saving Alice (not that he really could) all those years ago is back to haunt him.

— Again, the idea here is that you generally want your soldiers to be unquestioningly servile, but in extreme circumstances, they should be able to violate the so-called laws imposed upon them and do the right thing. It’s just that this is executed in such a dumb way. A guy literally has to hurt himself in order to prevent two rapes from occurring. There are way better examples than this.

— Well, after a great struggle and losing an eye in the process, Eugeo finally manages to defy his own programming in order to slice off one of Humbert’s arms. The girls also get quite a warm shower. The guy is pleading for Raios’s help, but the first-seat noble doesn’t care. He’d rather punish Eugeo instead.

— There’s that stupid tongue thing again.

— And for some reason, this is as far as Eugeo can go. He’s literally going to just sit here and let Raios execute him. We all know that Kirito is going to step in and save the dude, but suppose he didn’t. Eugeo would’ve died, then Raios probably would’ve gone back to “disciplining” the two pages. Way to half-ass your heroism, dude.

— But of course, Kirito steps in and saves his waifu.

— The two combatants then needlessly power up when they could just have a duel. Less is more. You don’t need a big flashy light show to convey the gravity of this situation.

— In the middle of the fight, Raios suddenly becomes monstrous… really monstrous. Not all souls are born equal, I guess.

— But you can’t stop the Kirito, so boom goes Raios’s two forearms.

— As the guy slowly bleeds out, the entire room gets to watch as his entire body kinda goes… haywire. It’s as if his digital soul is disintegrating right before their eyes. Judging by the characters’ reactions, I get the feeling that dying in the Underworld isn’t supposed to be like this. But eh, whatever.

— Anyways, the one-armed, rapey Humbert now accuses Kirito of being a monster before running off. Hilarious. I mean, Kirito’s an asshole, but he’s not a monster.

— Meanwhile, the boys try to comfort the two girls. All of a sudden, that mysterious head shows up to pinpoint the boys’ location, so they’ve definitely broken the law. Again, raping pages = A-OK! Killing nobles in order to protect people, however, is a no-no!

— But look on the bright side! What’s Kirito and Eugeo’s original mission? To save Alice, right? And what’s a better way to save Alice than to get yourself caught just like Alice!

— In the morning, Kirito and Eugeo wake up in their rather comfortable dungeon.

— When the blond guy steps outside, some woman — I forget her name — heals up his injured eye. Pretty lame. I think he should have lost it for the rest of the series. It would’ve served as a reminder that he’s capable of doing the right thing even if it’s against the law. It would also symbolize how the path to justice is never easy. Sometimes, you have to pay the price to do the right thing. Also, he’d get to wear a cool eyepatch. Yarrrr. But screw that. We wouldn’t want our manwaifu to be ugly, now would we?

— Anyways, an escort, i.e. an Integrity Knight, is here to take the two bad boys away. But what’s this? Might we be looking at Alice?!

— It is Alice! She’s a cool knight now! Like Agrias from Final Fantasy Tactics.

— Well, not so fast. The Integrity Knight promptly introduces herself as Alice Synthesis Thirty… whatever that means.

They look like a bunch of kids. Not even teenagers. Just flat out kids playing dress-up. Oh well, no Goblin Slayer this week, so we’re just going to jump right into SAO first. 

— Eugeo stupidly tries to reach out and touch the girl, so she just backhands him with her sword. That was pretty funny. Even if they were still friends — and Alice hadn’t gotten brainwashed — he shouldn’t just randomly touch people. I dunno, I think Eugeo is supposed to be endearing in order to balance out Kirito’s supposed cool, badass personality, but it’s just not happening. I rather see the guy screw up than succeed.

— The two pages show up just to give Kirito and Eugeo their swords. Yeah, even though they’re being detained for questioning and execution. Alice doesn’t let the guys directly hold onto the swords, but she accepts the requests anyway. Uh, sure. That’s a convenient way to guarantee that those two will get to keep their swords later. What a silly plot contrivance.

— Tiese blames herself for everything, but this is a stupid world with a stupid setup. I’m surprised nobody’s ever thought to rebel and overthrow the system, but I guess they’re all just perfectly obedient artificial souls. Hundred of years have transpired in Underworld and no one has ever sat down and been like, “Dude, this is messed up!”

