I wanna archive this...
Originally found here, but it would involve a lot of scrolling...
Sword Art Online has been one of those shows that has made a name for itself as a must watch anime this past year. It’s also garnered a lot of hatred from those who are not so happy with it. As for myself I’ve sat in an interesting spot between the two extremes. Personally I’ve enjoyed Sword Art Online quite a bit, but my friends are very much split down the middle on it. I basically have two circles of friends that I hang with, one of them absolutely adores Sword Art Online and the other abhors it.
If you have been reading the Sword Art Online glorioblog recaps you can probably guess which one hates it, but let me talk about the group that loves it. I played World of Warcraft for years, it was my life for a long time. Was being past tense, it is now something I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. That said I made a lot of close friendships that I still maintain to this day thanks to World of Warcraft. I also learned many life lessons from playing that game, my ability to romanticize MMO’s will probably never go away even though I seem to be incapable of enjoying them anymore.
The friendships gained in an online environment are the type that can only come about when people are forced to work together toward a common goal. If you have never had the chance to experiencing a raiding guild in an MMO let me fill you in on the basic reality of it all from the perspective of someone who was in various leadership positions in a World of Warcraft guild: It is not a friendly environment at all. People are at each others throats over the smallest things, and being a jerk is often idolized because it gets things accomplished, which can make the player base more than a little bit unapproachable.
The interesting thing about friendships gained in an online environment is that they are tested from the get go. You can learn things about a person from a few games of capture the flag that years of talking to them won’t reveal. The same goes for raiding, I can’t possibly express how much raiding strains relationships. Also, I played a healer so whenever anything went wrong it was always my fault, sometimes it really was, often it wasn’t. The bonds you forge under fire are made out of stronger stuff. Up the ante a bit and make it so that you die in game, you die in real life, and you have a situation where characters in a story have every reason to become closer with little motivation beyond that at all.
Why am I telling you all this in my final impression of Sword Art Online? Because I get it. Go ahead and call Kirito a pair of pants for dumb MMO gamers or whatever other insults satisfy any deep seated hatred you may have for Kirito if you like, but personally I feel that is missing the point. Instead of being a pair of pants that an MMO gamer can slip into Kirito is more of an idol. He is that far away goal that anyone who has spent time raiding in an MMO raiding can relate with trying to be. Not even so much an idol of what is liked, but what is expected. Kitito is not so much a pair of pants as he is a paragon of MMO gamer ideals.
Does all of that make Kirito a Mary Sue? Maybe it does. Does it make him an awful character? Some would say yes. Kirito is where I see the majority of the split between my two circle of friends. We at glorioblog regularly get reblogged on tumbler by Angry Sword Art Online fans who often can barely spell let alone properly organize their thoughts into a coherent argument, but one thing they have said about our recaps has stuck with me; To paraphrase: “These guys just don’t get it.”
I have things about Sword Art Online that I would like to critique, but I feel I first need to admonish both the fans and the “critics” of Sword Art Online for missing the point, or for not getting it as I said above. I should be able to celebrate my love for this story without needing to go to war on the internet to defend it from fans and foes alike critiquing it in a way that is more about personal agenda than any sort of meaningful statements about the anime itself or the story it told.
Fiction is created to be be enjoyed, or maybe more accurately I should say fiction is an artform that shares a complex expression of experience. If you want to know more on what I mean by that feel free to ask. Honestly there are many different ways we can define the different elements of what makes fiction work, but there is one thing that all fiction has in common: Fiction creates a veil of imagination that requires an emotional investment on the part of the reader. If that investment is denied by the investor the magic is broken.
Show me any particular piece of fiction, and I can show you a way to break that veil. All someone needs to set off at destroying it is something about the story they don’t like, and that veil can be broken. Something that makes them uncomfortable or offends them perform this trick the easiest, but all it takes is a slight distaste, and you can break free. This is true for real world stories as well in fact, but that is a topic for another day.
Stop and think about your favorite piece of fiction, it is no exception to the above principle of investment. Activating your own imagination is an important part of enjoying any story. If you won’t do that then you won’t experience the charms of a story no matter how well they are presented.
