Seriously. I’ve been neglecting buying this thing for a while, and thank God it was only when my dad offered to get me something at Barnes and Noble that I finally picked it up, cuz I’d hate to have spent my own money on it. There are no shortage of reasons that this is a disappointment, some of which come from the Bandai release in particular, and others inherent in the manga that prove, in my opinion, the vast superiority of the anime.
I’ll start from a technical standpoint – I think it’s very important to highlight the weakness of the translation of this manga. I understand that Lucky Star would be criminally difficult to translate, because it is a series so thoroughly ingrained into ‘being Japanese’ in general, but seriously, it’s been done much better before. This translation is fucking wooden. It feels like the translator was 100% literal with every sentence and did nothing to give the characters any sort of voice. It’s like reading a conversation between robots. (‘I am Konata. I like games.’ ‘I am Kagami. Konata, I expect that you have not studied, and wish to examine my homework.’ ‘Indeed.’ ‘Ah, I thought so’ <- 50% of the exchanges)
This is why I don’t feel like I can attack the general language and delivery in this manga – I suspect a lot of it has to do with the shitty translation. It feels so unnatural, so uninteresting, and never, ever funny. I read half of this volume and then went to the back and read the last few chapters, and I don’t think I can read any more. I just can’t derive any joy from it. I haven’t so much as cracked a smile once at any dialog exchange, nor found anything funny. The author or translator has a habit of telling an unfunny joke and then using the small text to hamfistedly explain it, driving it right into the ground. But this isn’t all the translator’s fault – I think the 4-koma format is actually one of this manga’s big weaknesses.
In Lucky Star, there are basically two types of conversation between characters – conversation that involves the anime and game fandom of Konata Izumi, and conversation about the everyday lives of high school girls. The difference between how these are handled in the manga and anime can be seen in an instant. The manga begins with the same infamous ‘choco coronet’ scene as the anime, only in the manga, it ends as soon as Miyuki tells Konata which end is the head. And that’s it. In the anime, the food conversation goes on for about 6 total minutes or so.
The thing is, the anime version feels like a real conversation between real girls. It is somewhat interesting and fun to watch unfold, as you laugh and say things like ‘ah, that’s true!’ or ‘oh, she’s that type!’ and you get to know the characters and get into the flow of the show. As for the manga, it really gives you nothing. You learn that Miyuki is the smart one… that’s all. It’s played like you are actually supposed to find it funny, like it’s a joke, but it comes off more as pointless, poorly delivered, and uninteresting.
And let’s not forget the natural advantages of anime as a medium. For one thing, voices. This is part of what makes me wonder if the translation is at fault, because I imagine that a lot of my enjoyment of the anime came from the excellent vocal performances, and generally, it’s going to make more sense to hear these conversations in Japanese. I’ve often posited that not understanding Japanese/Japanese culture is one of the biggest reasons that many people can’t enjoy Lucky Star, and outright reading a bad translation of it is not going to do you any good.
What’s more, the anime is gorgeously animated, and the manga is… barely passable, really. The character faces are practically templates with very minor distinctions, and at first look extremely awkward with the positioning of features (this improves throughout the volume, but it doesn’t pardon the embarrassing beginnings.) While I appreciate the author putting characters in different outfits, all of the body drawing is ultra-simplistic and it’s not like the bottom halves of their bodies are almost ever shown. This is truly and utterly a ‘talking heads’ manga if there ever was one. Sometimes, the top halves of bodies even get this sort of triangular shape, like slightly advanced stick figures, perhaps when the author was strapped for time. That’s just kind of sad. Character designs are one of the biggest selling points in the Lucky Star anime, and seeing them so weakened almost strips them of being themselves at all (coupled with having no voice and being terribly translated makes them not really resemble the characters I know and love.)
But as much as the art, dialog, and characters suck, there’s something more that bothers me the most about this manga, and the translation cannot excuse it – the portrayal of Konata’s ‘otaku’ humor. One of the main points of Lucky Star is that it’s a show that otaku can relate to and that has lots of anime and game-centric references that are done exceptionally well. When watching Lucky Star, I really feel that the team who created it understands otaku culture and honestly knows what otaku will like, if not are a part of the culture themselves. I felt no such thing towards the Lucky Star manga.
It’s pretty much boiled down to ‘HEY GAIS I LIEK ANIME AND GAMES’ with the response ‘OH KONATA U SO CRAZY’ over and over and over ad nauseum. There are next to no actual references to either individual games/anime or regular phenomena associated with them. Konata sometimes mentions incredibly broad methodologies of an anime fan/gamer, but it’s less like the author actually understands the culture and more like they are observing it from afar, like someone on safari looking at this ‘otaku’ creature through binoculars and being fascinated by their alien nature. It really kind of pisses me off.
The conclusion is that this manga is not even worth your time. Maybe the Japanese one is worth reading, but I wouldn’t know – the English translation is fucking terrible and the manga is not in any way interesting to read. I can’t finish this volume. I feel like I should sell it or something. It really doesn’t belong in my collection. I hold onto some pretty mediocre manga, but I can’t even see finishing this volume.
I really like these multi-studio vignette productions. They always bring out some of the coolest anime studios to do some excellent short films with some of the highest budgets they will likely ever wield. As much as I liked The Animatrix and Batman Gotham Knight, Halo Legends really blows them both away. Explaining any clip too long would just be redundant, since you can watch them yourself, but here’s a once-over.
Studio 4c produced the 2-part ‘Origin’ using their 2 most frequent styles (highly detailed and acid trip stylish) lavishly drawn, though not featuring a large amount of movement. The clips are kind of boring, but with the other videos in the series, they didn’t need to be totally active, so I think it works out. Studio Bones produced ‘Prototype’ with the thought apparently of ‘what if Halo had fucking badass mechs?’ Another 4c clip, ‘the Babysitter’ details a particular mission to kill a Covenant priest by a team of a spartan and some soldiers. It’s not as good-looking as I would have liked to see from a 4c production, but nonetheless it was fun, and very ‘like Halo.’
Casio Entertainment, whom I had never heard of, blew the fucking roof off of the thing with their amazing clip done entirely in high-grade CG and detailed with textbook adherence to the Halo style. This clip was balls-out-amazing and contained nothing but adrenaline-pumping action throughout. However, as amazing as it was, my favorite clip was definitely the Toei Animation one, in which Toei literally turns Halo into an uproarious, ingenious parody of their usual shounen action shows, especially Dragon Ball Z. Finally, there was Production I.G.’s clip, ‘The Duel,’ which was easily the most insane, dramatic, and beautiful. It was done entirely in water-color style and recounted a tale of the covenant as if the setting was ancient Japan. It was surreal and amazing.
So, it was all awesome. Oh wait. Right. Bee Train.
Fuck you, Bee Train. Fuck you straight down to hell. Bee Train is, long and by far, the worst fucking animation studio ever, bar none. No. Do not name a studio you think is worse, because they are not. Studio DEEN has produced more great anime than Bee Train. Toei proved themselves to be above them right here in this compilation. Bee Train is fucking godawful. Every single anime that they have produced is either the worst thing ever, or the biggest disappointment. Their ‘Homecoming’ clip is a unique mixture of the two into something so bad it is literally unfathomable.
Who the FUCK keeps calling these fucking bastards to do clips for these compilations? Didn’t they get the memo about how much Bee Train’s installment in Batman Gotham Knight sucked? And this one is worse! Where do I fucking begin?!
Like every Bee Train production, the animation is horrendous. When there isn’t some retarded pan shot going on, characters are essentially sliding across the background and when people are shot, they fall awkwardly enough to be hilarious. I watched the Halo Legends anthology with two friends, and we laughed every single time someone was shot because it looked stupid as shit. In spite of hiring good voice actors, the dialog was fuck-ass-terribad, sounding exactly like the dreck these bastards carted out for Phantom (the shittiest show ever made). Oh, and they told the story in two fragments, both of which plod along so fucking slowly that it is almost like watching nothing happen for 15 minutes.
One clip is about this bitch and her clone staring each-other blankly in the face for about 15 minutes while the bitch decides how much of a bitch she is and whether or not she wants to kill her clone because she doesn’t want her to fight because, as she crams down your god damn fucking throat with line after line, WAR IS BAD. The other half is about he same bitch fighting a battle, and in this battle a lot of people are shot, so it is assumed that they die, although the animation is not particularly reassuring about this idea, and no meaningful or cool-looking action happens because the shit keeps cutting away to watch the fucking bitch be a bitch to her clone.
All of the staring and gun shooting finally screeches slowly and painfully to an end when the bitch decides that killing her clone is too much a bitch move, especially since the clone is going to die before she will ANYWAY, and then she continues her battle and proceeds to get shot in the fucking heart and fall in the most awkward way imaginable to her slow death while her dumbass friends keep ignoring her commands to get their ship the fuck out of dodge until the clunker gets blown the fuck up.
Oh, and at the end, Master Chief’s ass shows up to look at the bitch’s body and put the charm she dropped into her hand – a process that takes about a grueling 45 seconds that feel like several years when the pain is so strong that watching any more of the shit might drive you to begin viciously biting your arm in an attempt to sever any kind of life-supporting veins.
This clip was fucking poison. This was worse than trash. This was a pile of shit atop a compost heap. Watching it along with the rest of the clips is like having the best fap of your life and then abruptly wrenching your dick right off. I can honestly say that I would rather be raped by a tentacle monster than ever have to watch this shit again. It was actually so bad that it was almost awesomely bad. My friends and I laughed many, many times throughout, when we weren’t screaming things like ‘DEAR GOD WHY’ and ‘FUCK YOU BEE TRAIN AAAAA!!!’
Please, Bee Train. Stop producing anime. For the love of fucking god. Or if you continue, DON’T PUT YOUR SHIT RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF A MOVIE FILLED WITH AWESOMENESS, LOWERING IT’S VALUE AND KILLING MY GOD DAMN BUZZ. Rot in hell.
(I was beginning to wonder if I’d get to use my ‘Bee Train Sucks’ category again!)
I’m falling behind on Finish or Fail posts. I still have to do them for Index, Utawarerumono, and Mononoke (spoiler: all finished) but I felt like writing about Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex real quick.
I will say upfront that I did not finish SAC season 1. After 8 episodes, I gave up and decided I would just watch the Laughing Man compilation OVA before moving on to season 2. I would have probably finished the season if I didn’t realize there was a compilation movie, so it’s not like I ragequitted the show. I just figured it would be easier to get through it in a more compact version. On to the rant…
I never, ever get tired of this shot. Oh what could have been...
My decision to watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex came from two different elements. The first involves my current focus on sakuga anime. Knowing that GITS SAC had one of the highest budgets on any TV anime, I’ve always wanted to see it for, if nothing else, it’s place in the hierarchy of animation. In this regard, I was pretty disappointed. Before I even start on this rant, I will give you some context. This series aired from the end of 2002 into the beginning of 2003, putting it’s release just after Full Metal Panic, RahXephon, Saikano, Chobits, .hack//SIGN, and Azumanga Daioh. It aired alongside the likes of Witch Hunter Robin and Haibane Renmei, and after it came series such as Kino’s Journey. Hopefully one of those shows will give you a general idea of the sort of things on TV at the time around this series airing.
The anime market was FAR less saturated back in ’02, leaving way less room for low-budget anime, but even then Ghost in the Shell would have been one of the prettier shows on TV, from a technical standpoint. It wasn’t nearly as above-average as my experience had led me to believe, though. (I think the episodes I saw on TV must have mostly been from 2nd Gig, which aired a year later. The difference between the two is almost as big as the difference between Full Metal Panic and The Second Raid.) While GITS SAC looks more expensive than most of what I listed above, I think RahXephon may have been about the same level, unless my memories are really glorified.
However, high-budget animation does not save GITS SAC from being an ugly show. You heard me. For all that the action scenes in the series are great in using that technical power to produce satisfyingly realistic (more tempted to say ‘professional-looking’) SWAT operations, the series nonetheless excels at being visually displeasing. Let me count the ways…
Character design. I actually like Motoko Kusanagi – she’s probably my second favorite thing in GITS SAC, but what the fuck is she wearing?! Kusanagi’s usual attire (pictured above) is the ugliest fucking excuse for an outfit I think I’ve ever seen donned by an otherwise attractive character. For one, the colors clash (pinkish purple on black?! WHY?!) For another, the jacket looks stupid as shit in combination with the rest of the outfit. I actually don’t mind it so much when she takes off the jacket, but she rarely does. It’s the most useless jacket of all time. I would love to burn it. Fuck this whole outfit.
Your reaction might be ‘well, they wanted to stay true to the original manga’, but I retort that if such was their goal, then they fucked this up real bad. For one thing, check out this picture of Kusanagi’s normal attire that I nabbed from the manga.
Yeah, the whole leggings and thong situation is still pretty stupid, but the t-shirt looks perfectly fine. It does enough to accentuate her breasts (not seen in this image, but read the manga) without the cleavage (I have nothing against cleavage, I just have something against what the anime made her wear to get it) and what’s more, it makes sense – her outfit says that she doesn’t really give much of a damn about what she wears if it’s comfortable, and a t-shirt looks comfortable (plus it’s all the same god damn color, and that color isn’t offensive). Nothing about that jacket or that corset-like thing looks in any way comfortable, so what inspired her to wear something so ugly? But you know, this wouldn’t bother me if everyone was wearing this shit. I’d believe that in the future, this attire is simply popular or something. After all, in the manga, everyone looks stupid. Look at fucking Batou.
Normal fucking clothes! Everyone except for Motoko dresses just like they do today! She is the single anomaly of misinterpreted 80s design lingering in this otherwise modern series. Well, her and Togusa’s fucking mullet.
You can’t even try to bullshit me by saying that it’s her ‘combat attire’ or some shit, because when she is going into serious combat, Motoko usually wears the awesome-looking stealth suit (which she also uses in the manga for those missions). There is no excuse. And don’t say it was ‘just for fanservice’ as if that gives it a pass or makes it less of a problem. I have no complaints about this image of the Dirty Pair (though I admittedly took the less-embarrassing outfits from the post-80s version) looking fucking great in next to nothing. This is fanservice done right, without giving me fucking eye cancer.
Finally getting past Kusanagi’s design, I will move on to the rest of the cast – or rather I won’t, because they all look fucking boring as shit. I understand that GITS SAC tries to be realistic by featuring a squad of characters who can pass for a real cop team (excluding Kusanagi, though the show’s future-setting of everyone-can-have-a-perfect-body explains her… but raises questions about several others) but once again, being realistic does not mean completely sacrificing memorability. Everyone in the show wears drab-ass shit and looks old as hell, and not in a good ‘cool older guy way’ but in a boring ‘unexciting guy with a mullet’ way. Seriously, Togusa, fucking grow it out or cut it short, man.
Witch Hunter Robin aired around the same time as Ghost in the Shell and was similarly a show about a police-type force fighting episodic crime with a realistic, serious attitude. It also managed to have a cast of cool-looking and very well-dressed characters whom I might actually try to remember instead of blocking from my consciousness. GITS SAC should take note.
Very nice, though the mullet seems to be inescapable.
But seriously, let’s get over the character designs. (The mech designs are made of win and awesome and the tachikomas are the best part of the show) seriously, moving on. GITS SAC has no style whatsoever. Maybe that works for some people - Baka-Raptor claims to not care about style at all. Now, I’m a purveyor of style, so coming from me, it might seem like having no style is a particularly huge turnoff, but this is not the case. A series can be fairly drab (Full Metal Panic is a pretty good example) and it will never bother me at all – as long as it’s art and animation work well with it’s story (which they do in that case.) However, GITS SAC is the most criminally boring show to look at I can think of.
There are no interesting ‘settings’ in GITS SAC. Even though it takes place in a big city, the only cool big-city shot I can remember is from the very first episode when Makoto chases a guy across some rooftops. It is hard to get a sense of distance or location at times, because the scenes tend to begin and end with people standing around in buildings talking, and the buildings are all so generic and boring that they are hard to even tell apart. Every scene is either in someone’s god damn office or in a car (but never on the way to a location, only when there’s like a car chase or some shit coming up) and for some reason, every single time the characters are on the highway, they seem to be over the water or out in bumfuck nowhere, with the city in the background, as if for some reason they have to leave the city entirely to get to anywhere in the city. I digress.
Something like 70% of the show is people standing or sitting perfectly still, conversing with completely straight faces about whatever today’s plot is. Kusanagi and Batou are the only people who ever show personality, but they are the muscle, and their moments of movement are usually when someone’s about to get their ass beat. If it isn’t boring enough to watch people talk, they also do it through their mind a lot of the time, meaning they aren’t even opening their god damn fucking mouth. I feel like if I lightly gave one of the characters a shove while he was rattling off plot details, he would just tip over like a statue and fall to the ground, and he wouldn’t even stop his fucking sentence. He would just lay there, stiff and awkward, and keep doing his job.
Hottest moment in the show so far, no cleavage necessary. Yes, I actually took a screenshot of it, and not even for post purposes.
Let’s go back to those other shows that aired around the same time as GITS SAC. We’ll ignore the shows with great but totally different styles (Abenobashi, RahXephon), and talk about Full Metal Panic, a show which manages to successfully portray a realistic, military driven show and still be thoroughly entertaining. The first season was produced by studio GONZO, and it wasn’t quite the technical marvel that GITS SAC is, but it’s a nice-looking experience. And it is never god damn boring – the characters have facial expressions and emotions and habits and manners of speech and things that you can actually look at during the periods of dialog, and the exposition and action are mixed together well, etc. While the show doesn’t go out of it’s way to be stylish, it still manages to create memorable locales and meaningful expressions which actually make some effort to entertain the eyes.
So yeah, it’s nice to watch a fist-fight between Motoko and some huge cyborg dude with intense and fluid animation, but it would be a hell of a lot more cool if Motoko was dressed to kill (I think she’d look good in something like Alphard from Canaan wears), and her enemies were memorable, and her one or two minutes of combat weren’t bookended by visuals so boring they make my eyes glaze over. Waste of a fucking budget.
There’s a lot more to come. I didn’t expect to go on so much about the visuals of the show, so I’ll be making follow-up posts about the other aspects (since I don’t want to end up with a 5000-word post like my last Finish or Fail, which even I don’t really feel up for re-reading anytime soon lol.) So if you could, please comment on this post only in regards to the visuals in GITS SAC season one, and not about other aspects of the show.
“Complex rating systems just kill me. Maybe someday such a system can explain to me how much I love fucking Macross 7.”
- ghostlightning, in reply to this post
Shakugan no Shana sucks and I hate it — So why the fuck did I just move the episodes back to my computer? Whydid I burn them to a fucking DVD in the first place? Why, after three years of hating the show, do I now feel the drive to watch it again? Sadly, I think the answer is love.
This isn’t a case of my ‘heart score’ being higher than my ‘head score’, seeing as Shana gets straight sixes. I certainly don’t have an ‘undying love‘ for it, what with the show having pissed me off before I even finished it. Today, I only had to rewatch one episode to remember that Shakugan no Shana is below any standards that I’ve ever had. In fact, most of the episode was actually painful to watch, and I’m not all that convinced I’ll make it through the whole thing. Come to think of it, I technically haven’t even finished all of Shana, since second season made me ragequit after four episodes.
So why? Why am I coming back to this show that has practically no redeeming factors? I don’t care about any of the characters besides Shana, and the way that she’s written infuriates me. Noiji Itou‘s amazing character designs are slapped in the face by the shit animation. Not even the fights are entertaining, mostly because the director sucks a fat cock. Plus the plot is trite. I mean, I seriously fucking hate this show. The only good things about it are the badass original ending song and the eyecatch music.
I knew all of this back in September 2007, yet I was still browsing ToysLogic for Shana figures mere days after finishing the series, fully intent on letting her be my first figure purchase. You will never see Shana on any of my ‘favorite characters‘ lists, but damn if I don’t have a moe for her a mile wide.
In the course of these three years, I’ve resigned to thinking of the show and character as things that I like for no reason whatsoever. I was desperately searching for one as I watched the first episode, but the best I could come up with was that I liked the cool glowing colors used on all the paranormal stuff. And, I guess, the presence of Rie Kugimiya, though she only had like eight damn lines, one of which was her ultra-annoying “URUSAI URUSAI URUSAI!” …And that’s about it.
I like to try and define exactly how I feel about every show I watch. Hell, that’s practically the whole reason for this blog! But there’s just no way that I would put up with Shana’s level of bullshit from any other show – the only reason I can come up with for why this series still holds a place in my heart is that, well, it just fucking does. [F]
Have you ever felt a completely irrational love for a show that does everything you hate?
It’s common practice for an anime to feature a male lead whom the audience can easily relate to, and therefor usually holds to society’s moral compass. It’s also common practice for that male lead to have one or more female love interests, and not uncommon for one of those love interests to follow a conflicting moral compass. This creates a “Defrosting the Ice Queen” situation, wherein the lead tries to bring his love interest over to what he views as ‘the side of righteousness.’
Being as I’m at ends with society’s moral compass and have a deep hatred for self-righteous people, I’m always wary of this trope. However, surprisingly, I often find it to be justified. For example, take Revy, the Ice Queen from Black Lagoon. The male lead, Rock, tries to change Revy and create some sort of moral base within her, but he does so because her attitude and actions are self-destructive. He gradually admits that while he doesn’t approve of her criminal way of life, he understands it, and he makes it clear that he wants Revy to change for her own sake, so that she can find happiness instead of wasting her life.
Mikiya, the male lead from Kara no Kyoukai, takes an even more brazen approach. He’s very firmly against murder, not because society says it’s wrong, but for his own personal reasons. Ice Queen Shiki is obsessed with murder, but Mikiya falls in love with her anyway because he doesn’t believe in her capacity to actually murder anyone. There’s a point in the series where Mikiya demands that Shiki not murder someone, for the simple fact that he doesn’t want to saddle the burden of sharing love with a murderer (not that he’s actually unwilling to do so.)
I’m fine with these characters – in fact, I have a lot of respect for them, because their moral pressure is an attempt to help the Ice Queen find happiness. What pisses me off is when a guy demands change from a girl because what she does “Just Isn’t Right.” And I’ve figured out that this is why I hate Shakugan no Shana.
Shana was doing fine at the start of the series. She had no reason to feel bad about the things she did, because they were part of her job as a Flame Haze. She takes a professional approach to her work and is annoyed when Yuji keeps complaining about what she does. She’s not just a joyless “Rei-type” either, as we see through things like her love for melon bread, the way she gets distracted by random objects, and her embarrassment over being seen half-naked by a guy.
If Yuji was acting in the interest of forming a relationship with Shana, then it wouldn’t bother me, but that’s not the case. He accuses Shana of being cold for referring to herself as “just a Flame Haze” and for not having compassion for people who die – he tries to force the morals of society onto someone with no reason to conform to them, and whose situation he in no way understands. How she performed her job was really none of his god damn business.
If anything, the ways that Yuji changes Shana only cause her more problems. Emotions are created within her that complicate her job. She somehow ends up falling in love with Yuji, but he doesn’t seize that opportunity for their joined happiness. If he’d just followed through on their feelings for one another, I could have forgiven him, but instead he is an indecisive fuck who’s bitchiness throws Shana into emotional turmoil.
This might sound fucked up, but Yuji’s influence made me unable to like Shana as a character anymore. I loved her at the beginning of the series to the point that she could have been one of my favorite characters – that’s why I could never bring myself to give up on the show no matter how much it spat in my face. But the sad truth is that Shana turned into a character that I can’t like or respect. It’s no different from losing a friend in the real world; If one of my friends started hanging out with a bad crowd and turned into a jerk, then I wouldn’t want to be around him anymore. Because I like him, I might try and change him back to the way he was, but I don’t get that opportunity with a fictional character. For me, Yuji, and any other self-righteous male lead, is ‘a bad crowd,’ and when Shana started hanging out with him, we slowly grew distant until we lost contact somewhere in season 2. [F]
Has a male lead ever ruined a series for you? What about him made you want to kick his ass?
My family doesn’t celebrate Christmas. We did growing up, but none of us are Christians, so it didn’t make sense to keep it up once the kids were grown. Instead, we celebrated Festivus in 2008, The Feast of Winter’s Veil in 2009, and this year I invented my own winter holiday called Agarwood Day (details in future). Each time, I’ve made up a series of themed activities to participate in, and we have a lot of fun.
Still, I like the mythos of Santa Claus. Maybe it’s just because in spite of being decidedly un-Christian, my mom loves Christmas movies, and therefor I’ve seen them all, but there’s something about Santa that just kicks ass. So while I might not see the fun in just any Christmas activity, something like Secret Santa is still a lot of fun to me.
I hadn’t known about the Reverse Thieves project last year until ghostlightning had already blown up Binchou-tan’s mountain (not actually sure this was the same secret santa, but I found out about it nonetheless then), so this year, there was no way I’d miss out, especially because I *love* receiving recommendations as much as I love giving them. I used to ritually make rec threads on Anime Suki and be a pain in people’s ass by asking for highly specific items and having seen more than most of everyone else. By now, I know all the anime worth watching, but it’s still nice to get the drive to actually sit down with something.
All three of the shows recommended to me were ones that I already had an interest in seeing to various extents. People have been recommending me Asatte no Houkou for years. Bungaku Shoujo had looked interesting, and I got to feeling like I had to watch it when I was working on my Hanazawa Kana post. Ookiku Furikabutte is somewhere on No Name’s 100-series-strong favorites list, and he was all giddy to have me watching the show. So with those on my plate and my constant need to take things to the extreme, I started out to watch all three of the things I was recommended.
My expectations for this were moderate, and yet still managed to be betrayed. I hated this movie. I knew things were going bad right from the start because I disliked the character designs with their Kanon2003 chins and it started so slow I could put children to sleep with it. Things didn’t look good when the plot started to emerge and I had no idea what was going on.
I don’t like mysteries. I hate suspense. I don’t want to spend a whole movie going “what the hell is going on?” because even if I’m genuinely interested, as I was for about 20 minutes of this film, then I’m also frustrated. You have to give me something to abate me until things come together. Kara no Kyoukai 5 is my favorite movie of all time, and it’s two hours of not knowing what the fuck is happening—I loved every minute of it because it dripped with style from the directing and visuals and the characters were interesting, the plot enthralling, and the whole experience just magical. I enjoyed the hell out of Shutter Island because it had breathtaking cinematography and great acting performances. Those are the only suspense-thrillers that I truly love—everything else just leaves me begging for more substance.
Bungaku Shoujo kept withholding information for no reason other than for me to ask the question “what’s going on?” The only thing it does to be interesting is try to be interesting, if that makes sense. Keeping the information at bay does not enhance the information. If I had read this as a 2-page recap told in chronological order, nothing would be different, and I’d be happier to know what was going on from the start instead of spending 50 minutes waiting for a payoff.
Because it doesn’t come. The only satisfaction one gets from a well-made suspense thriller is when the plot twist happens and everything clicks. This movie never clicked. There was no satisfaction. There was no point to most of the events. When the truth was revealed, it left me scratching my head. I got angry, honestly, at every plot twist, because all they did was make me hate the characters more and more for being retarded and poorly written.
Now, less broad strokes. All of Inoue’s friends were useless. Inoue himself had no personality whatsoever, and some of his actions were downright confusing, especially towards the end.
ASAKURA MIU WAS AN ANNOYING, CRAZY BITCH. At first, I thought I might like her. She was cute and clearly insane, which is something that I dig sometimes. Not this time. She wasn’t good-crazy, she was contrived, this-writer-is-just-making-up-bullshit crazy. Maybe I expect too much from crazy people and want them to have a clearly defined mental illness, but seriously, her crazy was so lame that I hated her for it. Doesn’t help that Hirano Aya gave a fucking terrible performance. I’ve never liked Hirano crazy—her voice is the worst part of Kate from Seikon no Qwaser for the exact same reason. If Miu had been played by someone else, there’s a chance I could’ve enjoyed her to some extent, but Hirano made her completely unlikable.
Production I.G. utterly disappointed me on the animation front. This is a movie, but I can barely tell. The animation quality is that of a good-budget TV series, but not even like a Kyoto Animation level one. More like something A.I.C. or J.C.Staff might do without even putting an especially large amount of effort into it. Production I.G. has a reputation as the biggest and baddest studio around with the highest animation quality, and movies are expected to look at least higher than TV quality—in this respect, the movie failed. I don’t understand why it wasn’t produced as another OVA along with the rest of Bungaku Shoujo.
The only bright point in this film was Hanazawa Kana, and God I’ve come a long way to be able to say that (by now you’ve read my post on her, but at the time of writing this, it hasn’t been published yet.) Her character was decent. Had she been a character in a series and perhaps actually had anything to do with the plot of that series, I might’ve really liked her. Here, her character is just sort of there for no good reason but to be cute and wrap things up at the end. Hanazawa is great for the role, but with so little to go on, I just don’t really care.
Overall, I think this movie was a total failure. Would not rewatch, would not recommend.
I’d planned to write something profound for this series but I didn’t get around to it, so here’s the summed-up version.
Asatte no Houkou is beautifully written. The series moves at a very slow but deliberate pace and not a single moment nor line of dialog feels wasted. The plot and characters are interesting and deep and Nogami Shouko, the best character in the series, ties everything together with a beautiful bow. Even though she has perhaps the most development to do, she facilitates the growth of all the other characters in the series. She’s the keystone and, being an adult mind in a child’s body, I absolutely adore her. She’s very much the type of character I want to write.
The first thing I noticed about this series is the gorgeous background art that I knew could only have come from Kobayashi Shinichiro working with J.C. Staff. Being a dialog-driven drama, there’s no reason for it to need fantastic bouts of animation, so it focuses instead on looking very nice and having attractive character designs, at which I think it succeeds.
There’s no unlikable character in the show and everyone comes into their own by the end. The human aspect of the series is very poignant. In some ways, it reminds me of Honeymoon Salad in the strange but beautifully heartfelt way that the family of no blood relation comes together. I’ll always remember Shouko as a loli, but I’m happy with how everything turned out.
The trouble with the series is simply that I can’t see myself ever wanting to watch it again. It’s a series that makes its point and moves on, and there’s nothing I could really stand to gain from watching it again. I love Shouko, but not enough to rewatch the show. For that reason, it can’t approach being a favorite of mine, but it’s a series I can easily recommend to others.
Ookiku Furikabutte – Actually, I Didn’t Watch It
I said I set out to watch all 3, not that I succeeded :p That plan was made before another plan to watch almost everything that aired in 2010 before the year clocks out. So far, the latter plan has been successful, which hasn’t left me time for a 24 (36 if you count S2) episode series. I was gonna watch the first episode for the sake of giving an impression, but the files I got from No Name are really low quality (must’ve been from his earlier days) so I said fuck it, maybe some other time. I’ve been assured that the series is great, so I’ll probably get around to it sometime.
Well, that covers my secret santa recommendations. I’m certainly interested in knowing who recommended these to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if my secret santa recipient already knows that I was their recommender, because I totally forgot that I’d been their secret santa (and recommended them some of my favorite shows), and talked about what the person watched with them without realizing, which is kinda hilarious.
Am I exceptionally hard on shows like Katanagatari, or exceptionally easy on them? I’m leaning towards the later, because if Katanagatari wasn’t what it is, then I wouldn’t have picked it back up, having dropped it after the first episode. There were times during the series where I felt I might’ve been glad that I decided to finish it, but now that I’ve done so, there exists no such positive emotion. Very rarely do I finish a show with as much spite as I did this one.
No Name and I watched it together and found that a very difficult activity; but not, for the most part, an offensive one. Let it be known that while these days I give shows more of a chance than I used to, I still would never go on watching a show that I had no desire to watch. I’m not a masochist like ghostlightning, and I don’t feel like I owe it to myself or anyone to finish a show. No Name was pretty set on dropping the show after two episodes, but I talked him into a three-episode test, and both of us enjoyed the third episode enough to keep watching.
The fourth episode was less easy to finish, and No Name got particularly pissed at the troll fight (even though I’d warned him about it), but there was still enough good to persist. Episodes five and six were good enough. Episode seven was the high point of the show, and the point at which I thought “I’m glad we didn’t drop this.” Episode eight was less good. Nine and Ten were enough to restore my faith that the series could honestly end well. Eleven was lame, and twelve was complete and utter shit, leaving such a bad taste in both of our mouths that we were upset for some time afterwards. The first thing I said when the show was over was “well, that sucked.”
I’m breaking it down on this level for a reason. My disdain for this series is not a simple animal. I don’t always write posts about anime that I don’t like, and especially not serious ones, but the way in which I dislike Katanagatari is, I feel, important to my identity as a fan, especially because it’s so closely related to the stories I care about most (being based on the works of one of my favorite authors, NISIOISIN.)
I have it on good faith that the novels are bad, because the biggest Nisio fan that I know of, Andrew Cunningham, hates them. (Albeit he’s far less easily pleased than I am.) Katanagatari was a stunt novel series wherein Nisio published one book a month for an entire year and created a matching formula for the books wherein the main characters travel across Japan for a year collecting twelve legendary swords. It’s a very cliché plot device, but the kind that seems like it would easily lend to creativity. All Nisio really had to do was create twelve interesting swords and twelve interesting sword-users, and the rest of his work would’ve been cut out for him. Considering that his entire shtick is interesting characters, this sounded like something he should be able to do.
Such was not the case. Maybe there wasn’t enough planning involved. Maybe he wasn’t really attached to the characters. While there were plot elements that must’ve been in place from the start, there were many parts of the story that were clearly made up as he went along, or things that weren’t thought out very well and ended up being useless.
The biggest failure to me was the Maniwa ninja corps, whose existence was almost entirely meaningless from beginning to end, to a point where they became a joke. In the first episode, the Maniwani were introduced as a dangerous third-party competing for the swords alongside Togame and Shichika, and in fact, the first Maniwani was already in possession of a blade. That was practically the last time a Maniwani was any kind of threat.
In the second episode, one of the 12 Maniwani captains was slaughtered by Uneri Ginkaku long before he was properly introduced. This trick would’ve been fine once. It also led to a funny fourth-wall-breaking scene where Togame noted that she was glad he was already dead because his thing was talking backwards, and she would’ve hated to have to write backwards dialog in her report. This may as well have been a commentary on Nisio’s own desire to make a backward-speaking ninja, but lack of desire to write backwards dialog. A lot of this commentary existed in the series, and I can’t help but feel that at times, it cheapened the experience, like Nisio was admitting his own creative bankruptcy in making the story.
In the third episode, a Maniwani was briefly built up to be a badass and then quickly slaughtered. He was killed in such a way that the attack wasn’t seen, as if to foreshadow this attack in Shichika’s fight with Tsuruga Meisai. The attack, however, was not used in that fight, and the Maniwani’s presence seemed pointless.