— The girl promises to rescue Eugeo one day. If we left it up to her, Eugeo would probably be long dead.

— Haha, here’s your bento, dude. Better hold onto it while you’re being dragged through the air in chains. SAO has always tried to be serious only to end up being deeply comical.

— Aw snap, we’re revisiting the real world… where main waifu continues to look deeply sad and concerned.

— Maybe you can. I don’t know why she couldn’t. Why wouldn’t they hook her up to the machine so she could at least see and interact with Kirito? He can’t leave for whatever reason (his soul is dying!), but I don’t think the anime has ever explained why nobody has bothered to go into the game and explain the situation to the guy. Or hell, it’s their game, right? You’d think they could just send him a message. Like how is that not possible?

— What an oddly clunky-looking robot. It’s like something out of an old sci-fi movie. Maybe robotics isn’t at a very advanced stage in this universe. Still, this is a very big hint that either Alice or Eugeo (or maybe both) will end up with a physical body at some point in the future. Probably Alice if I had to put my money on it. After all, she’s a waifu. C’mon, you’re watching SAO. How can Kirito possibly finish this story without adding yet another girl to his collection? And look, it’s nigh time that we get ourselves a robot waifu.

— As for Eugeo’s ultimate fate, I dunno. So far, he’s played a huge role for a dude. Klein only wishes he could have this many lines. As a result, I kinda feel like this guy might bite the dust just to add some emotional weight to the story. That’s the sort of amateurish writing that I would expect from this author. Minor character? Live forever as a sidekick. Major character? Kill him off so that all I’ll have left are waifus! But I mean, sure, I’ll cry for him.

— But let’s be honest, this Asuna stuff is a pretty boring diversion. I’m fine with taking a break from Kirito’s exploits in the Underworld in order to see what’s happening in the real world, but dull exposition about a robot is not exactly the perfect replacement… especially when we know that it’s just foreshadowing for a future robotic waifu moment.

— One of the researchers appears to smirk when he walks past Asuna. Oh boy. Are you an evil dude? How did an evil dude infiltrate this ocean base in the middle of nowhere? Then again, Asuna was able to find her way here…

— Anyways, back to the fake MMO world. We quickly see that the boys are in good spirits. They’re also pretty foolhardy. Yeah, let’s just break out and start an investigation. It’ll be easy!

— Kirito recalls a peculiar moment from two years ago. Two Underworld years, that is. I guess maybe he has doubts as to whether or not Alice Synthesis Thirty is truly the Alice that he and Eugeo are looking for. Or maybe a small part of Alice still remembers them.

— Still, this overall series is obsessed with climbing. Had to climb the castle in Aincrad in order to escape the MMO. Have to climb that stupid tree in ALO in order to save Asuna. Welp, gonna have to climb yet another structure in order to save Alice. The only time we stopped climbing was when we took a break to shoot each other with guns.

— It’s a good thing we can ignore bodily functions in MMOs. It would suck to be chained to the wall if you suddenly had to go relieve yourself.

— Even though the chains have super high durability, Kirito figures out a loophole where you can just use the chains against each other in order to wear them down quickly. That’s so stupid. Maybe Alice shouldn’t have placed these two in the same cell.

— Well, you’re still stuck with some heavy metal thing on your sword hand.

— If you think about it, isn’t it silly for Kirito to risk his life to save someone that he can barely remember? Doesn’t he want to ensure his Fluctlight or whatever is all safe and sound so that he can return to Asuna one day? Then again, I suppose I don’t really know if the bad guys can truly “kill” Kirito. It’s funny how we’ve gotten so much exposition about the Underworld, but I still feel like it’s unclear whether or not dying in this MMO has any major consequences for Kirito’s actual soul. We definitely saw Raios die, but I mean… his soul is artificial, right? Can’t they just store a backup of it somewhere? So what does it mean if someone with a real soul like Kirito dies in the Underworld?

— I also feel like the story shot itself in the foot by having Kirito barely remember his childhood in the Underworld. If he can barely remember Alice, I just don’t understand why he’s so emotionally invested in this quest. What’s in it for him? Again, isn’t returning to Asuna more important? Well…

— Look, he’s been here for two years. Maybe he’s a loyal dude. Maybe Kirito has been completely faithful to Asuna in the past two years. Or maybe he’s fooled around on the side. We’d never know. It’s not like we get to see every single thing he’s been up to in the past two years. So maybe Kirito is in no rush, because the guy has a sick obsession with virtual worlds. As such, he’s having more fun screwing around here than he does in the real world.