With Sword Art Online Many are having seizures about “plot holes” and broken internal consistency, but personally I think those are minor problems with Sword Art Online. They are real issues, but not to the extent that has been claimed. Why? Because Sword Art Online always leaves enough room to easily fill in the blanks. Personally I don’t really care that the door to reach the upper area of the Alfheim Online tower didn’t actually have a physical console on it, or that Asuna didn’t die immediately when she was killed by Heathcliff. These events and those like them range from minor oversights to intentional choice.
Alfhiem Online in particular was between a rock and a hard place when it came to depicting the fights. They could either have mid air chanting battles or cool choreographed fights. The thing is people would have complained either way. Better to make all of Kirito’s abilities look like skills without explaining them than have him sit around chanting, ruining the excitement of his fights. If you don’t believe me go look at Campione!. One of the biggest complaints against that anime was the way it was all chanting instead of choreographed fights. You can’t win.
Sword Art Online pulls out a lot of things where it just couldn’t win. It really isn’t hard to see why people take such offense at it, though I do think it’s a bit pathetic how personally offended some people are by this anime. Asuna’s max cooking ability, Kirito’s leet gaming skills, Kirito impressing all the ladies with his leet gaming skills, Sugo and making Asuna a victim of assault and the list goes on. All of these are situations where the anime couldn’t win, and yet my only disgust is with the reaction people have had to it.
Most of the “plot holes” of Sword Art Online can be solved by exposition that simply isn’t there. My own imagination is not so lacking as to need those things explained, and the direction of the story is never so complex as to be confusing without explanation. The most intelligent argument I’ve seen come out of this basically boils down to this: That isn’t the way storytelling is supposed to work so it isn’t okay. I can respect this position, having absolute standards for enoying fiction is not something I am willing to hold myself to, but I can understand that point of view even though I disagree with it. That said I am not hearing that argument from most of the people critiquing this anime.
I could go into a rant here about how experiences don’t need to be reasonable to be shared successfully, and I would feel pretty justified in that. Instead, what I want to stress here is that the goals of the author were clearly met. Reki Kawahara’s Sword Art Online feels a bit like a first draft that could use some editing. Some of the details could use some work, but the experience is complete. Because of that I highly doubt that fixing any of those issues would change a single opinion on this anime. I am reminded of the human mind’s ability to read a paragraph where the letters in words are in the wrong order.
To call the “plot holes” of Sword Art Online the major issues the anime suffers from feels incredibly silly to me. They range from minor oversights to obvious choices made by the author of the original story and those responsible for turning it into anime. To give one of the major examples Asuna’s non death may be a deus ex machina by technicality, but if so it was a deus ex machina of intentional design which defeats any meaning that critique holds for me.
To cite another example Sword Art Online has issues defining what a console is and is not in Alfheim Online, but in all seriousness that is not a major plot hole, it is a minor oversight. Change a few words and it all makes sense. For that matter is the word console even an accurate translation of the Japanese? I assume it is, but if not that would explain one of the biggest unintentional “plot holes” of Sword Art Online.
The important thing to realize here is that the flow inside any particular episode is never broken or cheapened by these “plot holes”, at least not unintentionally which is important to recognize when critiquing something. Are these problems that Sword Art Online should be critiqued for? Absolutely, just not on the magnitude they have been or with the implications that have been attached to them.
It has become a serious problem with anime “critics” when they hold their own enjoyment and personal taste up on a pedestal above what an anime inspires to be and then again over what it accomplishes. I’ve half the mind to just get out of writing about anime here and now thanks to all the frustration and headache this brings when I want to write about a popular show myself.
The critical gaze that many Sword Art Online watchers have cast on the anime has reached a ridiculous level. There is a lot of missing the point going on, and to be fair it is not just the haters doing it. A large majority of the fans who have come out in defense of Sword Art Online are just as guilty of misunderstanding what the anime has done right and what it did wrong as the people who abhor it, which finally brings me back to my own personal critique of Sword Art Online.