In the fourth episode, the part of the Maniwani in the story entirely changed gears, and unlike the first three, who were all clearly psychotic killers, three were introduced who were more normal and sympathetic, and also far more interesting characters. They were slaughtered by Nanami in the name of showing how strong she is—the tactic was effective, except that like almost every other fight in the show, the combat was horribly boring, consisting of five-second, barely animated action punctuating endless explanations about either what was about to happen, or what had just occurred.
I despise fight scenes that involve explanations of what’s going on, especially when what’s going on isn’t so hard to interpret as to need explanation, which the fights in Katanagatari almost never were. In episode two, I got it the first time that the blade was drawn so quickly that it couldn’t be seen—that was the point of the Maniwani getting killed to showcase the blade’s power. I didn’t then need it to be re-explained several times. I’ve seen a hundred and one super-fast swordsmen in anime, and I get the fucking point.
In the fifth episode, the Maniwani decided to team up with Togame in search of the blades. This was handled with the introduction of by far the most interesting Maniwani member, their leader, Houou, who cut his own arm off just to earn enough trust for an audience with Togame. This was classic Nisioisin, and there’s a lot of “classic Nisioisin” to go around in Katanagatari, which was exactly what kept me interested enough to keep watching. The fact is, I love his style of characters. Even if he failed to make me care about almost anyone in the series, at least they did crazy shit like cut their own arms off to keep me interested.
In episode six, one of the Maniwani went berserk with rage over her fallen comrades and attempted to kill Togame and Shichika herself. She did this by taking over the body of snow-loli Konayuki, which actually created some tension because I liked Konayuki. However, Shichika managed to kill the Maniwani without harming Konayuki, so the attack was ultimately meaningless. What’s more, in order to gain the trust of Togame once again, Houou sacrificed one of his comrades, particularly one who had powers useful to the sword hunt. Do you see the trend here? All the Maniwani did was die without putting up a fight.
In episode eight, Emonzaemon was ordered by Princess Hitei to assassinate Houou. In the process of attempting to do so, he murdered all three of the other remaining Maniwani. Not one of them managed to so much as harm him. The only thing that the Maniwani accomplished was obtaining one of the twelve blades, which happened to be one that, when taken hold of, would possess the owner with the spirit of Shichizaki Kiki. Houou meaninglessly got taken over by the sword, and in spite of the fact that he seemed to mortally wound Emonzaemon, who was built up as an arch-enemy of his, he didn’t manage to kill him, and the two never fought again. Instead, Houou rampaged and massacred the entire Maniwa village, only to be beaten by Shichika with relative ease. Not a single one of the twelve Maniwani heads accomplished anything except for getting killed.
This was a shame, because I really wanted to like the Maniwani. I thought they had potential as characters. Oshidori was heartbroken at the death of her fiancée at the hands of Nanami in episode four, but she died in a completely unrelated fight against Emonzaemon without doing anything. The adorable Pengin, played by Hirohashi Ryou (one of the few noteworthy seiyuu in the series), was told by Houou that he could herald in the next age of the Maniwa clan after he and the other “relics of the old era” were gone. Pengin was even built up to be quite strong, and was also given a big chance to come out alive, but he ended up being killed in a completely lame way by Emonzaemon after his unexplained escape from death against Houou. Emonzaemon was not so interesting a character as to have been worth sacrificing all of the Maniwa clan. He would’ve been a more fitting final battle for Houou, and not a final boss, as he turned out to be. Houou was really robbed in that not only was his final battle lame, but he didn’t even get to fight it, having been possessed by the blade.
It all seemed like such a joke, and the worst part was in the final battle when Shichika had to fight all twelve blades. One of the people he fought had the single line “I’m also a member of the Maniwa clan,” before getting slaughtered in a single hit. Shichika said “you were definitely the weakest of the Maniwa,” which made me burst out laughing because all of them were fucking weak.
The primary driving force behind the narrative of Katanagatari was an adventure to collect swords. Out of that equation, for the series to be successful, either the adventure or the swords should’ve been interesting. Neither was so.
Leaving aside the Zelda Wind Waker-esque starting island, the first location on the trip was a desert. Nothing else to it, just a desert with a castle in the middle of it. The desert was background for a long walk and conversation that had no real sense of distance since the direction didn’t use any fades or changes in scenery to make it look like space elapsed. Inside the castle was shown almost exclusively one hallway and room, where Uneri was stationed. There was no unique aspect to this room or hallway, and they’re easily forgettable.
The third episode had by far the most interesting location, being a mountain shrine that’s home to ten-thousand yandere lolis. This location was actually interesting and memorable enough to catch my attention, and was what gave me the drive to continue the series after that episode.
Four mostly took place on the starter island, and five took place in a port town of which very little was shown, so neither was really notable. Six took place in another somewhat memorable locale, a mountain with blistering winds and a constant blizzard where a race of super-powered beings would’ve lived, had they not just recently been wiped out.
Seven was another regular town. Eight took place in another somewhat interesting location, perhaps my favorite, being basically a lake that was now a giant trash-heap. (I have a strange affinity for trash-covered locales.) A huge opportunity was wasted, however, in that the laboratory of Shichizaki Kiki that they came to look for was never shown. Nine took place in “shogi town” which, in spite of being important to the way the match was won, wasn’t really explored.
Episode ten, one of my favorite episodes, took place in a ruined field, and jumped between there and a wooded meadow for Higaki Rinne’s trippy mindfucking, but once again, the field was shown in exactly one spot (where Togame was digging for the sword), and the meadow was just a rock in a clearing surrounded by trees. Episode eleven was sort of all over the place, and twelve took place in the capital. All in all, the adventure only had a few memorable locales and didn’t feel like much of an “adventure” at all.
The twelve “swords” were essentially what I would’ve come up with when I was thirteen if you’d asked me to think up a group of legendary swords. (As a matter of fact, I had my own group of legendary swords, since I was big into samurai stories, and a lot of them were like these ones. I wonder if I could’ve liked this show for the weapons as a kid, or if it would’ve just put me to sleep with the incessant rambling.)
One sword was super-strong, one was super-sharp, and one was super-heavy (and could be held from either side, which seemed completely irrelevant and wasn’t used for any cool purpose in battle), which covers the very essential basics. One wasn’t really a special sword, but ten thousand normal swords. One was apparently made of glass and must be swung in a perfect arc—it was never seen in a proper battle, though, and only seen getting broken with ease in the final gauntlet. One was a suit of armor with no special quality other than being extremely tough. One was a dagger that apparently gave its user infinite vitality, though its nature was never really explained. One was a fucking robo-geisha that just used normal swords. One, as aforementioned, contained the spirit of Shichizaki Kiki, and another was a pair of handguns. One was a bokutou that apparently made the user not care to fight, which wasn’t clearly explained either. Finally, one was just a sheath that, by some extremely convoluted explanation, made the user “find the sword in themselves” or something.
It was basically a mountain of generic blades, and the worst part is that they all got ceremoniously broken in a matter of seconds during the last episode. As it would turn out, had Shichika been allowed to break the swords all along, none of them would’ve even posed a remote threat to him. This revelation was probably the lamest part of the entire show. There was nothing cool about watching Shichika make every single hard-won fight throughout the series look like it would’ve been cake if he hadn’t held back, and he didn’t break any of the swords in a cool way. He just mowed them all down with hardly any effort. Robo-geisha, which should’ve been difficult, was killed for the bullshit reason that the person who tried to fight with it got in its way. The swordless sword was so useless that Shichika told the girl who used it to “just throw it at me.” She obliged, so he kicked it into her face, and it broke. The blade possessed by Shichizaki Kiki just made its second holder rabidly scream “SHICHIZAKI!!!” and charge at Shichika before getting his ass handed to him. The suit of armor was broken because it supposedly couldn’t absorb shock if it wasn’t on the ground or touching anything, which I don’t believe was ever mentioned in the first fight with it.
But hey, like I said earlier, Nisioisin’s specialty is in creating interesting characters. The Maniwani had potential to be cool, had they not been fated to die before accomplishing anything, but that still leaves all of the sword-holders and the other characters.
Before I get to them, I’ll start by mentioning that one of Katanagatari’s big weaknesses was its voice cast. Not all of it was bad, and some of the many newcomers who were used in the show might be worth looking out for in the future, but otherwise, there were a number of outright annoying performances. The big one was Shichika, the main fucking character, played by Hosoya Yoshimasa, who got a bit better as the show went along, but mostly had a flat, boring voice that aided him in being a flat, boring character for the early part of the show.
Worse than him, the most wretchedly annoying performance in the show was Nakahara Mai (the sole remaining member of my “seiyuu shit-list” for good reason) as Shichika’s sister, Nanami. She tried to do the whole deadpan psycho-loli thing and came off terribly monotonous and annoying. This was a huge shame, because she was one of the more interesting characters in the show, and I imagine if she’d been played by Yuuki Aoi or something, I’d have really loved her. I won’t get into all the minor characters with annoying voices beyond that point, though.
The first non-Maniwani sword holder was Uneri Ginkaku, a generic live-and-die-by-the-sword ronin with no personality to speak of. He didn’t even get any real dialog outside of his fight banter, what with the episode mostly having consisted of Shichika and Togame babbling on about nothing in the desert.
Next was Tsuruga Meisai, another part of why episode three was the one that finally drew me into the show, who was enjoyable if not particularly coherent. Tsuruga had a fun personality and commanded immediate respect, but as is my trouble with a lot of Nisioisin characters, her convictions were incomprehensible. I had trouble understanding why it was that she apparently had to die, or why, if she understood that she was mistaken about the swords, she was unable to correct herself. Her death just seemed pointlessly counterproductive.
Sabi Hakuhei fell victim to the troll of not actually being shown outside of a few glimpses before his episode. (At first, I honestly didn’t think he was supposed to be a real character, but just what Shichika was imagining when Togame told him about the character traits he should have.) Azekura Kanara, the pirate captain, was utterly unmemorable.
Itezora Konayuki was an adorable loli, which is always enough to earn my adoration automatically, and the reason for her being the first to defeat Shichika was interesting enough that I could accept her having done so. That said, Konayuki is where I bring up the obvious reason that my level of care for any sword-carrier is held at bay—they’re only around for one episode. It’s just not enough time for anyone to become a favorite character of mine unless they do something exceptionally interesting.
As I mentioned before, Nanami had potential to be the most interesting character in the show, even though her voice was annoying. Nanami was the epitome of Nisioisin’s characters. Nisio has this undying obsession with “geniuses” that have some extraordinary natural ability, and they find their way into everything he writes. Nanami was one of those, and as always, he brought in the conflict between how an outsider sees a genius and how said genius experiences their own abilities. Not just that, she had the works—a convoluted and incomprehensible thought process, a sadistic streak, murderous intent, strange speech patterns, and a weird desire to be killed for reasons that the plot tried to rationalize even though they’re completely irrational.
After that was the robo-geisha, which didn’t have a master. I enjoyed the robo-geisha enough, if just because its fight with Shichika was easily the best in the series. Next was Kiguchi “fucking sword-hair” Zanki, who was basically a generic serious-girl samurai’s-daughter character. I didn’t dislike her, but didn’t care about her either. Her sword-hair (and shogi eyes) were a perfect example of why I’m not big on take’s character designs—there’s a level of ridiculousness where things may be neat, but are no longer aesthetically pleasing, and this is exactly that.
Higaki Rinne was easily my favorite episodic character in the series, which is somewhat ironic since the character was actually a fabrication in most senses. His design was a combination of the best elements from Nanami and Konayuki, which I thought was great, and his personality was apparently supplanted from Togame’s father, who must’ve been a really fun guy. No Name was annoyed by his voice, but I thought it was fun and suited him well. If there’s one character likely to have a lasting impact and influence on me, it’s him.
Moving onto the regular characters, Hitei-hime was mostly an unlikeable bitch. I didn’t necessarily hate her outright, and didn’t mind the idea of her being Shichika’s travel partner in the end, but she was played up to be such a bitch that I couldn’t find any way to enjoy her. Her vassal, Emonzaemon, wasn’t bad, but he eventually grated on my nerves because he killed so many characters that were so much more interesting than he was. Had he died when it looked like he did while fighting Houou, it would’ve been fine, but he was nowhere near interesting enough to warrant surviving, killing several other characters, and being the final boss.
I believe this boils it down to the main characters. Starting with Shichika: at first, I didn’t like him at all. He had no personality and no chemistry with Togame whatsoever, plus his voice was terrible. Shichika, however, was the one character that was around long enough to prove his worth through action. I liked his nature as a human weapon, and admired his dedication to Togame. Somewhere in my heart lies a hopeless romantic whose favorite male characters are the ones that dedicate themselves to facilitating the happiness of their female counterpart. This is why I admire Kokuto from Kara no Kyoukai, for instance, as he makes it his purpose to facilitate Shiki’s growth of character.
That said, Shichika did little to make Togame grow and more did the growing himself, and he ultimately proved worthless because Togame died anyway. With my ability to care about him so intrinsically tied to Togame, there wasn’t much left for me to care about once she was dead. His final battle ended up having no weight to it whatsoever, and for fuck’s sake, he agreed! He went off into battle intending to be killed, and when he failed at that, he went off to absently perform what he would’ve done with Togame had she not died. I ultimately felt no need to care about his future in the end.
Togame, on the other hand, was long and by far the best part of the show for me, as she damn well had to be since she pretty much carried the entire thing on her own. In particular, Tamura Yukari was left to carry the entire weight of the dialog on her back, since she far outdid anyone else in the show in performance. (Even still, she wasn’t my favorite Tamura Yukari role, though she was one more reason that Tamura deserves some kind of fucking medal for her work holding up shows in 2010. B Gata H Kei, anyone?)
Togame was the best design, the best voice, the most interesting character, and the easiest to care about. She made her interactions with Shichika worthwhile and gave me a reason to care about him as a character. Her energy made it so that I could sit through the endless slog of tedious dialog without falling asleep, and the intrigue of her past and reasons for travelling spiced up the plot, even though those things never actually felt explained in the end.
The death of Togame is exactly why Katanagatari left me feeling empty, because her death was simultaneously meaningless and bullshit. Her final words to Shichika were the most painfully bad dialog in the show. I didn’t buy for a single second that she honestly still thought of him as a pawn. Her roundabout logic that “even [her] own emotions [were] pawns” was bullshit, and had no purpose to the story. At first I thought she was trying to BS Shichika into accepting her death, but when it became clear that she honestly believed in what she was saying, and when Shichika couldn’t call her on her bullshit, meaning that the series honestly expected me to buy into it, I was repulsed and disappointed. This was not characterization. This was shit.
Her death served no purpose to the story. It didn’t change the course of how things played out, didn’t facilitate anyone’s plans, and didn’t change Shichika in any meaningful way. It added nothing to her character, and only served to sever my emotional involvement in the story so that the rest of the episode was meaningless.
The plot that emerged in the last episode was, as Andrew Cunningham put it, embarrassing, and none of it mattered in the end anyway, so why should I care? The story itself declared its own meaninglessness after killing all enjoyment that I had for it, so why would I come away with a good feeling? If anything, I felt like the show was giving me permission to hate it, which is permission that I don’t want to be granted. This was not storytelling. This wasn’t Nisioisin’s “zaregoto” shtick done right, either. This was bullshit.
I’m definitely being too easy on Katanagatari, even though I just spent four thousand words ripping it to pieces. I could do this for any show that I don’t like, I just don’t care enough to do it for other shows. Obviously, I had a personal investment in Katanagatari, or else I wouldn’t bother. I wanted to like this series, and there are parts that I obviously did. The good things had enough of a poignancy and resonated with me so deeply as to make me finish the show and feel the need to talk about it publicly, in four thousand words, no less. It’s precisely because I love Nisioisin and love this kind of story that I feel compelled to love Katanagatari, and why it’s such an important thing that if it disappointed me so greatly, I understand exactly why.
tl;dr: I loved Togame and Higaki Rinne, wanted to love the Maniwani, enjoyed episodes 3, 7, 9, and 10, especially 7 for the visual style, video game references, and interesting characterization of Nanami, even though she had a shitty voice. Also, it had one of my favorite soundtracks of the year, and I enjoyed Shichika and Togame as a couple. Besides that, the entire thing was a shitpile.
Appropriately titled I Hate Bee Train. If you like angry rants about terrible, terrible anime, this is a place to go. For those unaware of what Bee Train is, it’s the most terrible anime studio in history. Some of their worst shows include Madlax, Phantom, Avenger, and the bad segments of Halo Legends and Batman Gotham Knight, while some of their less-utterly-fucking-terrible shows include .hack//SIGN, El Cazador de la Bruja, Noir, and Murder Princess. (All of which are still bad.) I’ll be episodically blogging these shows and tearing them to shreds for sport.
So far, there’s only one post on the site (Fucking Madlax Episode 1), but if you want more rage over Bee Train, check out this post I did here a long time ago:
…especially compared to FMA Brotherhood, which had the best and most satisfying final arc I’ve seen in anime (just a bit better than Eureka Seven’s). But that’s hardly surprising, because Brotherhood is a vastly superior show in every regard; and that’s not surprising either, because that’s the whole reason it exists. I joked once that Brotherhood gave me an excuse to not finish the original show, but I never actually took it off of my on-hold list and, having waited until Brotherhood was far from my mind (over a year), I finally put the nails in that coffin.
Here’s information: I never finished FMA before watching Brotherhood, so I didn’t go into Brotherhood with the same feelings about the show that other fans did who already knew one version of the story. Instead, I went into finishing FMA that way. However, it’s not as though I’m experiencing FMA for the first time: I was a big fan of this show when it was airing on Adult Swim in 2005, and had seen the first half (26 episodes) back then. Unfortunately, my family moved before the second half began airing, and we couldn’t afford cable anymore, so I never saw any more of the show. Besides watching the first ten episodes in Japanese a couple of years ago, I didn’t ever watch more of it until Brotherhood. Now, I finally borrowed the DVDs from a friend and marathoned the show in the past two days. It’s worth mentioning that I was already spoiled to a lot of the plot points, but I didn’t know how all of it comes together or anything.
Because my thoughts on this shitty ending are so jumbled and plentiful, I’m going to spew them in a somewhat disorganized matter. Starting with what’s on my mind at the moment, there’s Dante, the completely worthless main antagonist.
Dante first appears and is apparently killed unassumingly right at the point where the anime starts to seriously deviate from the manga’s plot (AKA when it starts getting shitty). I already knew that she was going to be the big bad, but I think that even if I hadn’t, all the scenes wherein the homunculi insist on calling her “that person” and needlessly hide her identity would’ve pissed me off. One of the things I hate the most in anime is when the plot revolves around a mystery that’s only a mystery because it’s a mystery—i.e. there’s no discernible reason why the homunculi don’t call her by name when talking about her. From a plot standpoint, it only serves to throw off whether the ringleader is Hohenheim or someone else. However, it’s revealed to the viewer that Dante is the big bad almost right after Hohenheim appears; the “that person” dialog only starts effecting Ed and Al’s ideas about their dad after the fact. There’s no mystery, but the potential for maybe some character development? Nope; by the time Ed gets to confront Hohenheim about it, he already knows that Dante is the villain, and the conversation ends up being, “were you and Dante just fucking around?!” “No.” “Oh, okay, then.”
Dante ended up in Lyra’s body, which was a truly terrible idea. My guess is that when the character Lyra was first introduced early in the show, the writers hadn’t yet planned on making her Dante’s vessel. That she was a named character at all means she was likely to return at some point, because FMA just works that way, but I imagine that if they knew she’d be harboring the big bad inside of her, they’d have hired a voice actress who could properly play a villain. Instead, her voice is Kakazu Yumi, who’s only role I’ve ever heard is fucking Anzu from Yu-Gi-Oh, and who’s completely average and boring as Lyra. Never once did Lyra-Dante seem like a threatening or imposing villain in anyway. This might’ve been on purpose, which would be just as stupid.
What I find most insulting about Dante as a villain is that she’s probably the stupidest major character in the series. Maybe that was the point—after all, this show tries so hard to be grimdark (I call the result grimdork), so it wouldn’t be surprising if “dumbasses create the world’s problems” was the inspiration for her character. Ed’s best line to her is “enough with your sophistry!” and God, was I with him on that. Her reasoning about life being unfair, and therefor equivalent exchange doesn’t exist blah blah, made no sense in the scientific framework of the law itself and really amounted to the kind of ideas some jackass teenager would have about “omg life is so unfair.” What I wanted Ed to point out was that the law of equivalent exchange has effects that go beyond the individual—that it operates on a universal principle and not a personal one—but instead he just said how he prefers not to think the way that she does and to believe that effort will yield reward, which is okay but doesn’t really put her in her place.
Dante is never shown doing anything significant on her own, and in the final episodes, she stands around and watches as her plans are foiled. Someone explain to me why she didn’t just have Gluttony eat Al as soon as she captured him? Especially if she really intended, as she says, to hop into Rose’s body and have sex with Ed; wouldn’t it be better to inhabit Rose’s body before Ed gets there? Actually, I don’t even know why she needed Gluttony to eat Al. It seemed to come out of nowhere while she had Al apparently disabled, laying on the transmutation circle. This raises another question: if Al was disabled, why does he get up when Ed dies? None of this is explained at all, so it just seems to happen. Dante wastes too much time and apparently her body is too weak to defeat Ed on her own, so she has her homunculus buddies take a fucking eternity to get it done, which of course pisses off Al enough to foil her plans anyway. All of this is fucking stupid and poorly thought out, even more on the part of the writers than on Dante her fucking self.
After this, Dante is like, “well shit, guess I gotta hurry and get another philosopher’s stone made before my fucking body dissolves” which seems fairly unlikely to begin with, but then she gets killed in a way so confusing that I had to check the FMA wiki just to make sure she wasn’t actually alive and to return in the movie. Minutes before, Gluttony had been stopped from eating Al by way of Al dissolving his bottom set of teeth, which implied that Gluttony could no longer eat. However, Gluttony managed to get into Dante’s elevator (through the floor while it’s ascending; no fucking idea how that works) and looked hungry. The only thing we see is Dante clap her hands, and then the elevator opening, empty. Now, one would assume that since Gluttony’s jaw had not apparently come back, he’d have a hard time eating her, although in retrospect, the fact that he ate through the floor proved that he wasn’t incapable (SO WHY NOT EAT AL?!). On top of that, the whole clap thing implies that Dante was about to protect herself with some kind of alchemy, but we have no idea what she did. Her body may have been deteriorating, but she was still a pretty strong alchemist and Gluttony was plenty fucking slow and retarded, so what happened? If she was going to get eaten, why leave it so ambiguous? And moreover, WHY WAS THE ELEVATOR EMPTY?! Did Gluttony decide, “aw hell, I’ll jump back down this elevator shaft”? I know that Gluttony shows up again in the movie so none of this makes any sense.
-
The whole idea of the other side of the gate being our world is fucking retarded. I don’t understand why this idea was necessary and it seemed to come out of nowhere at the end of the show. What fucking luck, too, that Ed ended up with his dad. This could be justified if we knew that Hohenheim had been there for a while and had time to look for him; it also might explain how he’s so important that Churchill calls him for council. I’m guessing all of this will be explained in the movie as some kind of time difference between the two sides of the gate, because otherwise, Hohenheim should’ve only been on Earth for like a couple of days, maybe weeks. That wouldn’t make much sense, though, since it’s obvious that the two dimensions are meant to overlap in time-frame. I’d have to watch the movie to find out, but since I already hate this whole idea to begin with, not to mention hate everything I’ve read about the movie, I really don’t want to.
There’s no good reason for Ed and Al to have been separated by alternate dimensions in the end, which, as I understand it, is also how the movie ends. The mechanics of human transmutation in this case are left ambiguous enough that the writers could come up with whatever they wanted, so they went with something as grimdork as they could get away with. This sentiment permeates the worst parts of the finale.
I’m putting all the blame for this on Aikawa Shou, who wrote most of the episodes, including the final twelve. I’m blaming him because I’ve seen his brainchild Neo-Ranga, which like FMA is a great show that ends in a complete fucking trainwreck of fail xanatos gambits. He also wrote a lot of Martian Successor Nadesico, which ended this way as well, only with far less shittiness. I don’t know why Aikawa seems to favor the shittiest endings imaginable, but he’s writing Un-Go (also by Bones and directed by Mizushima Seiji), so be ready for it.
The grimdorkness comes from the show’s desire to be cynical and “adult.” This is best represented in the part of the finale which I hated most—Roy Mustang’s story. Towards the end, Mustang’s crew seemed to be pulling off something similar to what they did in Brotherhood, which is an uprising and overtaking of the government. Instead… honestly, I’m not all that sure what the fuck they did. As I understand it, his team staged an uprising to distract the military or something while Roy moved in to kill King Bradley. How this makes any sense, I do not know, especially since it had to result in deaths among Mustang’s ranks.
What Mustang tells Ed in episode forty-eight is that he’s going to give up on trying to become the Fuhrer in order to kill King Bradley, simultaneously getting his revenge for the death of Maes Hughes (this is also stupid, because while it’s true that Bradley was a part of Hughes’ death, it’s not as though he actually killed him) and stopping Bradley’s plans. I have no idea why Roy had to do this, nor why he had to do so immediately. I don’t even know how he was planning to do it, since Bradley is immortal and it’s by pure chance that Selim happens to deliver his weakness at the end (and then is strangled to death in the name of extreme grimdorkness). Also, why does Roy have to give up his dream in order to accomplish this? We’re told that it’s because if he attempted an assassination, there’s no way he can have a military career. But… he does stay in the military. One would assume that if it was known he killed Bradley, then he’d be executed or something; instead he becomes a regular soldier in the movie and goes to a faraway outpost. WTF? If no one knows he did it, then why did it matter? He was a brigadier-general, just a step below the Fuhrer himself! Not to mention that because of his decision, power gets passed to a council and the military corruption is presumably never exposed. We’re even told by Sheska that the country is still at war. What in God’s name happened to Roy’s resolve? Why did he come so far to turn back when he was closer than ever? None of this makes sense and is a complete desecration of his character. The biggest insult is Ed and Mustang seeming to conclude that giving up their ambitions is the “adult” thing to do. SO. MUCH. FAIL.
Like with Ed and Al, Mustang’s ending was as grimdork as it could get away with, but it clearly wanted to be even more grimdork, what with Roy Mustang getting shot in the fucking face.
Gentlemen, let me tell you of Frank Archer-bot: the stupidest thing that ever happened in Fullmetal Alchemist. Frank Archer was a mildly interesting mid-series antagonist with a calm, collected nature and dark ambitions. He didn’t ultimately accomplish much except trap three of the show’s strongest characters in a room surrounded by weak-ass chimeras, then escape with ease (the second-stupidest thing that ever happened in Fullmetal Alchemist). Archer died when Scar turned the town of Lior (then full of soldiers) into a philosopher’s stone contained within Alphonse Elric (great episode). It seemed pretty clear that he was dead—maybe I saw it wrong, but I seem to remember him dissolving into pink dust along with everyone else. Everyone in the show seemed to believe he was dead, too. However, some time later, we’re told that he’s still alive and see a brief flash of him covered in bandages, half of his body (including his fucking head) gone, screaming. In the second-to-last episode, Frank Archer is revealed to have been revived with the shittiest automail the world has ever seen. This includes an arm that has an elongated shoulder for no apparent reason and is also a gun; a leg that isn’t really connected to his hip, causing him to limp awkwardly while he walks; and a small, retractable turret gun that comes out of his mouth. Frank Archer was revived as this hideous monstrosity for one purpose—to kill Roy Mustang.
Izumi Curtis keeps Archer busy while Ed escapes the headquarters where they didn’t find King Bradley. When Roy Mustang breaks into Bradley’s house, someone in the house calls the headquarters, and for whatever reason, the message is given directly to the unstable, barely able to walk, insane canon man Archer, who’s like, “I’ll be on my way,” than starts slowly limping out of the compound. One would assume that even if the Fuhrer’s house was just a ten-minute drive from the headquarters, it probably took Archer a good ten minutes to navigate his way to a car, and another ten to reach the house—but actually, Archer ends up crashing into another car, which has a fleeing family Bradley inside. This is what gives Selim the opportunity to run back to the house with his father’s skull, but it’s clear that Archer asks for one of the cars in the Bradley entourage so he can reach the house. If Archer took a car, then why did Selim beat him to the house by such a vast margin? Whether Archer took one or not, why didn’t he notice Selim heading for the house? If he walked, that had to take another twenty minutes. How fucking long were Roy and Bradley going at it?
After some kid-strangling and King-burning goes down, Roy leaves the house and comes face to face with Archer. Archer pulls a gun on him, and the camera cuts away to Riza Hawkeye catching up. She then shoots Archer to death from behind, only to find that Roy was already shot in the face. Why he couldn’t blow Archer to smithereens in time, we’ll never know. Considering that robo-Archer did nothing except for kill Roy and then die, he clearly was brought back for no other purpose. But Roy survives anyway, so the entire fucking existence of robo-Archer was meaningless. All it accomplished was giving Roy a motherfucking eyepatch.
Beyond this point, my complaints about the ending are much more general, and some apply to the whole show, albeit more extensively in the later half. My biggest annoyance was the quantity of scenes wherein a character managed to survive or even die simply because people stood around for too long. Take the aforementioned chimera scene, wherein Roy could’ve easily blown all of the chimeras to smithereens even while Archer was still unlocking the cage, but instead spends enough time standing around for Archer to escape. Another is a scene wherein Greed is running from Lust and Gluttony—they and two of Greed’s pals are in a room together; Lust and Gluttony just stand in the doorway while the chimera guys give a minute’s worth of self-sacrifice speech and Greed escapes. They wait until one of the chimeras delivers an embarrassingly shitty line (“I’m transmuted from a dog, so I have a strong sense of loyalty”) and charges at them before Lust kills both chimeras instantly with her finger blades. Greed, of course, is long gone. Almost every fucking scene involving the homunculi is like this because the homunculi are obviously overpowered, so there’s no reason for them to fail except by shitty writing and directing.
I don’t even want to talk about episode thirty-five. That was by far the shittiest episode of the entire show, which is kind of shocking after “The Other Brothers Elric, Part Two.”
If I wanted to be a huge dick, I’d also start complaining about how this show is overrated for its animation, which was nothing special except for that one fight with Greed; but I won’t get into all that. It’s not like I hate this show—on the contrary, there’s a ton about it to like, and if it weren’t for Brotherhood, I’m almost certain that I’d consider it rewatchable, what with my love for some of the main characters. (I even think that some of the later episodes were pretty decent (late thirties, early forties).) But that’s the thing—Brotherhood makes it unnecessary. It has the original FMA’s success to thank for that. Had FMA not been rampantly successful both in Japan and the West, it wouldn’t have gotten a remarkably well-budgeted sixty-four episode masterpiece of a repeat adaptation. I’m very thankful for that (lol secret late Thanksgiving post).
Edit: Something I forgot: WTF was up with Rose in the last few episodes? We never learn what kind of hypnosis bullshit Dante was using on her, and she just snaps out of it after Ed gets killed, long enough to yell “Edward!”—and then she isn’t even fucking on-screen until the resolution.
You may have noticed that I never talk about Xbox-exclusive games. It’s not that I don’t (didn’t, rather) enjoy the game’s exclusive titles. I used to be a big fan of Halo and Gears of War, and if you really plumb my archives (please don’t), you can even find a horrible post about the Halo 3 beta circa 2007.
I would love to play Xbox games—the problem is that the Xbox 360 is the worst console ever made, bar none. This is my story.
My family got our first Xbox 360 in early 2006, not long after its launch. We bought it mostly anticipating the release of Phantasy Star Universe, which would be and still is my brother Victor’s favorite game of all time. But right in the beginning, our first game, IIRC, was Dead Rising possibly followed by Enchanted Arms.
Foolishly, the first time we bought an Xbox 360, we didn’t buy a warranty to go with it. The Red Ring of Death was not a known thing yet, nor was anything else that could go wrong with the console. Ours started having errors and eating games in the span of about 2 FUCKING WEEKS. Since my dad hadn’t bought a warranty, and none of us were smart enough to contact Microsoft, he traded the console in and had to pay another hundred bucks to buy a new console, with the warranty.
But our problems were far from over. Some time later, our second Xbox 360 started eating games. What do I mean by this? A game would freeze, and then a strange sound would come out of the system, as if the disk had been displaced inside the console. It would take a few tries to get the disk drive open, and when it did open, the game would have rings of deep scratches on it. This left the games almost unplayable; if we could get the game running, it would still freeze eventually, and always at the same point. I believe our first copies of Gears of War and Phantasy Star Universe were both ruined this way. I know for sure that Victor had to buy a new copy of PSU at some point.
This time we had a warranty, so we were able to get a new console, no problem. Our third Xbox 360 lasted about a year before it got the dreaded Red Ring of Death.
At this point, we were well aware of the red ring, and the policy that you could send the console to Microsoft in exchange for a brand new one. So, after a forty-minute phone call to someone in India and nearly two months of waiting, our fourth and final Xbox 360 (to date) arrived. Don’t let “final” imply that this story has a happy ending.
The final Xbox 360 lasted a couple of years before it caved. It was late 2010, and a friend and I were playing through Halo: Reach on co-op, Legendary difficulty. We were having a blast, and it was starting to make up for how shitty the game had felt on single-player—until the console red ringed and I wasn’t even surprised.
For the next year and a half, we just stopped playing the 360. We never found the energy to go through the process of sending it in again—and besides, we’d barely been buying any games for it at the time. Most of the good shit was cross-platform, and it seemed obvious that the PS3 was the way to go, being as it doesn’t run the risk of eating games and dying.
But in 2012, out of a mix of nostalgia and watching random youtube videos, we found out about a supposed temporary solution to the red ring problem. Apparently, by turning the system on and then wrapping it in towels, causing it to generate a fuckload of heat, it could somehow reverse the curse. We saw no reason not to give it a shot.
And it worked! At least, it seemed to. I played some Reach on co-op (shitty) again for about an hour, and it went off without a hitch. But later, I tried to play Gears of War, and the game kept freezing on me early into the first level. It didn’t seem to be a problem with the console, since it happened repeatedly at the same moment, and there were no red rings going around. In any case, I continued to distrust the console.
Tonight, I decided I wanted to play some good ol’ Halo 1, and get all nostalgic about some shit I’ve largely forgotten about for six years. I stole my TV back from Victor and hooked everything up, but the cords didn’t want to cooperate with the TV. The AV cords wouldn’t work at all. The component cords worked, but there was no sound. (And before you ask, yes, I made sure they weren’t in the wrong places.)
