48 thoughts on “Sword Art Online – Episode 14”

1. My headcanon, or: how I would have rewritten this episode in 3 steps.

   1) Callback. Asuna recovers from paralysis not because of WILLPOWER but because Kirito gives her an item that cancels out negative statuses thanks to the fact that THEY ARE MARRIED HENCE THEIR INVENTORIES ARE MERGED.
   2) Callback 2. When Kirito dies, he’s revived by Klein – WHO HELD ONTO THE REVIVING ITEM FROM EPISODE 3 ALL ALONG.
   3) Motives and final speech. Kayaba is wired onto the system like everyone else. How would he have avoided being found and have the police kick the way to disconnect everyone out of him otherwise? He is connected and he can’t be disconnected lest he dies, hence why no one dared trying – fearing he could bring the secret of how to stop the game in his grave. And when he dies in-game, he dies in reality too, like everyone else. SAO is just the most elaborate suicide in history.

   Now prepare for the real fun to begin.

   • He did die. I don’t know why cut that line out of the anime.

     • They probably cut it so that what happens at the end of the second arc makes a bit more sense. Granted, what happens is still BS, but A-1 Pictures lessened the impact of the stupidity if only by a fraction.

   • Yeah, I’m honestly surprised that there weren’t a whole lot of callbacks. To me a lot of the earlier episodes of the first arc seem to either explain or hint at various things that would (presumably) become important later. Heck, I expected a major plot twist that would encompass everybody and utilize every trick that SAO had shown the viewer. But instead the show decided to roll down a hill it couldn’t climb back up at episode 10.
   • 1. Unfortunately, she’s still paralyzed, so she’s still not allowed to use that item.
     2. Unfortunately, Klein is also paralyzed, so he’s still not allowed to use that item.
     3. Unfortunately, his real body is paralyzed; let’s extract and create the Auxillery Brain.

     But yeah, I’m a hundred percent sure that the people in the real world should not be dumb enough to not know how to manipulate currents to short-circuit the NerveGear.

     And paralysis is bullshit.

     Confirmed on Saint’s stream.

     • A. I was thinking more of an item with a permanent effect. Like a ring or an amulet. Dunno if sharing inventories = able to equip said item.
       B. True that. Well, they could have done without the paralysis anyway.
       C. Wut O_o?

     • Yeah, if the paralysis is the problem, just remove the fuckin’ paralysis. It was a cheap dramatic trick in the first place.

   • Wow, damn, you fixed the ending. And it’s not like the bullshit way they resolved this was actually plot-critical or anything… this would only significantly improve the story. You’re hired!

2. I think you might me surprised over the second arc in the beginning, at least (bar a few things). Felt rather fresh and fun for all it’s worth.

   … then, of course, it somehow became even worse than the first arc.

   • Also, this is a fine subtle touch I enjoyed about Sword Art Online. I have no idea if the LNs actually touched upon this, but the anime showed these two dudes every now and then in the background (I remember at least seeing them once or twice):

     http://i.minus.com/ibaxwVRqzzpzYQ.jpg

     • …Wait, they actually followed that up?

       …I’m kind-of impressed.

     • To quote from the Abridged version of that scene in episode 1:

       “Hey, you’re not a girl!”
       “I’m surprisingly okay with this!”
       “Me too!”

   • Brace yourselves, imouto is coming.

   • That sounds good to me! I imagine at least setting up the second arc’s conflict will be kinda interesting, whatever it is.

3. “this is apparently a program where the developers actually have to walk around and fiddle with things to administrate”

   Like Dennou Coil! But less awesome.

   You know what bugs me about this episode? They should have brought Kirito back to life with that special revival crystal he gave Klein after killing Santa in episode 3. Seriously.

   • Looks like someone else thought the same already!

     • That sidestory hadn’t been written yet so it didn’t exist when this ending was written. The anime writers are even worse than the original writer, which doesn’t help since it wasn’t exactly a masterpiece in the first place. They add more plot holes on top of what there already were.

     • That’s odd. That was a sidestory? So was it supposed to be like Contagion where they showed the origin of later events at the end to resolve the “mystery”? Kirito got the crystal pretty much right after his apparent formative event when Sachi died, almost as a direct consequence of that.

   • Yeeeeep. Goddamn, that would have been so much better.

4. I think your first interpretation of the villain is correct, he’s just not the sort of person to explain himself eloquently. I think you shouldn’t take what he says too literally. Or the story seems way better and makes more sense if you don’t.

   • All of our internal SAOs are better than the on-paper SAO, apparently.

5. The “coming back from the dead” ending thing was pretty stupid. It would have worked perfectly fine if Kirito managed to score a hit on him just before he died instead.