Sword Art Online did a lot of things right, and a few things wrong. Reki Kawahara is a master of atmosphere and world building. The passion he put into making both Aincrad and Alfheim is nothing short of incredible, and A-1 should also be commended for the work they did in bringing them both to life. As I mentioned before Kirito is like a paragon of MMO gamer ideals, and Asuna is like every MMO gamer’s wet dream right down to having her cooking skill maxed out, but what makes them interesting is their interactions with the world and each other.
Honestly I didn’t like Asuna much at first, and it wasn’t really anything she did that changed my mind, it was the world itself. Reki Kawahara created a lot of fairly simple characters for this story. At first glance that may seem like a flaw, but personally I don’t think it is. Character growth may be the primary way to make a character interesting inside a story, but sometimes just seeing the way a character reacts to a given world can be enough to justify that characters part in it, and really when you stop and look at what can be taken away from playing an MMO that is what it’s all about. It’s not about players and the way they grow; it’s about the world and how it challenges them. This also means more awful things happening to characters, more people upset, and less winning all around, at least on the internet with “critics”.
There is an argument to be made for poor character motivation in the Alfheim Online portion of this anime, and it’s one I am inclined to agree with. The well defined character motivations end with Aincrad. One of the most jarring moments is when the people who help Kirito make it to the top of the tower in Alfheim Online just show up out of the blue and help him make it to the top. Logically this doesn’t make much sense. Supposedly this is better explained in the books, but I can tell you right now that is was not a mistake to skip out on explaining that in the anime. Some things are better left unsaid. Drawing any more attention to those characters than was absolutely necessary would have been a bad idea.
One thing I think should be pointed out here is that Sword Art Online often addresses the audience directly. This is probably to help cover up the simplistic motivations of the cast. Why make us question things that are obviously completely lacking in depth? To do so would only cheapen the experience.
For better or worse Sword Art Online is a story all about Kirito. The entire world inherently understands that Kirito is a paragon of MMO gamer ideals. Call him a mary sue if you must, but point is the world is aware of it whatever title it is that he has. In Aincrad this was established by the way the world gave him duel wielding capacity. In Alfheim Online this is established by the way Kirito kept so much of what he achieved in Aincrad. Both this world and this author love Kirito. This is both the strongest and weakest point of Reki Kawahara’s storytelling. You will either come to love Kirito or you likely won’t enjoy this anime much at all.
Reki Kawahara is great at world building, and passionately understands MMO’s and how to tell a story that comes from an online world, but most of his character might as well be NPC’s, and in Alfheim in particular it probably would have worked better if they were. Even at the end of Alfheim Online the story is all about Kirito, even when it arguably should have been about Asuna it was about Kirito. All the hatred, all the critiques laid upon this anime all come back to that one focal point, Kirito. You either accept what he is, or you don’t.
Reki Kawahara also has something of an imouto fetish. Personally I would have rather the people from Aincrad assist in getting Asuna back. The motivation was already built in, but then Reki Kawahara is not very good at character motivation. It’s a shame on a certain level, but I am not interested in critiquing Sword Art Online for what it is not. Many of the moments that people seem to hate about Sword Art Online so much are because they make them feel uncomfortable, but… in most cases, they were supposed to, providing more examples of situations where Sword Art Online simply can’t win.
A lot of what this rant stems from is that I do not believe that many of the people criticizing Sword Art Online are doing so for the reasons they say they are. I am not even sure if they are aware of this, in many cases I think not. Misunderstanding that something uncomfortable or “offensive” is the actual reason something is hated seems to be common practice with popular anime, but is irritating every time it happens on a large scale nonetheless.
If you are looking for missing exposition from the books it is pretty clear to me why it is missing. Exposition brings logic to the table that doesn’t always need to be there. Compare Sword Art Online with Accel World and you have two stories that on paper should clearly favor Accel World. It is without all the little “plot holes” that plague Sword Art Online. Everything about storytelling best practice tells me that Accel World should be the better story. Even the protagonist of Accel World is better defined. I can easily see the ways that Reki Kawahara has improved as a writer between Sword Art Online and Accel World, but Sword Art Online still manages to be a lot more fun.
