Hello hello hello again. I hope you guys enjoyed that last one – I actually had a paragraph written up about how Kirito’s presence kind of destroys the narrative, but decided to illustrate that in a slightly different way. Hopefully that still came across! Sword Art Online is super insecure about making sure you like Kirito, and so it warps everyone else to make sure you understand he is courageous and attractive and a friend to all the woodland creatures.

That post’s format also meant I didn’t actually engage with anything that episode actually did do, but the episode did have a couple moments worth covering. Kirito’s transformation, I’m actually fine with – yeah, it’s ridiculous that he’s powerful enough to take on a dozen other characters, but if he’s going to do that, having him abuse fear and confusion is certainly more believable than having him just be that tough. And his “sometimes I just go crazy in battle” line seemed both good and bad – on the bad side, it definitely plays into his Tragic Hero cliche, but on the good side, it demonstrates the show might actually be aware of how glorifying all of Kirito’s violent exploits is kind of a weird thing to do.

The other point worth mentioning is Kirito’s final speech, about the consequences of your choices in a videogame world. The first arc more or less proposed the point that experiences in a videogame world are perfectly valid, and if it had actually successfully articulated the points its narrative constructed, it would have ended with “sharing these experiences makes them valuable, videogame or not.” That would have actually closed the book on Kirito’s inconsistently articulated loner issues while also illustrating a theme that makes real use of the setting. The first arc didn’t really do that, but that’s just a failing of the writing, not the idea. This arc seems to be continuing into a corollary of that idea – because your choices in a videogame are meaningful, those choices also reflect on you as a person back in the real world. In fact, your choices in a videogame might actually reflect your most true self, because they are the choices you make when given total freedom.

I like that! I really like that thread. I also like that it plays off what Kirito wants to believe – it’s easy for him to say this stuff, because he’s a person who deeply loves videogames and acts like a hero in videogame realities. I like that these points might be true even if he’s articulating them for selfish reasons.

Unfortunately, this is SAO, so I doubt all this stuff is going to come together. But I can still hope, at least!

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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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