Having no sound in a shooter is shitty, but I figured I could make up for it by getting ultra-nostalgic and putting on System of a Down, which we used to always listen to while playing versus mode. It took me a minute to get the wireless controller and console to recognize one-another (I forgot about the signal button on the console, since on the PS3 you only need the controller button), and once they did, I realized with horror that there was a half-second lag due to playing on an HD TV.
Nevertheless, I started the game up on Heroic, skipped all the cutscenes, and started running around the ship. As expected, the lag and lack of sound were sucky, but for some reason I just wanted to play on through it. I might have played the whole first level like that even, were it not for the game freezing on me right as I got into the first gunfight room.
—
Victor keeps the PS3 on top of his computer, which sits on the floor in his room. The other day, our brother Shade was playing Dark Souls, and I accidentally knocked the PS3 from its upright position into a sitting position. The game kept right on playing like nothing happened. I stood it back up while he was playing, incredulous all along. You can knock a PS3 or Wii on its side and it doesn’t even matter, but an Xbox 360 will just break down and start eating games for no fucking reason.
Look, the PS2 was a stupid console. I’ve had two original PS2s give out on me when their lasers stopped working correctly. For the past six years I’ve had a PS2 slim (still use it because our PS3 isn’t backwards-compatible), and it sometimes gets finicky—but as it turns out, the thing actually runs better when you turn it upside down. The disk is so fucking secure inside the console that turning it upside down is a viable solution to issues, whereas the 360 can’t hold a game right even standing correctly.
I have a friend’s Super Nintendo in my house which has been operating since the early 90s. I’ve got a Pikachu N64 which still works after thirteen years. My Gamecube is literally caked with filth in every single crevice, and even under the lid (our Gamecube saw a lot of abuse), and it STILL FUCKING WORKS. The thing had orange soda spilled on it when my brother was six years old, and he didn’t even wipe it off. It’s seen hell.
I wouldn’t mind owning a working Xbox 360, but I can’t bring myself to consider investing in a console that I know has a fucking ridiculous failure rate. One of my friends has a slim which has been working for four years or so, but the idea of paying for a new system just so I can play my old games, several of which are questionably playable thanks to the efforts of past consoles, is sickening. Plus, I’ve got enough PS3 and PC games to keep me occupied for a long time.
So, that’s the reason you won’t ever see me talking about Xbox games here unless someone gives one to me.
Sword Art Online is easily the worst TV show that I’ve ever watched to completion. Mind you, ordinarily when I don’t like a show, I stop watching it pretty early on, and when Sword Art Online first aired in Japan, I dropped it after seven episodes. However, over the next two years, I watched the show’s meteoric rise in popularity, and once I began making anime videos, people started asking me for my opinion on the series daily. Realizing that unless I made a video about it, people would never stop asking, I decided to marathon the show with my little brother, who watched eighteen episodes when it first aired and has literally bitched about it constantly for two years. We watched the entire thing, filming our reactions along the way.
Now, I know that a lot of you watching this video probably really enjoy this show. After all, it’s insanely popular, sitting at number eight on MyAnimeList’s most-watched shows; appearing on over 300,000 lists, and over 20,000 top fives, with an overall score of 8.25. Personally I would give it a 1, but I want you to know that I don’t begrudge anyone for enjoying this show. In fact, I think it’s great that this show makes so many people happy, which is always something to be celebrated. I don’t expect you to agree with anything I say in this video, and I don’t blame you if you don’t bother watching it. The purpose of this video is simply to explain why I, and so many others who feel similarly, hate this show so fucking much.
It’s hard to know where to start with SAO, because other than the fantastic character designs and generally solid visual presentation, it does almost everything wrong. If I had to start somewhere though, I’d pick the most obvious issue that pretty much everyone who hates this show complains about.
–Part One: The Main Character–
Kirito is one of the most bland, boring, humorless, inhuman lead characters I’ve ever seen. His personality sucks, his motivations never make sense, he acts inconsistently, makes stupid decisions constantly without any real penalty, and is pretty much impossible to like. Having an unlikeable protagonist isn’t necessarily a bad thing if the character is supposed to be an anti-hero or outright villain, and if there are other characters that we can root for, but Kirito is the straight-up hero of this tale and the series focuses on him almost exclusively. Let’s dive in and analyze this kid.
For starters, we have to figure out WHO Kirito is to begin with. The first episode paints him as a sort of moody kid who’s really, really into Sword Art Online. Almost all of his dialog in this episode is either him delivering exposition to some random douchebag that he met in the game, or having really straight-faced reactions to everything that goes on around him. By the end of the first episode, Kirito has no apparent personality whatsoever.
This isn’t so bad, though. The first episode mostly exists to establish the world and scenario, and while it does this through a fucking ridiculous amount of characters standing around dispensing exposition, at least it means that we’ll understand everything about the setup moving forward.
Episode two teaches us that Kirito was one of the game’s beta testers, but it still doesn’t bother giving him any personality. He seems to be really distant from everyone, though he takes an interest in Asuna just because she also seems to be a loner. They have some completely lifeless conversations and a huge battle happens, during which Kirito gets really emotional about the death of some blue-haired guy and screams a lot. Afterwards, everyone finds out that he was a beta tester, and for some reason this makes him an asshole.
Kirito’s response to this is one of the most baffling plot contrivances I’ve ever seen. Instead of trying to defend himself or come to an understanding. Kirito declares that he is the most powerful and badass player of all time, and pretends to be some kind of evil mastermind before abandoning the party and going off on his own.
Kirito has just completely exacerbated the idea that beta testers are assholes and painted a huge fucking target on his back, for no apparent reason. He ends up spending the rest of the show constantly hiding his power level and the fact that he’s good at the game because he knows that everyone hates beta testers, even though it’s his fucking fault that everyone hates them to begin with!
This retarded scene pretty much sets the stage for all of Kirito’s interactions throughout the first half of the series. Kirito always has to remain distant and secretive around other people because he doesn’t want to reveal too much about himself and his power level. The result leads him down a path of constant misunderstandings, betrayals, and general emo bullshit, which never gets any better because Kirito has no ability to communicate with other human beings.
Episode three jumps ahead a bit and shows Kirito with a party of lower-level players that he’s been hanging out with. It’s not really clear why he’s partying with weaker players, but he’s concealing his level and lies that he’s actually around the same level as them. Even assuming that EXP share is broken in this game and he’s not accidentally stunting the growth of his teammates by being in their party, you’d think it’d be pretty fucking clear that he does way more damage than any of them, but whatever.
Because Kirito keeps his level a secret, his teammates get overconfident in their skills as a group, and even though Kirito knows it’s a terrible idea, he tags along to do a mission outside their level range and everyone but him ends up getting killed, including the first in a succession of cute girls who are in love with him for no reason. This whole scenario only amplifies Kirito’s already abundant moodiness and convinces him that he should never party with anyone again because he’ll probably get them killed. Yeah, honestly, that’s probably a safe bet, considering his absolute incompetence at communication.
The next episode is a bit lighter, in that no one dies and there’s a cute little girl who reminds Kirito of his sister, so he decides to help her out.
Let me remind you that at this point, Kirito’s overall motivations and place in the story have no solid foundation. He isn’t participating in the raid groups who are trying to actually complete the game, and seems to spend most of his time dicking around on floors that are way below his already outrageous level.
As a result of this, nothing about his character has any weight to it. He’s just a wandering downer, winning the hearts of girls everywhere by being stupidly good at the game and looking cool and mysterious in black trenchcoats. In this episode, we find out that Kirito feels vaguely guilty about taking up a lot of his sister’s time growing up or something, which is pretty in line with his character as the most brooding asshole this side of Batman.
By this point, we really know all that there is to know about Kirito. His main character arc revolves around learning to trust other people and to trust himself not to get everyone killed. Through his relationship with Asuna he finds someone he cares about enough to not act like a total asshole around her, and that helps him find motivation to actually do something in the story. During the couple of episodes that show his domestic life with Asuna, we see the first specs of humanity from Kirito as he actually seems enjoy himself sometimes, although I still wanted to punch him in the fucking face when he was on a date with Asuna and had her fucking thighs around his neck, and all he could do was look annoyed the whole time.
The closest Kirito comes to developing any sort of personality is when he spends time with Yui, the little girl that he and Asuna adopt. Kirito gets a few random dad-like moments at this part, and while it doesn’t last, it actually seems like maybe he’s capable of human emotions other than sorrow and anger. I think it’s kind of hilarious to note, however, that Yui’s entire function in the game is that she’s an AI meant to help improve the psychological state of individual players. I couldn’t help feeling like the only reason Kirito experienced any levity around her is that Yui was literally programmed to bring those feelings out of him.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that a brooding, emotionally distant main character is automatically a bad thing. One of my favorite anime characters is Shinji Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion, who was exactly that. However, Evangelion was entirely built around the themes of isolation and personality disorders. In that show, Shinji was constantly criticized and punished for his mistakes and forced to slowly mature as a character and a person. And even Shinji, the prince of emo himself, experienced frequent moments of levity and calm throughout the series, which made him seem really human and gave more weight to the parts where he suffers. I could go on all day about how great a character Shinji is, but my point is simply that Sword Art Online doesn’t flesh out Kirito’s personality, nor compliment it well enough with the other story elements, to make him a likable character.
Kirito is unstoppably badass and has the entire female population of the game riding his nuts, yet he can barely bring himself to smile most of the time. The closest thing to a human moment he gets in the early part of the show is when he relaxes under a tree with Asuna at the start of episode five, and for once it actually feels like no one’s about to burst into tears or be horribly murdered at any moment.
Moreover, because Kirito is so ludicrously amazing, it’s hard to feel even a slight amount of tension in any scenario he’s put into. Kirito knows the game better than anyone and is overlevelled for every quest he bothers to do, in addition to being the unstoppable lead character anyways. There’s this fucking ridiculous scene in the fourth episode where he gets attacked by seven guys at once and they can’t even fucking scratch him, effectively ending any feeling that Kirito might ever be in danger for the rest of the show.
In episode nine, Kirito makes the baffling decision to hide the fact that he can dual-wield from even his close friends, and allows the deaths of several people before deciding that it’s time to step in and save them. It’s never established why he can’t tell anyone about this power, and he even explains that it’s not something he learned from the beta, but just because it popped up in his skills list at some point. If anyone asked him about it, that’s all he’d have to tell them; and sure enough, once he reveals it to the same friends he was hiding it from, there are no consequences. During his battle with the boss, Kirito had been taken down to low health solely because he hadn’t revealed this power, and as soon as he did, he crushed the boss immediately, proving not only that he didn’t learn his lesson that hiding his powers would get people killed just like it did in episode three, but also that he’s so powerful at this point that he can only even compare to the next-best players in the game if he severely limits himself.
To make a long story short here, the problem with Kirito is that he’s a fourteen year-old boy’s wish-fulfillment empowerment fantasy. He’s the coolest-looking, coolest-acting, most powerful gamer in the history of the world, and every single girl that he runs into falls in love with him immediately. And yeah, if I’d watched this show when I was fourteen, I’m pretty sure it would’ve been the greatest thing I’d ever seen. I was obsessed with video games to the point that I even enjoyed the snore-fest .hack//SIGN just because it took place inside an MMO, and I loved badass swordsmen characters, ESPECIALLY if they happened to be my age. Kirito would’ve been far and away my favorite character ever back then, and I can totally understand why some people could still enjoy a character like that. But you know, even though Kirito doesn’t do anything for me as an adult, it’s not so much the fact that he’s an unstoppable badass which bothers me; it’s the technique the show uses to make him seem like such a badass. Which brings us to–
–Part Two: Every Other Character In The Game–
The weirdest thing about Kirito being so overpowered is that he’s not even doing anything special. Sure, he knew the game a little better from playing the beta, but the beta didn’t run for nearly as long as the amount of time that everyone gets trapped inside the game. Plus, as early as episode two, it’s established that certain things have changed since the beta, so it’s not like knowing the beta gives you exclusive data that no one else would have. If the playing field is only barely skewed in Kirito’s favor, and literally anyone could get to be as powerful as he can, then why is he the most badass player in the game? The answer is that every single other player is a complete fucking moron.
Surviving in Sword Art Online is not actually difficult. The only reason you’d ever be in any danger is if you made a terrible decision. Moreover, the techniques for becoming strong in the game are very simple–grind low-level monsters that you’re really unlikely to die against and play with a strong party. MMORPGs might be a little bit complex for entry-level players to figure out, but it only takes a matter of days to learn at the most. Remember that the most powerful player in this game is a fourteen year-old boy who figured this all out pretty easily. It stands to reason that anyone with a gram of common sense could come to the same conclusions that Kirito does in a pretty short amount of time. Yet, after the first month-long time skip in episode two, most players still don’t know shit about the game, even after the beta testers provided them with a handbook.
Sword Art Online is a video game. Even though the players have been absorbed into the game, nothing has really changed about the its core systems. Most people can learn to play a game in a short amount of time, especially if they have guidance, even if they’re just playing it for fun. In this series, EVERYONE’S LIVES ARE ON THE LINE. You would think that every single person in the game would buckle down and learn everything about it immediately, while forming a strong community of adventurers, with adults taking control and protecting the children, and everyone concentrating their efforts on carefully grinding and exploring the world.
None of that happens. Instead, in episode two, a large portion of the gamers decide that beta testers are cheaters because they know more about the game and are working for their own best interests over those of the group. The most powerful, knowledgeable assets to everyone’s survival are ostracized by a community of idiots.
It takes a pretty pessimistic view of humanity to assume that if ten thousand people got trapped inside of a game, the majority of them would be braindead idiots who get themselves killed immediately or wander around the game world acting like fools until they eventually get picked off. But what bothers me more than the fact that most of these gamers should’ve learned how to play the game properly in a matter of days, is the fact that they should’ve ALREADY known how to play the game, because all of them were first-responders to the product.
Sword Art Online opens up on the titular game’s launch day. Most of the players had stood in line for the game or pre-ordered it, and the ten thousand copies that existed were sold out in a matter of hours. These people had already purchased the probably expensive Nerve-Gear technology to play the game and were hype enough about it to jump in immediately. And yet, of the people that Kirito encounters in the show, a lot of them barely seem to be gamers at all, much less having any concept of how MMORPGs work. In the first episode, Kirito has to explain the basics of gameplay to Klein, who claims to have been so excited about this game that he waited in line for three days with his friends. Klein doesn’t even understand how the Nerve-Gear works–he’s clearly done no research on the game whatsoever, for all of his excitement.
It is impossible for me to believe that this group of first responders would be so completely inept at this game that they die off in droves right from the beginning. Not to mention the fact that Kirito says there were one thousand slots in the closed beta testing, meaning that if all of the beta testers returned for the finished version of the game, they’d make up a whole tenth of the game’s population. Assuming that none of the beta testers were among the first wave of deaths, that means by the time episode two rolls around, with two thousand dead and beta testers being considered suspect, those players would still represent an eighth of the entire player-base. How the fuck can they all be legendary badasses to the point of needing to hide their power levels if one in every eight players is a beta tester?!
Every character in Sword Art Online is demonstrably worse at the game than Kirito, at times in ways that don’t even make sense. In the early episodes, Kirito teams up with newbies too stupid to live and spends a lot of time dicking around on the lower floors, laying low and level-grinding lowbie mobs. However, even though he spends most of the game soloing and wandering around using levelling tactics that he admits are inefficient, he somehow remains the highest-level player around.
In episode nine, Kirito and Asuna team up, with Asuna being pretty much the front-liner of one of the most powerful guilds, leading the charge into the higher levels of the game and generally being enough of a badass that everyone recognizes her. Given Asuna’s no-nonsense attitude, constant presence in high-level questing, and general badassery, you’d think she’d be at a much higher level than Kirito at this point. However, as mentioned before, when Kirito reveals his dual-wielding ability, it shows that he’s still exponentially more powerful than Asuna, or seemingly anyone else. We’ll get back to Asuna later, but for now all this talk of game mechanics brings us to our next point.
–Part Three: The MMORPG–
The anime series Sword Art Online is based on a series of web novels written by Reki Kawahara which were first published online in 2002. This was the same year that Final Fantasy XI, perhaps the biggest MMORPG hit in Japan, was released, and at the time its main competition would’ve been the likes of Everquest Online in terms of open-world MMOs. When interviewed about his inspirations behind the series, Kawahara has said that he’s a pretty low-level player when it comes to games, so when he wrote SAO he wanted it to be about one of the high-level players that he didn’t think he’d ever become.
Now, I don’t want to make any sweeping assumptions about whether or not Kawahara really understands high-level play in old-school MMO games. Maybe he does understand it and just chose to write a story that wasn’t all that true to the formula of those games. Whatever the case may be, the mechanics of Sword Art Online don’t seem to make any sense in the context of an MMO.
Before I dig myself too deep into this point though, I have to admit that I, too, have not really played any old-school MMOs. I’ve mostly played games from the post-World of Warcraft era such as Tera Online, which are more geared towards the solo player experience and are really easy for new players to get into. However, from what I’ve been told by friends who’ve played older MMO games, those games were strongly oriented towards party and guild play, with soloing pretty much not really being a thing. The whole point of MMO games back then, and arguably still now, was the in-game communities and playing with other people.
I’m not saying that SAO is broken just because it centers around a solo player, nor am I saying that it should be impossible for Kirito to play solo in this game, although I would argue that him playing solo is a stupid, bullshit way to make him seem powerful when it really just makes him a reckless moron. What I’m saying, really, is that Sword Art Online does not capture the essence of what it’s like to play an MMORPG. Being set in an MMO universe is more of a way to set up the mechanics on which to play out a death-game plot, but beyond laying the foundation of the story, the MMO mechanics aren’t really utilized.
If you’re going to set a game in a world where encounters are deliberately too difficult for an individual to handle, then it makes no sense to create a main character who can handle just about anything by himself. It implies that this game is actually easy to play solo, and that everyone who fails to do so is just really bad at the game, as I’ve gone over already. What’s really sad is that this contradiction isn’t just expressed through the storytelling, but even appears right in the show’s dialog.
In episode one, Kirito says that a single sword can carry you anywhere you want to go in this world. The implication there is that individual player’s strength is what’s most important. However, in episode two, Kirito tells Asuna that there’s an upper limit to what you can do playing solo, and that she should join a powerful guild. Apparently this advice doesn’t apply to himself though, because he still manages to be incredibly successful without ever joining a guild. When Kirito finally gets forced into a guild in episode ten, he says that he was reaching the limit of what was possibly as a solo player anyways, but in the end he beats the final boss entirely by himself. Do you see how everything that this series does to make Kirito seem powerful ends up breaking the rest of the series’ logic?
The mechanics of the game, as represented in the show, are horribly inconsistent, and at times just badly thought out. Even though a point is made to show us how hyper-immersive this game is, with food that you can actually eat and full range motion, when characters go to apply condiments to their food, it still happens through an immersion-breaking video game interface.
There is no job system in the game, so everyone just levels up whatever they feel like and gets whatever armor they want, in a system that more closely resembles the levelling in an Elder Scrolls game than it does the average MMO. Because the game has no classes, there are no tanks, DPS, healers, and support–everyone just rushes into combat at once. There’s a mechanic called “switching,” where characters continuously switch in and out of battle, but it’s never explained how this mechanic works or what it actually does. All of the battles in the show end up being a completely incomprehensible mess of people yelling SWITCH and running at enemies, attacking with all their might.
The major guilds in the game often seem to have all of their members wearing the exact same armor, as if it were a uniform, which from a dramatic standpoint is probably a lazy way of making sure the viewer knows that they’re all on the same team. However, the idea of having all of the people in your guild playing the same character type is totally asinine. Even in guilds that aren’t particularly serious, there’s always a drive to make sure that you have a good enough balance of different kinds of players. If all you have is DPS players in your guild, with no tanks or healers, then the whole usefulness of getting guild members together for dungeons and raids will fly out the window. However, since SAO doesn’t have a class system, nor any tactics in its battle system whatsoever, I guess it doesn’t even matter.
There’s probably more to be said about why this world doesn’t make sense if I really dug into it, but the bottom line is really just that the world wasn’t well thought-out. Kawahara obviously wasn’t all that concerned with making sure that the world was an air-tight, believable MMO experience. In one interview, he openly admits that there are plot-holes in the Nerve Gear mechanic, but that it was the best thing he could come up with at the time. He also admits that when he wrote the second book, he wanted to flesh out the game world more because the first book was, by his own admission, rushed. After all, Kawahara wrote this novel because he wanted to submit it to a competition, which he didn’t end up doing anyways because he exceeded the page limit, so he just posted it online.
I think it’s rather obvious, in light of all this information, that Kawahara wasn’t taking this story all that seriously. It was something he wrote quickly, based on simple ideas, and didn’t take any time to iron out all the wrinkles. Sword Art Online was never about making a detailed and interesting world and characters, nor was it meant to be any kind of fully realized masterpiece. It was just a fun little death game story that rode on its very simple premise long enough to tell a story that Kawahara could submit to this competition. The direct result of the way that the Sword Art Online novels were first created brings us to-
–Part Four: The Structure–
While Sword Art Online was originally released on the internet, it was written with the basic intent of being a “light novel,” and as of being officially published starting in 2009, has become a light novel series running seventeen books in total. Light novels are a form of super-short young adult literature which usually feature anime-style illustrations; and the medium has grown into massive popularity in the last half-decade or so, with light novel adaptations becoming the most common source material for anime.
On average, a single light novel tends to translate to anywhere from three to five, or possibly six, episodes of anime, depending on the adaptation. Most light novel adaptations, such as Haruhi, Baccano, or Bakemonogatari, to name a few of my favorites, will adapt three or more novels for every thirteen episodes of show, often mixing up and combining the order of the books so that the they don’t need to feature multiple climaxes, but can have all the climactic moments at the end of the series.
The Aincrad arc of Sword Art Online covers the first two books, but in a semi-chronological order instead of in the order that the events are presented. The entire story of the characters being trapped inside of, and eventually escaping, the titular game, all happens in the span of the first book. The second book is actually a collection of short side stories that were meant to show some of Kirito’s adventures in the early part of the game, which otherwise would’ve been quickly glossed-over in the first book.
Fusing these two books together seems like a natural idea, and if you were going to have to adapt both books, then this was certainly the best way to handle it. However, the problem is that this results in truly awful pacing and a complete dissolution of the tension and urgency that the first two episodes establish. Arguably the strongest thing that SAO had going for it was its initial premise. The idea of a high-stakes death game set inside an MMORPG world was an exciting and grim way to start the show, and as stupid as the second episode seems on closer inspection, dramatically it was a strong way to start the series with a lot of tension and excitement.
However, instead of capitalizing on that, the show then immediately cuts away to a series of totally pointless one-off storylines. Any excitement the viewer might have had to see how the players were going to work to get out of this game, flies out the window around the time some random little girl gets a whole episode’s worth of fanservice for no reason at all. By the way, have you noticed that besides the scene of Kirito resting, I haven’t mentioned episodes five and six at all? That’s because those two episodes are so boring, pointless, and unmemorable, that if you asked me for a plot synopsis I’d probably just stare at you and say, “something about ghosts.”
The reason I originally dropped Sword Art Online after seven episodes, is that the show didn’t make a single ounce of progress between episodes two and seven. Any sense of urgency had long since gone away, and after episodes of Kirito dicking around being stupidly overpowered all over the place, it became impossible to take anything seriously.
I don’t know how faithful A-1 Pictures were to the source material in adapting this series to animation, but there’s no question that they should’ve taken some artistic license with regards to these episodes. Instead of loading us down with the random stories of people who don’t and will never matter, we could’ve learned more about Asuna, the one character besides Kirito who actually matters, and seen more of what happened on the front lines. Even hearing stuff now and again about how much progress had been made in the game over all, or keeping up the death counters and time counters that Kirito brings up in the important episodes, would’ve done a ton to keep up the sense of urgency. As it stands, it really feels like the whole mid-section of the Aincrad arc is a gigantic pointless distraction.
But even when the arc finally gets on-track, with Kirito and Asuna’s relationship coming into focus, it then immediately gets away from the death game and MMO aspects entirely by having Kirito and Asuna go off into the woods to get married and raise a kid. At this point, you could be forgiven for forgetting that this was a death game series at all. When the story finally comes back into focus out of literally nowhere, it’s like waking up from a nap–oh, fuck there was a story in this wasn’t there, we better hurry and like, wrap that up shouldn’t we.
It really does happen that fast. After two and a half episodes of Asuna and Kirito in the countryside, they get a call from the guild leader, whom we will soon learn is actually the game’s creator and arch-villain, telling them it’s time to take on the final dungeon. So they go to do that, and Kirito ends up figuring out after the first floor that the guild leader is going to be the final boss, so they have a one-on-one fight and Kirito kills him. It feels like the creator just got sick of waiting around for Kirito to take the initiative on finishing the game and just wanted to get it over with.
I can seriously picture Kawahara having gotten really into writing the whole Asuna and Kirito arc, only to realize that he was coming up on the page limit and/or due date for the competition, so he didn’t have time to naturally transition into the final arc and instead just kinda made it end. Maybe he didn’t have time to shorten or rearrange the story for the contest, or didn’t want to, or was just really attached to the Kirito and Asuna storyline, but by now had trapped that story inside this poorly thought-out death game plot. Whatever the case may be, the result feels like the first draft of a story that was posted online when the author gave up on fixing it, and which never would’ve been published if not for the fact that his later work got popular. Y’know, cause that’s exactly what it is.
–Part Five: Asuna–
While I have a few problems with Asuna’s character which I’ll dive into shortly, let me start by saying that Asuna is by far the best thing about Sword Art Online, and not just because of her jaw-droppingly gorgeous character design. Her personality isn’t particularly deep or interesting, but she’s definitely not hateable, and all of the best things about the show revolve around her involvement in the storyline.
At the beginning, Asuna falls squarely into the Type-One Tsundere archetype. This is a character who starts off not really liking the main character, often taking an abrasive approach in their interactions, but who eventually falls in love with and is nice to them. Tsundere is one of the most common archetypes of female characters in anime and it’s incredibly easy to get wrong, especially with the Type-Two Tsundere archetype that became popular in the mid-2000s, where instead of going from abrasive to loving, the character constantly flips back and forth between the two.
Asuna’s character progression actually makes sense, and she straight-up explains it to someone in episode thirteen. At the beginning, she was trying to get out of this world as fast as possible because she felt like she was losing her time in the real world by being here–and she was always stressed out and on-edge as a result. When Kirito taught her to relax and learn to live in the world they were trapped in, she calmed down a lot. After the two-year time skip in episode eight, Asuna is distinctly more happy and clear-minded, and her attraction to Kirito is readily apparent.
The fact that Asuna and Kirito actually enter a functional, sexually active relationship in this series is a gigantic breath of fresh air that I appreciated so much it actually made me want to give the show an extra point on principal alone. Even in most mature, smartly-written anime, it’s incredibly rare to see a relationship that actually becomes a legit thing, and the parts where Asuna and Kirito spend time alone were legitimately romantic and enjoyable. My metric for how good a romance is basically boils down to how jealous and lonely I feel when watching it, and when Asuna was staring at Kirito’s sleeping face in bed, I started feeling some type of way.
But unfortunately, the story ends up shitting on Asuna’s character at several key moments because of its insistence on pronouncing Kirito as the ultimate badass. In fact, the angriest that I ever got while watching this show was in every moment that Kirito’s actions ended up degrading everything that was great about Asuna’s character.
The problems really began in episode eight, when Kirito and Asuna first start showing an interest in one another. The first half of this episode was the first scene in the entire show that I actually kind of enjoyed. It depicted a relaxing conversation between two people first discovering that they might have some chemistry together, and actually gave them a chance to act like people for once. Plus, Asuna’s house was really pleasant to look at. This scene is immediately followed by Asuna falling onto Kirito in the town square, and Kirito accidentally grabbing her breast. Accidental gropings are probably the most asinine trope in all of anime history, and every single accidental groping that’s happened since Evangelion deconstructed the trope nearly two decades ago is the worst scene in whatever series it belongs to.
But the stupid anime bulshit actually wasn’t what squandered the goodwill the first half of the episode had earned. What follows is a scene where some douchebag refuses to let Asuna do what she wants, so Kirito challenges the guy to a duel, with Asuna’s liberties on the line. Nevermind that Asuna is more than capable of speaking for and defending herself, and in fact by all rights SHOULD be more powerful than Kirito at this point; but no, it’s up to her new boyfriend to defend her honor. The whole time, Asuna keeps hiding behind Kirito, while he tells her to stand back and let him handle this, and I think you can see why I’m starting to get pissed off here.
Throughout the Asuna and Kirito arc, a lot is done to suggest that Asuna is a total badass, and that even Kirito kind of regards her as “crazy strong,” deferring to her as the muscle of the duo. There are several parts where Asuna hides behind Kirito, but when it’s something like the scene where she’s afraid of ghosts in the woods, I can totally accept that. She doesn’t have to be an iron wall of unstoppable fury, but when she can’t even defend her own honor against an opponent far inferior to her, it pisses me off.
In episode ten, the same guy tries and almost succeeds to murder Kirito in a trap. Asuna manages to save Kirito’s life and beats the guy back, and she has him at her mercy, but relents because she can’t bring herself to kill someone. As a result, the guy ends up attacking her, and Kirito somehow magically overpowers his paralysis in order to save Asuna and kill the guy at the last moment. What could’ve been a chance to show off how badass Asuna is and cash in on her promise before to always protect Kirito, instead becomes yet another show of how Kirito is so magically powerful that he can overcome status effects by sheer force of will.
During the marriage arc, Kirito and Asuna are established as a sort of power duo–the two most powerful players in the game, made even more powerful by their collaboration. It’s a really romantic portrayal of their characters as almost one unit–a pair of lovers whose love makes them unstoppable. In episode thirteen, it’s kind of suggested that Asuna is ultimately the more badass of the two when she takes out the giant fish, and during the big boss battle, the two of them are fighting side-by-side.
However, during the final boss battle, Kirito is the only one who’s allowed to fight. Asuna does get to do the magical back-from-paralysis technique to save Kirito from a killing blow, but Kirito just one-ups her again by getting killed anyways and then pulling off the ultimate COME-BACK-FROM-DEATH move before delivering the final blow to the boss. And that, uh, brings me to–
–Part Six: WHAAAAAT?!–
I’ve already talked a lot about the logical fallacies and plot contrivances that consistently undermine this series, but there are moments in SAO that are straight-up baffling, and completely destroy any suspension of disbelief which might’ve remained. Leaving out stuff I’ve already mentioned, like the blue-haired guy refusing to heal himself in episode two, and other such random suicidal tendencies of the characters, here are some of the most insane things that are possible in this world.
Number One: There is an item that can bring a player back to life, as long as it’s used within thirty seconds of the player being killed. Whaaaat?! I thought that when a character dies in the game, the Nerve Gear fries their brain with microwaves. Is there a thirty-second delay between death in the game and death in the real world? Does the Nerve Gear just put them to sleep for those thirty seconds, so that they won’t wake up and take it off their head? Or does it just magically bring them back to life if you use this item? The entire concept of being able to come back to life after losing in this game makes no sense whatsoever. I guess this is what Kawahara meant when he said that there were plot holes with the Nerve-Gear.
Number Two: In episodes five and six, a duo convinces Kirito and Asuna that they’ve been killed by a ghost, by faking their deaths in a part of town where no one should be able to die. It’s explained that they pulled this off by using weapons that were degrading to simulate receiving wounds, or something like that. Each of them is shown apparently dying, and the animation used looks just like the animation for dying, except that the characters are apparently teleporting away, which has a completely different animation. This is just a case of really bad planning on the part of the animators I guess.
Number Three: As I mentioned previously, Kirito breaks out of paralysis through sheer force of will. Why is Kirito able to do this when literally no one else can? No matter how strong their desire to live, or to protect someone else, no one else except for Kirito, and later Asuna, can break out of paralysis. The show actually does have a sort of explanation for this, but it’s even more baffling and insane.
Number Four: Kirito and Asuna are apparently the happiest people in the entirety of Aincrad. In episodes eleven and twelve, Kirito and Asuna find a little girl in the woods and start raising her as their own. It later turns out that this little girl is a rogue AI that was programmed into the game, sort of like Zelfie from .hack//LEGEND OF THE TWILIGHT. By which I mean, exactly like Zelfie from .hack//LEGEND OF THE TWILIGHT. Which also came out in 2002, but I’m sure that doesn’t mean anything.
The little girl, Yui, turns out to be an AI whose purpose was to monitor the psychological states of players and help to keep them on-track. However, for some reason, she was trapped and not allowed to help players, but only to watch them suffer. I don’t know why the game’s creator would bother programming this AI if he wasn’t going to use it. I guess because he’s just a sadistic asshole. Anyways, Yui spent years being horribly depressed watching everyone else be horribly depressed, until one day she found Kirito and Asuna, who were apparently the ONLY PEOPLE, in two years of playing the game, who had learned to enjoy themselves in this world.
Um… excuse me?! Do you mean to tell me that no one else in this game has been happy or had a relationship? We already know from episode five that other people have been married in the game, though in that specific instance the husband actually murdered the wife, so it might not be the best example. Still, I can’t believe that in two entire years of several thousand people playing this game, no one was notably happy and functional until Kirito and Asuna started their relationship.
This entire implication is so stupid and out of left field that I just wanted to ignore it at first, but in the end I realized that this fact is actually important. And that’s because of
Number Five: Kirito and Asuna come back from the dead through sheer force of will. I’ve already made my point about how coming back to life after being killed by the Nerve-Gear makes no sense, but at least before, there was a special item that made it possible. In episode fourteen, Kirito and Asuna come back because they really love each-other a lot. In perhaps the most asinine attempt to make something seem super-romantic and powerful that I’ve ever seen, Kirito wills himself back to life just to kill the final boss, and he and Asuna make it out of the game.
Given that we’ve established the possibility that it might take thirty seconds for the Nerve-Gear to kill someone, there’s actually a way that this could have been a clever twist. After Asuna was killed, if Kirito had immediately realized that he had a thirty-second window to end the game and bring her back, he could’ve wrecked the final boss really quickly and then the idea would be that he saved her right in the nick of time. It would’ve been a great way to make the stakes seem really high in those last moments where the viewer thinks that the show’s best character is gone forever, and bringing her back might’ve been pretty gratifying.