Exposition and explanation in the dramatic moments of Sword Art Online would have completely ruined what Sword Art Online had going for it. In fact many of the “plot holes” of Sword Art Online would be better off if the story had never addressed them in the first place and to the credit of the anime staff Sword Art Online avoids giving us more than the bare minimum of what we need. Change the first use of the word console to area and suddenly one of the biggest “plot holes” is fixed. A-1 made the right choice when they avoided exposition toward the end of the anime as it would have brought focus onto the character motivations of the rest of the Alfheim Online cast. How can I say something so audacious? Because for better or worse this never was never their story.
Something I learned somewhat Ironically from playing MMO’s is that it is usually a good idea to build something toward it’s strengths. It is better do a few things great than a lot of things poorly. When playing a priest who can do a lot of different things spending skill points on holy damage is probably a bad idea. Holy damage is, or at least was pretty damn useless in World of Warcraft. This same principle applies here with why I can say that I am very happy with A-1’s adaptation of Sword Art Online.
A-1 took Sword Art Online, a story that while a bit messy, clearly had a lot of passion in it. They played up the drama it had to the best of their abilities while avoiding the weaker aspects of the supporting cast’s character motivations. They played up the world building that Reki Kawahara is so good at in a way that put emphasis on all the little implications the world had on the people in it while avoiding drawing attention to the little inconsistencies that plague the overall story, and avoiding focusing in on the side casts dubious motivations.
In the end there is only so much you can ask of an Adaptation, and I do not think Sword Art Online could have been done much better than it has. I do think a bit more attention to detail was given to Aincrad than it was to Alfheim, but personally I will take what I can get, and do believe that those details betrayed the goals of this anime much at all.
If you have not picked up the anime I will say this: temper your expectations, Sword Art Online is not perfect. Sword Art Online is a case where you will find problems if you go looking for them, but if you can turn down your critical gaze for a bit, and ignore those storytelling best practices you think you know so well you just might be in for a treat. Watch a few episodes and decide if you can get behind Kirito’s character. If not drop it then and there as I can more or less guarantee you won’t like the rest. If you can get behind Kirito as a protagonist then you just might be in for one of the most exciting stories anime has given us in some time.
Sword Art Online has been one of those shows that has made a name for itself as a must watch anime this past year. It’s also garnered a lot of hatred from those who are not so happy with it. As for myself I’ve sat in an interesting spot between the two extremes. Personally I’ve enjoyed Sword Art Online quite a bit, but my friends are very much split down the middle on it. I basically have two circles of friends that I hang with, one of them absolutely adores Sword Art Online and the other abhors it.
If you have been reading the Sword Art Online glorioblog recaps you can probably guess which one hates it, but let me talk about the group that loves it. I played World of Warcraft for years, it was my life for a long time. Was being past tense, it is now something I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. That said I made a lot of close friendships that I still maintain to this day thanks to World of Warcraft. I also learned many life lessons from playing that game, my ability to romanticize MMO’s will probably never go away even though I seem to be incapable of enjoying them anymore.
The friendships gained in an online environment are the type that can only come about when people are forced to work together toward a common goal. If you have never had the chance to experiencing a raiding guild in an MMO let me fill you in on the basic reality of it all from the perspective of someone who was in various leadership positions in a World of Warcraft guild: It is not a friendly environment at all. People are at each others throats over the smallest things, and being a jerk is often idolized because it gets things accomplished, which can make the player base more than a little bit unapproachable.
The interesting thing about friendships gained in an online environment is that they are tested from the get go. You can learn things about a person from a few games of capture the flag that years of talking to them won’t reveal. The same goes for raiding, I can’t possibly express how much raiding strains relationships. Also, I played a healer so whenever anything went wrong it was always my fault, sometimes it really was, often it wasn’t. The bonds you forge under fire are made out of stronger stuff. Up the ante a bit and make it so that you die in game, you die in real life, and you have a situation where characters in a story have every reason to become closer with little motivation beyond that at all.
