I believe it started when I was twelve years old.

I’d been normal, before that – more or less. I had friends, family. Sometimes we disagreed, sometimes we fought – it was a normal childhood, full of normal relationships. People would listen to what I say, and respond based on whether they agreed or disagreed. It didn’t seem unusual. I didn’t know how precious it was.

Then it happened.

It began with the girls. When before, they’d generally just treated me with friendship, cordial distance, or dislike, now they started stuttering. Blushing as they spoke to me, or just awkwardly turning away. Telling me I was a dork, and then staring at me over their textbook, day after day after day. And it wasn’t just a few girls – not just some usual schoolyard crush. It was every female in my presence, always, forever.

Then it started with the boys. Some began laughing uproariously at anything I said, matching my every word and gesture with a “you said it, bro!” Younger boys began to preen and sulk, acting like attention-starved children. Men began to point at me in elevators, cackling wildly as I walked away. You were either with me or against me, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it – no matter how I acted, no matter what I said, women fell for me, boys idolized me, and men stared at me through wild eyes and steepled hands.

I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know what would make it stop. Was I being punished, somehow? Was it some kind of cruel cosmic joke?

All I know is that I am no longer one of them. They can’t help it – though I see them act like human beings among themselves, in my presence, they become slaves to their own instincts. They love me or despise me, all acted out in some sick approximation of human emotion, all entirely beyond my control. I am a monster, now. I am cursed.

I wander this simulacra of reality, haunted by simulacra of human beings. It suits me, I suppose. God or devil, I only know that I am alone.

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SAO crossed some lines last week, and once you’ve crossed those lines, it’s fairly difficult to uncross them. We no longer have the threat of Kirito actually dying to provide momentum, so instead we’ve introduced a crazy man who actively threatened to rape Asuna and keeps her in a cage. This scary man is the threat, the threat which Kirito must vanquish before it can defile his helpless woman.

This is one of the oldest, laziest, most regressive and cheaply founded and identity-diminishing narratives in the Man Narrative book. Sword Art Online is not a good show, and it’s been pretty happy to revel in lonely guy power fantasies for basically its whole running time, but this is definitely a new low for the series. It’s bad enough that I feel it’s important to actually point it out here in this unusually somber introduction, before I go on to become implicit in trivializing the fundamental shittiness of this author’s choices by making jokes about them. Rest assured, I will make jokes about them! This is some dumb, ugly shit, and laughter is, if not actually an actual doctor-prescribed medicine, at least a nice way of flipping off shitty attitudes to maybe not feel so depressed about them all the time. In trying to create a big scary villain, this author has unwittingly created a much more relevant and believable Bad Guy – the show itself. SAO is the enemy now. Time to go to war.

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Alright, let’s keep this train rolling! Last episode was ultimately kinda dull, but it had to establish a lot of exposition-stuff that should now let us actually get moving again. It’s looking like Kirito will be able to skip Yui’s lesson in Z-targeting, so hopefully we can just enlist Not Kirito’s Sister into the party and be on our way. Alfheim, ho!

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Well that was… something. We’ve upgraded from a villain who’s more or less a non-presence to a villain who actively takes pleasure in not acting like an actual human being. In the course of one ridiculous scene, Sword Art Online managed to instantly dissolve any tension this arc could create by predicating itself on the most absurd conflict imaginable. Kirito must now save his helpless waifu from Dr. Evil.

I feel like it must seriously take willful dedication to screw up character writing that badly. This isn’t “I don’t know how to write distinctive human beings” bad – Kirito already exhibits that, and this guy is not like Kirito. This is like that scene in Attack on Titan’s first episode, when the recon group is coming back from a terrible mission, and everybody crowds the streets to see who’s still alive. And one woman comes out to ask what happened to her son, and you think “oh, well, that’s kinda on-the-nose, but sure, they gotta give this sadness an individual context.” And the captain motions to one of his soldiers and says “it’s little Jimmy Stetson’s mom, bring it here,” and the soldier brings over this rag-covered thing, and the lady opens it up and HOLY SHIT IT’S A SEVERED HAND AND AHHHH GOD “THIS IS ALL WE COULD FIND” AND “AHHH HOLY SHIT MY SON IS DEAD” AND “AHHH THAT’S RIGHT YOUR SON IS DEAD GOKU, HEEEEE’S DEEAAAAAAD.”

This is like that except it’s the show’s actual antagonist instead of one horribly directed scene. This is like the actor comes on stage and says “what’s my motivation” and the director goes “alright, you just got back from eating babies, and later tonight you’re going to set fire to some orphanages, and right now you’re mad because you got blood on your shoes from curb-stomping the elderly. Aaand SCENE.”

This is actually pretty great. Let’s see what they do next.

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So. That ending.

