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.