Why am I telling you all this in my final impression of Sword Art Online? Because I get it. Go ahead and call Kirito a pair of pants for dumb MMO gamers or whatever other insults satisfy any deep seated hatred you may have for Kirito if you like, but personally I feel that is missing the point. Instead of being a pair of pants that an MMO gamer can slip into Kirito is more of an idol. He is that far away goal that anyone who has spent time raiding in an MMO raiding can relate with trying to be. Not even so much an idol of what is liked, but what is expected. Kitito is not so much a pair of pants as he is a paragon of MMO gamer ideals.
Does all of that make Kirito a Mary Sue? Maybe it does. Does it make him an awful character? Some would say yes. Kirito is where I see the majority of the split between my two circle of friends. We at glorioblog regularly get reblogged on tumbler by Angry Sword Art Online fans who often can barely spell let alone properly organize their thoughts into a coherent argument, but one thing they have said about our recaps has stuck with me; To paraphrase: “These guys just don’t get it.”
I have things about Sword Art Online that I would like to critique, but I feel I first need to admonish both the fans and the “critics” of Sword Art Online for missing the point, or for not getting it as I said above. I should be able to celebrate my love for this story without needing to go to war on the internet to defend it from fans and foes alike critiquing it in a way that is more about personal agenda than any sort of meaningful statements about the anime itself or the story it told.
Fiction is created to be be enjoyed, or maybe more accurately I should say fiction is an artform that shares a complex expression of experience. If you want to know more on what I mean by that feel free to ask. Honestly there are many different ways we can define the different elements of what makes fiction work, but there is one thing that all fiction has in common: Fiction creates a veil of imagination that requires an emotional investment on the part of the reader. If that investment is denied by the investor the magic is broken.
Show me any particular piece of fiction, and I can show you a way to break that veil. All someone needs to set off at destroying it is something about the story they don’t like, and that veil can be broken. Something that makes them uncomfortable or offends them perform this trick the easiest, but all it takes is a slight distaste, and you can break free. This is true for real world stories as well in fact, but that is a topic for another day.
Stop and think about your favorite piece of fiction, it is no exception to the above principle of investment. Activating your own imagination is an important part of enjoying any story. If you won’t do that then you won’t experience the charms of a story no matter how well they are presented.
With Sword Art Online Many are having seizures about “plot holes” and broken internal consistency, but personally I think those are minor problems with Sword Art Online. They are real issues, but not to the extent that has been claimed. Why? Because Sword Art Online always leaves enough room to easily fill in the blanks. Personally I don’t really care that the door to reach the upper area of the Alfheim Online tower didn’t actually have a physical console on it, or that Asuna didn’t die immediately when she was killed by Heathcliff. These events and those like them range from minor oversights to intentional choice.
Alfhiem Online in particular was between a rock and a hard place when it came to depicting the fights. They could either have mid air chanting battles or cool choreographed fights. The thing is people would have complained either way. Better to make all of Kirito’s abilities look like skills without explaining them than have him sit around chanting, ruining the excitement of his fights. If you don’t believe me go look at Campione!. One of the biggest complaints against that anime was the way it was all chanting instead of choreographed fights. You can’t win.
Sword Art Online pulls out a lot of things where it just couldn’t win. It really isn’t hard to see why people take such offense at it, though I do think it’s a bit pathetic how personally offended some people are by this anime. Asuna’s max cooking ability, Kirito’s leet gaming skills, Kirito impressing all the ladies with his leet gaming skills, Sugo and making Asuna a victim of assault and the list goes on. All of these are situations where the anime couldn’t win, and yet my only disgust is with the reaction people have had to it.
Most of the “plot holes” of Sword Art Online can be solved by exposition that simply isn’t there. My own imagination is not so lacking as to need those things explained, and the direction of the story is never so complex as to be confusing without explanation. The most intelligent argument I’ve seen come out of this basically boils down to this: That isn’t the way storytelling is supposed to work so it isn’t okay. I can respect this position, having absolute standards for enoying fiction is not something I am willing to hold myself to, but I can understand that point of view even though I disagree with it. That said I am not hearing that argument from most of the people critiquing this anime.