Instead, Kirito becomes a lifeless husk after Asuna is gone, and gets himself killed. Then, after he’s already dead, he gets angry enough to finish the fight, and he wills himself back to life to finish off the boss. It’s clearly been more than thirty seconds since Asuna has died, and there’s no logic whatsoever to the fact that Kirito can will himself back to life, but in the end Asuna survives anyways. She didn’t will herself back to life before, but there she is, still alive, when the world is coming to an end. Even if, right after Kirito had died, he and Asuna had BOTH willed themselves back to life and delivered the final blow together, this might’ve been an almost acceptable version of the most tacky ending imaginable, but with it being just Kirito, an extra layer of what-the-fuck is added onto the stack.
Anyways, with the final boss being killed now, I think I’ve said just about all there is to say with regards to this series. I could go on about how the high-intensity animation doesn’t save the badly choreographed and confusing fight scenes or something, but honestly, I think I’ve covered all of the major ups and downs that the series has to offer. With that, I can finally put this series to–oh. Oh no. I forgot.
–Part Seven: The Entire Second Half Of the Show–
Holy fucking shit. If Sword Art Online wasn’t already bad enough, the second half of the series is an entirely separate story which is even worse, but in totally different ways. Whereas the first arc was stupid, baffling, and structurally broken, the second arc is boring, offensive, and even more contrived than the first arc. It’s like a buy-one, get-one-free pack of terrible shows, one of which is idiotic, and the other of which is abhorrent. Just like with the first arc, there are so many problems that I don’t even know where to start, so we’re gonna have to break this down into subsections all over again.
–Number One: Asuna–
There are a lot of things that make the Fairy arc stupid, asinine, and boring, but most of the things that make the arc downright OFFENSIVE, are the things involving Asuna. You may remember how in the Aincrad arc, I stated that all the best parts of Sword Art Online were the parts where Asuna’s character was allowed to shine, and that all of the worst parts were where Asuna was degraded by the shows chauvinistic mindset. During the Fairy arc, Asuna gets trapped in a bird cage for eleven episodes and constantly sexually assaulted by a madman while patiently waiting for Kirito to come and save her.
Now, as I’ve been watching SAO, the hardest thing for me to comprehend is that so many people actually enjoy this show so much. However, almost everyone, even fans of the show, seem to have problems with the second arc, and most of them cite the villain as the problem, as well as the lack of Asuna. This makes me very happy, because it means that even if people can enjoy something as stupid as this series, at least I know they’re smart enough to recognize when a show does some really fucking uncomfortable shit.
Asuna only gets two really sizeable scenes throughout the Fairy arc–one of them involves her attempted break-out, which results in a several-minute scene of her being groped by disgusting and completely out-of-place tentacle monsters, and the other of which involves the villain doing everything short of outright raping her in the final battle. The only apparent purpose for all of this is to make the viewer hate the villain as much as possible, and it succeeds in this–but it also made me completely and totally hate the show for having me sit through this bullshit.
This could be taken as a biased emotional response, but I don’t know any better way to put it: I don’t fucking want to watch Asuna get sexually molested. I don’t understand why the fuck I had to sit through it, and the fact that these scenes are drawn almost erotically, as if to imply that I’m supposed to be able to get off to this shit, actually offended me. For eleven episodes, what the first season built up to be a strong female character who kicks ass and gets to be in one of anime’s few functioning relationships, gets degraded into a locked-up princess that Kirito has to save, who is constantly at the sexual mercy of the villains holding her captive. It was gross, disgusting, creepy, and it had no business being in this story.
Sword Art Online is not fucking Berserk, or Game of Thrones, or fucking Bokurano. It’s a thirteen year-old wish-fulfillment fantasy about overpowered video gamers using the power of love to overcome literal death. Yes, it has a dark edge to it, in that people die and suffer throughout the series, but the overall tone of the story is childish, immature, and simple. It is not a show with adult themes or a sobering, horrific storyline. This show has no business displaying these kinds of scenes in the first place.
Moreover, the scenes are handled with a lack of taste that I’d expect from an actual tentacle porn OVA. If they really had to make it so the villain was sexually molesting Asuna, it could’ve been handled with at least a degree of tact or subtlety, but instead we end up watching minutes-long scenes of this disgusting piece of shit tearing her clothes, licking her face, and generally tormenting her for what feels like an eternity. It was enough to make me legitimately uncomfortable, as I kept wondering again and again how the fuck anyone at any stage of creating this series thought that this was an okay way to present these scenes.
At the very end of the series, when all is said and done, Asuna and Kirito are finally reunited in the real world, and if nothing else the series does at least offer a pretty satisfying resolution. We see how the characters interact in the real world, and what they plan to do going forward, and the whole time I just kept thinking how much more satisfying it would’ve been to witness these scenes immediately after the Aincrad arc, instead of having it come after all the pointless, disgusting bullshit that I’d just been put through.
–Number Two: Kirito’s Sister–
Being boring and one-dimensional must run in Kirito’s family, because his fake sister gives him a run for his money in both regards, with the added bonus of being completely erroneous. I could supercut the entire Fairy Dance arc to include only the scenes where Suguha isn’t around, and it wouldn’t change the core narrative of the arc in the slightest. Everything that happens from the moment Kirito meets Suguha inside of the game, up through the moment that he leaves her behind to go take on the final boss, is a completely pointless distraction that adds nothing to the story of Kirito trying to get his girlfriend back.
Suguha’s entire character boils down to two words: “loves Kirito.” Every thought that she has, every action she takes, all of it revolves around the fact that she’s in love with Kirito. She becomes his companion for the whole Fairy Dance arc because she seems to be vaguely in love with his in-game character, whom she doesn’t realize is the same person as the fake brother whom she’s in love with. This of course leads to the ironic twist where, after realizing that she’s never going to get with Kirito because he’s in love with Asuna, she decides to chase his game avatar instead, only to find out that he, too, is in love with Asuna.
As viewers, we already know everything that Suguha is going to experience before it even happens. The moment we’re aware that she’s in love with Kirito, which is instantly, we know that she’s going to be let down eventually, and that she’s going to find out that the character in the game is the same as her brother. We’re then subjected to around eight episodes of Suguha being flustered over him, before she finally realizes everything, confesses, admits defeat, helps him out like she was already doing, and resigns from relevance.
Suguha’s presence in the story is obnoxiously boring, but it’s made far worse by just how stupid it is that she takes so long to realize Kirito in the game is her brother. Even if we assume that Kirito exclusively uses the name “Kirito” in online games, he still has the exact same face, eyes, voice, and attitude that he has in real life, plus his username is just a really obvious abbreviation of his first and last names. Suguha’s character looks nothing like her, and she roll-plays a more headstrong character, so it’s a little more acceptable that Kirito doesn’t notice it’s her, especially having barely heard her voice in the last two years. However, Suguha not recognizing the guy whom she’s hopelessly obsessed with when he’s barely different from his real-world counterpart is just utterly fucking stupid.
Worse still is the fact that Suguha never mentions to Kirito that she’s been playing a virtual MMO game. When Suguha explains how she got into the game, she specifically mentions understanding how Kirito felt about these games. So why does she never make this a topic of conversation? Here’s this thing that Kirito is massively passionate about, which would make an excellent conversation starter and bonding experience, and she never even mentions the game’s existence to him. In scenes where the two ask one-another about why they were up late, Kirito never mentions going into the game, which might be understandable because he doesn’t want to worry Suguha; but she lies and tells him that she’s been “on the internet.” Why? What possible reason could she have for hiding the fact that she plays this game? Is it because if she did tell him, then they’d find out that they’ve been playing together? Has Suguha been reading the script? What’s that? Is that the script over there in the grass?
–Number Three: Fucking Everything–
I’ve used the word “contrived” a lot of times in this post, and I’m about to use it a lot more, so for a moment I’d like to explain what exactly this word means. A contrivance is something which is created in a way that feels unnatural, spontaneous, artificial, and/or unrealistic. A plot contrivance is typically the result of when an author wants a certain thing to happen, but there’s no reason that such a thing should happen in the context of the story, so they come up with a reason for it to happen out of thin air. The Fairy Dance arc of Sword Art Online is founded entirely on a gigantic mountain of contrivances.
The arc seems to be formed around the idea that Asuna would still be trapped inside the Nerve Gear, and Kirito would have to go into another game to rescue her–and also, that Kirito’s sister, who’s in love with him, would take the part of his partner in the new game. All of the plot elements are constructed around making this story idea possible, regardless of whether any of it makes sense or flows naturally from one arc into the next.
So it turns out that Asuna’s dad is a big-wig at one of the companies that was involved in creating Sword Art Online to begin with. He wants one of his lead programmers or whatever to have long-run company control, so he plans to marry him to Asuna, even though she’s still in a coma. Because Asuna can’t sign the marriage documents, and obviously is going to refuse it anyways, Asuna’s dad decides to adopt the guy instead, which is actually a fairly common thing in Japan for businessmen who want one of their top employees to inherit the company. But the creepy guy wants Asuna to wear the wedding dress anyways, and basically tells Kirito that he’s going to rape her or something. If you’re wrinkling your brow right now, you’re having the appropriate reaction.
But wait, there’s more! This douchey guy is ALSO an evil maniacal programmer who’s trapping people inside a virtual MMO game, and he’s doing experiments on the brains of 300 trapped SAO players in order to figure out how to manipulate human emotions and… take over the world. Are you laughing yet?
Now, even if we let all this go–even if we can accept that virtual MMO games would still be played by ANYONE after the SAO incident, regardless of having better-regulated headgear–even if we can accept that Asuna just happens to be a part of this family, and happens to be getting married off to the biggest douche on earth who happens to be another evil programmer for Kirito to fight–the way that Kirito gets involved in the game is almost just as stupid.
In Alfheim Online, there’s a giant world tree which is meant to be the final dungeon. On top of it is where Asuna is being kept in a giant cage, but no one can actually reach that high up because the area is blocked by admins. However, a team of four characters managed to breach the top of the tree by launching off of one another, and the one who reached the top took a screenshot of what they saw, which, after doing a detail zoom, revealed a girl in a cage. These images leaked onto the internet, and Kirito’s buddy from SAO sent them to him, which causes Kirito to go into the game in search of Asuna.
If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering, if Suguha is playing the game already, couldn’t it have been so much easier? Why couldn’t Asuna be hidden in this game that Suguha plays, and Suguha could’ve been the one to find out about her, but she couldn’t save her because you have to play through the hardest dungeon to get to her. Then she gets Kirito into the game and they party together to go save Asuna. It would’ve been the kind of coincidence that actually feels kind of clever, and made the fact that Suguha ends up being Kirito’s teammate for the arc seem really natural.
Instead, Suguha and Kirito just happen to meet inside the game, and Kirito saves her at random, so like every other girl in the series, she immediately falls in love with him. The only reason that Suguha and Kirito have to meet this way is so we can have the dramatic turn-around when she finds out that he’s her brother… but why? That plot is stupid and boring! We know right from the third episode of the arc that Suguha is the player Kirito teamed up with, and it’s obvious that she’s going to be heartbroken. Why do we have to suffer this boring, pointless plotline, when we could’ve had an arc that made sense, and with the whole mistaken identity thing taken out, Suguha’s character would’ve had space to do anything other than obsess over Kirito.
Again, everything in this arc feels contrived and stupid. It’s just a sequence of plot points that the writer wanted to get to, connected by threads of utter bullshit. And to make matters worse–
–Number Four: UUUGGHGGHHHH—
Oddly enough, despite how ridiculous the setup of the Alfheim arc is, I actually thought for a little while that it might be better than the Aincrad arc in terms of overall construction. This time, instead of jumping around through a bunch of random stories over a large span of time, it’s established right off the bat that Kirito has about six days before the douchbag is adopted into Asuna’s family, and the story is told in a linear fashion. Giving Kirito a clear motivation right from the start was a great idea, and with that motivation being the imprisonment of the only likable character in the series, I actually felt some reason to get behind him for once.
Including Kirito’s daughter, Yui, in the new game, is probably the best decision that the writer made going into this arc. I’ve mentioned before that Kirito shows more character around her than anyone else, and giving him a teammate that he was as closely tied to as Asuna was a great way not only to give him something to be happy about, but to give him a partner who would actually be in on his plans the whole time, and not just someone for him to act cold and distant towards. Plus, due to her nature as an AI, Yui could be a plot convenience and exposition dumper, but also just as motivated to save Asuna as Kirito is, because she regards Asuna as her mother. I also just like Yui as a character. She’s adorable and doesn’t piss me off.
Kirito is altogether a more likable and interesting character in this arc, because of the fact that unlike SAO, Alfheim Online just a normal game. Without the fear of death weighing on his mind, Kirito is able to enjoy himself a little more, and sort of remember that the reason he played SAO to begin with is that he really loves playing MMORPGs. Throughout the arc, Kirito is a little bit more lighthearted, and you get the sense that he and Asuna will probably actually play more MMO games once they’re reunited because they’re so in-their-element in those worlds. Which, in fact, is exactly what happens at the end.
But that’s about where my praise for this arc stops. Even with the clever setup going into Alfheim, what actually happens in the game ends up being a boring slog through a completely unmemorable world, populated by characters that I probably wouldn’t remember existed if I didn’t have Wikipedia helping me keep track of it all. Hey everyone, remember Eugene? No? He’s the guy who shows up out of nowhere and has a gigantic, ridiculous battle with Kirito in episode twenty. Did you know his name is Eugene? I didn’t.
The first half of this arc once again suffers because of the way that the source material was constructed. You see, the Fairy Dance arc is told across the third and fourth books of the original light novels. Now what happened here is that the first book needed to have its own climax so that it would seem like there was a point to splitting the story across two books, and so the end of the first book wouldn’t just be a big blue-balling disappointment. To make this work, there needed to be a side-plot which could be resolved at the end of the first book, which would tie into the second book at some point as well.
The side plot is this: some douchey guy in Suguha’s race wants to sell them and the Cait Sith race out to some mean dudes call the Salamanders for… some reason. It doesn’t matter, because Kirito beats the Salamanders leader, and the evil guy gets banished from his race. The end. Oh, and because Kirito saved the day, these races come back later to help him take on the final dungeon at the last minute. Hooray.
I can’t even pretend like this story takes up an enormous amount of time or is horribly distracting like Suguha’s arc, because it actually happens so quickly that I couldn’t keep track of what was going on before it was all over. I was too busy being distracted by the fact that Kirito transforms into a giant satan monster and completely destroys an entire group of players out of nowhere–which he never does again, even when he’s fighting hundreds of CG robots in the final dungeon. What the fuck is happening?!
When the game Alfheim Onilne is explained to Kirito in episode sixteen, Andrew tells him that there is no levelling in this game, as well as no skill system, only magic. When Kirito starts the new game, his data gets transferred over from SAO, most of which is worthless because of the rules of the new game–but apparently he’s incredibly strong anyways. I appreciate the idea to have Kirito’s stats carry over so that he wouldn’t have to start off weak, and it was a clever video game construct to utilize here, but I don’t understand WHY Kirito is powerful in this world.
In this game, a player has no overall level, but levels up each action that they perform through repetition, which actually isn’t that different from SAO’s class system. The problem is that none of Kirito’s skills from SAO exist anymore, so he’s only capable of doing sword slashes. Apparently his sword slashing data carried over, though, because he’s immediately a master at it and one-hit kills relatively high-level players right off the bat. He also totally uses what by all accounts appear to be sword skills throughout the arc, and even refers to something as a “skill” at some point. At the beginning of the arc, he says that his dual-wielding skill was lost and doesn’t exist in this game, but then during the first major battle he takes a second sword from Suguha and it makes him super powerful again. Okay. He then goes back to one-handed swordsmanship for the final dungeon until Suguha dramatically gives him a second sword again.
If they were going to go to the trouble of making this a totally different game world with totally different mechanics from SAO, then why make Kirito fight in the exact same way? In the third episode of the arc, Kirito is shown trying to memorize and learn spells, and he uses one to turn into a gigantic, overpowered demon at some point, but then he never uses any spells ever again. Even though it seemed like his demon mode was able to accomplish far more than his swordsmanship could, he never uses it. Ugh, the more I think about this arc the more it pisses me off.
–Number Five: Don’t Hurry, Or Anything…–
The premise of the Alfheim arc, and the presentation of the Alfheim arc, are kind of at ends with one-another. While both of the ideas on which it’s constructed–to present a story in which Kirito has a clear motivation and a time limit on getting his goal accomplished, and to present a more carefully-paced story in a more fleshed-out video game world, end up clashing with one-another.
As I mentioned before, Kirito is told by the evil douchebag that he basically has six days before Asuna gets raped. However, after that first mention of the time limit, it’s never brought up again. Kirito’s overall sense of urgency fluctuates wildly from scene to scene, with parts where he seems really driven to hurry up and find Asuna, and other parts where he seems content to dick around and enjoy himself in this fantasy world.
The problem here really is that the viewer is aware of too much going into the arc. We already know that Asuna is in the world tree, and we clearly see that characters can just fly around freely in this game. So immediately, we’re like, why doesn’t Kirito just make a beeline for the World Tree without talking to anyone? Why isn’t he trying to get this over with in the shortest amount of time humanly possible?
When Suguha has to go and defend her race or whatever in episode twenty, she’s like “hey I’ve got some stuff to take care of, so you can go on ahead,” and Kirito’s just like, “naw, it’s no big deal, let me help out with your business or whatever,” and tags along. He doesn’t even know what she’s about to go do, or understand how long it might take, but he goes along on this random tangent anyways like he’s got all the time in the world.
The idea to have Kirito explore a video game world in more depth, and to have a more relaxed pace was a good idea; but doing it on a six-day time-limit while constantly reminding us that Asuna is being sexually assaulted by some fucking asshole is about as stupid as it gets.
And the worst part is that for all the time the character spend dicking around in this game, the world itself is still completely uninteresting. At least the world of SAO had a unique setup, with a lot of variety in its locations and a lot of different mechanics which were brought up along the way. Alfheim online seems to just be a big goddamn forest where nothing happens. Apart from the spells, races, and PVP mechanics, nothing is really added to the world. We never get any sense of what everyday life might be like for players in this game, because the only characters we ever follow are Kirito and Suguha–and all Suguha ever does is obsess over Kirito.
Every ounce of good sense that this arc starts with is completely squandered by the way that it’s constructed. The second half of the arc consists of some boring, tensionless action scenes that go on forever, followed by a final battle that is offensive to all senses. Once again, Kirito overpowers the limits of the system, which at this point is literally presented as the point of his character by the ghost of SAO’s creator, who apparently has become the God of the Wired from Serial Experiments Lain.
After all is said and done, there’s a surprisingly satisfying scene of Kirito almost cutting the douchebag’s throat in the real world, and Kirito and Asuna are reunited at last. SAO’s creator gives Kirito what is basically the source code for Sword Art Online, and Kirito releases it onto the internet, spawning the creation of hundreds of new MMO games on private servers around the world. Because, you know, that doesn’t sound like the most insane and dangerous thing which anyone has ever done. And finally, after years of being traumatized and tormented in the worlds of two virtual MMO games, Kirito and friends all meet up inside of Alfheim online, and Kirito mods the game so that the entire final dungeon of SAO is now playable in this world. You know, so that he and Asuna can play through BOTH of their worst nightmares all at once.
–Part Eight: The Epilogue–
I can already tell you what a lot of the comments on this video are going to say. “You’re overanalyzing it. Why can’t you just enjoy the show and turn your brain off. Of course you’re not going to enjoy it if you go into it with that mindset. Can’t you just enjoy a show without analyzing it?” No. The answer is no, I can’t do that. And moreover, I shouldn’t have to. There are plenty of shows out there that I can watch that won’t insult my intelligence like this.
The reason I decided to make this video was partly because I wanted people to stop asking me about this show, but the motivation to actually watch the entire series and make a video about it came when I started watching Log Horizon. Similar to Sword Art Online, Log Horizon is a show about a bunch of players being trapped inside of an MMO, but the series literally fixes every single problem that I had with SAO in the span of like two episodes.
Log Horizon is actually built around exploring the core concepts and ideas of MMO games, and could even be considered something like an analysis of what makes those games fun to begin with. It utilizes video game mechanics brilliantly to create a fully realized and deeply involving world that I find myself wanting to know more about constantly. And the show delivers–it ties world-building into the core narrative of the series, which is about a bunch of gamers realizing that if they’re going to be trapped inside of this game, they need to form a functioning community so that they can all live here comfortably.
In Log Horizon, people don’t die when they are killed, but the drama comes from the human conflict of different level players taking advantage of one-another. In this show, the main character, who, like Kirito, is one of the best players in the game, but in this case is a strategist in his mid-twenties who’s both humble and likeable, realizes that someone needs to take hold of the situation they’re in and try to improve the lives of everyone trapped in this game.
It’s a show about people coming together, and even though there are a lot of dickholes playing the game, common sense usually wins out and people fight to keep their world balanced and liveable. The show has a large cast of characters, all of whom are unique and interesting in their own right, and the plot construction is fucking brilliant. It tackles the human experience of playing the game, develops a firm political backdrop, and stays intriguing and exciting even when characters are just sitting around talking for most of the episode.
Log Horizon doesn’t have the flashy, over-the-top animation in its fight scenes that SAO has, but its fights are comprehensible and the characters actually have to use tactics in battles as they would in a real MMORPG.
I’m not saying this show is perfect–it’s got a silly and repetitive sense of humor which can get really old, and because it’s balancing so many characters at once, a lot of them don’t really stand out. Still, I’d easily recommend this show to pretty much anyone, and have been greatly enjoying it so far.
Like Sword Art Online, Log Horizon was originally a series of light novels. Both of them are probably aimed at a young male demographic, and both are more or less wish-fulfillment fantasies about a nerdy gamer whose skills end up making him the most important person in a virtual world. Sword Art Online aired on a late-night time slot, most likely aimed at otaku viewers looking for trashy entertainment. Log Horizon aired in a prime-time slot on Japan’s government-funded public broadcasting network aimed towards educational shows. In other words, for all intents and purposes, Log Horizon can be considered an educational family show.
Understanding this, I feel that there’s no excuse for Sword Art Online to be the way it is. When I see a show with better writing, characters, execution, and themes aimed at an even younger audience, I wonder how anyone could stand there and say that it’s acceptable for Sword Art Online to be so fucking retarded. I understand if you enjoy this show, and I won’t blame you for being entertained, but DO NOT try and excuse this show’s shortcomings by making it sound like I’M doing something wrong by recognizing them. You can enjoy this show all you want, but you can NOT make excuses for it.
Sword Art Online has a second season beginning soon, and I think it goes without saying that I don’t plan on watching it. Even if it turns out to be better than the original, I’d be hard-pressed to believe that it could actually become a GOOD show. Frankly, I’ve been disappointed by pretty much every A-1 Pictures show that I’ve ever watched with only a couple exceptions, and by now I think it’s clear that Reki Kawahara is a hack writer, so I’m considering my involvement with the series done. I can finally move on now and finish Log Horizon in peace. I encourage you to do the same.
At the start of the summer season, I released two videos regarding the first two episodes of Zankyou no Terror–one about how the first episode showcased excellence in anime directing and show-don’t-tell storytelling, and the second about how the show gracefully handled its exposition. However, as early as episode three, I began to recognize a big problem overtaking my impression of the series. As time wore on, I and many other viewers gawked in abject horror as Zankyou no Terror turned out to be kind of a giant trainwreck.
If you look around on anime message boards, or just talk to my brother, you’ll walk away with a laundry lists of reasons for why people didn’t like the show, but I think a lot of these reasons come down to the tangible details of the situation. Not to say that these aren’t issues in themselves, but I think that the biggest flaw in Zankyou no Terror is fundamental to the entire structure and style of the series. In spite of the technical proficiency of its animation, writing, directing and music, Zankyou no Terror failed because right from the beginning, it forgot to give the audience any reason to give a damn.
Film Crit Hulk has written at great length about the problems that come from writing a script around the ‘mystery box” mentality–a term which was coined by J.J. Abrams. The idea of the mystery box is that the audience is drawn in by their desire for answers to the big mysteries left open over the course of a film or series. However, when a script relies solely on its mysteries to carry the viewer through the show, it starts to claw at the viewer’s patience, and Zankyou no Terror very quickly and severely becomes a test of patience that never pays off in the end. In fact, despite the series clearly having been written with the “mystery box’ mentality, with the big reveals saved for the very end, I’m hesitant to call it a real mystery shows since all of the answers are readily apparent right from the beginning. The ending of Zankyou no Terror doesn’t offer any twists, but merely the confirmation of suspicions that the viewer has all along, so if you were holding out hope that the big reveal might make everything interesting in retrospect, you’ll be that much more disappointed in turn.
In the first episodes of the series, we learn everything there is to learn about the two main characters. They’re terrorists who were tested on as children, but escaped the facility that trained them. One suffers post-traumatic stress disorder, while the other seeks connection in a girl named Mishima Lisa. They’ve stolen a bunch of plutonium for some reason, and they keep bombing buildings while giving riddles to the police for some reason. However, they make a point not to get anyone killed. All of this can be discerned from the first episode, or at least in the first two, and this remains all of the information we have on these characters throughout the entire series.
We only learn why Nine and Twelve are doing all of this at the very end, and the reason is simply to expose the existence of Japan’s atomic bomb to the world. Because we’re never sure what the characters are after, it’s impossible to really care about their actions throughout the series, and when it turns out to be something incredibly simple which we could’ve guessed from the start, we find ourselves wondering why it was ever a mystery to begin with. Even if we ignore how asinine the entire terrorism plan is, and how ridiculous it is to paint these characters as moral or noble in any way, the story is just so badly structured that we can only recognize how stupid these characters are at the very end. Even if the whole terrorism thing really DID seem justified, we wouldn’t have known that at all watching the series, and thus had no reason to root for or care about the characters. Hell, even if Nine and Twelve had just been really interesting people to watch, it might not have mattered that we didn’t know their motivations, but every conversation between them is just a repeat of the stuff they talk about in episodes one and two, so they always feel like a waste of time.
Speaking of a waste of time, Mishima Lisa is the most pointless character I’ve seen in quite a while. She’s painted as important right from the beginning, and we’re made to understand her character very clearly, but all she amounts to is a sort of love interest for Twelve. There’s no chemistry between them, and neither are interesting in their own right. All of the dialog surrounding Lisa is either about how she’s in the way, or about how Twelve wants her around anyways. Her involvement in the story never feels justified, and she takes up ridiculous amounts of screentime just for the same repetitive conversations.
And if she’s not bad enough, there’s the rival character, Five. I use the word “character” with hesitation, as Five is more of a gimmick. Her only trait is an obsession with taking down Nine (the reasons for which we never really learn), and she tries to do so using over-the-top, immersion-breaking schemes that never amount to anything. Her entire subplot adds nothing to the story and changes nothing in the end. She’s purely a frivolous character used to pad out the runtime of the show and provide a rival who would seem to be on more equal footing with the main characters, even though Shibazaki had already proven himself more than capable of contending with them, and Five’s stupid plans only managed to make the script feel campier than it seemed to want to be.
Looking at Nine and Five, I found myself thinking about Death Note, and how that show’s central rivalry was so perfectly handled. We totally understood both Light and L’s motivations, and they felt like real, living characters, whose plans, however campy, all made sense in the context of the story surrounding them. These two had intense, meaningful encounters right from the beginning, where both sides were giving their all to winning. In this show, Five just comes off as a total psychopath who isn’t at home in the straight-faced setting of the story, and Nine is a boring, static character, who only regards Five as a very dangerous nuisance. There is no thematic weight to their rivalry, no drama, no characterization–it just feels like it’s going through the motions of what’s supposed to make a thriller story interesting, with no comprehension of how to actually make viewers care about characters.
Shibazaki is the closest thing that the series has to a real character–he’s motivated by past mistakes, and by his hatred towards nuclear terrorism, and there’s weight to his actions as he puts himself at risk to get his job done. However, Shibazaki is almost completely declawed as of episode five, with the arrival of Five, and even in the end his ability to solve the riddles never really amounts to much. Nine and Twelve enact their entire plan exactly as they’d had it laid out from the beginning, and while they see Shibazaki as integral to that plan, and it’s on him to carry the message in the end, it never really feels like he accomplished anything.
In the end, Zankyou no Terror is a series without a soul. It has no thematic weight to it whatsoever. It doesn’t tell the viewer anything but a fictional story about a game between two terrorists and two members of the police force. The bulk of the story is just a bunch of setups for explosive set pieces, none of which are involving or have any dramatic tension. None of the characters are interesting, and most of them don’t even matter. The only saving grace of the experience is the heartbreakingly phenomenal soundtrack by Yoko Kanno, and the outstanding visuals. However, I hesitate to say that the show really had any interesting scenes after the first episode, because in spite of the attempt to create a thick atmosphere and delicate use of pacing, it’s so impossible to care about anything that happens that I constantly found myself waiting for the series to get to the point. Every gigantic action set piece felt like a waste of time since I didn’t understand the significance of any of the characters’ actions, and especially the setups of Five’s plans were so ridiculous that I couldn’t even take them seriously.
I can’t say that Zankyou no Terror is even slightly worth watching. If you want a mystery thriller involving terrorist plots, go read the infinitely superior 20th Century Boys, or even just read or watch Death Note again. Any single episode of that show is more interesting than the entirety of Zankyou no Terror.
October is the month for horror, and you know what that means!
Right now, let’s make one thing clear. This is not a fair and balanced, unbiased review of Sword Art Online 2’s Gun Gale Online arc. I do not see any value in that kind of review to begin with, and you’ll find nothing like it on my channel. Moreover, let it be known right here and now that I have never hated anything with the level of fervor and passion that I hate Sword Art Online. This is the kind of hatred that has come around full circle to being love. You may find yourself asking, “if you hate this show so much, why watch it? Why take so much time out of your life to rag on it?” And the answer is simply that I LOVE hating Sword Art Online. And believe me, there is plenty of demand for this kind of video.
In case you missed it, I’ve already made an hour-long analysis detailing why I hated the first season. You don’t necessarily need to watch that video if you’re just here to sit back and laugh at this show with me, but I do recommend checking it out if you want to get an idea of the mindset I’m approaching this show with, and also just to witness one of my all-around best analytical videos. By the time I finished that video, I was exhausted with the show and wanted nothing to do with the upcoming second season–but in the time that followed, something changed, and I slowly became obsessed.
For starters, while the majority of the comments on my video were from people agreeing with me, and even a shocking amount of people admitting that they agreed with all of my points even though they enjoyed the show, there were still some comments which argued against my video, which kept my mind on the subject–and I’ll be addressing some of these comments shortly. Moreover, I found that I kept being baffled all over again the more I thought about the show, finding new reasons to hate it and continually getting into rants about it on my radio show. It reached a point where almost every single day I found myself telling someone–anyone–about some new or old reason that I hated Sword Art Online. It became like a pastime. If you follow me on twitter, you’ve probably seen no shortage me bringing the show up again and again.
I won’t pretend to understand this obsession of mine. Honestly, I think Sword Art Online may have broken me somehow. I’m really not used to watching bad shows all the way to the conclusion, and most of the time when I drop a show, I actually do so expecting that it probably gets better later. I never would’ve imagined that a show I at first found to be mediocre and dropped after six episodes would turn out to be the most vile trash I’ve ever consumed in my life. But let’s backpedal a bit here and address some concerns that viewers had about my last video.
A lot of people were upset by the fact that I gave Sword Art Online a one out of ten score. People have tried to rationalize with me their reasoning for why the show deserves a better score, or that I might have some kind of broken and stupid scoring system. Some have even said that if I think SAO is THAT bad, there must be very few anime out there which I can enjoy. That one I’d chalk up to the accusers having seen very little anime, as I can quite easily name hundreds of shows that I enjoyed more than SAO. I’d also like to point out that I have given out every score from ten to one, and still found that Sword Art Online is at the bottom.
I’ll admit that there were things about SAO I kind of enjoyed. I liked Asuna’s character design a lot, and found the general look of Aincrad kind of appealing. The animation quality was pretty high in a few scenes, although I’d argue that it completely goes to waste because of the shitty fight direction, but there are some memorable sakuga moments in the show. Plus, as mentioned in my review, I actually enjoyed the romance between Asuna and Kirito in the two or three scenes where they made a decent couple.
Sword Art Online is not the least enjoyable show that I’ve watched in recent enough memory to grade it. That dishonor goes to Armitage III: Dual Matrix. However, I gave Armitage a two out of ten, because even though it was horrendously boring, it never managed to offend me, other than in the fact that it wasted my time. Meanwhile, whereas I probably would’ve given SAO a two or a three if it had ended with the Aincrad arc, I was so put off by all the ridiculous Asuna rape scenes in the Alfheim arc that I took the score back down to a one. That is to say that the negative aspects of SAO so overwhelmingly outweighed the positives that even the few things I did like about the series were not enough to raise its score above a film in which I found nothing even remotely enjoyable.
Moving along, another complaint I got a lot of on my last video was that I didn’t understand the reasoning behind Kirito announcing himself as a beater at the end of episode two. Basically, the idea was that Kirito was trying to divert all of the hatred towards beta testers onto himself in order to protect them, and I admit that I fucked up in my video by failing to grasp this somehow. However, this doesn’t make it any less retarded and narratively broken. First of all, no one actually knows who the beaters are exactly, so they still end up doubting anyone who’s overly powerful, as evidenced both in the dialog of certain episodes, and in that Kirito has to hide his power level. Moreover, I still stand by that the most intelligent course of action would’ve been to have a fucking conversation like a normal human being and sort shit out instead of trying to become the batman and failing. I acknowledge that I made a mistake in the last video, and I hate myself for doing it because every stupid SAO fanboy who gets to that part screams at me that my whole analysis is wrong, completely ignoring the other fifty-odd minutes of legitimate criticism, based on that one little mistake that, even when corrected, does not in any way improve my opinion of the show.
So anyways, I said before that I wasn’t going to watch Sword Art Online 2, but my brother Victor and his friend Hope, who both hated the first season just as much as I did, thought it might be fun to watch season 2 and make fun of it the whole time; and I knew it would make for a great video series, so we filmed ourselves doing it. Unfortunately, we only got to do three episodes before Aniplex started pulling them down for copyright infringement, so I thought, fuck it, I give up. We got someone who’d read the novels to explain to us the bafflingly stupid plot of GGO, had a laugh, and got over it. At least we would have, were it not for the fact that somehow, GGO began to heal the series’ reputation which Alfheim had shattered.
Even though I watched the same first three episodes that everyone else did, which were some of the most trite, boring, and badly written episodes of anime that I’ve seen all year, I saw people on 4chan and twitter buzzing about how it was showing a lot of promise, already better than Alfheim, and had an interesting character in the form of Shinon. Wait, who? That cardboard cutout I flipped off at Otakon? Really? REEEALLY?!