— Also, I wrote all these worlds just to ignore any talk about Eugeo’s resolve. Like I’ve said, I really do not care about that kid.

— Because the chains are super strong, you can use them in order to break free of your jail cell. Okay then.

— And honestly, security here is pretty lax. I guess the Axiom Church never expected anyone to ever break out of their jail cells. Security is so lax that we can just stand in this garden and have a conversation without even needing to whisper.

— Dude, is this really the time to stop and smell the flowers?

— So lax.

— See? How can you like a lame character like this guy? Eugeo is so pathetic.

— Wow, this conversation in the garden just keeps going.

— Apparently, security is so lax because Alice just knew that the two boys would somehow manage to escape. So why even risk it? Why not just make sure they can’t escape in the first place? Beats me.

— Instead, she just has this dude waiting for Kirito and Eugeo. So here’s our first boss fight, I guess. He introduces himself as Eldrie Synthesis Thirty-One, but who really cares what his name is.

— And with that, the episode comes to an end. So the conversation in the garden was just extra long in order to buy time.

After spending quite some time on both Goblin Slayer and SSSS.GRIDMAN, I don’t want to dwell too much on SAO. I just wanna get back to Bloodborne. Look, SAO just is not as interesting comparatively, and the other two shows aren’t even good. Hell, SAO rarely even feels like an MMO these days. And with that, let’s start the show.

— Hopefully, Kirito and Eugeo facing off against Eldrie means there won’t be much to talk about, so I can get this post over with quickly.

—  Not only does their opponent fight with a whip, the whip can elongate in the middle of battle. Luckily, nothing is as strong as those chains attached to them. Nothing.

— Kirito looking cool as always. No wonder this show has so many fans.

— Uh, are you gonna tweet him to death?

— When they do the whole system call, generate element, form element to so-and-so shape, it’s basically no different from casting a spell. Nevertheless, some of the magic (no pun intended) is lost, so these battles come off as dry and boring to me.

— Whip it good.

— So it’s 2v1, but Kirito and Eugeo still get their butts kicked. That’s when Eugeo remembers that this guy used to be the top swordsman of a place I don’t give a damn about (it’s not even real). They just grab people with great potential, erase their identities, and brainwash them into becoming Integrity Knights. For what purpose? Shrug. We’ll find out later, I’m sure.

— It’s just funny to me that it’s this easy to freak them out. Just go up to these Integrity Knights and tell them all about their previous lives. Eldrie is completely losing it, and as a result, some weird triangular prism starts coming out of his forehead. It’s funny ’cause all the bad guys had to do was make these dudes wear masks in order to conceal their identities. If Eugeo had never recognized Eldrie, then this never would’ve happened.

— Eugeo and Kirito continue to try and revive Eldrie’s memories, but out of nowhere, an arrow strikes Kirito in the foot. Our heroes look up to see… well, wouldja look at that? A guy clad in heavy armor from head to toe, so we have no clue who he is!

— So it’s time to run away, and for some reason, a lock of Kirito’s hair is giving him directions. A lock of his hair. Yeah, you heard me.

— A magical doorway then allows both boys to escape. They are greeted by some short girl who quickly informs us that although they are currently inside the cathedral, because the entrance has been deleted, no one else can enter without her permission. Alright then.

— She then takes them to a giant library that apparently has all sorts of information about the Underworld. Why do I get the feeling that the show is about to take a hot, steaming exposition dump on us?

— Oh lord, here it comes…

— Yep.

— zzz

— Hahahahahahahaha… oh, she’s serious. Anyways, I’m not gonna provide too much commentary on this stupid origin story. I mean, c’mon, it’s as basic as you can get. Evil is hereditary, religion is nothing more than a tool to oppress the masses, Rath as a whole has no goddamn clue what’s happening right beneath its very nose, blah blah blah. Some people are going to be like, “Why blog something that bores you?” It’s funny, ’cause they never ask themselves why they read a blog that they obviously disagree with. Anyways…

Yawn. Is it over yet? Oh, it is? Cool. Great. See you guys whenever the next episode airs.