I could go into a rant here about how experiences don’t need to be reasonable to be shared successfully, and I would feel pretty justified in that. Instead, what I want to stress here is that the goals of the author were clearly met. Reki Kawahara’s Sword Art Online feels a bit like a first draft that could use some editing. Some of the details could use some work, but the experience is complete. Because of that I highly doubt that fixing any of those issues would change a single opinion on this anime. I am reminded of the human mind’s ability to read a paragraph where the letters in words are in the wrong order.
To call the “plot holes” of Sword Art Online the major issues the anime suffers from feels incredibly silly to me. They range from minor oversights to obvious choices made by the author of the original story and those responsible for turning it into anime. To give one of the major examples Asuna’s non death may be a deus ex machina by technicality, but if so it was a deus ex machina of intentional design which defeats any meaning that critique holds for me.
To cite another example Sword Art Online has issues defining what a console is and is not in Alfheim Online, but in all seriousness that is not a major plot hole, it is a minor oversight. Change a few words and it all makes sense. For that matter is the word console even an accurate translation of the Japanese? I assume it is, but if not that would explain one of the biggest unintentional “plot holes” of Sword Art Online.
The important thing to realize here is that the flow inside any particular episode is never broken or cheapened by these “plot holes”, at least not unintentionally which is important to recognize when critiquing something. Are these problems that Sword Art Online should be critiqued for? Absolutely, just not on the magnitude they have been or with the implications that have been attached to them.
It has become a serious problem with anime “critics” when they hold their own enjoyment and personal taste up on a pedestal above what an anime inspires to be and then again over what it accomplishes. I’ve half the mind to just get out of writing about anime here and now thanks to all the frustration and headache this brings when I want to write about a popular show myself.
The critical gaze that many Sword Art Online watchers have cast on the anime has reached a ridiculous level. There is a lot of missing the point going on, and to be fair it is not just the haters doing it. A large majority of the fans who have come out in defense of Sword Art Online are just as guilty of misunderstanding what the anime has done right and what it did wrong as the people who abhor it, which finally brings me back to my own personal critique of Sword Art Online.
Sword Art Online did a lot of things right, and a few things wrong. Reki Kawahara is a master of atmosphere and world building. The passion he put into making both Aincrad and Alfheim is nothing short of incredible, and A-1 should also be commended for the work they did in bringing them both to life. As I mentioned before Kirito is like a paragon of MMO gamer ideals, and Asuna is like every MMO gamer’s wet dream right down to having her cooking skill maxed out, but what makes them interesting is their interactions with the world and each other.
Honestly I didn’t like Asuna much at first, and it wasn’t really anything she did that changed my mind, it was the world itself. Reki Kawahara created a lot of fairly simple characters for this story. At first glance that may seem like a flaw, but personally I don’t think it is. Character growth may be the primary way to make a character interesting inside a story, but sometimes just seeing the way a character reacts to a given world can be enough to justify that characters part in it, and really when you stop and look at what can be taken away from playing an MMO that is what it’s all about. It’s not about players and the way they grow; it’s about the world and how it challenges them. This also means more awful things happening to characters, more people upset, and less winning all around, at least on the internet with “critics”.
There is an argument to be made for poor character motivation in the Alfheim Online portion of this anime, and it’s one I am inclined to agree with. The well defined character motivations end with Aincrad. One of the most jarring moments is when the people who help Kirito make it to the top of the tower in Alfheim Online just show up out of the blue and help him make it to the top. Logically this doesn’t make much sense. Supposedly this is better explained in the books, but I can tell you right now that is was not a mistake to skip out on explaining that in the anime. Some things are better left unsaid. Drawing any more attention to those characters than was absolutely necessary would have been a bad idea.
One thing I think should be pointed out here is that Sword Art Online often addresses the audience directly. This is probably to help cover up the simplistic motivations of the cast. Why make us question things that are obviously completely lacking in depth? To do so would only cheapen the experience.
For better or worse Sword Art Online is a story all about Kirito. The entire world inherently understands that Kirito is a paragon of MMO gamer ideals. Call him a mary sue if you must, but point is the world is aware of it whatever title it is that he has. In Aincrad this was established by the way the world gave him duel wielding capacity. In Alfheim Online this is established by the way Kirito kept so much of what he achieved in Aincrad. Both this world and this author love Kirito. This is both the strongest and weakest point of Reki Kawahara’s storytelling. You will either come to love Kirito or you likely won’t enjoy this anime much at all.