So here I am again. 1300 words deep into the longest video introduction ever, and if you’ve stuck around this far, then welcome aboard my friends, because the ride never ends. Whereas with season one, I broke everything down into major points that I wanted to tackle, with season two I’ve decided to take a different approach and tear the series apart scene-by-scene in a way similar to the Your Movie Sucks reviews of The Walking Dead. Assuming you’ve seen my last video, you should already have a good basis of what my major problems are with the series as a whole, so here we’ll be building off of those points by analyzing how badly the show fucks up on a moment-by-moment basis. So without further ado, LET’S GET IT ON!
—
Episode one
—
The first episode is called The World of Guns, which would actually sound kind of rad if I didn’t know any better. It opens up with some legitimately fucking awesome cityscape shots, before diving into this little bar. Now, I don’t have a problem with this bar, I like bars, but I’m just gonna put this little counter here on screen for a second and I’ll explain it later. All the patrons of this bar appear to be wearing noob armor, which happens to look almost exactly like the noob armor from Sword Art Online. You’d think that all these noobs would at least go out and get some basic new armor before dicking around in a bar all day, but whatever.
Everyone’s tuned in to this video cast where top players are being interviewed inside the game. Kinda seems inane to watch this kind of thing while inside a game world, but I know people who actually picture-in-picture netflix while playing their Xbox One, so I guess I kinda get it, though in that case they’re at least PLAYING the game and not just sitting around in a virtual bar watching videos. Whatever, the video seems to have a nico nico douga style chat thing going on in the background, which makes me wonder if the people commenting are all doing that from inside the game or what.
This blue-haired douchebag is explaining that for eight months, agility-based builds have been dominating the game, but for some reason recently, strength builds are now starting to gain more traction. When I first heard this, I assumed that the game must have been patched recently to nerf agility builds, but if this was true, the players would probably be fucking rioting as basically happens when anything changes in League of Legends, especially if it’s as hard to change your build as this guy is implying. They don’t mention any patches though, so my next assumption is that something new was learned about the fundamentals of the game which caused this change, sort of like when wavedashing was discovered in Super Smash Bros. Melee and it came to completely define the way professionals played the game.
Either way, most of the best players would probably change their build immediately. Even if it’s a game where you can’t respec your character, high-level players probably make a bunch of characters with different specs anyways. I’ve watched my little brother go through a ton of Path of Exile builds, which are exceedingly easy to fuck up if you don’t know what you’re doing, basically unbothered by how much grinding it takes to get a new character up to a decent level. It’s just what MMO players do. That said, I can’t possibly imagine players getting into a game where it takes eight fucking months to be able to make a high-tier build. You’d basically be trapped into one build forever, so if you did anything wrong, or anything changed about the game, as is the case in this show, you’d be completely fucked, which is exactly what happened to all the agility players. This wouldn’t just be grounds for strength players to mouth off, it would more likely be the death of this game as something which anyone played seriously, and people would move on to the next one.
Anyways, this asshole Death Gun gets up and starts mouthing off, and I guess the people on the other side of the screen can hear him for some reason, because they all stop talking. Death Gun shoots the screen, and seconds later, Zexceed starts grabbing his heart and falls over dead. Hm… an item which when used on someone makes them die of a heart attack moments later, with “death” in the name. What does that remind me of…? Oh right, it’s Death Note. They ripped off Death Note, but with a gun. Also, can we just talk about the name Death Gun? As opposed to what, Life Gun? Honestly, this is one of those things that’s so dumb I kind of love it, so we’ll leave it at that.
Now we cut to best girl Asuna, who helpfully tells us the month and year just in case we weren’t sure when this takes place. She wonders, “what’s the difference between the real world and the virtual world?” to which Kirito replies “the amount of information.” Now, I suppose if you could manipulate the brain to experience a virtual world in a way that’s indistinguishable from the real world, then from your perspective it would seem to be identical, but I think there’s a lot more separating actual real-world existence from virtual existence than just information. For one thing, the real world doesn’t disappear during a power outage.
Admittedly, this first little exchange between them is kind of cute, where they realize they’re wearing their old SAO colors. It reminded me that I kind of liked this couple once, briefly. Kirito then starts detailing how the East Park of the Imperial Palace is like its own little closed-off world, which has its own closed-circuit security, isn’t allowed to be flown over or tunneled beneath, and is basically isolated from the outside. I tried looking into this to see if it’s true of the modern imperial palace, but didn’t come up with any info on it. When I first saw this scene, I assumed since it came out of nowhere that it was some kind of plot foreshadowing, and that the closed-offness of this place would be significant, but I was wrong. Apparently it’s because this place reminds Kirito of the floating castle from Aincrad. You know, that place where all those thousands of people died in a gigantic tragedy. How romantic!
Asuna asks Kirito about his plans for the future, and he clarifies his previous statement about information to indeed be about individual perception of reality, while explaining that he wants to eventually develop new technology to improve the function of augmented reality and make it so he and Asuna can live with Yui as if she were real. Now, I think this is pretty fine as a motivation, but I thought it was odd that Kirito suddenly has this ambition which we’ve never heard about before. As it turns out, the explanation for this lies in Accel World, the series which got Reki Kawahara popular and allowed Sword Art Online to finally get published and continued professionally. Accel World actually takes place in SAO’s future, and is based around the very VR technology which Kirito goes on to create. In other words, if Kirito wasn’t enough of an absolute God in his own story, he even lays the foundation of Accel World, too. We’re hearing about it now because this volume was released after Accel World was well underway, so Kawahara is basically retconning Kirito into eventually creating that technology.
At eight minutes and forty seconds into the episode, Kirito walks into this little diner. (Oh hey, it’s that counter again.) He’s here to meet… some guy, who apparently works for Cyber-Connect–I mean, the Virtual Division. Whatever that is.
We launch into a fucking insanely massive exposition dump the likes of which are rarely seen. Seriously, this blows the fucking Walking In Circles scene from Fate/Zero out of the water, and that scene at least was so ridiculous to look at that it was entertaining in its own way. These two just sit around dumping exposition, half of which we could easily have inferred from the opening scene, for what feels like an eternity. Kirito comments that Gun Gale Online is the ONLY Japanese game with professional players, which just seems preposterous to me, considering there are Japanese games with professional players in existence already.
In the middle of it all we get this FUCKING AMAZING visualization of Death Gun firing a bullet through someone’s ethernet port, which flies around the room Mr. Mosquito style, and murders someone in their bed. When I first saw this scene, I couldn’t stop laughing for minutes on end. The fact that it’s actually really well animated, but looks so fucking ridiculous, just makes it all the more perfect. No matter how awful this show might be overall, I’ve gotta admit I never get sick of this ridiculous bullshit.
Kirito then explains that in GGO, you can exchange your in-game currency for real world currency, which is why there are so many passionate high-level players. Once again, this IS something that happens in MMOs in real life already, though not on official terms. That said, I can’t imagine how or why this system would actually work in an official capacity. When people sell in-game funds to another person, it’s a trade of one currency for another, but Kirito implies that in this game, you straight up pay out the points you’ve earned for cash. It makes sense to have a system like this in a casino, where you only win if you’re lucky and you get kicked out for winning too much, but I don’t understand how a game developer can afford to consistently pay its players, often far more than what those players are paying for their subscription fees. Apparently the top players are making 200 to 300 thousand yen a month, which is like 2 to 3 thousand dollars. How can this system possibly function?! By the way, is that Steve Jobs’ ghost introducing the iGlass? Is that Apple’s answer to Google Glass? Cause if so, eleven years is a hell of a long time to stay behind the curve, Apple.
Kirito’s scene in the cafe ends at 19 minutes and twenty-two seconds into the episode. That’s ELEVEN FUCKING MINUTES that this episode spent on pure exposition, between characters SITTING DOWN IN A CAFE. One of the worst parts of Sword Art Online has always been that the show is just plain fucking boring. I thought the exposition in the first episode of season one was bad, but even that wasn’t nearly this long, and at least it had this whole thing with the evil guy floating in the air and like every Randy in the whole game shitting themselves in terror. This is just a couple guys eating fucking cake and explaining the whole plot. What baffles me is that anyone even made it past this episode. If I’d gone into this show with no expectations and watched this episode, I never would’ve made it through this entire scene. I’ve dropped shows halfway through the first episode that weren’t even this bad about their exposition. The idea that anyone watched this episode and got really excited about another season of Sword Art Online blows my fucking mind.
As Asuna explains the connection between the Imperial Garden and castle Aincrad, she still refers to the creator of SAO as Commander. You’d think something more like “that fucking monster” might be more appropriate, but I guess since these two met in SAO, they prefer to think of it as their romantic getaway rather than that terrible place where everyone got murdered by a sick, evil man. Whatever keeps the PTSD at bay I guess. At the end, we get to meet Shinon’s ass and cameltoe, followed, to a lesser extent by Shinon, and OH MY GOD she’s voiced by Miyuki Sawashiro?! I loved you, how could you do this to me?! We close out on the horribly obnoxious opening theme, which, by the way, I highly recommend everyone watch my AMV where I set this opening video to that one fucking horrible Hawthorne Heights song. It’s legitimately my favorite thing I’ve ever made and I’ve watched it like thirty times. Seriously, go do it, it’s linked below, pause the video.
—
Episode two
—
Episode two’s cold open has Shinon fighting a large boss by sitting on a ledge outside of its attack range and emptying like eight cartridges of ammo into it. I assume that she’s exploiting a glitch, in which case someone needs to patch this fucking boss, because there’s no way this should be a viable strategy. This would mean that the sniper class has no chance of ever dying as long as they have a perch to fire from, meaning they can basically cheat the system and solo the entire game by playing in the most boring way imaginable.
So I guess to make up for the first episode only having like two minutes of game footage, this episode is set entirely inside of Gun Gale Online and follows a mission with Shinon. It opens up with a bunch of Randys talking about some mission they’re about to do, and it’s evident from their character designs that none of them matter at all. This guy’s moustache is notable enough to make him relevant to this episode, but just by looking at these guys, you can tell that none of them will ever show up again, so there’s no reason to care about anything which might happen to them.
Moustache guy explains that in this game, only real guns are effective against other players, wheres they kill monsters using energy guns. Because players who focus on killing monsters primarily use and assumably spec towards energy guns, they’re easy prey for player killers using real guns. In other words, the PVP in this game is horribly fucking broken and makes no sense because Reki Kawahara doesn’t know shit about MMORPGs.
Have some shots of Shinon’s legs and tits while this guy pervs on her, even though he knows she’s a high school student. Even though YOU know she’s a high school student. Okay look I know this show is made for high school students anyways, but until the day twenty-somethings stop calling it awesome, I’m not going to be okay with it.
This might be a bit of a nitpick even for me, but what’s up with Shinon putting on a headset when the other guys run out onto the battlefield? Do you have to actively equip a headset in this game in order to party chat? I guess it’s supposed to add some kind of realism factor, which I can totally see being a thing, but it seems really asinine to not have party chat available at all times, and who knows how they handle guild and private chats. This is the kind of thing I could see being done in like a niche military-style realistic MMO game, but not in the one of the biggest games around.
Apparently one of the mechanics in this game is that you can see the trajectory of bullets that are coming at you. Theoretically, you’d think that this would make sniping nearly impossible, since the element of surprise is gone the moment you fire, and as long as the opponent notices in time, which the cloaked guy does, they can easily sidestep it. It’s explained later that a sniper’s first shot doesn’t have a prediction line, but that’s just cheap, since they’re basically guaranteed at least one kill. Being able to see these lines isn’t necessarily a bad mechanic, but it would probably turn it into a sort of tactics game that’s more about misdirection and team effort than typical cover-based shooter strategies like what the characters seem to be using. At this point though, it really just feels like Kawahara was throwing in every new idea he had for a game mechanic with reckless abandon. By the way, Shinon can easily dodge a flurry of bullets without even being behind cover.
All of the Randies get killed like you knew they were going to, and Shinon keeps repeating this corny ass line about how she has to kill this guy because he’s quote, “strong enough to smile on the battlefield.” It’s a fucking video game, I kind of hope most people are having enough fun to smile on the battlefield. When the big guy catches her before she has time to shoot, she gets the drop on him by jumping an absolutely insane distance INTO the direction of his fire, and for whatever reason he just isn’t capable of raising the gun fast enough to shoot her before she can get into point blank range and annihilate him. At this point, it’s less a matter of Shinon being the best sniper in the game, and more just that she’s unstoppably, unbelievably overpowered. Seems to be a common theme among SAO characters.
So once all that’s said and done, we jump cut to Alfheim online, and hey, it’s the loli from episode three of season one! And OH MY GOD, SHE’S GETTING TENTACLE GROPED BY PLANT MONSTERS, AGAIN! WHAT A FUCKING PHENOMENAL CALLBACK! You know, my good friend ghostlightning had a term for when a show would call back to memorable moments from previous iterations or works. He called it, “remembering love.” However, my friends, for this scene I’m coining the term, “remembering hate.” As in, OH YEAH, I REMEMBER WHY I HATE THIS FUCKING SHOW. Because it thinks that “loli who’s always getting tentacle groped” is an actual characterization!
Anyways, this episode gives us our first look at my favorite thing in SAO 2, the Spurned Women’s Club. This group, consisting of the girl who fell in love with Kirito in episode three, the girl who fell in love with Kirito in episode seven, and Kirito’s sister who’s been in love with him forever, follows Kirito and Asuna around so they can bask in the glow of their unyielding jealousy with only one-another for comfort. Seriously, this is a thing, all of Kirito’s rejected would-be girlfriends just follow him and his girlfriend around, it’s amazing. I assume Asuna let’s them stay just to look down on them.
Hey Kirito, isn’t it uncomfortable to lay with your arm on top of your sword like that? I’m still not clear on how much feeling the characters actually have in these games. If I find out it’s none at all, then Kirito and Asuna’s sex scene from the first show is just gonna get really awkward. At least the ending theme isn’t that bad.
—
Episode three
—
It was around the time of episode three coming out that people started to really warm up to Sword Art Online 2 when the show was first airing, and I totally get why. It’s the first episode that actually injects some fucking human drama into the show by giving us the backstory and motivations of Shinon’s real world counterpart, Asada. That said, I’d be hard-pressed to call this a “good” episode of anime by any stretch. Yeah, in a show that’s this barren with things to care about, any little bit of characterization is going to feel like a breath of fresh air, but that doesn’t change how sloppily paced, boring and generic most of the episode is.
It starts off with Carne Asada in a generic bullying scenario in which she gets brought to her knees by a girl pointing a finger gun at her and threatening to show her model guns at school. I guess GUNS are her TRIGGER!!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!
Carne Asada gets rescued by some kid who obviously wants to fuck her and they sit down in yet another cafe for another four fucking minutes of completely boring exposition. This time they don’t even have the decency to show the characters eating or waiters taking away their dishes or any crazy visualizations, they’re just fucking sitting there. Having a mirror in the background isn’t impressive when the characters aren’t doing anything, which is why the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya is the only show that got this right.
Exposition scenes in cafes are one of the worst things you can ever do in a show, because they’re totally fucking boring and cliche. If you take screenwriting classes, as my brother Victor has, they actually teach you to never write exposition scenes in cafes or restaurants because it’s so fucking tired and boring. And it was at this point in episode three that I started thinking back, and realized that Sword Art Online is CRAZY with its diner scenes. Off the top of my head, episodes three, four, five, six, eight, fifteen, seventeen, and twenty-five had dialog scenes in some kind of pub or cafe, and that’s just what I can remember. This wasn’t as aggravating in season one though, because the first two arcs were set inside of fantasy games, so the cliche of meeting at the pub or inn is a fitting trope of the genre. Even when they met at the bar in the real world, it wasn’t so bad because one of the characters from SAO actually ran the place.
Now, however, there’s been two exposition cafe scenes in the real world, and it just comes off as fucking lazy, while drawing attention to just how much Reki Kawahara uses cafe scenes as a crutch to dispense large amounts of story details that he isn’t creative enough to weave into the narrative. When I see two characters sitting in a cafe talking, I take that as a signal that I’m about to see a bunch of boring shit for X number of minutes, and it immediately disengages me from what’s happening, and characters introduced in these kind of scenes leave no impact whatsoever. It’s the worst way to handle expository dialog, yet it seems to be the only way this show knows how–and it only gets worse from here.
ANYWAYS, now we jump into Carne Asada’s backstory. I like how when her mom gets shoved to the ground, she doesn’t even drop her magazine, she just sits there like an idiot. Eventually she gets up and attacks the guy, and amid the confusion, gets a hold of his gun and GATS that summbitch. I find it kind of hard to believe that she would’ve fired the gun more than once, or that it would’ve been necessary to do so, but whatever, this is fine as a backstory. It makes enough sense as a reason she’d be scared of guns; though this whole conceit that her mother’s afraid of her now is total bullshit. I’m pretty sure if my daughter saved my life from a crazy fucking drug addict, I’d have given her a high five, put her on my shoulders, carried her straight to McDonald’s and bought her a happy meal with a My Little Pony toy. Then I would’ve educated her on gun violence or something, look I’m not irresponsible.
Kirito tells Asuna about how he’s gonna go play GGO for a while, and we learn that for him to transfer his current file into another game, it’ll erase all his items in Alfheim for some reason. This is really a plot device for why Asuna isn’t going to follow him into GGO, although if she knows the circumstances behind why he’s going, then I’m not really convinced she wouldn’t have gone anyways to look out for him. It certainly would’ve been better than basically writing the best character out of the show for fourteen episodes. Kirito then visits this creepily flirtatious nurse and jumps into the game.
Back with Shinon, it’s finally revealed that the reason she plays Gun Gale Online is for some kind of exposure therapy to get over her fear of guns, and she’s convinced that if she can become the best player in the game, it’ll erase her fears. You know, I could rag on this, but it’s really not that bad of a concept. From a dramatic storytelling standpoint it’s fine, it’s a character motivation that makes enough sense that we can at least buy into her desire to become the best player in the game. Like, I get it. It’s certainly not the stupidest motivation we’re going to see this season.
—
Episode four
—
Let’s talk about Kirito’s fucking character design. First of all, apparently in Gun Gale Online, your character model is totally randomized. NO ONE WOULD PLAY THIS FUCKING GAME. No one, and I mean NO ONE would play an MMORPG in which you have to manage your build for MONTHS ON END if you can’t even design your own fucking character. This is like the most basic feature of MMORPGs, and most games are constantly trying to expand on customization rather than reduce it. The idea that this is one of the biggest MMO games around is practically insane at this point.
Moreover, on what basis does the game choose your character model, because it seems like most people have voices that perfectly match their design. Part of me thinks the game might automatically morph the voice to match the body, since Kirito starts talking with a really effeminate inflection before he even realizes that he’s in a female-looking body, but at this point I can hardly imagine the concept even making that much sense. The fact alone that not only does Kirito’s character just look like him with long hair, but that Carne Asada’s character is just herself with blue hair and without glasses, feels like it’s trying to insult my intelligence.
Hey remember that big guy from episode two? Did he only spec to be a gigantic strength build after his character was already oriented that way? His randomly designed character? And don’t try to tell me that the character designs somehow read what the person playing them looks like, because Zexceed looked nothing like his character. I don’t even want to know how they’re gonna explain Death Gun. But you know what’s really fucked about all of this is the logic behind it. The only reason this system exists is so that Kirito could have a girly looking design for this arc, and the conceit that he couldn’t customize it exists because it wouldn’t be in character for him to design it that way. Not a single thought was paid to how this would shatter the immersion by making no fucking sense. Ahaha! Look at Kirito try to use feminine hand gestures to convince Shinon he’s a girl! It’s funny cause it’s sexist!
Shinon tells Kirito a bunch of shit that we already learned in episode two, and then we meet this magnificent character. [Horrible English quotes.] It’s funny cause it’s racist! (No really, it’s actually funny though.) Kirito plays this little bullet dodging game, and immediately displays a better understanding of the game’s mechanics than most of its long-time players because he’s some kind of virtual MMO Newtype. Seriously, is predicting the prediction lines that novel of a concept? Wouldn’t high-level players have discovered this technique like, immediately? I know that every decent FPS player I’ve known is able to predict their enemy’s movements and firing trajectory, so I don’t see how this is any revelation to the players of GGO.
Shinon says some things to suggest that at this point she’s basically a gun otaku, excitedly describing the histories and capabilities of several guns, which kind of calls into question how she’s still so afraid of them even being suggested in reality. Kirito being the gothy fifteen year-old he is immediately goes for a black-handled beam saber, arguing that if the weapon exists in the game, it must be usable. Of course, usually when a weapon isn’t being used in a game, it’s because that game is unbalanced, but if this game is in fact balanced, then Kirito’s right–and you’d think that sword users would be pretty common for the same reason that people always rushed for the energy swords in Halo multiplayer. Shit, why am I even questioning this, obviously our lord and savior Kirito is just so good that he’ll make this otherwise broken weapon usable.
While he’s at it, he makes these buggies which apparently everyone finds impossible to control usable, and at this point I’m wondering if GGO is just meant to be like this really shitty, broken game that would kinda suck if you weren’t stupidly awesome like Kirito. I mean what kind of MMO makes you travel in real time with no teleporters, and then has cities that are several kilometers in size? Why is anyone playing this fucking game?!
Text version and links (video version highly recommended though): Co-edited by The Davoo: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheDavoo Part One here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHhebk70xRo The style and title are in reference to one of my favorite youtube channels, YourMovieSucks! Watch his vids: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL83BA48D283767122 If you enjoy my videos, consider supporting me via patreon: http://www.patreon.com/digibrony Or through paypal: digitalboyreviews@gmail.com Watch my analysis of the first season here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uON7ANNOi4 Text version of this post (go here to leave comments): SAO book burning video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYFCJMbfh0U&feature=youtu.be Check out my channel Digi Does Anime if you’re keeping up with current-season shows: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrNNYICtHM3OxLFOKsvGywA My Anime List: http://myanimelist.net/profile/Digibro My twitter: https://twitter.com/digibrah My tumblr: http://scarletmonochrome.tumblr.com/ — (How the hell did I miss this? (4)) — Episode five. — If you expected the last four episodes of setup and exposition to be the slow part of Gun Gale Online, and that the series would pick up now and get into the action, then you’ve seriously overestimated Sword Art Online. If anything, the show gets even slower at this point as it grinds through its distended midsection waiting for anything important to happen. Sword Art Online has always had big pacing issues, but in the first season a lot of those problems resorted from the way the series was adapted. The first book of the Aincrad arc told the entire story of everyone being trapped in the game, whereas the second book told a bunch of bonus stories about what Kirito was doing during certain major time skips. The TV series decided to adapt both at once chronologically, and while this made sense, it also killed the pacing by interjecting a bunch of random, pointless side stories into what had at first seemed like an urgent and heavy storyline. Alfheim Online had less of an excuse, as it was obvious that the random conflict in the first half of the arc only existed so that the first book of the light novels could have its own climax. Meanwhile, Gun Gale Online’s pacing fails in a totally new way. See, the thing about light novels is that they’re typically very short, hence, “light,” and most light novel adaptations tend to have one book equate to four or five episodes; sometimes even as little as three, and rarely as much as six. Yes, in some shows, certain arcs end up being rushed, and it can be nice to have a series take its time and flesh things out better, though I’d also argue that some shows trim the fat from the source material more than anything. Still, my point is that a light novel typically doesn’t equate to a lot of anime episodes, yet the two books of Gun Gale Online were adapted into fourteen; and if you think it fills all that extra time with juicy details that flesh out the world and characters, then you haven’t learned your lesson yet. Gun Gale Online is a long, boring slog. It had no reason to take up fourteen episodes; in fact, I’m not even sure it needed seven. Season one’s Aincrad arc had fourteen episodes, and while I do think that arc could’ve easily been tightened up, and a few episodes removed entirely, (especially five and six), it didn’t feel nearly so stretched out. Reki Kawahara did say that the reason he never submitted SAO to the competition that he was writing it for, was because the novel exceeded the word limit–so it’s probably safe to assume that Aincrad was a bit longer than the average light novel. The Alfheim arc was only eleven episodes long, and even that felt like an overlong bore, but Gun Gale Online takes it to a whole new level. I will admit that while watching episode five, something clicked in my mind and I suddenly fell in love with the show’s soundtrack. Maybe because I’d been blasting Yuki Kajiura concert footage all day leading up to watching it, or maybe because I was super shitfaced drunk and had the volume turned up really high, but either way, it happened. It’s funny because in spite of Yuki Kajiura being my favorite soundtrack composer, I didn’t care for a lot of the music in season one. This hadn’t surprised me, since Kajiura has done soundtracks that I didn’t like before, but I don’t even know if SAO 2 has a whole new soundtrack, or if it just finally grew on me. This revelation got me thinking about the Yuki Kajiura paradox. That is, the paradox wherein she is at once my favorite soundtrack composer, and also the composer to literally ALL of my least-favorite anime. Back in the early 2000s, Kajiura provided the soundtracks to a plethora of shows by studio Bee Train, including my favorite soundtrack ever, for .hack//SIGN. You know, that other famous but honestly not very good show about kids getting trapped inside of an MMORPG, which was conspicuously released just a few months before SAO first came out, but I’m sure Kawahara didn’t rip it off in any way shape or form. Bee Train is the worst anime studio in existence, and in fact I used to run an entire blog dedicated to hating the studio in a style very similar to these Sword Art Online videos. Writing for that website first taught me how fun it could be to rag on something which you really hate with the same passion that you’d write about something which you really love–and that same spirit of fun-loving aggression is what I’ve been putting into all my SAO content. Funny then, that most of the shows I’ve ragged on in this way have Yuki Kajiura soundtracks. If she hadn’t also done the soundtracks to a bunch of shows that I liked, I’d think it was some kind of curse. ANYWAYS, this episode starts off with Kirito and Shinon signing up for the BULLET OF BULLETS tournament, and then Shinon dumping some more exposition about the game. Apparently, Gun Gale Online is actually owned and designed by Americans, but its Japanese servers are run by Japanese, which kinda conflicts with Kirito’s earlier observation that GGO was the only JAPANESE game with professional players. The American servers for Tera Online are run by an American company called En Masse, but no one considers it an American game. Shinon also explains that because of the money transfer system, and the fact that it’s played across countries, it occupies a “legal grey zone,” which is why you can only manage your money transfers inside the game, and the actual website only lets you create your profile. In other words, the money transfer system is *totally illegal.* This explanation probably happened when either Kawahara or the show writers realized while writing this story that collecting taxes on the money transfer system would be really difficult to figure out, especially if an American company was paying Japanese players–so they hand-waved it as the game being a “legal grey zone,” whatever the hell that means. I’m not saying necessarily that the existence of a game like this is unrealistic, but it’s certainly a huge risk and only a matter of time before some kind of government crackdown or regulation starts happening. Like many things in this series, what makes this whole concept weird is that there was no reason for the game to be like this. If Kawahara or the show writers realized that their ideas were immersion-breaking and made no sense, they should’ve just removed them entirely instead of trying to half-heartedly make sense of them. Next, we see Shinon in her underwear, and something about this scene made me feel really old all of a sudden. Like, don’t get me wrong, I’m not offended or anything by underwear shots, and I’m a far cry from someone who doesn’t like fanservice, but I couldn’t get over the feeling that I’m watching a kids show, and that this kiddy fanservice was just not made for me. Like, yes, if I was fourteen, I bet Shinon would’ve been mai waifu and I’d be all googly-eyed over this, but as an adult I’m just like “jesus, put some clothes on.” Frankly, I’m more offended by how Kirito can’t keep his cool. This guy’s been getting laid in VMMOs for years, and he’s flustered over a little underwear? But I guess we needed a reason for Shinon to start hating him from now on. By the way, this scene wasn’t in the original web version of the novel, but was added to the published version, and I’ll talk more about that later. Once that’s over, they sit down in a cafe (5)–okay fairly, it’s a lounge, but it’s the same shit. Shinon explains the rules of the tournament, and then says some shady stuff that makes Kirito suspicious. Thirteen minutes in, Kirito finally jumps into the first preliminary round. His opponent is a dude hiding in the bushes in full camo gear, who stands up, making himself completely visible and alerting Kirito to his exact location, and then opens fire–and, of course, thanks to the prediction lines Kirito can easily dodge it. Shouldn’t the guy have waited for Kirito to turn around, since the only way to shoot someone without them seeing your prediction lines would be to hit them from behind, and since he wouldn’t have been seen if he’d just stayed crouched? Whatever, I guess the guy’s an idiot. Kirito gets hit twice in the leg, but it doesn’t affect his movement at all. Earlier, we saw Shinon get one of her legs shot off completely, but I guess if you don’t lose the limb then taking damage doesn’t matter. Sure would be nice if this game could decide on what level of realism it wants to convey. Kirito realizes that since the game tells you where the bullets are going to go, he can easily deflect all the bullets with his sword, and since he’s literally god he’ll be the first one who’s ever thought of it. He uses his psychic newtype powers to I guess hear the dude rustling in the bushes, and then charges him in what is probably the best-looking moment of animation in the show, followed by the most hilarious case of awesome badness in the show. (Screaming.) So after the match, Kirito is greeted by Death Gun, who they actually seriously gave a Darth Vader breathing apparatus sound effect. Well yeah I mean Kirito’s got a light saber, so obviously he’s gotta be fighting Darth Vader. Hey what made Darth Vader memorable again? Was it his menacing presence, the fact that he murdered his own subordinates, turned out to be Luke’s father, and actually had a meaningful character arc across the original trilogy? Naw, pretty sure it was the heavy breathing, let’s make our villain do the same thing to make him extra scary. I’m guessing this wasn’t in the original light novels, unless the sentence “he breathed through some mechanical apparatus in a manner similar to Darth Vader,” was in the book. Look, I don’t have a problem with references and reincorporation, in fact I often celebrate those things. But when you tack aspects of really memorable characters onto really unmemorable characters, it only draws attention to how weak those characters are in comparison. Death Gun is only threatening up to this point because he kills people and wears a spooky scary skeleton mask, and now he’s making Darth Vader sounds, as if thinking about how cool Darth Vader is will somehow help us like Death Gun more. What made Darth Vader’s breathing so off-putting to begin with was that it wasn’t how you’d expect a villain to sound. It was a unique idea that hadn’t really been done before, and that’s an effect you could only ever get once. Copying it just makes Death Gun feel cheap and unoriginal. If they wanted to copy Vader, they should’ve copied his character arc, not his gimmick. Kirito realizes through this exchange that Death Gun is a fellow SAO survivor (by the way if they made “SAO survivor” t-shirts I would be ON that shit), and also a member of the evil player-killer guild Laughing Coffin. Alright, I can dig it. No seriously, that’s not a bad angle–a spectre from Kirito’s past who went insane during the time they were trapped in SAO, that’s cool. Let’s see where they go with it. — Episode six — While this was also true of episode five with the exception of the big fight scene, episode six seems to be where the production values of this season took a big dip. We’ve already had tons of reused footage popping up, and half the scenes feature stationary characters anyways, but episode six opens with a wholesale replay of the last two minutes of episode five. Whether this was the result of the production falling behind schedule, or just a way to fill time in a series which shouldn’t have taken up fourteen episodes, is a matter of speculation, though I suspect the former. I’m sure A-1 Pictures has multiple sub-studios working on different shows at the same time, but they did launch this season alongside Persona 4 The Golden, Aldnoah.Zero, Kuroshitsuji: Book of Circus, AND the still-running Fairy Tail sequel, not to mention releasing a Persona 3 movie and a Space Brothers movie around the same time. These guys are BUSY. Kirito starts off regaling us with the story of a big battle in which he teamed up with Asuna, Klein, and a bunch of other randies in a raid against the Laughing Coffin guild back in SAO. What follows is probably the worst-looking fight scene in the series so far, with lots of shots of character just standing still in the background with sparks flying out of them, this horrible looping CG shot, and all these still panning shots of people doing nothing. I mean sure, it could’ve been worse, and on the whole SAO isn’t a bad-looking show, but hearing Yuki Kajiura music blasted over panning shots started giving me acid flashbacks to the old Bee Train days. Likewise, Kirito starts having PTSD flashbacks, and that’s actually kinda cool. That’s characterization, maybe even the most this fucker’s gotten in the entire series up until now. He’s got something to be legitimately upset about; the fact that he knowingly murdered two other people and hasn’t really owned up to it yet, and is being haunted by someone who did the same and is continuing to do so even now. That’s a decent rivalry, and seeing Kirito so shaken that he actually wonders for a second if Death Gun might be one of the men he killed, before realizing how illogical that is, while kind of funny, was also not a bad touch. Shinon sees something in Kirito’s shaken expression that reminds her of herself, drawing a thematic link between them, and man, could this actually be going somewhere?! Kirito is put into his second preliminary match, and everything is ruined immediately. The enemy fires a flurry of bullets, and they all miss even though Kirito is just standing there. Great. This enemy has already proven himself so utterly incompetent that even if Kirito wasn’t the greatest warrior on planet Earth, he’d have nothing to be afraid of. Kirito gets super duper pissed off and gun-katas his way to victory in what is somewhat unclearly a montage of matches. Shinon also gets a random, pointless, easy match for no reason. Next, Kirito and Shinon have a match together, and I swear to god, this scene was designed specifically to piss people off. The idea here is that Kirito and Shinon have both already qualified for the final round, so this match is just a formality; but they don’t explain that before the match starts. Kirito decides that he doesn’t give a shit who wins or loses since he’s getting through anyways, and just stands there; and Shinon can’t bring herself to shoot him because she feels like he’s fucking with her. But they don’t explain that before the match starts! It just looks for a minute like Kirito psychically understands that Shinon won’t shoot him, and that Shinon is buckling under the pressure of whatever mental hangup she’s got going on. Maybe I’m being biased here, but both times I watched this scene I got really pissed off before they explained why Kirito wasn’t dodging the bullets, and I’m still pissed off now because I don’t understand why they even had this fight to begin with if it was totally unnecessary. Oh right, because this was the end of the first book and it needed to have its own climax, of course. Kirito and Shinon have a little heart to heart, then Kirito challenges her to a sort of quick draw contest. Once it starts, he chops Shinon’s last bullet in half, which in fairness I’ve seen done before with real swords on airsoft pellets, so that actually didn’t break my suspension of disbelief. However, I couldn’t help but think back to the last episode, wherein Kirito’s sword melted a bullet on impact, and now it’s somehow cleanly carving them in half. Yes, I notice this kind of shit. Kirito closes the gap between them and… are you fucking serious? Are you for real? This is your murdering pose? It looks like you’re