Review: _Sword Art Online_
Feb. 24th, 2023 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurMuch of my TV watching happens in the morning, as I do my morning run on the elliptical. I tend to pick a standard-length episode of something, set the machine to 45 minutes, and go. But that tends to leave a few minutes at the end, so I always like to have a series going that I'm watching in small chunks of 3-5 minutes at a time, after the theoretically-but-not-actually 45-minute episode ends.
Last year, that filler series was the anime Sword Art Online. I finished it a couple of months ago, and have been meaning to write a review ever since, but I kept putting it off, because I can't put it into the "recommended" or "disrecommended" buckets. Instead, this one is Complicated.
tl;dr -- I recommend (with reservations) the first two seasons, and then recommend that you stop, put down the remote, and walk away.
Let's get into the details. Mild but necessary structural spoilers here, about the overall shape of the series. Buckle up -- this one's long.
Sword Art Online is composed of four seasons of 25 episodes each -- but really, it is five stories, four running half-a-season (about 12 half-hour episodes) each, then one running two seasons. I think of the first two seasons as four "books", and let's talk about them as such.
Book one is the story of Sword Art Online (SAO) itself. The story opens in the very near future, with the commercialization of NerveGear -- an immersive VRMMO (virtual reality massively multiplayer online game) that plugs into your nervous system, providing an unparalleled simulation. You put on the NerveGear headset, lie down, turn it on, and poof -- you are wandering around a virtual world.
The first episode is opening day for Sword Art Online, the first game built to use NerveGear. Ten thousand lucky players have been chosen to be the day-one players. They all enter the game, gather in the grand arena in the middle of town for the opening ceremony -- and it all goes horribly wrong.
They are confronted by the inventor of the NerveGear and SAO, who declares that they are all part of the grand experiment. They won't be allowed to just leave -- instead, they will collectively have to fight their way up all 100 levels of the game, and only once someone gets there will the exits be opened.
And oh, yes -- if you die in the game, your NerveGear will fry your brain. (I don't think he actually goes "Bwahaha!" at any point, but that's the general tone.)
Suffice it to say, only the first book is about SAO itself. That's a good thing: it's a mildly interesting premise, but there is no way it would have sustained 100 episodes. The main spoiler I'll give is that everyone (who is still alive) does get out at the end of book one.
The story has a clear primary protagonist. Kirito is a master swordsman who is expert in this sort of game. He's also (IIRC) 15 in real life at the beginning of the story, so there's some coming-of-age aspect here. (Albeit hurt by a good deal of Boring Protagonist Syndrome.)
The other main protagonist is Asuna. The story is unsubtle that these two are going to wind up the great loves of each others' lives. Fortunately, she is a plenty strong character unto herself (often more interesting than Kirito). She's a year or so older than Kirito, and the considerable amount of time they spend together in SAO results in a powerful relationship that exists entirely in-game; the ramifications of that play out in subsequent seasons.
Indeed, one of the main flaws of the whole series is that it is chock-full of strong, interesting women -- all of whom are more or less in love with Kirito. It's not as awful as such tropes often are in manga and anime, but I did wind up rolling my eyes about it fairly often.
There's quite a bit of supporting cast, and a few more major characters who show up along the way (indeed, they are quite a tight posse by the end of the series), but Kirito and Asuna are generally the center of the story.
The rest of the first two seasons continue to tell stories of the impact of VRMMO in the near future. Summarizing those...
Book two picks up shortly after book one left off. In the wake of The SAO Incident (which left an awful lot of people effectively in a coma for years), the world is nervous about the technology, but the cat is out of the bag and people are creating more games -- with better safety protocols, and without mad scientists running them.
So this book takes place mainly in Alfheim Online. Where SAO was pure D&D dungeon-crawling, AO is more of an open-ended world, populated by a variety of species of fairy. It's a bit more fun, less grim than book one, but as things transpire it becomes clear that there are deeper, sinister real-world plots happening underneath AO. While it's not exactly hard science fiction, it continues the general thrust of the series, exploring the ramifications of what can happen if people are jacking computers directly into their brains.
It's a mostly fun season, marred by the fact that Asuna spends much of the season trapped in a tiresome damsel-in-distress plot. She's by no means entirely weak and helpless, but she's fairly dependent on rescue, which is just kind of annoying.
Book three is Gun Gale Online. This time, we're moving away from fantasy, into a grim futuristic first-person shooter world. Kirito is specifically recruited to dive into the game, because somebody is apparently doing something impossible: despite the safety protocols now in place, one of the shooters is managing to somehow kill people in the real world.
It's an intriguing story, not least because Kirito steps a little bit back from the center. We get a new character, Sinon -- a girl who was badly traumatized by gun violence in the real world and is working through it in this fantasy one. She gets some actual arc here, and is frankly a much more interesting character than Kirito, although the serious issues do get some fairly typical anime simplification.
This book comes with a bit of a content warning specific to itself (beyond the obvious "gun violence"), because Kirito winds up incarnating in GGO in a decidedly androgynous avatar, with the result that everyone (including Sinon) thinks that he is a girl. This could have made for a genuinely interesting story, but it goes in exactly the opposite direction: Kirito initially hides the gender discrepancy, is utterly embarrassed when it comes out (Sinon is furious), and the whole thing is kind of played for laughs. So I suspect my trans friends are likely to find this story extremely irritating.
Tangent: note that there is a separate spin-off series called Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online -- it is set in this particular world, but is pretty much entirely unrelated to the plots and characters of SAO. It's a bit light and fluffy, but really kind of great. There is a bit of real-world plot going on here, but it is mostly just a story of players having a good time and trying to win a big tournament.
Most notably, it is an almost entirely female-centric story -- there is only one major male character, and he's pretty secondary.