Pretty bad, huh? Yeah, it was pretty bad. I was kinda just nodding along at the time, because frankly, at this point I don’t really expect anything out of Sword Art Online. It’s not going to pull its pieces together, it’s not going to wow me with thematic turns or character revelations or clever worldbuilding inversions. It’s a good day for Sword Art Online if Sword Art Online manages to get its pants on.

But yeah, that ending was bad. Bad on an overt level, bad on an underlying level, bad in basically all the ways a thing can be bad. Oh! Not visually. It actually had some pretty great, well-used animation. But everything else? Well, let’s run it down.

On a narrative level, not only did the finale fail to draw in all this first arc’s lingering, relevant pieces (which were helpfully laid out by last episode’s commenters, and included such potentially useful loose ends as Yui’s existence, the revival crystal, and how married couples share inventories), but it instead decided to just resolve things through a series of “and then our heroes succeed just because” deus ex machina. There certainly wasn’t any narrative weight to this one – if this battle wanted to have heft on a base storytelling level, it undercut that pretty completely. It just felt like a succession of events the author knows stories tend to end with, not the sequence of events that would have successfully ended this story.

On a character level, we ended this arc with Asuna at pretty much her worst point so far (“my life has no meaning without Kirito”), Kirito remaining his entirely neutral self, and our villain ultimately… not knowing why he did any of this? I dunno, this show doesn’t really have character arcs outside of that one Asuna dictated to the audience. Kirito was affected by the death of Sachi (sometimes), but how did he actually grow from that? We flashed back and saw him get mad about it, but did he actually change? Eh.

On a thematic level, what the fuck. We actually had a theme going there, what with the “learning to embrace the validity of digital experiences” stuff that kept cropping up even in the vignettes. And then, at the end, how does this resolve? Well, it doesn’t – Kirito just wills himself to not die in order to beat the bad guy, the bad guy (and yeah, I’m gonna keep saying “bad guy,” because this guy has clearly not earned the right to be called an antagonist – he’s just a Force of Evil) has a completely unrelated speech about Why We Videogaming, and then everybody goes home. I gave one clear example of how this could have been resolved last week – if you want another, how about leaning on the villain’s “people keep surprising me in this world” refrain, and have the ways people have made this world their own actually have a meaningful impact on the resolution. Or hell, you can even keep his speech, and have his “I don’t know what I wanted anymore” lines be overtly reflective of how our experiences change our expectations of life, mirroring the goddamn protagonists. Almost anything would be better and make greater use of this show’s existing resources than just resolving it with Kirito Manning Up and a completely unrelated Final Villain Speech.

And on a worldbuilding level, well, I sure hope you weren’t actually trying to appreciate this show on a worldbuilding level. Last episode made it achingly clear that Aincrad is not a world Kirito is independently inhabiting – it is a world generated by his personal need to have awesome stuff to do. So, uh, good luck with that.

But even given all that negative stuff, I honestly am not disliking SAO. How can I get mad at it for failing in ways it’s never indicated any ability to succeed in the first place? It’s a silly adventure about a guy parading around and saving waifus. SAO is not ashamed of what it is, and I’m happy to say I’m actually pretty much enjoying it. You don’t have to only like good things, and many of the ways SAO is bad are actually extremely entertaining to me. I welcome the terrible stuff – just straight-up failing as a narrative means your story will be boring (because story craft is actually how you generate intrigue, excitement, and emotional investment, not just an arbitrary set of rules we apply to stories to feel superior), but if you fail spectacularly, your failings can become their own reward. I’m apparently about to enter the “bad half” of SAO, and I am actually pretty excited about that – what is bad is often fun, and what is fun is good.

So let’s do this, SAO. Let’s see just how bad you can get.

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Holy shit it’s the end of the first arc. I think? We’ve just got the Skull Reaper to go, right? And then dealing with the creator of this world, I assume? Well, I’m ready. Now that I’m in a rhythm, I’m actually having a good deal of fun with this show – it’s not good, but it’s very rarely boring, and its digressions into terribleness (Episodes 10, 12, and that one conversation from 13) are really more hilarious than frustrating. When a show I really like makes a very poor choice, it aggravates me – it’s a choice that will always scar that show, and whenever I rewatch it or show it to someone else, I’ll be very aware that it’s less than it could have been. But when a show I’m just watching to be entertained makes mistakes, I mainly just hope those mistakes are also entertaining. And Sword Art Online is very good at making very entertaining mistakes.

Yeah, this show’s won me over. You hear that, cackling commenters?! I’m having a good time! This show will not break me!

Alright, let’s get the fuck out of Aincrad.

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After episode ten’s torture-porn and episode twelve’s moe-murder-porn, I just have very little left to say. I just… I…

Look, let’s just watch the episode.

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