about to sweep her up and take her on your fucking honeymoon. You can’t tell me this was done for anything other than some really weird fanservice. He looks like he’s going to make out with her rather than murder her. How can I be expected to take this shit seriously when it can’t even take itself seriously? They’re talking about the nature of true strength and relating their deep seated personal trauma while he’s holding her in a “bed me” stance. Hey did you expect Shinon to possibly be a strong female character? Cause not only does Kirito overpower her and borderline grope her, but condescends to her about how he doesn’t like killing girls while he’s at it. Why am I watching this?! — Episode seven — ((Onii-chan!)) UGH. In retrospect, maybe I was hard on episode five when I called it the start of the slow part of the show. Because this episode is the start of a new book, it decides to kick off with the tension down low again, and my god is it ever boring. It opens with Suguha, who I still give zero fucks about, revealing that she’s figured out that Kirito is playing GGO. I wasn’t aware that it was a secret, but apparently it is. We also get this exchange: (I could feel it) lolwut. Next there’s a cute little scene of Kirito face-timing Asuna since they can’t meet in ALO, because I guess he can’t just make a temporary lowbie alt account there for some reason. (Why are your books so spaced out across your shelves?) Asuna worries about whether anything’s happened to Kirito in this new game, and thus begins a trend throughout this part of the show in which every time Asuna is on-screen she says the only things that make any sense. I mean yeah, I’m biased because I clearly like Asuna, because she’s an oasis in the shitstorm that is this series, but it slowly becomes comical as the arc goes. In this case, she’s offering to talk to Kirito or even join him in GGO, but he brushes her off with a hand-wave and goes back to obnoxiously flirting with his sister. Next we get a scene wherein Shinkawa starts to show his creeper side as he admits to being in love with his twisted vision of who Carne Asada is. She turns him down, although she does so in a way that suggests that she’ll consider having feelings for him after she’s sorted out her life issues, which is a dangerous way to tell someone like this off, but not an unrealistic one, and could foster some decent drama once we realize how crazy this kid is. Kirito continues having PTSD flashbacks on his way to the nurses office, and once he gets there, he and the nurse have a long heart-to-heart about whether or not Kirito should feel guilty about all of the people he’s killed. By the end, the nurse has basically absolved him of all worries and buried his whole character arc before it even had time to take flight. To me, this scene represents the first big missed opportunity in creating what could’ve been a legitimately great sequel to Sword Art Online. Imagine if we restructured this entire arc to be about Kirito and Asuna jumping into this game together, or even Kirito jumping in first with Asuna joining later, and took out Carne Asada’s whole sub-plot entirely. Instead of Asada tangentially relating to Kirito through her own past trauma, or this nurse character tangentially relating to him through the deaths she’s witnessed as a surgeon, Kirito could’ve shared all of this emotional weight with someone who actually played Sword Art Online with him and experienced a lot of the same things–and also happens to be, you know, HIS LOVER. There could’ve been a dynamic between how each of them reacts to Death Gun, or how each of them feels about their time in SAO, and they could’ve helped one-another cope and deepened their bond even further. A couple who continues to face new hardship and find new strength in one-another. This would’ve been especially effective if we were following the story of the original web novels. As I’ve been releasing these videos, helpful commenters have been telling me all the reasons I’m wrong by pointing to the original novels, and while a lot of the explanations for things that make no sense in the anime are still pretty stupid, there’s been a few major changes that really upset me. Most of them aren’t even the result of the anime, but of converting the original web novel into the eventual published versions. I have no idea if these changes were Reki Kawahara’s idea, or if he was forced by publishers to make them, but the biggest, most aggravating change is that in the original novel, apparently Asuna actually does kill Kuradeel, instead of Kirito stealing her thunder and doing it himself. Were it not for this change, not only would that scene have been far less frustrating, but we’d know that Asuna also has blood on her hands, regardless of whether she did or didn’t kill anyone during the Laughing Coffin raid. This would put Asuna in the same boat as Kirito, giving them even more reason to share this arc together. I mean for fuck’s sake, the nurse literally utters the sentences, “I can’t take away your burden or carry it with you. I didn’t play Sword Art Online.” It’s like they’re tacitly admitting that she was the wrong character for this scene. Nothing else important happens for the rest of the episode. — Episode eight — After some boring recap, Kirito approaches Shinon and literally BEGS her to give him yet another exposition dump. So, after agreeing, she invites leads him to… you guessed it (6). This time, EVERYONE’s having a big cafe exposition scene! That guy you forgot about from episode one, that guy you forgot from episode two, and even that guy you forgot about from episode four! (Kirito being moe) (me throwing up) Kirito asks Shinon a bunch of questions about the tournament, which she says were explained in the email that Kirito would’ve received from the admins. Kirito says that he did read it, but that he wanted to confirm by having her explain it again. He may as well have said, “yeah, but the audience doesn’t know yet, so let’s do some exposition!” Bullet of Bullets apparently takes place on a ten kilometer battleground with tons of different terrains, which sounds like it’d make for a long, epic battle of stakeouts and tactics. Except it has a satellite that broadcasts your position every fifteen minutes, so there’s no camping. So everyone has to be moving around constantly, and you can’t really find a place to hide and stay there, so there’s no real reason for the battlefield to be enormous. If this got down to two people, I feel like one of them could just run around this giant map endlessly and never get caught because both players keep learning each-other’s location. Once again, this reeks of taking a bunch of ideas that sounded cool and throwing them in without consideration for balance. Shinon tries to escape this boring exposition, but Kirito drags her back, just like the one guy did in the first episode. He asks if there’s any names which Shinon doesn’t recognize in this tournament, and immediately concludes that one of them must be Death Gun. This scene leads to some instant hilarity for anyone who can read English letters. One of the minor twists in this arc is that Kirito and Shinon think that the three names are “Gunner X,” “Pale Rider,” and “Steven.” We can clearly see that the third name is Sterben, which is German for “to die,” but Kirito and Shinon don’t realize their mispronunciation until much later. Had they realized that the name was German, they might’ve connected it to Shinon’s friend, who plays under the name Spiegel, meaning “mirror.” This is another one of those things that’d probably seemed less idiotic in the novels, since they wouldn’t have to show us the name written in English letters, but even then I find it funny that these kids can read English well enough to know that it almost says Steven, yet totally read it wrong. I also can’t wait to hear how they handle this in the dub. Kirito then tells Shinon about his past in SAO and how a player killer is in this game, and we get to see a lot of recap footage again. This cafe scene lasts a grand total of eight minutes, before Kirito and Shinon step into this elevator and… what. Is that the shot from Evangelion? The one with Rei and Asuka, one of many iconic shots from that series? It’s framed a little differently (read: worse), but it’s definitely the same shot. What a strange, meaningless callback. Thirteen minutes deep, the Bullet of Bullets FINALLY begins, and we get a several-minute montage of pre-established characters murdering hapless randies. Shinon’s about to put moustache out of his misery yet again, when Kirito gets her into another sex pose cause why not, fuck it. Mustache gets wasted all over again by Pale Rider in another legitimately good-looking action scene, before Pale Rider gets stunlocked by Death Gun. Kirito explains that he’d been underwater when the satellite scan happened, so apparently the scan hadn’t detected him, which Death Gun is also using as a tactic. That would be kind of cool, if it didn’t instantly negate the whole purpose of the satellite scan, which was to make camping impossible. As long as you time it so you’re always underwater when the satellite goes by, you can stay hidden all day, and for Death Gun to already know this trick, it means that past participants know this trick, which means that everyone should know this trick. The episode ends with Kirito begging Shinon to hurry and shoot Death Gun, although it might’ve made more sense to shoot Pale Rider who was incapacitated, thus removing him from the game and, ostensibly, harm’s way. Whatever. — Episode nine — Back in Alfheim Online, the Spurned Women’s Club are all watching a livestream of Bullet of Bullets in, wouldn’t you know it, a cafe (7). All of them are splooging their fucking panties over how great Kirito is, including Klein who I’m pretty sure is just as in love with him as any of the others. He did say Kirito was cute back in the first episode of season one. Good thing they found an excuse to show more recap footage. And now, my friends, we come to the scene that finally broke this entire arc for me. I mean, other than the nine-thousand other things I’ve already talked about, but this is the first really big one! Something so immersion-breaking and stupid that it put a crack in my skull just trying to wrap my head around it. Death Gun murders a man. On. Fucking. Camera. So okay, let’s take a step back for a moment. Kirito was sent on a mission into Gun Gale Online in order to confirm the existence of Death Gun and find out if it’s possible that Death Gun is really killing people. That’s it, that’s his mission. It’s not to fight Death Gun, it’s not to win the Bullet of Bullets, it’s a quest for information given to him by a government agent. Kirito already has reason to suspect that the character with this avatar is Death Gun, and that he’s a former player killer from Sword Art Online. Hell, he’s even convinced that Death Gun really does have the power to kill people by the time he’s about to pull the trigger on Pale Rider. So Death Gun murders a man. It’s obvious that’s what happens, because when he shoots him it only takes out a speck of life, yet the man starts convulsing in possibly the most hilarious death scene ever. (roll scene) I guess they didn’t wanna hire a voice actor just to make death noises. Pale Rider is marked as disconnected, and then Death Gun brags to the cameras that if he runs into you, he will bring you true death with his gun. What. The fuck. Even if we don’t immediately assume that Pale Rider has just died in the real world, it’s pretty obvious that some kind of foul play is going on. Why did Pale Rider freak out like that? Death Gun seemed to know it was going to happen. Is he cheating? Did he use a hack? Even if we assume it was staged, it still seems like cheating. More importantly, Kirito not only has reason to suspect that Pale Rider was just killed, but he should have some kind of direct line of communication to a government worker who suspects that Death Gun might be killing people. Can Kirito not contact the world outside his headset? Cause if not, ew, creepy, once again I can’t imagine ever playing one of these games, but even if he can’t, he doesn’t have a reason to be here anymore. He could just disconnect, tell the nurse “that’s the guy,” and have the government agent contact the authorities to check out Pale Rider’s house, and contact the game administrators to have the tournament postponed so they can investigate, and maybe have Death Gun’s character suspended. But no. None of that happens. Death Gun just murders a guy on-air, and no one does a damn thing. Even after Klein realizes that Death Gun’s slogan, “it’s show time,” was the slogan of the old Laughing Coffin guild leader and tells the girls, no one does anything. They keep bringing up how Kirito and Shinon can’t figure out what Death Gun’s name is because he’s always off the radar when the satellite goes by, but are the names not displayed on the live stream? Why can you not see a player’s name just by looking at them in this game, anyways? That seems like a really asinine plot convenience. Everything about this entire setup seems like a really asinine plot convenience. How much shit does this show expect me to try and buy into just to keep following along with its ridiculous plot? How many rules which serve no logical purpose other than to push the plot along am I going to have to accept to keep any suspension of disbelief? See that’s the problem, there is no anchor with this series, no ground on which to gain your bearings. The entire world, the whole setup of Gun Gale Online as a game, is built around the narrative that Kawahara wanted to construct, without ever attempting to work as a setting on its own. I can’t imagine any reason why names would be hidden in an MMORPG except that it makes for a convenient plot device. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to sense or communicate with the outside world in any way, no reason there should be a satellite to prevent camping which you can easily avoid, no reason that Death Gun can just kill a motherfucker on camera and get away with it, except that it makes for a convenient plot device. This is the fundamental flaw at the heart of Sword Art Online, and it’s why the show fails on such a basic level. It’s why I can’t get invested in the setting or characters, because nothing in the series feels organic. Everything is forced, broken, and a huge insult to my intelligence. AND IF I WASN’T MAD ENOUGH, right in the middle of the episode, out of NOWHERE there’s this fucking atrocious action scene, wherein some ugly randy pops up and opens fire on Shinon and Kirito only to get completely fucking destroyed with zero effort. Hey I guess this really is just like Star Wars… Episode Two. With Kirito whipping that fucking lightsaber around like nothing fucking matters. Fourteen minutes in, once again Asuna says the only thing that makes any sense, and decides to log out and go contact Kirito’s employer for answers. We’ll come back to this though in another episode. After Kirito acts like a condescending dick for a few minutes, he and Shinon rush to the incorrect conclusion that Gunner X must be Death Gun because, I dunno, they’re stupid. Death Gun then gets the drop on Shinon because apparently he’s got an invisibility cloak. Well okay. I guess the water thing was just a misdirect, which might’ve been cool, except now the question is, why doesn’t everyone have an invisibility cloak? I guess it could be an ultra super rare item, but unless Death Gun is literally the only one who has and/or knows about it, you’d think everyone would be after one of those, since it’s game-breakingly powerful. I mean this isn’t like Halo where you can see the invisible person if they’re moving and invisibility only lasts a few seconds, Death Gun was totally undetectable and could conceivably just hunt everyone down and completely destroy them. Apparently, as Death Gun explains in a monologue seemingly directed at Kirito, who isn’t here, Death Gun wants to kill Shinon in order to send Kirito into a blind rage, to prove once and for all that he’s the real Kirito from SAO. Even though earlier in the series we saw that Death Gun was deliberately targeting Shinon already. Shinon recognizes the gun as the same model which she used to kill the bank robber in episode three, and the episode ends with a fake-out fade to black as a gunshot signifies Shinon’s possible death. This brings us to one of the worst scenes in the entirety of Gun Gale Online… but we’ll get to that in the next one.
What better way to start off a tense scene where Shinon’s life might be at risk than with a panning shot of her ass?
Later on in the series, we learn that Death Gun is actually a three-man team, consisting of two SAO survivors and Shinkawa, who is one of them’s brother. At any given time, one of the brothers is playing as Death Gun, while the other two break into the houses of his victims and inject them with a killer chemical at the same moment that Death Gun shoots them in the game. We’ll talk about how insane this plan is later, but for now let’s focus on this scene wherein Death Gun is about to murder Shinon.
Assuming that Death Gun’s plan really was to kill Shinon in real life, that means one of the other members of his crew must be in her room right at this moment, standing over her with a syringe full of deadly chemical stuff, ready to kill her. But Shinon doesn’t die here–Kirito swoops in and saves her at the last second. So… what did the other guy do? Did he just go, “oh shit, I guess we can’t kill her now, better hit the road.” Am I seriously to believe that someone had broken into Shinon’s house and was seconds away from killing her, only to stop and leave because Death Gun didn’t pull the trigger in time? They hand-wave it by saying that the kids are watching the MMOStream in order to determine who to kill, but what if Death Gun wasn’t on screen at the moment he shot someone? What if it looked like he’d hit someone but they weren’t totally sure, like in that scene where Shinon narrowly dodges a bullet on the buggy. Just seems like it’s a really messy way to go about this. I’ve got a lot more to say about how insane this entire gimmick of the kids breaking into peoples houses is, but we’ll get to that in a later episode. This scene just stuck out to me as particularly silly to think about.
So Kirito carries Shinon to a station with three buggies and this hilarious-looking horse (show Eva horse), and she’s like “don’t take the horse, it sucks,” so they get on one of the buggies. It bothered me in this scene how Shinon’s voice sounds like she was paralyzed in the real world and not just in the video game, though I suppose it could be a part of the whole voice modifier thing. Kirito tells Shinon to put the ugly horse out of its misery, and she happily obliges, except oh no, I can’t shoot it because my PTSD is back. It’s almost like playing a game about shooting guns when I’m terrified of shooting guns was a really terrible idea!
Naturally Death Gun takes the stupid horse and starts chasing them down, and if this scene was meant to be anything other than hilarious, then it failed miserably. Death Gun is still firing the same gun at them, so I like to imagine that the other guy is still standing over Shinon’s body, constantly half-pressed on the syringe only to stop cause the bullet didn’t connect yet. Death Gun starts catching up to them, so Kirito tells Shinon to shoot him, but she’s being too much of a wuss, so he offers to let her drive while he uses the rifle. I feel like he shouldn’t actually be able to use the rifle, since he’s specced completely differently, but it doesn’t matter because Shinon doesn’t want anyone else using it, stating that it’s “a part of her.” Wait, didn’t you just acquire this rifle at the start of episode two? Was that supposed to be like a flashback or something? How attached to it can you be?
Kirito leans back to help her take the shot, and it sure is lucky that this road goes on in a straight line forever cause he’s not even watching where he’s driving. It’s not enough that Kirito can drive these supposedly super hard-to-use buggies, he’s gotta be able to drive them better than real people can drive real vehicles. The gun’s shaking too much to get a good shot, but Kirito’s like “don’t worry the shaking will stop in five seconds,” and then launches off this conveniently placed car ramp. Wat. Wouldn’t this make it even harder to take the shot?! I guess so, since Shinon hits a car and blows it up instead.
Kirito drives out into the desert and Shinon’s like, hey there’s a cave over there, we can use that to hide from the satellite scan. Wait, what’s the fucking point of the satellite scan if you can just easily hide from it? So I guess camping IS not only possible, but preferred? Okay then the battlefield size make sense, but then why have the satellite scans? Also, why didn’t everyone go for cover immediately to avoid detection? Shouldn’t this mean that the point is to see how far you can get from one piece of cover to the next in fifteen minute bursts while seeking vantage points where you can see other players on the run? Why has everyone just been running around in the open all willy-nilly this whole time?
So Kirito and Shinon take cover in this cave, and you’d better get comfortable ‘cause they’re gonna be in here for a fucking while. Kirito briefly describes his encounter with Gunner X, who it turned out was a woman; and strangely she not only has a more detailed character design than most players, but is actually named, “Musketeer X…” for some reason. Seriously, what, how, why, I don’t get it. I’m guessing Kirito’s battle with Musketeer X was expanded on in the original novels ‘cause I can’t think of any other reason for these distractingly specific details.
Next Kirito monologues about how he’s going to fight Death Gun, and says “if he points that gun at me again, I might just abandon you and run.” SO EDGY! But here’s the thing. Why does Kirito have to fight him? When did that become a thing? What would fighting Death Gun even accomplish? May I remind you that the whole point of this mission was to find out what Death Gun’s deal is and whether or not he’s killing people. That mission is already complete, so what’s left to gain from Kirito putting himself at risk to fight this guy? Sure you could argue that Kirito wants closure over his past, but isn’t it much more important that he gets the information about Death Gun out there and gets him out of this game as fast as possible? You can’t even use the excuse about them not knowing his name anymore, because at this point they’ve already confirmed that Death Gun is Sterben. Why aren’t they doing anything about it?
You see, t here IS a reason that Kirito has to fight Death Gun, but it’s got nothing to do with what makes sense in the context of the story, and everything to do with how the story was written. Death Gun has been built up as Kirito’s big rival, so of course it stands to reason that the two of them are gonna fight in the end–you could’ve figured that much out from the opening scene alone. But it’s precisely because it’s so obvious that you never stop to think about how little sense it makes. Given everything we know about Death Gun, about this situation, and even about Kirito who was reluctant to take this job in the first place, it seems like the most logical course of action would be to logout now, have the tournament postponed, and open an investigation on Death Gun’s character. But because it’s already been determined from the beginning at the conceptual stage that Kirito and Death Gun need to have a gigantic final battle at the end, that’s exactly what happens, regardless of how it fits the narrative.
Before I move on from this scene I also want to point out that as of this episode, Kirito no longer sounds feminine in the slightest. Masuoka Yoshitsugu’s performance of femme-Kirito has been pretty inconsistent from the beginning, which I guess I can’t really blame him for since it’s a weird position to be put in, but at least he seemed like he was trying to sound effeminate up until this point, and then finally just gave up. I guess it’s cause the scene calls for him to look like a badass, so they didn’t want him using the weird girly voice. I’m willing to blame the director for all of this, because I also think that Sawashiro’s performance as Shinon is among the worst she’s ever given, and from someone as experienced and technically proficient as she is, that’s a pretty big letdown. But since no one probably knows what the hell I’m talking about when it comes to Japanese voice actors, I’ll just leave it at that.
Shinon then explains that during BoB you can’t log out on your own. What?! Wait, what?! Hold on… hold on what?! Wait but you can forfeit, right? Kirito just told Shinon that she should log out like a minute ago, wait hold on this can’t possibly be legal, you have to be kidding me. Please say you aren’t telling me that you physically cannot log out during BoB, please tell me that this is not still a fucking thing. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe this is still happening. How many people have to die before this shit becomes illegal? At this point, anyone who puts on one of these helmets which makes your real life body completely useless, and then willingly subjects themselves to a scenario in which they can’t logout, deserves a Darwin award after their inevitable homicide. So I guess that answers my last question, Kirito really DOES have to fight Death Gun if he wants to get out of here, assuming there’s really no way for him to contact the outside world from inside the game. It’s not stupid cause of the narrative, it’s just stupid because all the characters are fucking morons!
Kirito and Shinon share what I think was supposed to be a dramatic moment, though all I read was an onslaught of vague emotional buzzwords. I think this was one of the parts when I first watched this arc all the way through where I remembered that I was alive and started screaming uncontrollably. So after Shinon’s emotional freakout, this line legitimately happens: (even though I hate you, let me lean against you for a while). Great. That doesn’t at all resemble yet another scene of completely forced pandering. Kirito and Shinon then explain their entire emotional subplots to one-another, which is all shit we’ve already heard multiple times so it’s impossible not to get bored. Unless you’re into Shinon’s body, I guess. Oh my god there’s still four more fucking episodes of this.
—
Episode eleven
—
Surprising as this may sound, it’s time to give this show a little bit of credit where I think it’s due. If there’s one thing which Gun Gale Online handles better than the first two arcs of the series, it’s the decision to focus on one consistent theme. Kirito’s PTSD is easily the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to his character, even if the show doesn’t really go anywhere with it, and having another character who could bounce their feelings off of him, as well as a villain tied to his dark past, was a good plan. Setting a story about PTSD in a dark and serious, realistic shooter game was an excellent idea, and it got me thinking about how this arc could’ve been great.
Specifically, Gun Gale Online should’ve been Heart of Darkness, aka Apocalypse Now, aka Spec Ops the Line. Instead of being a popular competitive game with all this money transfer bullshit, GGO should’ve been an obscure military shooter game which not a lot of people know about. Rumors circulate in the deep web that people have been getting murdered in this game, and maybe Kirito has some reason to suspect from the beginning that the perpetrator is a former SAO player.
Right from the start, Kirito could be grappling with his PTSD flashbacks, and as he plays through this mysterious game searching for the phantom player Death Gun, he encounters the culture and players of this game and sees how they reflect his own hangups. Shinon could even still be a character, but instead of having her take up half the story and showing her from the beginning, she could’ve been one of many people whom Kirito encounters and learns about on his journey.
But most importantly, Kirito should have been the one who suffers the most from his past hangups, and HE should’ve been learning from everyone else. Instead of having Kirito immediately get over his issues, and then putting the weight of the emotional character development on Shinon, it should’ve been Kirito who is made weak by his realizations of the people he’s killed; and characters like Shinon should’ve been helping him to move past it. This way, not only would Kirito be humanized in his weakness, but Shinon wouldn’t come off as some weak little girl who needs big strong Kirito to make her life better.
At the end of this journey, Death Gun should have confronted Kirito with a deeper realization about himself, sort of like Kayaba did at the end of the first arc. Kirito’s always saying and thinking these things that are meant to make him look morally grey and like he’s not sure if he’d always do the right thing, but you can never buy into it because he always does the right thing in the end. Put him into a situation where he actually has to kill Death Gun in order to save someone’s life, making him relive the same pain that he was trying to put behind him, but ultimately coming to terms with it. And most importantly, involve Asuna in all this. Even if she doesn’t play the game with him, have her be the one who tries to work through Kirito’s mental hangups with him. Have her relate her own stresses over her experience in SAO with him, and let them learn and grow together.
You could keep a lot of the core elements of this arc exactly the same and still make a compelling story out of it. Instead of making this game world overly complicated, just make it straightforwardly realistic. It didn’t even need to have RPG elements, it could’ve just been like a Day-Z style open-ended realistic shooter game. Instead of going to great lengths to explain the mechanics of the game world, we could’ve focused on the culture of that world, which is often the most interesting aspect of massive multiplayer games. Teach us about the people playing this game, and let Kirito adventure through it instead of just putting him in a boring tournament scenario. Cut out all this bullshit about Death Gun being a three-man team, and just make it one really crazy motherfucker who’s using some kind of hacking or something to murder people. It’s already a future sci-fi world where people can get trapped inside of virtual helmets that melt their brains, so why bother with this whole breaking in and injecting people idiocy when you could just make up some sci-fi stuff for why Death Gun can kill people? Just have him be this dark mysterious figure that we don’t know much about and have a really menacing final confrontation with him. Let the themes of the narrative carry the weight of the story instead of relying on boring exposition and pointless side characters.
By the way, if you’re a writer and you think the idea of making a Heart of Darkness story set inside of a Day Z style virtual MMO sounds rad, then by all means take that idea and do as you wish. I’d certainly love to see it made.
Anyways, that’s enough dreaming for now, let’s see what’s happening back in SAO2. (Shinon’s ass zoom). Wow. I did not add in that zoom effect just now. That really happened.
During this scene, Kirito sits here and speculates the entire fucking plot. No joke, he comes up with the idea that Death Gun can’t kill people just by shooting them because he didn’t use his handgun when he tried to shoot Kirito, meaning that he must have to do some setup in the real world to make the murders happen. (This, by the way, confirms that the entire time he was trying to shoot Shinon, the other guy must have been standing over her body. What if he’d accidentally hit Kirito instead?) Kirito then realizes the possibility that there may be two Death Guns after, and I wish I was making this up, noticing a lizard nearby that has two tails. This moment uses the same dramatic zoom that it did on Shinon’s ass–can you imagine how hilarious it would’ve been if he’d realized there were two Death Guns after looking at Shinon’s two ass cheeks?
Kirito goes on to speculate why Death Gun is killing people in this particular way, how he might be breaking into the houses of his victims, what kind of method he might be using to carry out the murders, the reasons that no one has recognized these as murders, and the psychological state of Death Gun’s player, all with complete accuracy. Let’s just add “master detective” to Kirito’s already excessive list of godlike talents. This kid is basically the Batman.
He then tells Shinon, “hey, don’t freak out, but there’s a good chance Death Gun has broken into your house and is currently standing above you waiting for the signal to murder your ass.” Shinon’s heart rate increases, and the game starts threatening to automatically log her out, but then Kirito’s like, wait, calm down! If you log out now, you’ll be in serious danger!” I’m sorry, how is Shinon in less danger being completely helpless with a murderer at her bedside than she would be if she had control of her body? I know if I’d heard there was possibly someone standing over my unconscious body, I would’ve immediately been trying to log out.
For that matter, we’ve now confirmed that it is indeed possible to log out of this game if your heart rate picks up, so why doesn’t Kirito do that to get outside? He could ask Shinon for her home address, do something to quicken his heart rate until he gets booted from the game, then have Shinon stall for time by running around this gigantic map while Kirito goes to her house, hopefully with like an entire police squad at his back. Or he could even just go with having the government official shut down the game, and the guy standing over Shinon’s body would probably get spooked and run away instead of killing her. There’s plenty of options that make sense, and none of them involve staying in this game any longer than you need to.
Back in Spurned Women’s Cafe (8) the government worker guy shows up and for some reason is acting all cheery and douchey like he has no idea what’s going on. Asuna isn’t having that shit, and tries to interrogate him, but when he dances around the questions, Yui just suddenly starts explaining the whole thing. First of all, why the hell does Yui know all of this, and second of all, why the hell is didn’t she explain it to them while they were waiting for this guy to show up? I certainly would rather that this explanation happened off-screen before he arrived so I wouldn’t have to sit through more fucking recap!
Asuna and Klein inform Chrysheit that Death Gun is a former SAO player, which means we’ve confirmed that not only is Kirito not communicating with anyone outside the game, but they have no way of gathering info from him at all. You’d think there’d be some way of bugging him or having him stream everything he sees inside the game. Actually, it just occurred to me, how do you talk in these games? Does the Amusphere intercept your brain waves when you try to speak? That’s the only thing that makes sense, though now I’m wondering how this thing is able to intercept all your brain functionality without being plugged into your head or anything.That aside, I can’t believe they’ve got Kirito playing this game in a hospital room with all this heart monitoring shit and haven’t even bothered finding any way for him to report his actions inside the game. Even if he can’t communicate with them though, you’d think that this guy would’ve seen that part of the livestream where Death Gun killed the guy and taken action based on that.
Once again, Asuna says the only thing that makes sense, and asks if they can check the records of all surviving Laughing Coffin members and see if any of them are logged in to GGO right now. Chrysheit says that knowing if they were a laughing coffin member wouldn’t tell them the name or address, which doesn’t seem to answer the question. Do they in fact have any of these names and addresses, and if so, couldn’t they just check every SAO survivor? There’s a good chance that only one of them is currently involved in the Bullet of Bullets besides Kirito, so it wouldn’t be hard to figure out who. Loli girl is then like, “can’t we question the people who run GGO?” and he’s like, “it’s an overseas company so it would be too hard.” But I thought the Japanese servers were run by a Japanese company. Can’t they just ask them?
Suguha explains to everyone that Kirito probably realized that Death Gun was a former SAO player the other day, judging by how scared he looked, and holy shit that’s right, Kirito knew about this BEFORE the Bullet of Bullet started. So you mean to say that he just didn’t bother telling anyone? He didn’t share this relevant information towards solving the case with the nurse or Chryssy or anyone? They could’ve been cross-referencing SAO players with GGO players this whole time! Everyone then starts talking about how if they’d known about this they would’ve converted along with Kirito, but then they all start sucking his dick over how cool he is for not wanting to involve anyone. IRRESPONSIBILITY IS AWESOME!
Hey, one of the players is named Jack Reacher.
Back over in GGO, what the fuck are you two doing? What is this shit? Kirito I swear to god if you can’t keep it in your pants for one fucking game I hope Asuna cuts it off. Shinon’s reached a low enough point where she makes Kirito tell her what to do, because the gender dynamics in this show aren’t fucked up enough already. I know I haven’t been saying as much about this as I probably should have, since I already tackled so much of the sexist bullshit back in my review of season one, but this is quickly turning into an even more egregious and disgusting example.
Next we get this stupid fucking scene wherein one of the livestream cameras locates them inside the cave and they’re all embarrassed about getting seen in this position. Shinon’s like, “teehee, is there someone you don’t want seeing this?” HEY REMEMBER HOW THERE’S A FUCKING MURDERER AT YOUR BEDSIDE, DO YOU EVEN REMEMBER THAT? Shinon says that the camera won’t pick up voices unless you yell, but it didn’t seem like Death Gun was yelling when he addressed the camera earlier. Nonetheless, I feel like this rule was only written in after whichever writer wanted to have a scene with the camera in the cave, and was initially going to say that the camera doesn’t pick up audio, but then remembered that Death Gun talked to the camera earlier so they changed it to it only picks up audio if you yell. Now that I think about it, couldn’t Kirito have just started yelling at the camera, “HEY, STERBEN IS DEATH GUN, HE’S KILLING PEOPLE FOR REAL, SOMEONE FUCKING DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?” I guess that would be too easy though.
Also, THIS SHOT LEGITIMATELY HAPPENS. The camera sweeps down for a look at Shinon’s ass and cameltoe before sweeping back up to her face. I can’t even believe this is really happening. The music in this scene makes it seem like this is supposed to be a lighthearted romantic comedy. I assumed at first that the point of this scene was to piss off the spurned women’s club or something, but we never even learn if they saw this. What the fuck was the point of this scene?
Episode twelve – I can’t believe this is still happening
—
WHEN WILL WE LEAVE THIS FUCKING CAVE?!
Kirito deduces based on how quickly Death Gun targeted Shinon after killing Pale Rider, and based on the fact that there seem to have been two disconnected players, that there may in fact be two or more Death Gun partners running around killing people in the real world. Ergo, both Shinon and Dark Wind, whom this episode spends a few minutes building up as a character for no reason since he’s about to accomplish jack shit in the final battle, are possibly at risk.
I actually kind of like Kirito’s reasoning for how Death Gun would continue to be a player killer out of self-identity. It’s interesting to think of how one might incorporate elements of their online self into their perception of who they are, especially if they spent a lot of time immersed in a game world which is practically indistinguishable from reality, and even more especially if they’d previously gotten away with murder in one of these online worlds. It’s another concept which, if it were more fleshed out and used in a show that didn’t suck, might be kind of cool.
So the big final battle starts, and Shinon takes out Dark Wind so Death Gun won’t be able to get to him. But if there really was someone standing at his bedside ready to kill him, wouldn’t Dark Wind wake up and see him there, which is exactly what Kirito said was too dangerous earlier? I guess getting killed doesn’t necessarily log you out of the game, and it’s possible that the killer would’ve seen this happen on the livestream and got the fuck out of there, but those are just my speculative defenses.
So now we cut to Asuna heading up the elevator to Kirito’s hospital room, and she’s talking to Yui on her cell phone. Yui is an AI that lives inside of Alfheim Online, so the fact that she can talk to Asuna means that it may indeed be possible for people inside the game to communicate with people outside of it, unless Yui is just like inside Asuna’s phone or something. Yui then tells Asuna to look at a nearby monitor, and then turns it to the MMO Stream. If that sentence made no sense, let me spell it out–Yui, the AI that lives inside of Alfheim Online and possibly Asuna’s phone, is able to tune a random, completely unconnected monitor in a hospital room to be viewing the MMOstream, instantly. Why? How? Is Yui in the computer? Is she an omnipotent being which travels through the net? Can she take control of any electronic device? If her reach is not limited to Alfheim Online, then why hasn’t she joined Kirito in Gun Gale Online? Couldn’t she be relaying reports from one game to the other? Literally any problem which I’ve raised with regards to Kirito being unable to communicate with the outside world could be solved by Yui. This is the most senseless and ridiculous thing that could have possibly happened.
Also, it’s confirmed now that the names of characters are displayed in the MMOStream video, so everyone watching it at home should know that Death Gun is Sterben. All that talk about cross-referencing SAO and GGO accounts was unnecessary–they can just call up the company and have them suspend Sterben’s account and ask for his home address.
Death Gun and Kirito are locked into their final showdown, and it’s worth noting that Death Gun sounds COMPLETELY different from how he did before. Back in episode six he sounded all disjointed and robotic (clip), but now he just sounds like a normal guy with a speech filter on (clip). As the conversation between these two continues, it becomes apparent that the notion we’re supposed to buy into, is that they can’t stop or capture Death Gun because they can’t remember what his name was in Sword Art Online, cause I guess that’s the only reasonably doable way to figure out who the fuck he is. Also, the only reason Kirito doesn’t know his name is because after the last time they fought, Death Gun was about to tell him his name, but Kirito said he didn’t want to hear it because he’d never see him again. Really? Was it really necessary to set up this half-assed dramatic irony in which Kirito, with odd specificity, decided not to learn just this one guy’s name who would happen to come back to haunt him later? This is so fucking corny it hurts.