   The issue in your duel was that you scratched him but didn’t instantly gain the first strike – how is that related to…

   I don’t think the scratch is important.

   I figure that the way the “first strike system” works is that the first clean hit you get the other player knocks his health down to 5% or whatever So if Kirito actually managed to hit him, he health wouldn’t actually go below 50%.

   .

6. This was the episode that broke me. Not because it’s dumb. Not because it’s terrible. Not because it’s cheap and lazy. Even though it is all of those things, it broke me because it’s insultingly transparent. The biggest, and arguably only, question of the story, “why does SAO exist?”, is answered with an implicit “to give Kirito something to do”. The villain of this story could have just as easily been replaced with the technobabble from a Holodeck episode of Star Trek. Say what you will about stuff like Index or Mahouka, at least those have the decency to pretend to actually be about something.

   • It’s like the author himself forgot the theme the show was building towards, or just wasn’t actually aware of it in the first place. This series composer should have been way more ruthless…

     • I think that most, if not all, of the social/communal/self-built truth stuff that the show tries to explore are just kind of incidentally inherent to the overall gamer fantasy, and not really a purposeful element of the story. Asuna doesn’t learn to value her time in Aincrad because Kawahara wants to say something about constructed realities, but just because that’s how people in these kinds of stories are supposed to act.

       I agree with you though, one of the most disappointing things about SAO is A-1 Pictures’ decision to double-down on the otaku/gamer dollars rather than trying to rewrite it for more wide-audience appeal.

     • I think you would have to do a major rework of SAO to “fix it”. And there is no guarantee that the show would be better.

       I think someone asked the author about the criticisms leveled at SAO, his response was something like “you write something better”. The anime writers weren’t will the make that gamble :p

     • @moridin84-“You write something better” Source? I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard him say anything close to that. He’s admitted that SAO is flawed, and has actually told people not to think too much about what happened at the end of SAO.

     • Not sure how reliable this is but…
       http://hakotoshokan.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/sword-art-online-author-responds-to-haters/
       http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2012/12/17/sword-art-online-author-hits-back-at-critics-in-interview

     • The first article sources the Crunchyroll article. But… the CrunchyRoll article doesn’t say what he said. It looks like, judging by the “Update”, and some of the comments, there was a mis-translation/misunderstanding somewhere. That said, it does seem he responded negatively to criticism, but I don’t know enough (any at all) Japanese to know what he said in the interview.

7. The poofing sound of a potentially great character disappearing in a puff of smoke

   I think Kayaba had the bones of a great character. Kayaba’s motivation is grounded, is something most people who have concocted elaborate imagined SOASE scenarios, opened up Halo Forge, or the starcraft world editor can relate to, and one that holds the foundation for a lot of interesting drama. Of all the things SAO tried, and stumbled at, Kayaba was the most ambitious, though I suppose that makes the stumble hurt more.

   • If the show had actually made any indications of being about that stuff, sure. But yeah, they just introduce him and he has his speech and then he goes away.

8. Alright, bring back Kuradeel, I’m starting to miss that guy

   cackles to infinity

   Oh, they’re bringing him back, alright. WITH TENTACLES.

   • Okay, technically the tentacles aren’t his. Fine.

     Oh, they’re bringing him back, alright. WITH MALICIOUS LICKING.

   • Man, I am excited to see how bad this can really get. I was honestly kinda disappointed with this finale just being Poor Writing Bad – I wanna see Hilariously Ill-Conceived Bad.

9. The bit with Asuna “sacrificing” herself was particularly dumb an inane, and seemed to only be there so both her and Kirito could hear Kayaba’s non-explanation.

   Others have hit most of the high points, especially regarding dropped plot threads (from sidestories, but still, ADAPTION)

   It was just all so very, very dumb.

   And I was rather mad about this episode at the time too.

   • A lot of what happened in this episode kinda felt like moments where the author thought “well, now this happens in stories” without considering why that happens in stories. “Oh, here’s the part where the heroine sacrifices herself. Here’s the part where the hero has a heroic comeback. Here’s the part where the villain makes his big speech.” All this stuff happens pretty often, but it has to actually be reflective of what the story has done up to that point – it doesn’t work just by existing.

10. “I guess you could argue that he was waiting to demonstrate the GM’s nature in front of too many witnesses to ignore, but in that case, the next question becomes “how would he know the GM’s hacks don’t let his health get to yellow?” That doesn’t really have anything to do with what happened in the duel.”
    IIRC, there was a one-off line sometime before the duel that Heathcliff’s HP bar had never gone below green so it’s possible that Kirito went “hey I got first hit but it didn’t count, and his HP barely goes down in a fight anyway, OH SHIT THAT MIGHT BE CONNECTED AND NOT JUST A ONE-OFF BUG” but that doesn’t actually fit with the flow of the writing.