Our protagonist, Llenn, is a Japanese schoolgirl who is cursed with a terrible problem: she is very tall by Japanese standards, towering over her classmates, with the result that she feels like a freak in the real world. When she hears about VRMMO, she goes into it with one goal: to find a game that will give her an avatar that is Not Tall.
So she winds up in GGO not because she was seeking it out, but merely because she winds up incarnated in an avatar that is practically a chibi: very short, and very pink. So pink. She turns out to be a natural shooter, so she winds up with a cute hot-pink submachine gun, with which she is terrifyingly dangerous. (Given the "short, pink and dangerous", I wound up associating her rather strongly with my friend Lyonete from the SCA.)
Anyway, GGO is really rather fun, has basically none of the drawbacks of the main SAO series, and stands on its own well. If you can find it, this bit I recommend unreservedly.
Anyway, back to the main story...
Book four is the high point of SAO proper IMO. The story is titled Mother's Rosario, and is notable because Kirito isn't the center of the story, and doesn't even appear much -- this book is all about Asuna.
On the one hand, she is dealing with matters that are purely real-world. Her parents think it's extremely unhealthy how much time she still spends gaming, especially after she was trapped in SAO for so long. She'll be graduating high school soon, and they have strong opinions about where she will go to college -- opinions that don't leave much room for Kirito.
Meanwhile, back in AO, she winds up getting involved with a small guild of adventurers who are determined to beat the next level, which nobody has gotten through yet. They're very talented -- none as experienced as she is, but almost single-mindedly focused on their goal.
Why they care so passionately about getting through this, and making their mark, turns out to be the center of the story, and turns out to be perhaps the most interesting bit of science fiction in the entire series. It's a fascinating exploration of how NerveGear would be used if it existed, and turns out to be a very affecting story, with a lot more emotional depth than the rest of the series.
I'm not sure whether or not it's possible to just watch book four on its own: it does assume all of the background, characters, and experiences from the previous parts. But that said, it is very much its own story, and it is head-and-shoulders the best part of the main series. So it's plausibly worth watching on its own -- it's a tight little story, and a good one.
And that brings us to season 3: the beginning of "Alicization". I'm not quite sure what happened here, but I kind of suspect they changed show-runners. At this point, the series pivots from being a collection of relatively tight 12-episode stories to being a huge epic that sprawls across all of seasons 3 and 4.
The high concept takes things a step beyond NerveGear, going from fairly normal science fiction into a bit of woo-woo, in several respects:
- They (who "they" are is complicated and slow-building) have come up with a new technology that allows you to not merely see and feel VR, but connects your "fluctlight" (a ridiculous term that is clearly your soul) directly into the computer.
- They've created artificial fluctlights, that exist entirely inside the VR -- basically, highly advanced AIs that don't even realize that they exist in a simulation.
- And therefore, there is no reason for that simulation to merely run in realtime -- they are speeding things up in there so that the simulated civilization is moving hundreds of times faster than realtime.
Kirito winds up inside this scenario, living much of a full life inside of it. He has a best friend Eugeo, who is essentially the Sam to his Frodo. (And they come so close to saying in as many words that Eugeo is the other great love of Kirito's life, but they can't quite bring themselves to go there.)
And then there is Alice, his other best friend, who is (for reasons that I don't think ever quite make any sense) the key to this whole world. She's fierce, interesting, and yes -- somewhat in love with Kirito.
The plot is complicated and often nonsensical -- they're trying to do epic fantasy involving war between the kingdom of light and that of darkness, an evil AI who is trying to take over the simulation (and from there leapfrog into the real world), a psychotic mercenary leader from the real world who likes to eat souls, and for absolutely no obvious reason, a recurring series of Alice in Wonderland motifs.
It's a complete mess, frankly. It's not quite at the "I demand those hours of my life back" level, but good it ain't. It's wildly over-ambitious, badly plotted, often a bit lurid, and while it has its moments, it's mostly kind of silly in how over-dramatic it tends to be.
So regardless of the stuff that came before, I do not recommend seasons 3 and 4. They provide a little bit more backstory about the SAO incident, but it doesn't matter much and isn't worth the effort.
The "Alicization" story does end, pretty conclusively, with season 4, and that could have been the end of the series. Unfortunately, they decided to add a tag of "so what happened next?", which teases the non-existent next season (which is clearly going in a more firmly sci-fi direction) with something of a cliffhanger.
Before I finish, some important content warnings. I've already talked about some of the minor ones; on top of that, there's a fair amount of violence, and mid-level anime gore. (Especially in the latter two seasons -- see "lurid".) Season 3 is rife with mind-control tropes, which are pretty squicky for some folks, as well as some weird fetishization of the villainess (who is quite beautiful, and completely naked for something like the last eight episodes).
Most importantly, the show has a problem with recurring Attempted Rape tropes. At least three times in the story, one of the main female characters is threatened with imminent rape -- it is very clearly how they signal, "This isn't merely a bad guy, he is CRAZY and EEEEEVIL". One is merely repulsive (end of book 3), one is worse (end of book 2), and (no surprise, given "lurid") when it happens in season 3, it is over-the-top, lingering-on-the-horror disgusting.
Everything else aside, that aspect is going to be enough for a lot of people to give the series a pass. That said, it's one of the stronger arguments for just watching book 4 (and/or the standalone GGO series) on their own -- they don't have any of that nonsense, and have a lot more courage of their convictions in telling stories that don't call for that sort of grand guignol.
So like I said: complicated. I recommend the first two seasons with reservations; I do not recommend the second two seasons. I do recommend the GGO spin-off (if you can find it -- I'm not sure whether it is currently available in the US), and it may be worth watching just book 4, Mother's Rosario, on its own.