—
Episode thirteen
—
I think this is supposed to be a heartfelt scene, where Yui’s asking Asuna to hold Kirito’s hand for her, since she can’t interact with their world, but when Asuna’s like “don’t worry, I’m sure your hands will reach him!” and puts the phone under Kirito’s hand, I always burst out laughing. To what capacity does Yui even exist in this phone? Is she capable of any senses other than hearing and speaking, considering she’s in call mode? I’ll stop thinking now.
During this fight scene, Kirito’s inner monologue suddenly sounds exponentially older than the voice that’s coming out of his mouth for some reason. Kirito remembers that he did actually hear Death Gun’s name before, which was Red Eyes Zaza, and then he narrates some stuff about how Shinon’s sniper attack is a phantom bullet, so they could work the arc title in there. Then we get some hard rock music over images moving in slow-motion cause what could be more totally radical than that? (clip) Kirito then cuts Death Gun in half and his body fucking explodes! I don’t even know what to say about this. Or wait, I guess his body didn’t explode, cause his parts are still together… what the hell was that explosion about?! At least at the very end, his voice has gone back to sounding like it did before.
Kirito and Shinon exchange their personal information under the assurance that the killer must’ve fled Shinon’s house now that Death Gun is out of the game. Which, while consistent with expectations so far, isn’t something I’d lean too heavily on when trying to predict the movements of a psychotic fucking murderer. I’ve been told that in the original web novels, Shinon kills Kirito to end the game and emerge as the winner, but in the time between the web novels and the final publication, Kawahara read the Hunger Games, and decided they should both win.
*reki kawahara reaches into hat labeled “villains,” pulls out RAPEY GUY*
Again?
*hat falls and spills, they all say RAPEY GUY*
I’m a little bit confused about Shinkawa’s motivations. On the one hand, he obviously wants to possess Carne Asada. On the other hand, he was apparently going to kill her after Death Gun shot her in the game. He says something about not letting her be alone, so I guess he was going to kill her and them himself? He seems pretty intent on raping her in this scene though, which begs the question what was he going to do, or what, in fact, DID he do, while he was there earlier. Cause I find it hard to believe that this guy was standing over her ready to kill for hours, and didn’t do anything perverted while she completely lacked control over her body. He obviously wants to get some before he murders her, so why didn’t he do it then? Am I really arguing about how unrealistic it is that Shinon didn’t get raped earlier? These are the kind of conversations that Sword Art Online leads to, folks.
So Shinkawa turns out to be this creepy guy who’s obsessed with being the best player in Gun Gale Online, and apparently he’s poured all of his time and dedication into it. He wants Death Gun to be the most powerful player in the game, but when Zexceed started saying that agility builds were obsolete, Shinkawa decided to kill him and I guess anyone else who was a strong player. Why was this necessary? It’s actually implied that Zexceed may have been wrong about the change in builds, since many people think he only got lucky in beating Dark Wind in the last Bullet of Bullets. Death Gun definitely seemed like he was easily the most powerful player in this year’s tournament other than Kirito, so what’s the big deal? If he’s legitimately really good at the game, why does he need to kill other players to prove himself? Couldn’t he have just won the Bullet of Bullets fair and square and shown the world who was best that way?
If Death Gun had been a former star player who was ruined by the changing dynamic in gameplay, I could see why he’d be pissed off, but it’s continually suggested that he’s a player no one’s ever heard of who’s entering the Bullet of Bullets for the first time. He hasn’t even given himself a chance to prove his strength yet, and he’s already killing people just for saying that they’re stronger than him. But Shinon never bragged about being better–in fact, I’m pretty sure she’s never played in a Bullet of Bullets game either. Why is she so famous in this game already when no one’s even heard of Death Gun? Is Death Gun only performing so well in this tournament because Shinkawa’s brother is controlling him? Shinkawa doesn’t seem to mind who’s controlling the avatar as long as everyone recognizes his power, so why not just let his brother win the tournament for him? I’m just saying, his reasons for wanting to kill people seem really flimsy, and the fact that he wants to kill Shinon totally contradicts with the fact that he wants to hook up with her. I get that he’s supposed to be a crazy person, and his voice actor really does a good job of selling that angle, but having a character who’s crazy shouldn’t be license to give them motivations that don’t make any sense. It might make their actions more believable, but it also makes the story and the character far less interesting.
—
Episode fourteen
—
*reki kawahara awakes in a cold sweat* what if the girl is stronger than Kirito?? *he shakes his head, smiles, falls back asleep* impossible
Kirito gets into a tussle with Shinkawa and it looks like he gets injected in the heart. Carne Asada drops a radio on rape-boy’s neck like a G, and then it turns out Kirito’s still wearing one of the electrodes from the heart monitor back at the hospital and it saved him from getting injected, yay! But seriously, how thick are those electrodes? The needle can instantly pierce through skin, but not through what appears to be a thin piece of plastic? Then Asada’s all smiley and like, thanks for coming! CALL THE FUCKING POLICE!
We flash forward to Carne Asada getting confronted by the generic bullies again, only this time she’s not taking their shit. One of them threatens her with a toy gun and she almost freaks out, but when the girl doesn’t know how the safety works, Asada disarms and educates her. Yay, it worked! She then turns around and shoots… a can off of a pale, okay how the fuck did that get there? Did she really set that up while she was waiting, on the off chance the bully would really pull out her brother’s model gun and then Asada would be able to disarm her and shoot the can off the pale? Was there nothing more realistic which could’ve been naturally stationed in their surroundings for Asada to shoot, like a nearby mailbox or something, literally anything less stupid than shooting a can off a fucking pale?! She doesn’t pick up the can or the pale afterwards, so either they weren’t hers, or she’s totally littering.
So now, at long last, we get to the part where Kirito explains the entire Death Gun plan inside yet another cafe (9). Apparently it began when Zaza first got the Death Gun cloak which allows the player to become invisible and started standing behind other players when they entered their information into the Bullet of Bullets tournament. Ohh, so THAT’S why we needed the whole convoluted explanation for why you have to handle all the real-money transfer shit inside the game world instead of on the website! It’s a huge, unbelievably complicated plot device!
Meanwhile, Zaza’s brother Shinkawa was getting pissed off because he was having trouble levelling his character, and so they decided they should murder Zexceed because he was pissing them off. It kind of made sense when they explained why Zaza wanted to kill people, but I guess Shinkawa was just born a psycho, since this was his idea to begin with. The two of them broke into their dad’s hospital and stole some killer drugs and a master key, which they just have at the hospital, which apparently is a key that just can open any place with weak security, because this world doesn’t make any fucking sense whatsoever. It sure is a good thing that the people they wanted to kill all happened to live alone in apartments with bad security. As for stealing the killer drug, I defer to my friend Hope who works at a veterinary hospital.
(roll Hope clip)
After some boring pedantic dialog about the meaning of reality, the government dude reads Kirito a short message from Zaza which seems like it’s obviously foreshadowing some shit that’ll happen in a later book. What follows after this is possibly my favorite scene in the entirety of Gun Gale Online for purely ironic reasons.
In this scene, Kirito legitimately indoctrinates Carne Asada into the spurned women’s club (10). “Wassup bitches, allow me to introduce my latest bitch, Shinon. Shinon, this is my side bitch whatshername and my main bitch Asuna. Have a seat over there while we get your harem signup paperwork ready.” By the way, these school uniforms are fugly as hell. What were they thinking putting red ribbons under blue crosses on white collars? If there’s one thing I didn’t expect SAO to fuck up, it was costume design, but I guess this show couldn’t leave any stone of badness unturned for too long.
After a while of joking around, the club reveals that they went to Carne Asada’s hometown and tracked down the post-office worker (had you just thought it was a bank all this time? I had too) and her child whom Asada saved all those years ago. How long did they have those two standing around in the back room waiting while they sat there shooting the shit? How’d they keep that little girl quiet back there all this time?
So apparently this lady’s been super thankful to Carne Asada ever since the incident, but for whatever reason wasn’t able to get ahold of her. I know I kind of addressed this before, but I still can’t believe that all this time, no one ever celebrated what Asada did back then. I’ve heard from commenters that in the novels her mom was apparently pretty crazy already, so I get why she reacted that way, but how did Asada end up getting teased all through school instead of being praised as a hero? You’d think she’d have been on the news getting celebrated as the amazing little girl who saved a post office from a deranged gunman. And if this lady was so thankful, couldn’t she have put a little more effort into tracking Asada down? I mean Asuna and whatsherface were able to find this lady all the way in Asada’s hometown, and I doubt Asada moved away immediately after the incident, so how hard could it really have been?
Whatever, the little girl gives her a crayon drawing and then has some lines obviously delivered by a real child and then weirdly overanimated. (clip) Asada then ruins the picture by crying on it and the episode, along with the arc, finally ends.
—
The Epilogue
—
A lot of people have said that I only like hating on Sword Art Online so much because it’s popular, and those people are absolutely correct. If a show this bad came out and no one cared about it, then it wouldn’t be a big deal, but it’s gotten to be one of the most popular anime of all time in spite of its innumerable flaws. Sword Art Online proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that as long as a show has good-looking artwork and a decent hook it can make a killing, and people won’t even notice all the stupid shit that happens until it becomes overwhelming like it did back in Alfheim Online. And then you can win everyone back just by being slightly less stupid.
Reki Kawahara basically gets away with murder writing Sword Art Online, and he pretty much admits it. In various interviews, he’s admitted that there are plot holes in the story, that he’s incapable of writing female characters who aren’t in love with Kirito, that his favorite character is Klein, but he gives the females more screen time because he knows it’s what the fans want, and in one interview he even states that he doesn’t come up with the characters and setting before he starts writing, but makes them up as he goes. All of this is pretty evident not only in how the stories are constructed, but in how frequently Kawahara pumps them out. The guy puts out at least two books of both Accel World and Sword Art Online every year, and there’s no way he has time to flesh out each and every one of those books along the way. He’s obviously doing it because it makes him a lot of money, to the point that he’s willing to make creative changes based on what makes the story more marketable, and I can’t blame him for that; but I think we should be calling these things for what they are rather than acting like they’re just okay.
A-1 Pictures deserves a good chunk of the blame here too for for continuing to develop shows with half-baked scripts while banking everything on character design. GGO didn’t have to be a rushed-yet-boring fourteen-episode clusterfuck of constant reused footage and senseless bullshit, but that’s the kind of show they decided to make. I don’t know what it is about this studio, but with very few exceptions they have this incredible tendency to make shows that start off strong or have a strong premise, but just don’t congeal into any kind of decent story and eventually become really confusing when you’re forced to face the disconnect between their incredible design sense and their lackluster storytelling. In many ways, A-1 Pictures is even more aggravating than Bee Train, because at least Bee Train shows are as ugly as they are bad and never get your hopes up that they’ll be okay.
I’d like to think that people are finally starting to learn their lesson at this point. While people seemed to be excited about the start of Gun Gale Online, it seemed like more and more people were bored and confused as it went along. Every single time I’ve seen someone talk about what makes this arc good, they just mention how much they like girl Kirito and Shinon’s character designs. I guess if that’s enough to keep you watching a show, then go for it, but pretty much every A-1 Pictures show looks exactly the same, so it’s not like you don’t have options. After GGO, Sword Art Online 2 has launched into a series of mini-arcs about Kirito and the spurned women’s club dicking around in Alfheim Online, and a lot of people have been saying that the series finally truly jumped the shark. Others are enjoying it more now that it’s dropped any pretentions of being a real story. After GGO, there’s two books of these side-stories before SAO jumps into a giant continuous arc which has spanned the last seven books, and I won’t be the least bit surprised if that story eventually gets brought to animation as well. But before that happens, I’d like to offer some alternatives.
In my first Sword Art Online video I talked at length about one of my favorite shows, Log Horizon, which does the whole trapped in an MMO thing perfectly. But that show is pretty talkative and political, so if you like Sword Art Online for the visuals and the fantasy action, allow me to make some suggestions. Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood is a gorgeous show full of jaw-dropping action sequences which also tells an epic, involving story full of interesting characters and themes. .hack//QUANTUM is a fun little three-episode OVA which does the MMO thing pretty well and is by far the best looking and most entertaining part of the .hack franchise. If you like manga, check out Tate no Yuusha, also known as Shield Bro, which is a dark take on the normal guy sent to a video game world genre with a lot of big twists and some pretty interesting concepts and characters. If you really just want to see cool, inventive fantasy fight scenes, check out Read or Die, Soul Eater, and Sword of the Stranger. If you want a strong romantic subplot in a fantasy adventure series, check out Eureka Seven. If you want a show about characters being trapped in a terrifying life or death scenario with heavy psychological and sociological themes, watch Infinite Ryvius. There are countless shows which offer similar things to what Sword Art Online does without being a stupid clusterfuck, and if you need more recommendations just check out more of my videos. A lot of people seem to just watch my SAO videos and then assume that I must hate anime or something, but the vast majority of my analysis videos are for shows I really like, so check some of them out.
At the end of the day, I made these videos just for fun, and I hope you can appreciate that. I have to put up with a lot of stupid fucking hateful comments on these videos, but enough people have been enjoying and demanding more of them that I felt the drive to continue, and I hope you’ll stick with my channel as I intend to do some epic-length in-depth analysis of shows that I actually like soon. Have a nice day, and remember to keep a healthy hatred of Sword Art Online in your heart as you go.
So the fall 2015 season is already a month and a half underway, and now that I’ve climbed out of my cryo-sleep chamber that beams old GAINAX shows into my head for weeks on end, I guess I’ll give one of those seasonal charts a look. [MAL seasonal chart organized by popularity.]
Alright, we’ve got One Punch Man. This is obviously gonna to be cool as shit. Everyone’s been hyping up the manga for years now, and the main character’s like some weird melon-headed bald superhero dude surrounded by wacky and interesting alien cyborgs and shit. Studio Madhouse is still pretty damn reliable when it comes to action shows, and the director is the same guy who lead Space Dandy under Watanabe’s supervision last year, which was probably the best-looking anime TV series ever made. Definitely gonna watch this one.
Next we’ve got some sequels to shows I didn’t watch, some Silver Links show I don’t care about and… oh, look. An A-1 Pictures show. Judging by this cover art, I’m guessing it’s a light novel adaptation–not that I need to guess since it says so right there.
Now, I realize I’m probably the only weirdo who feels this way, but it’s been over three years since this studio put out a show that I actually liked–a time span in which the studio has released approximately seventeen thousand TV shows–and it happens that Tsuritama was directed by a dude I generally love. Every time they make a show that seems kinda cool at first I end up hating it by the end, and their visual aesthetic drives me up the fucking wall with how unappealing it is.
My gut reaction when I see “A-1 Pictures,” and “light novel,” is to stay the fuck away and never look back–which might seem a little closed-minded and dickish to people who don’t get where I’m coming from. Justifying why I feel these stupid emotions is hard. It’s not the kind of thing I can explain away in one sentence or paragraph or informational video. It’s not just one thing about these shows that rubs me the wrong way; it’s a little bit of everything. So if I’m gonna get to the heart of this, and try to get you to appreciate my big dumb hateboner for this studio, then we’re just gonna have to watch the show together while I bitch about eeeeeeeeverything.
Now before you leave a comment about how I shouldn’t watch a show I don’t like, or about how I’m an asshole for ragging on some show that people love, or whatever other reactionary comment you might be typing up right now, let me set some things straight. First of all, there are reasons to watch something other than enjoyment. In this case, the reason is a combination of intellectual curiosity and a desire to get this off of my chest. Secondly, there are plenty of people who ask me every day to talk more about shows that I don’t like, and who love it when I help them to justify their own negative feelings towards a show–and just as easily as I could’ve decided not to make this video, you could’ve decided not to watch it. And lastly, this is literally my job. I make youtube videos about anime. I don’t do anything else. This is my life.
So, now that we’re all on the same page, let’s head on over to crunchyroll and fire this baby up. If you want to watch along with me, I recommend using this kickass crunchyroll.com/digibro link to sign up for an account; because if you do then crunchyroll will literally give me five dollars. You can tell I’m serious because if I wasn’t then I’d never recommend this show to anyone, ever.
Before we actually click on episode one, let’s take a look at that little poster they’ve got on the side to give us a sense of what this show’s gonna be like. Every single thing about this poster puts me off immediately. We can tell that the main characters are in uniforms since they’ve got the same color scheme and general look, which means that this show takes place in high school. Now, that’s no huge knock on the series, considering that 95% of anime takes place in high school, but it brings along a set of expectations about what the setting and characters are gonna be like.
The uniforms are completely unrealistic and nothing like anything that’d be worn in a real Japanese school, and they’ve got this sort of sleek, almost sci-fi aesthetic to them–which means that this isn’t gonna be just a high school, but a special school for abnormal people. The fact that both characters are holding some kind of spectral-looking weapon means that it’s probably going to be a school where everyone has super powers, and which has some kind of school-sanctioned battling going on for some stupid-ass reason. Every season has at least two shows like this, and the fall season has three which are nearly identical. [Cavalry and 35 Shiken]
Moreover, the girl’s uniform has an unrealistically tight little miniskirt that would break the dress code at any school which actually bothered to have uniforms, along with sexy thigh-high stockings that show off just a few centimeters of flesh which are known as the absolute territory. The idea that she can position her legs like that without the skirt riding straight up and flashing her panties is a fantasy only anime can create, but it puts it in your head that surely, if you watch the show, you’ll be able to see the rest. Her rather large breasts are very pronounced by the way that her chest is pushed out, even though she’s looking at a downward angle; so all of you at home, I’d like you to look down at something while puffing your chest out a little and see how that feels. Anyways, the point is, this is gonna be a fanservice show.
Both of the character designs are what I would describe as “light novel default characters.” First, let’s take a look at Light Novel Guy. What separates Light Novel Guy from Harem Guy is the pointiness and swooshiness and possibly color of his hair. A typical harem guy or otherwise milquetoast Yuuji Everylead dude has black hair, sort of like a bowl cut or just a drab, boring look to him; and maybe glasses, so that he looks like basically every random fifteen year-old Japanese kid. What separates Light Novel Guy from Yuuji Everylead is that Light Novel Guy is how an edgy, “too cool for school” fifteen year-old Japanese kid sees himself. He stands out from the crowd a little bit, and has a dark, brooding edge to him that let’s you know he’s the most important dude around. He’s just generic enough to project yourself onto, but just stylish enough to look like kind of a badass when the chips are down and there’s an ass to be kicked.
Light Novel Girl, meanwhile, is a more specific package, but with a few more variables. She’s just a bit shorter than Light Novel Guy, and she has very large breasts–but not like crazy large. If she had really huge boobs then she’d be the girl with the big boobs, which is one of the side characters, so it’s important that her boobs be about as large as could be considered reasonably proportioned for her height. She’s got a slender body, but just enough leg that she looks like she could muster up a reasonably strong punt to the groin, and her candy-colored hair falls anywhere from her upper back to just beyond her butt. This is what I call the “main girl look.”
So if their overall designs weren’t generic enough, we can also figure out their equally generic personalities by looking at their weapons. Light Novel Guy’s got this big dumb sword with way too much shit going on, which I guess is meant to look like it’s got a status buff or something, or like it’s poisoned… whatever, it looks like a plastic toy that’s possessed by a ghost. Meanwhile, Light Novel Girl has a shiny pink rapier, and is standing in a comparatively defensive position.
Obviously Light Novel Guy is the type of fighter who’s brash, passionate, and maybe a bit out of control from time to time. He jumps headlong into the action, yells about friendship, and does a lot of damage, in contrast to his typically lackadaisical and confused nature. Meanwhile, Light Novel Girl is more poised and reserved. She takes herself very seriously and is easily embarrassed because she tries to be guarded with her emotions; but since she’s on a crash course with the main character’s crotch just by being in the same show as him, then this is going to manifest itself in what many would describe as the “tsundere” archetype. Light Novel Guy is going to see Light Novel Girl in various stages of undress more than once, and she is not going to be happy about it.
The background is littered with garish effects that I’m not even sure what they’re meant to represent. The fiery orange shit behind Light Novel Girl kind of looks like it’s meant to be in the shape of wings on her back, but then there’s also an errant pool of orange crap behind Light Novel Guy, so it’s hard to say for sure. It doesn’t quite look like an explosion or a fire, so much as just like someone going apeshit with a photoshop tool that makes gradient orange splashes. Behind that is like a bunch of stars and vague sci-fi-ish doodles that once again don’t seem like much of anything. The bottom part has been swallowed by this ugly white goo–which, in fairness, isn’t the designer’s fault–the original image has the Japanese title in one of those snazzy light novel fonts, and I guess someone at Crunchyroll just did a really lazy job of superimposing the English title overtop of it.
Alright enough of this shit, let’s watch the show.
Right off the bat, the first episode opens up with one of my most hated anime tropes: the totally pointless shitty fight with no context. Two characters that I’ve never seen and know nothing about are fighting for reasons that I don’t understand. It seems to be in some kind of underground arena with a rabidly interested crowd, but it’s hard to tell if this is like a sporting event, or a gladiatorial thing, or if the characters are doing this willingly, or even whether or not they’re supposed to end up killing one-another. I mean, one of them does end up dead, but was that because of the nature of the competition, or some kind of accident? There’s just too little to go on.
At the very least, I can tell I’m supposed to be rooting for the girl, because she actually has a face and a voice. This girl is like ridiculously cute because she wears glasses, so I know she’s an important character on some level, whereas her opponent is a perfectly generic big dude with a mask and no voice whatsoever. Now, I’ve got a theory, based on the way that the mask breaks off at the end of the battle, that this guy wasn’t given a voice because we’re not supposed to know who he is, and if we heard that voice coming out of someone else or saw the actor in the cast list later, then we’d know who the killer was. In any case, the cute little girl seems like the underdog in comparison to the big scary masked guy, so for now she has our allegiance in spite of knowing nothing about either character whatsoever.
Within the first ten seconds of this battle–as in, two seconds after seeing the faces of the competitors for the first time–all of the dramatic stakes in this fight go flying out the window, because the characters transform into a pair of colored lights beaming around at random. Already, the rules and limitations of their abilities have been made irreparably unclear. Like, what the fuck kind of combat scenario comes out looking like a choreographed light show? How far beyond human capability do these powers extend if the characters can move at these ridiculous speeds and, for all we know, turn into laser beams? It’s going to become apparent in a second that these colored lights represent the colors of their weapons–but the fact that in this shot there aren’t even people attached to them makes the entire scene feel like a surreal metaphor for an actual fight.
The next shot is a laughably horrific excuse for fight choreography that tries to cover itself up by happening so fast that you’ll be impressed just because the characters are indeed moving. The guy comes running through the foreground towards the girl, but the sense of space is conveyed so poorly and his weapon is so awkward looking, that it kind of looks like he totally whiffs. We can only really tell that he’s aiming for the girl’s head, because she ducks down to dodge his attack, even though doing so was probably unnecessary. The girl like rocket boosts off to the right, and then swings at the dude, but this time he ducks under it–which was probably unnecessary because the colored light representing the sword’s arc is actually right where his head would be, if not for the fact that it’s in front of him and missed entirely.
So the guy lunges at her, but–wait, what the fuck just happened? Wait, go back and do that frame by frame. So in one frame, we see the girl’s head start to move to the right, and then in the next frame she’s suddenly in a completely different pose and facing the opposite direction. The dude not only laughable misses his attack, but instead of lunging forward, his body apparently moves backwards, and then he jumps over another sword slash that looks like it wasn’t even remotely close to hitting him anyways.
After that, the camera just starts switching characters from foreground to background a bunch of times because as long as things are moving fast they must automatically be exciting, and then we get some more ineffectual stabbing action before the girl goes in with her big yell. Now this moment where the guy knocks the girl’s hand away is pretty alright, as it creates a tension dispersal and represents the changing tide in the battle to his taking control–but it’s just followed by a bunch of other nonsensical disconnected frames.
The whole thing finally wraps up in one of those big all-or-nothing attacks that always makes me wonder why, if the characters could bust out these super moves whenever they wanted to, they decided to save them for the end of the match when they’re already exhausted. There’s a clash of swords, a pan up to the weirdest light fixture ever, a hint at this mystery man’s special powers, and then the girl is dead. From her last words, “I’m sorry, Ayato,” you can pretty easily figure out that this girl is probably the main character’s older sister, because who else would it be? The name has to be the main character’s name, and the only person who’d be around this age and give this much of a shit about him this early into the story would be his sister.
Now, I don’t think it’s impossible to open up on a big, stupid, flashy fight scene and have it be an enticing way to start a show. Obviously any amount of dialog or setting detail which might clue us into the purpose of the fight would go a long way in making it more interesting, or even just if the fighting styles of the characters hinted at what kind of people they were–be that idealistically, or culturally, or just in the way they fight. Both of these characters seem to have the exact same superpower and nearly identical weapons; how boring is that?
Lowering my standards as far as I possibly can with regards to scenes like this, let’s take a look at the nearly identical opening minute and a half of the Black Rock Shooter OVA. Once again, we’ve got a fight between two characters I’ve never seen and who have no dialog, and the scene ends with one of them being killed. Their powers are so over the top that there’s no sense of stakes or limitations, and a lot of it is just aimless sword swinging. But even this scene managed to intrigue me in a couple of ways. The location of the battle is like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and gorgeously rendered with excellent cinematography; the characters are both pretty goddamn cool-looking, and some of the animation cuts and fight choreography is downright stellar. Even the way that Black Rock Shooter’s death is represented is a lot more artful and interesting than the spot coloring pool of blood. And let’s address that, too.
When I watched this opening fight from the Asterisk War, I wasn’t sure at first if it was supposed to take place in the past, or if it was colored this way just because the location was supposed to be a dark and dreary place. Black-and-white is like a universal film shorthand for flashbacks, but the scene isn’t actually IN black-and-white–it’s just really heavily desaturated, but not so much that you can’t tell the girl’s hair is supposed to be purple. The laser beams are still bright and colorful, which makes it seem like the location is just a really dark place and the swords are really bright; but then the blood is also really bright, which gives the impression that it was meant to look artsy and cool. It’s like they couldn’t decide between whether they wanted to do like an artsy black and white spot coloring flashback scene, or a more normal-looking fight scene where you can still tell what the characters are supposed to look like and which still has the same general feel as the rest of the show–so they went halfway in both directions and made something that looks like shit.
Now that I’m finally done talking about this stupid fight scene, we can let the camera pan up through all these weirdly esoteric shapes which don’t seem like they’re meant to be literal layers of the building where this fight took place, and then abruptly cut to this screenshot of the Sword Art Online opening theme. This has got to be the laziest possible visual shorthand for vague futurism. It seems at some point that the anime industry collectively decided that the inside of the internet is a stylish color gradient with a bunch of random particle effects and image tabs opened up across an ethereal plane of nothingness.
Years of Hollywood films have conditioned us to associate random photographs of vaguely industrial buildings with exposition about the current state of humanity, and through a handful of helpful photographic screenshots, we learn that something called Invertia drastically changed the world as we know it–apparently by way of a bunch of meteors falling on Tokyo. Continuing the theme of vague futurism, a CG globe with a bunch of random names on it and some weird hexagon with meaningless symbols attached to it apparently are meant to represent the shift in world powers; it looks more like an RPG stat graph. We are told that the Invertia caused a shift in the moral principles of society for some reason, which only informs us that the people of this world should be completely unrelatable to us. This is a very important and accurate detail. I hope you’ve also figured out that the word “invertia” is a not at all clever reference to the idea that this incident inverted the nature of the world as it stood. This will not be relevant later on.
Over the course of the following scene, the narrator informs us that the Invertia led to a new race of people being born with superpowers called the Genestella, and that those people meet in this city called Asterisk in order to fight one-another; but I want to break the rest of this scene down in more depth for what’s happening visually, and I’m out of time in this video. Yes, it took me fifteen minutes to make it two minutes into the first episode. Yes, this is going to be a long ride. Yes, I am a crazy person.
When I left off in the previous video, a handkerchief was floating through the air over an idyllic cityscape, where fancy buildings are interspersed with luscious park reserves, and Light Novel Guy makes a nice catch. A quick shot of Light Novel Girl informs us that the handkerchief is hers, and she seems to be upset about something. Now, if you’re a genre-savvy anime watcher viewing this episode for the first time, then you probably already know what’s about to happen. All you had to see was that the girl’s shirt isn’t buttoned up all the way, and you can guess that this scene is going to end in Light Novel Guy accidentally seeing her in her underwear as a result of his nice-guy attempt to return her handkerchief. If you’re like me, then you’re probably halfway between rolling your eyes, and being quietly impressed at the speed with which this show is rushing headlong into trashiness. But we’ll put a pin in that for now.
We quickly get our first good look at Light Novel Guy, and oh my god, it’s Kirito! No wait, maybe it’s Inaho? It’s hard to tell with these A-1 Pictures characters cause they all have the same fucking face. Seriously, there’s like maybe ten or so different face templates which this studio seems to use on every single character in the majority of their shows. It’s crazy! Now look, I’m not one of those guys who thinks that anime characters all look the same. I can appreciate the subtle differences between say, the characters in K-On, vs. the characters in Hyouka, vs. the characters in Hibike Euphonium, and I’ve seen evidence to the fact that when you switch these characters’ faces around, they actually look really weird. But what happens when you put Kirito’s face on Ayato? Oh. Or how about Inaho’s face? Oh. I guess anime characters do all look the same. And it’s funny that I’m even bringing this up now because it’s SOOO much worse with their girl characters. Anyways, I digress.
Light Novel Guy–by the way, this guy’s name is Ayato–gets all glowy, meaning he’s gonna do some superpower stuff, and makes this really awful-looking leap up to Light Novel Girl’s window. He lands all dainty and smooth, but then is struck with embarrassment as he realizes what he’s just accidentally done. Pat yourselves on the back everyone, cause you saw this coming.
Funnily enough, our first panty shot is decidedly not tantalizing, on account of Light Novel Girl apparently has no ass whatsoever, but the camera pans up quickly to hide it and to get into some bra territory. We’ll come back to this in a second–after the camera’s done panning out across the entire world of this story, in a way that actually kind of reminds me of the opening panning shot from Kill la Kill–besides being several fathoms less interesting because it’s just a normal city and not the creatively constructed world of Honnouji Academy. This comparison may end up being more relevant than you first expect, but we’ll save that for later.
After the title card, we fade in on this shot of a huge building complex, which at this point I’m going to assume is a school campus–in which case it may indeed roughly share the populace of a small city. The main building is 28-stories high–I counted.
So of course, it wasn’t enough that we caught a glimpse of this girl in her underwear before–now we get the full-on slow camera pan treatment with all the details in the garments. May I remind you that this is our first exposure to this character–forgive the double entendre. Before we’ve been treated to any piece of information about her whatsoever, our first impression is that her underwear matches her hair.
Now look, I’m not someone who dislikes fanservice in general. In fact, I actually enjoy shows like Kanokon and Seikon no Qwaser wherein the fanservice is pretty much the entire point of the show, because at that point it’s basically just softcore porn with actual characters. Even in shows that aren’t about fanservice, I tend to be okay with it as long as the fanservice is what I call, “diegetic.” [word on screen.] What I mean by this is that the characters are scantily clad for reasons that actually seem normal and make sense narratively. Like, it’s not unusual to think that if you, say, went to the beach with a bunch of girls, then you’re going to see them in sexy bathing suits. That kind of thing is a part of life. It can add to characterization or to our perspective on a character to see how they may act in situations that lead them to be naked, or sexualized; and that’s totally normal and makes sense.
What bothers me is when you take like a plot-driven show that doesn’t really have much to do with sex or sexuality, and cram in a bunch of random, totally unrealistic scenes wherein characters accidentally see one-another naked just for the sake of itself. I mean, it’s not like I don’t understand the appeal of having like a real, normal, plot-based show that happens to be full of cute girls and maybe sometimes you get to see them naked–but it’s not even slightly difficult to accomplish this just by having the girls converse in a locker room, or making a pool episode, or at the very least, just admitting that the guy is deliberately checking the girl out. A moment like this doesn’t even feel like it’s happening in the context of the story–it feels like it’s happening directly to the viewer. Like the universe of the story has conspired around finding a situation in which the audience can be treated to a titillating camera pan of a half-naked girl which isn’t really in-character from the main guy’s perspective, nor a logical result of the narrative at all.
And what’s more, in this particular case, I’m not even really sure how this is meant to attract me to the show. Light Novel Girl certainly isn’t my type, which is more a matter of personal taste, but why do I even care that I caught a two-second glimpse of some girl I’ve never seen before in her underwear? If I wanted to, I could minimize this window right now, open up a new tab and type “pink hair anime boob” into google and immediately have hundreds of pictures of girls identical to this one in whichever particular state of undress most interests me for as long as I want. What is so enticing about random, disjointed fanservice moments that it could possibly compete with the infinite resource of carnal pleasures known as the internet?
But for the sake of argument, let’s say that I live in a universe where the only source of entertainment in existence is anime, and my browser has been set to automatically load up crunchyroll at all times and no other websites whatsoever. I’m only a few clicks away from Kanokon, Recently My Sister Is Unusual, Demon King Daimaou, and So I Can’t Play H, which all have a lot more fanservice, with actual nudity, and much better animation. If I’m specifically only into girls with long pink hair, I’ve got Shin Koihime Musou, R-15, and Familiar of Zero right there. If I am specifically interested in seeing fanservice of a character voiced by Ai Kakuma, then I can watch Amagi Brilliant Park and Kanojo ga Flag Oraretara on the same site. The only thing that this scene provides me which I can’t get a better version of elsewhere is fanservice of a pink haired girl voiced by Ai Kakuma–and if you’re watching this show for such a specific reason, then you probably don’t give a shit whether it’s good on not. By the way, if you want to watch all of those shows, why not use my crunchyroll link to sign up and make me some mon-[cut me off]
So Light Novel Girl reacts about how you’d expect and we watch her change into her weird, illogical school uniform as Kirito explains his reason for being there. As soon as Light Novel Girl hears this, she makes the fastest transition from “tsun” to “dere” that I think I’ve ever seen, lowering Inaho’s guard and making her look like kind of a reasonable person. On a side note, it sure was considerate of the school to provide their students with uniforms that conform perfectly to the contours of their ass–I bet that’s real comfortable.