    “Oh SAO. Never change” Man I have been so looking forward to your reaction on his reasons why since it goes against everything you enjoy (based on your anime reviews). And it’s yet another great example of “I can see what the author was going for, how after so long everyone’s goals change/vanish” but the contrast between his in-game self and real-world self was just too big for me (plus, considering he was controlling his avatar the whole time, how did he even continue to muster up the emotion to care about this two years in?)

    I am also proposing we let Higgsbosoff become the head writer on the show this summer.

    • Well, thanks for the trust :D. But considering that I’ve been spoiled about how in this new season Kirito is going to have a FEMALE avatar… heh. You don’t want to leave a genderbent Gary Stu in my hands. It wouldn’t end well (not that it will either way).

    • Man, if that’s what he was going for, he actually could have connected that to the stuff the show has actually supported, with how people’s human connections here make this into a valid reality. You sculpt your own realities, and find meaning in new things, and that could have been reflected by him as well as by the protagonists. Missed opportunities as far as the eye can see…

      And yeah, Higgsbosoff has apparently got this. His finale is way better than this one.

11. “Wait, how did you gather that from your duel?” – The legend by the players was that Heathcliff’s HP bar never hit the half-way point. So Kirito assumed the immortality on him just prevented his health from going that far.

    “Wait what does that even mean” – “Sword Skills” are pre-programmed abilities in the game, that strike much faster and stronger than a normal sword swing. Against monsters they’re perfect, as the monsters aren’t programmed to know the paths to most of the Sword Skills. However, against players who’ve memorized most consecutive-hit Sword Skills, it’s problematic, because at the end of each Sword Skill, there’s a set amount of time where you’re frozen (hence the concept of the “Switch” play-style that SAO players use, to keep a player from being attacked while stunned) Not that the anime cares too much about Sword Skills, and instead shoves them into the background.

    “Are they even going to pretend to explain this” – It’s not as crazy as him coming back from the dead. The anime didn’t do a great job of making clear what happened here. In the novel, his avatar had died, but he hadn’t yet broken apart into polygons. Instead, at the last second he decided to stab him. Still crazy, but yeah.

    • Welp, these all seem like clear failings of the adaptation then. If any of this was going to be relevant in a dramatic sense, it should have been made clear by the narrative. I guess this one’s A-1 Pictures’ fault.

      • For the most part, the only problem A-1’s adaptation has had, is omitting some of the more important pieces of Kirito’s narrative. Every now and again they’ll include a piece of Kirito’s inner-monologue, but only when there’s no other choice.
        I recall reading a review, that this was one of Director Itou’s problem with SAO, as he followed a “Show, don’t tell” method of story-telling

12. My personal explanation for what actually happened here is that Kayaba beat Kirito fair and square (answering something that Kayaba was curious about) and then decided to give up because his great master story he’d planned had been spoiled. Since Kayaba is only mostly a jerk and does have a sense of the dramatic, he used GM powers to revive Kirito and let Kirito ‘defeat’ him; it was simply a better story than having Kirito die and then Kayaba saying ‘oh what the heck, we’re done here, you’re all free’.

    (Even if Kayaba killed Kirito his in-game life was basically done no matter what, so there went a lot of his fun.)

    As for Kirito and his apparent awareness of how GM characters behave in SAO: my explanation is that GM staffers were present in the beta and so Kirito got to see how their characters interacted with the world. My understanding is that real MMOs sometimes have GMs play special game-blessed characters for special events and so on, and also sometimes show up in the world to troubleshoot things. A MMO beta seems like an especially good time to have this happen and to see it.

    I’m calling these personal explanations instead of theories because I’m sure they’re wrong and absolutely not what the writers were thinking. I just have this compulsion to make things make sense.

    • I can’t think of a show that has forced people to work harder to make sense of it. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with only two thirds of the pieces included.

13. You miss Kuradeel, eh? Brace yourself.

14. Look, the ending is supposed to be “I wanted to create my own world, one I could control. But ultimately I learned that that’s impossible, not because you can’t create a new world, but because everyone creates their own world every day, through the experiences they share with others. I can’t dictate the meaning people find in my reality, and even my attempts to make hard rules only inspire people to slip between the cracks. I wanted to create my own world, but it was really the players who made this place real.”

    Nice, if we gather all the comments of Bobduh, they will become a SAO Fix Fic.

    Verdict for the first arc: Inconsistent story, ideas are not well-thought, but still leave some emotional impacts on me. It isn’t super horrible like the critics have said. I decided to continue my suffering =)

15. On the other hand, SAO does make a pretty good AMV/MAD. It feels like the biggest substance of the show is its aesthetic rather than its actual story.

16. @4:29- exactly what I was thinking! LOL

Comments are closed.