Reki Kawahara is great at world building, and passionately understands MMO’s and how to tell a story that comes from an online world, but most of his character might as well be NPC’s, and in Alfheim in particular it probably would have worked better if they were. Even at the end of Alfheim Online the story is all about Kirito, even when it arguably should have been about Asuna it was about Kirito. All the hatred, all the critiques laid upon this anime all come back to that one focal point, Kirito. You either accept what he is, or you don’t.
Reki Kawahara also has something of an imouto fetish. Personally I would have rather the people from Aincrad assist in getting Asuna back. The motivation was already built in, but then Reki Kawahara is not very good at character motivation. It’s a shame on a certain level, but I am not interested in critiquing Sword Art Online for what it is not. Many of the moments that people seem to hate about Sword Art Online so much are because they make them feel uncomfortable, but… in most cases, they were supposed to, providing more examples of situations where Sword Art Online simply can’t win.
A lot of what this rant stems from is that I do not believe that many of the people criticizing Sword Art Online are doing so for the reasons they say they are. I am not even sure if they are aware of this, in many cases I think not. Misunderstanding that something uncomfortable or “offensive” is the actual reason something is hated seems to be common practice with popular anime, but is irritating every time it happens on a large scale nonetheless.
If you are looking for missing exposition from the books it is pretty clear to me why it is missing. Exposition brings logic to the table that doesn’t always need to be there. Compare Sword Art Online with Accel World and you have two stories that on paper should clearly favor Accel World. It is without all the little “plot holes” that plague Sword Art Online. Everything about storytelling best practice tells me that Accel World should be the better story. Even the protagonist of Accel World is better defined. I can easily see the ways that Reki Kawahara has improved as a writer between Sword Art Online and Accel World, but Sword Art Online still manages to be a lot more fun.
Exposition and explanation in the dramatic moments of Sword Art Online would have completely ruined what Sword Art Online had going for it. In fact many of the “plot holes” of Sword Art Online would be better off if the story had never addressed them in the first place and to the credit of the anime staff Sword Art Online avoids giving us more than the bare minimum of what we need. Change the first use of the word console to area and suddenly one of the biggest “plot holes” is fixed. A-1 made the right choice when they avoided exposition toward the end of the anime as it would have brought focus onto the character motivations of the rest of the Alfheim Online cast. How can I say something so audacious? Because for better or worse this never was never their story.
Something I learned somewhat Ironically from playing MMO’s is that it is usually a good idea to build something toward it’s strengths. It is better do a few things great than a lot of things poorly. When playing a priest who can do a lot of different things spending skill points on holy damage is probably a bad idea. Holy damage is, or at least was pretty damn useless in World of Warcraft. This same principle applies here with why I can say that I am very happy with A-1’s adaptation of Sword Art Online.
A-1 took Sword Art Online, a story that while a bit messy, clearly had a lot of passion in it. They played up the drama it had to the best of their abilities while avoiding the weaker aspects of the supporting cast’s character motivations. They played up the world building that Reki Kawahara is so good at in a way that put emphasis on all the little implications the world had on the people in it while avoiding drawing attention to the little inconsistencies that plague the overall story, and avoiding focusing in on the side casts dubious motivations.
In the end there is only so much you can ask of an Adaptation, and I do not think Sword Art Online could have been done much better than it has. I do think a bit more attention to detail was given to Aincrad than it was to Alfheim, but personally I will take what I can get, and do believe that those details betrayed the goals of this anime much at all.
If you have not picked up the anime I will say this: temper your expectations, Sword Art Online is not perfect. Sword Art Online is a case where you will find problems if you go looking for them, but if you can turn down your critical gaze for a bit, and ignore those storytelling best practices you think you know so well you just might be in for a treat. Watch a few episodes and decide if you can get behind Kirito’s character. If not drop it then and there as I can more or less guarantee you won’t like the rest. If you can get behind Kirito as a protagonist then you just might be in for one of the most exciting stories anime has given us in some time.