Of course, the idea that Light Novel Girl is actually a reasonable character is nothing but a false promise, and as soon as she remembers her purpose in the story, she immediately flips into attack mode and destroys her own living quarters. Like, what else is this shot meant to communicate if not that she’s literally blown up her entire apartment because some guy, to whom apparently she is incredibly grateful, happened to see her in her underwear for a second. It’s a good thing this show takes place in a world where everyone’s moral principles are different from ours or else this behavior would seem completely irrational.
Now, you’ve probably figured out at this point that I’m not going to offer this show a whole lot of compliments–that’s not what any of us are here for anyways–but while we’re on this shot of Light Novel Girl’s cocky smile I’d like to give it credit for the one thing I do think was handled alright by this show: the color design. I realize that some of my critics who literally refer to me as “Pretty Colors Digibro” are laughing their asses off right now, but seriously, the colors are pretty. As silly as the uniforms are, they kind of remind me of Phantasy Star Online–and as much as I don’t like Light Novel Girl’s hairstyle, I like that shade of pink and how it contrasts with her eyes. The use of gradients in her hair is nice and subtle–which isn’t going to be the case for every character, but we can talk about that later. I just wanted to pause on this shot because it’s actually got some character to it–even if that character has been such a jumbled mess over the past thirty seconds that it’s impossible to have any idea what this girl is actually like.
The next shot immediately caused me to burst out laughing. At first I thought, Jesus Christ that is some awful framing, why would you ever position the camera like this? The characters look like they’re just superimposed onto the backgro–and then I saw the CG classmates. Nothing quite takes me out of a scene the way a bunch of random, generic CG pedestrians do. It’s never enough that they look completely different from everything else in the show’s world and stand out like a sore thumb, but they always end up with these janky walk cycles that look fucking hilarious. This shot is especially incredible because the perspective is so fucked up that they look like they’re significantly shorter than the main characters.
After a few more students filter into the foreground, it becomes apparent why the main characters look so awkwardly superimposed onto the background. The trees in the distance have this awful filter drawn over them to make them look washed out, as do the CG classmates, and the students in the foreground are blurry and out of focus, to suggest that the focal point of the proverbial camera is fixed on the main characters; however, the entire grassy area that they’re standing on is all in focus–most especially the foreground closer to where the students are standing. This is yet another case where it seems like they tried to pull off something cool and cinematic, but only went halfway and ended up with something janky and hideous.
We’re treated to a quick rinse and repeat of the girl being irrational and standing awkwardly in a shot full of CG dudes and then we finally learn her name–Julis. She presses this button on her boob and then a super weird laser thing shoots out of it and a duel is begun. We’re not gonna comment on the other details here because they’ll be more relevant later. Believe me, you’re not missing anything, they just kind of stand there and talk about how they’re going to fight for a minute and a half while the camera tries its damndest to find new angles to shoot them from.
After some random, weird little sci-fi holograms float around for a while, we finally launch into yet another big, stupid, pointless fight–only this time it goes on for two whole minutes. I mean it’s better than last time since we at least know that both of these characters are relevant, and we know their names and why they’re fighting–but somehow, knowing that this entire fight is predicated on a stupid-ass accidental pervert scene and that there is literally NOTHING at stake somehow only makes it all the more annoying.
The only conceivable narrative purpose for this fight would be to show off the powers of the main characters; but like everything else in the show, the powers are generic and meaningless. Julis has a bunch of terrible-looking fire spears that she throws at Kirito, and he blocks them easily. Then she uses the same attack at a higher speed, and the result is basically the same. The constantly changing camera perspective, ultra-brief cuts, and random explosions all create a nauseatingly difficult to comprehend scene that looks like a million things are going on even though barely anything is actually happening. Julis is impressed with Kirito’s speed, so she decides to hit him with a stronger attack. All of her attacks have stupidly long and complex names that you’ll never ever remember if they come up again, but it’s okay because the attack is just a really big fuckoff fireball.
Kirito runs straight at the fireball, but it’s a trap–Julis actually makes it explode. Now in the process of making this video I have watched this fight scene four times, and it wasn’t until the fourth time that I really sat back and thought about what happens next. Every other time I was so bored and disoriented by all the flashing lights that I just kind of stopped thinking about it until the fight was over–but now that I’m going through moment by moment, I can really allow myself to drink this in.
Inaho jumps directly through the explosion, as if it didn’t do anything to him at all, while shouting the name of an attack called like the twin dragon or whatever, and then… cuts… the explosion? I think? Is that what’s happening here? Like, it’s clear that the explosion has already happened–he is inside of the explosion, and it has not done anything to effect him. But then he slashes his sword in the air a couple of times, and there seems to be another explosion behind him as a result… or something? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN THIS SHOT?!
Right from this we cut to Kirito pushing Julis to the ground to protect her from a yellow energy bolt thing fired in from the sidelines, so whatever the fuck was going on with him inside of that explosion is just kind of written off in the next shot. I’m willing to bet that no one even noticed how utterly and weirdly stupid that fight scene actually was. So many things were moving around so quickly, and there was so much visual stimulation that the entire thing just kind of turned into white noise–and it’s not until that moment when Ayato pushes Julis to the ground that you wake up from your trance and realize that the episode is still happening. Considering that all of those enormous explosions didn’t even manage to scorch the grass in the place where the characters were fighting, you could be forgiven for mistaking that entire scene for a fever dream that you had after passing out during the prior two minutes of characters standing around.
It was right around this point in my first viewing of this episode back when it came out that I stopped watching the show. After seven minutes of nothing but irritating, generic, and boring scenes, this utterly meaningless action sequence finally lost me to the point that I got out my phone and started tweeting about how shitty and boring the show is–and I think I left it running for about three more minutes before I finally shut it off.
At this point, you probably have a pretty solid general sense of what goes through my mind when I’m watching a show like this–the kind of relentless scrutiny that builds up and breaks a show for me so quickly that I just can’t take it anymore. But, my dear viewers, if you’ll have me, then this is not the end. I didn’t make this video to explain why I dropped The Asterisk War–I made it so that I can slowly try and get to the heart of all the things that bother me so much about shows of this nature, and about the works of studio A-1 Pictures. In pursuit of this, I have already watched all of the seven episodes of the Asterisk War which have aired at the time of this writing, and believe me… I have a LOOOOOT more to talk about–so stick around on my channel for more.
I’d like to invite you all to imagine yourselves in the following scenario:
Some guy you’ve never met before does something that really pisses you off, so you challenge him to a duel in the name of preserving your honor and punishing him. Nothing is really at stake or anything, and the guy doesn’t even seem like a terrible person, but you just gotta fight him for your own reasons. So the two of you trade blows for a couple minutes, and then all of a sudden the guy yells “get down!” and pushes you onto the ground, as an arrow whizzes through the spot where your head was just seconds prior. It takes a moment to process, but you realize that an attempt has just been made on your life, and that your opponent has just saved you. Now, given the situation, which of the following actions do you take?
Immediately jump to your feet and try to uncover the source of the previous attack; and, if possible, hunt down and put a stop to your assailant.
Call on the huge crowd of people who have gathered around your fight to identify and attempt to grab the attacker before they escape.
Immediately try to evacuate the area and to hide somewhere that won’t leave you prone to an incredibly likely second attack, or:
Realize that your opponent has accidentally groped you and immediately disregard the attack on your life in order to get flustered.
If you chose option number four, then it’s likely that your moral principles have been inverted.
So after Julis is targeted by some attacker off to the side, not a single person does a goddamn thing about it or even addresses it over the course of the entire episode. The crowd just stands around dumbfounded, and the student president comes walking out all nonchalant to cool the heads of the fighters instead of trying to pursue the assailant. The show manages to get away with introducing her this way because we don’t know who she is or what she can do yet, but if you come back to this scene knowing that she’s one of the most powerful fighters in the academy, extremely protective of the academy’s students, and more than capable of hunting down and capturing this very target in a later episode, then this scenario looks amazingly contrived.
It was around this point, when the yellow energy arrow thing hit the ground, that a lot of questions popped into my head about how these powers work exactly. In the opening scene, we saw a lot of dodging and blocking attacks, and we never really saw the attack that ended the battle, but we at least confirmed that these weapons can be used to kill someone. However, when Julis blows up her apartment and then creates a huge explosion right in front of Kirito, it doesn’t cause any harm to him whatsoever. As a genre-savvy anime watcher, I found myself assuming that this show follows some kind of logic where energy and projectile attacks aren’t really all that heavy on damage, whereas close-range bladed attacks are a lot more lethal; not that there’s really any logic behind this, but when you watch enough anime, your brain just kind of accepts it.
So this leads me to the question of whether or not the yellow arrow attack was meant to be lethal, or merely to do damage. After all, we just watched a bunch of projectiles and explosions be completely useless, and those were coming from the fifth most-powerful fighter in the entire school–so unless the assailant is even more powerful than Julis, then there’s no reason to assume that the attack would have done any damage–unless we’re meant to assume that the kind of attacks which Julis used were inherently non-lethal, whereas this type of attack is inherently lethal. See, this is why we need to have some sense of rules or limitations when it comes to random fantastical super powers, so that pedantic assholes like me don’t get hung up on trying to understand what those powers are capable of. Considering that Julis becomes more concerned about her accidental groping than she does about the attack, I can’t help feeling like maybe the attack wasn’t actually supposed to be a big deal in the first place.
So this scene is our first introduction to the girl with the big boobs that I mentioned in part one. Her personality type is Big Boob Girl Personality Type A: the Mysterious and Polite Big Sister. This character always talks in a very polite, yet somewhat airheaded manner, as a blatant way of concealing the fact that they know a lot more than they let on. They always seem to take control of any scene that they’re a part of, and feign ignorance over the fact that the other girls are jealous of their huge boobs. These characters usually have some kind of authoritative position in their school and are able to pull the strings and to create opportunities for the main character in the background. Sometimes this character is the same age as the others, as is the case with Claudia here, but other times they may be a bit older. Whereas Light Novel Girl’s personality is not necessarily beholden to the Main Girl Look, it is extremely rare for the Mysterious and Polite Big Sister to not also be a Big Boob Girl.
I’m not going to get too in-depth about anything here for now, but I’d like you to pay attention to the school badges and how they appear to be holograms which Claudia is able to restore using her own badge. At this point, all of this hologram technology is a bit outside of our comprehension, but later into the show we’ll be looking back on this when things get confusing.
We’ve finally made it to the second half of the first episode, as Claudia takes Ayato on a trip through the school to dump some much-needed exposition on him. In the course of voraciously flirting with him right from the get go, Claudia literally explains to him all of the stuff that I just said about the Mysterious and Polite Big Sister. She explains that she puts on an affable outward appearance in spite of the fact that her inner thoughts are dark and conniving, right after stating that she’s been the student council president for three years and displaying that she has all the power in this school. It’s like she’s reading her own TV Tropes entry, in a way that’s so spot on that I’m left to wonder if this is meant to be self-aware and tongue-in-cheek, or if they really thought that the best way to show us a character’s personality is to have them explain it.
Once the pair makes it into Claudia’s office, she activates what I like to call the Exposition Machine–a holographic projector that allows characters to stand in one place and dump exposition without constraining them to their current location, and allowing for relevant on-screen footage without taking the viewer out of the scene. I can’t help but wonder if the sequence of displays presented by this Exposition Machine are pre-scripted and used more than once, or if Claudia programmed all of this just to teach Ayato about the city, or if it has some kind of AI that reacts to her speech, or if she’s controlling it with a computer chip in her brain, or if it just doesn’t make any logical sense.
Claudia names off each of the six schools of Asterisk City, but a few of the images have been deliberately censored to hide the identities of their schoolmasters for dramatic effect. Now, if they had done this exact same scene without using an Exposition Machine, and were just showing these images to the audience, then this would be understandable–but thanks to the conceit that these images are being projected by a hologram machine, we have to assume that the images contained within that machine have, themselves, been deliberately censored, in-universe. This could conceivably be the case, but it seems both silly and unlikely.
As Claudia explains the concept of festas, a huge hexagon behind her shatters into a bunch of little hexagon displays, which all just have random pictures of swords clashing and other generic depictions of battle going on. Just as these things are meaningless to the viewer and moving around too much to really be taken in, they would probably be just as effective to Ayato; so once again, if the impetus here is to keep the audience engaged by having stuff move around the screen, then I have to wonder if the purpose is the same in the context of the narrative.
The next couple of sentences are where we finally get introduced to the closest things to what might be considered the point of this show. Claudia explains that Asterisk City is basically all about these giant inter-high battles called Festas, which are internationally-viewed events, and she hopes that Ayato will compete in them because their school’s track record has gone downhill.
Ayato, meanwhile, is not particularly interested in that, and asks about whether his sister has attended this school in the past. It’s actually unclear at this point whether Ayato is looking for her, or if he’s looking for information about her, or if he’s aware of the fact that she’s dead. Since we already know that she’s dead, we’re tempted to assume that he knows as well, though it later seems like this isn’t the case; and at the end of the conversation, he claims that he’s not even here to look for her, but just came to this school to search for a purpose. He doesn’t say anything about why he thought that coming here would lead to that purpose, so I guess he’s just following his sister’s footsteps? This also brings up the question of whether anyone else knows that she’s dead, and whether or not they’re hiding this information from him–but for now all of it is pretty unclear.
Processing all of that can wait for now, because shit is about to get stupid. After Ayato asks about his sister, Claudia gets him to look at this weird, glitchy image of what seems to be his sister’s student file. She says that this student entered into the school five years ago, but then she also says that all of the data about her was deleted, and that it’s questionable whether she ever actually did attend the school. Except… all of the data wasn’t deleted, because that right there is, in fact, data, which suggests that she did, in fact attend this school. Why the fuck else would this file exist, and why would it say that she was a student?
Moreover, what in the name of god is up with the file itself? Like, if all of the other data about her was deleted, then how come this one is just fucked up looking? Why does it seem like this image has some kind of glitch or virus, while the rest was totally deleted? Was this image left on purpose in order to create a trail or a clue for someone, or are we meant to assume that this was some kind of botched attempt at file deletion? If it’s the latter, then how in the world did the perpetrator fuck up so badly that they deleted all of the other files, but left the one with her face and name with just a glitchy, fucked-up look to it? Also, am I to believe that in this world where they can turn an entire room into a hologram projector, they don’t have the technology to try and reconstruct this file to look right? This just seems like such a poorly thought-out visual representation of his sister’s lost data that it raises way more questions than it seems like it was intended to.
Claudia goes on to explain that there’s an incredibly powerful sword at this school which, in spite of never having been officially checked out, has a bunch of recorded combat data from around the same time that his sister attended the school, meaning that there’s a possible connection between them. If you’re thinking right now that you didn’t actually realize that this is what Claudia was trying to say here, then don’t worry, because you’re not alone. The first couple of times I watched this scene, I got so lost amid all the made-up technical jargon that I just kind of zoned out until the conversation was over. It was only after realizing that I had no idea why the conversation went from the sister to the sword that I watched it again and fully processed the information. I mean, I got that she was basically saying that they have the sister’s sword, and therefore Ayato was probably going to end up using it, but I sort of lost the logical thread of the conversation.
Now, once again, it’s probably apparent that I’m not going to say a lot of good things about this show–why would you want me to, anyways?–but I will say that I think that the music is actually pretty good. It’s not enough to salvage the mind-numbing script, and I don’t know if I’d listen to it independently, but it would’ve been a fitting backdrop to a much better show. Weirdly enough, the soundtrack was composed by a Swedish electronic and jazz musician named Rasmus Faber, who leads a band called Platina Jazz that’s done five albums worth of anime theme song covers, and has a channel on youtube with them playing a lot of them live. This guy’s entire career is more interesting than anything that actually happens in this show, and he seems to have some pretty excellent taste in anime theme songs, so maybe go check out his channel.
Getting back to the show, Claudia hands Ayato a weapon that looks and sounds like a plastic toy. Seriously, I can’t be the only one who giggles a little every time someone grabs a weapon in this show and the sound effects are totally plasticky. I just can’t shake the impression that all the characters are swinging around Power Rangers toys.
Claudia wraps up the conversation by flirting some more and saying some mysterious stuff about how she’s glad they’ve finally met. Using my magical future-sight which has already watched seven episodes of this nonsense and still has no idea what the connection between these two actually is, I think it’s pretty safe to say that their history mostly exists as an excuse for this girl to come with a pre-packaged interest in the main character and to be on his side from the very beginning for the sake of narrative convenience.
Alright, it’s time for Inaho’s requisite classroom introduction. Those of you who don’t know a lot about anime or Japanese culture may be wondering why his teacher is carrying a baseball bat full of nails. This weapon is an old-school staple of the high school delinquent punk, and anyone who carries one most likely has a bad attitude. It’s not uncommon in shows like this for the main characters’ teacher to have some kind of quirky personality and to show up at random times in the story as a minor support character; but in the seven episodes of this show that are out so far, I don’t remember this teacher having more than four lines of dialog in total. I have to imagine that they gave her the baseball bat in her first appearance so that the viewer would know off the bat *caugh* that she’s supposed to be a yankee type character; but considering how totally irrelevant that is to the rest of the story, I’m not even sure why they bothered giving her any gimmick at all.
Gee, I wonder how many of these classmates are going to be relevant to the story–could it be the only two people in the room with brightly-colored hair?? Naturally, the only open seat just happens to be next to the girl that Ayato was fighting with this morning, so now their mutually flustered encounters may continue. You might be thinking, but wait! The window seat is open too, and isn’t that usually where the main character sits?? –but we’ll get back to that in episode two.
After class is over, Julis determines that she is currently in Kirito’s debt, and offers to do him one favor in exchange for him saving her life. I’m tempted to say that this is important, since the entire next couple of episodes are going to revolve around that favor, but I honestly can’t bring myself to say that any of this shit is important when nothing in this show fucking matters at all.
Julis exiting the scene activates Classmate Guy to make first contact with the main character. If you know anything at all about high school anime, then you’re probably familiar with Classmate Guy–every high school anime protagonist has at least one or two of them around. They usually exist for the sole purpose of providing exposition about the popular female characters, being the butt of comic relief, and/or declaring their jealousy over how much female attention the main character gets. They’ve usually got brown hair and barely stand out from the rest of their classmates, and are given some kind of dumb, unmemorable name that will never ever stick with you–and you’ll probably forget that they exist most of the time until they randomly show up. This particular Classmate Guy falls under the Newspaper Club archetype–a person who is obsessed with everything going on in the school and is therefore more informed than anyone else about what’s going on behind the scenes. This is one of the more powerful forms of Classmate Guy, and this particular one has some tricks up his sleeves, but we’ll get back to that when it’s more relevant in a later episode.
Classmate Guy basically explains all the shit that we already figured out about Light Novel Girl just from looking at the promo art. She’s very proud, very guarded with her emotions, beats a lot of people up, yeah we got it. This is also where we learn one of Ayato’s stupid personality quirks, which is that because he’s had it so drilled into his head that he needs to return anything which he borrows, he memorized the voice of the person who threw him a sword to battle Julis with, and is therefore able to return the weapon to Classmate Guy. Every Light Novel Guy has at least one trait of this nature–a predisposition to being a nice guy which reaches the level of superhuman capability, which is part of what makes them come off as such caring and kind-hearted people to all of the girls in the story. ‘Cause you know, the nice guys get all the action in these shows.
The conversation is interrupted by the shouts of Big Dumb Looking-Guy, who’s pissed off at Julis and demanding a rematch. You can tell this guy isn’t someone you wanna root for because he’s got a couple of ugly lackeys following him around and he looks like a muscle-headed brute–but you can also tell that he’s probably going to come back in future episodes and possibly end up joining the main character’s team because his character design is a little too unique to be just a one-off villain. Believe me, if the fact that only the important characters have any effort put into their designs has not been made apparent already, it will become so later on.
Classmate Guy excitedly describes this situation as a “big scoop,” and then materializes a holographic lens in front of his eyeball. Previously, during the buildup to the fight between Julis and Ayato, there was also a guy recording that fight in a holographic window–but in that case we could see the image on the display, whereas this time it seems to be a lens through which Classmate Guy is recording this.
What I’m trying to wrap my head around is the logic by which a hologram is needed for use as a lens. Again, the hologram technology in this show is never really explained, and it seems as though it mostly manifests itself by way of characters generating browser windows with their minds. Specific images can be conjured up instantly without any verbal or physical input, meaning that the students’ control over holograms is purely psychic. It still isn’t really clear if these holograms are controlled by the students’ Genestella powers, of if they’ve all go microchips in their brains and the entire world is full of projection materials or something; but the point is that whatever they’re using to manipulate these holograms is controlled by their brains.
If that’s the case, then the students should be able to record information just by using their eyeballs. I mean, not only would a hologram not be able to contain any technology, as the technology would be the thing projecting the hologram–nor would it be able to store any data, as the data would also be stored within the actual technology–but it doesn’t even make sense for the hologram to provide any augmentation. If the hologram is supposed to allow him to zoom in or something, and that technology comes from within his brain, then he should just be able to zoom in using his eyeballs. At least with the little holo-screen thing I could understand it being like a viewfinder or something for the student to confirm what their eyeball-recording looks like, but this whole hololens things comes off as totally pointless and ill-considered.
Classmate Guy sheds some light on the school’s battle ranking system, and how the strongest fighters are known as Page Ones, but we’ll talk more about that later on. After some back and forth with Big Dumb-Looking Guy, Julis makes her bold proclamation that she has a goal which she is dedicated to pursuing, and which she is going to win the Festa in order to accomplish, which seems to spark some interest in our protagonist. Well, at least we know that ONE of these characters has an actual motivation and some stake in the narrative… we just don’t know what it is yet or any of the consequences for failure.
We did it everyone! We finished watching the first episode of the Asterisk War! And it only took nearly three times the actual length of the episode to do so! I mean, technically I haven’t even talked about the opening video, which plays at the end of the episode, or the song that goes along with it, or the next episode previews…. so I guess our work is cut out for us.
If that video disappears, catch it on Google Drive.
Text version:
Over the course of the last three videos, I’ve complained a lot about how the characters in The Asterisk War seem like nothing more than walking cliches. Now I’d like to take this video to explain exactly what it means for a character to be a cliche, and why it bothers me so much to watch a show that’s full of them.
Almost every character in every story in existence can be slotted into some kind of archetype; which comes as a result of the limited number of thoughts and ideas which humanity is capable of experiencing. We write characters that make sense to us and who reflect our perception of reality; and as such, there tend to be a lot of commonalities among our expressions–because, as human beings, there are only so many things that set us apart from one-another.
Moreover, it’s almost impossible to be a creative person without being influenced by other creative people. Almost everyone who makes art is a big fan of art, whether their scope of influence is very broad, or very narrow. As such, any writer’s sense of characterization is most likely informed by the work of other writers–be that in the way of direct inspiration, or in the way of giving them ideas about what to avoid and subvert in their own writing.
When you look at the landscape of storytelling from a bird’s-eye perspective, by consuming as many works as you can and relating them to one-another in a complex web of influences, then the trends among those works become increasingly apparent. Once you understand that Hideaki Anno is a huge fan of Mobile Suit Gundam and Space Runaway Ideon, then you understand why he might construct a story about a young man being thrust against his will into piloting a giant robot for the sake of a cause that he doesn’t necessarily believe in–and why the film conclusion basically involves everyone dying and the nature of the universe being rewritten. Once you know that Attack on Titan author Hajime Iseyama is a big fan of Muvluv Alternative, then you understand why he’d construct a story about humanity making a desperate stand against an overwhelmingly monstrous force, in which major characters are regularly eaten by giants. It’s a chain of causality and influence that allows you to view culture as one big, grand metanarrative.
A cliche is what happens when a scenario is written not as an emergent result of being influenced by other work, or of the author translating their understanding of the world around them, but instead as a result of making an observation about the types of scenarios which can be found in the greater cultural consciousness, and then creating a scenario based around that idea.
Take, for example, the tsundere. The term “tsundere” began as an observation: people noticed that there was a tendency in visual novels for one of the main female characters to start off acting abrasive towards the male character, and then to eventually develop feelings for them and end up acting lovingly towards them. The moment when tsundere became a cliche is when authors started going out of their way to create characters which would fit into the tsundere archetype.
Now, I don’t think it’s impossible to write a good tsundere character while being aware that you are, in fact, writing one [Senjougahara]; it’s more a matter of your approach. To me, the biggest way to tell a good character from a cliche one, is to ask yourself the simple question: why does this character act the way that they do?
For example: Louise from Zero no Tsukaima starts off acting abrasive towards the main character, because she’s generally a prideful, insolent, angry, and sensitive rich girl who spends most of her time pissed off at everyone. Her personality gradually changes as a result of the main character’s influence, and she finds herself falling in love with him; but let’s take a step back and ask ourselves why she acted that way in the first place.
We understand from the beginning that even though she comes from a noble and important background, Louise is possibly the weakest magician at her school; and this disconnect between her prideful upbringing and the constant source of ridicule that is her powers causes her to understandably develop a complex about it. As the series continues, the more that we learn about her family and her past, the more her attitude just sort of makes sense as the result of her surroundings. Whether you find her personality to be tolerable or not, I think that Louise is a pretty well-done tsundere character for this reason.
Now, let’s take a look at Julis from The Asterisk War. Like Louise, she’s known for acting abrasive and insolent towards her classmates and getting into fights; and we see in the first episode that she’s very sensitive and prideful. Likewise, her personality is changed by the main character, and she very quickly begins to develop feelings for him. So let’s ask the big question: why did Julis act the way that she did in the first place?
In episode three, we learn that when Julis was a kid, living as a princess in another country, her life was saved by a bunch of kids from a local orphanage; and she spent a lot of her time hanging out with them afterwards. She decided to come to Asterisk City so that she could win money and put it back into the orphanage, and she seems to harbor a deep grudge against the world, and against this city in particular, for its callousness and reliance on money. However, while this explains her motivations, it doesn’t really tell us anything about how she became the kind of person that she is today. We don’t really get a sense of what she was like before or after meeting these orphaned kids, or if she might have changed after coming to the city. We really don’t know much of anything about her besides the surface-level details of her personality and the broad strokes of her endgame motive.
Now, I don’t think that every character needs to be given an extensive backstory in order to sell us on the idea that they are who they are for a reason; another method is simply to reinforce the character’s personality throughout the narrative. It isn’t until episode nine of Toradora that we learn some of the reasons for Taiga’s bad attitude and solitary, clumsy living experience; but we get a pretty firm grasp of her character by the end of episode two. We more or less understand who she is and what she’s going through and the difficulties created by her situation, so that even if we don’t know exactly how she became this way, we can appreciate how much she changes when she starts being influenced by her friends.
Meanwhile, our entire understanding of what kind of person Julis had been before the intervention of the main character comes from a couple of accidental pervert scenes, and one little explanation from Classmate Guy. In fact, we’re only informed of the idea that she’s known for being hard-nosed towards her classmates AFTER we’ve already seen her softening up towards the main character as early as their first interaction. Her dere is built directly into her tsun! We never once get to see what Julis was like before the beginning of her transition into the person that she is by the end of episode four–oh, and yeah, the transformation only takes like four episodes; but we’ll talk more about that later.
All of this gives the impression that Julis was written as a tsundere first, and as a character second. She was built from the ground up to be a girl who would start off with an antagonistic demeanor towards the main guy, and then to eventually soften up and fall in love with him. Any other aspects of her personality feel like window dressing to the core idea of her being a tsundere; and as a result, nothing about her character resonates with the audience. The only appreciation that you can have for her is on the database level–by recognizing her place within the tradition of the tsundere archetype, and possibly having a categorial attraction to that archetype as a whole.
This problem of recognizing the characters as cliches first and as characters second is pervasive throughout the entirety of the series, and is why it’s so baffling and hilarious that Claudia reads off her own TV Tropes entry during her first on-screen minute in episode one.
At the start of episode two we finally get our proper introduction to Ayato’s older sister, Haruka, in the form of a flashback to his childhood. This scene only manages to establish Haruka as yet another walking cliche: Dead Family Member Type A: The Maternal Guardian. This is a character whose only apparent trait is their nobility in protecting and educating the protagonist to become the kind of person that they are today. The best way to handle this kind of character is to show them as little as possible: to have them mostly exist in the form of the protagonist talking about how influential they were from time to time so that we know what they meant to said protagonist. As soon as you start actually showing this character dispensing lessons and declaring their desire to protect the protagonist, the character becomes too good to be true.
It’s understandable for Ayato’s memories of his older sister to pertain mostly to her influence over him and her desire to protect him; but the presentation of this scene does not suggest that this is from Ayato’s perspective. If it were, then lingering on the face that Haruka makes after Ayato says that he’s going to protect her would seem out of place, since he obviously doesn’t interpret any meaning out of her making this face. The delivery of this scene really makes it out like Haruka’s entire life was all about protecting and guiding her little brother; which, if true, makes her an incredibly boring character.
In Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, the mother of the main characters was dead from the beginning, and the brothers often remembered her as a caring and kind mother whose death, and their attempt at resurrecting her, were the inciting incident of the story. However, what eventually made Trisha Elric interesting was that she never quite got over the departure of her husband or was able to be completely happy with her life as a solo parent. It was in recognizing how hard her life had become and trying to maker her happy again that the brothers began developing their alchemy powers and learning to become stronger as individuals. Even though we barely knew anything about Trisha, we had some idea of the fact that she had a life and feelings outside of taking care of her children, and that realizing this was a huge part of those children coming into their own as responsible people.
In contrast, what Ayato remembers about his sister is that she was always trying to protect him; and what he takes away from that is that it’s his job to protect someone he cares about as well. Like the Elric brothers, Ayato wanted to protect his maternal figure; but unlike them, he doesn’t even know yet that he failed to do so. Whereas the Elric brothers had to confront the real meaning of being a protector and the sacrifices that come with caring for someone before the death of their parent and the beginning of their journey, Ayato only learns the basics–that protecting someone is the way to go–and doesn’t even know what his sister eventually sacrificed in order to protect him. He will never have the opportunity to see his sister in another light, and neither will we. Moreover, the narrative has no intent of punishing him for the shallowness of his ideals–Ayato is so fucking overpowered that protecting the people he cares about is the easiest thing in the world.
Like everyone else in The Asterisk War, Haruka’s existence seems like it was intended to fulfill a narrative purpose more so than anything else. She exists so that Ayato can have a guardian figure who was responsible for his sense of morality and even possibly for his combat abilities, as well as to facilitate a mysterious connection between Ayato and the school. Her personality is only revealed inasmuch as what is necessary in order to fulfill these narrative goals. It’s entirely possible that we may one day learn about Haruka’s personality and motivations in more depth, but given the overall dearth of creative ideas in this series so far, I would be absolutely fucking shocked if such a thing were to happen.
Episode two is also our introduction to Saya, and I don’t think it’s even remotely exaggerating to describe her entirely in TV Tropes terms. Deadpan Loli. Childhood Friend. Hammerspace. Done.
Why is Saya in love with Ayato? Because she is his childhood friend. We are literally given no other explanation–in fact, after it’s revealed that they were childhood friends, it seems like the show just figures that we assumed she was in love with him and doesn’t even bother building up to it or stating it outright–she just immediately starts fighting over him.
Why does Saya attend this school? Because her father is apparently a sort of mad scientist who constantly comes up with new and crazy weapons, and she wants to help promote those weapons by using them in combat. Why is this relevant to the show? Because it would be really adorable and funny if there’s this little girl who’s always pulling out gigantic guns.
Why does Saya have this personality? I’m not sure–in fact, her personality confuses me a little, because it kind of fails at being the cliche that it sets out to be. I know that’s a strange and pretentious-sounding statement, but hear me out. The deadpan loli is usually a very strict and specific character archetype. These characters very rarely speak or react to the things going on around them–and when they do, their reaction is always deadpan. They may have moments of determination and jump in to protect their friends, but it feels like they have to muster up all of their energy just to do so–or otherwise, their priorities and abilities are so alien that we can barely comprehend them. They’re usually tired and noncommittal; and if they’re a part of the main character’s harem, then they act like the guy belongs to them just because he does.
Saya has most of these elements, but her deadpan act isn’t very convincing. In spite of her having missed a day of class due to oversleeping and then regularly passing out, she ends up being a lot more talkative and proactive in the following episodes, and is a lot more clearly motivated then a typical character of her archetype. Now, if you wanted to, you could view this as breaking convention–maybe this is the type of character that they wanted to make. But I can’t shake the feeling like this was just a really awkwardly failed attempt at making a deadpan loli character. The proactive and fiery attitude that she takes towards her competitiveness with the other girls just kind of seems at odds with the sleepy and noncommittal nature that she’s presented with at the start.
Maybe I’m reading too deep into all this–particularly as someone who’s a fan of the deadpan loli archetype–but that’s just how it comes across to me; not that it matters because Saya is completely fucking extraneous and you could cut her from the show entirely and it would change absolutely nothing, because she exists exclusively for the sake of being able to shoehorn a deadpan loli childhood friend hammerspace character into the story.
Here is a list of other, better deadpan lolis, just in the name of providing examples: [Ruri Hoshino, Chino Caffuu Renge Miyauchi, Remon Yamano, Yotsugi Ononoki, Hiiragi from Hanamaru Kindergarten, Korone from Demon King Daimaou, Chiaki Minami, Hitoha Marui, Shiro from No Game No Life, Limone from Simoun, Noel Kannagi, Guu from Hare and Guu, Nozomu Ezomori]
Now, I don’t necessarily think that a viewer needs to be able to recognize these cliches, or to be able to provide examples of other characters who follow the same archetypes, in order to recognize that these are cliched characters. Even if you’ve only seen a handful of different anime series, you will probably suspect that these are not the most interesting or unique characters in the medium, because all of them have so little in the way of personality or motivations. They aren’t the kind of characters that you easily connect with or understand; and if you’ve even heard the word tsundere before, then you could probably figure out that Julis is one of them. However, I do think that the more familiar a viewer becomes with these cliches, the more annoying they become.
I think if you challenged me to try and name one hundred tsundere characters in less then twenty minutes, then I would be able to do so with time to spare. I have seen tsundere who were the main characters of some of my favorite anime, such as Taiga from Toradora. I heard the term for the first time in 2007 when I was being disappointed in characters like Shana and Nagi Sanzenin; and I’ve seen characters following this archetype from before the term even existed, like Akane from Ranma ½, or even, to an extent, Yukino Miyazawa from Kare Kano–one of my favorite anime characters. I’ve seen decent tsundere like Asuna and Misaka, and I’ve seen terrible cliche tsundere from–fuck, nearly everything this season!
Every single time I see a new tsundere, that tsundere is going to be compared to every other tsundere that I’ve ever seen before. Is she as complex and interesting as Asuka Langley? Is she as cool and likeable as Makise Kurisu? Is she as hot as Haruhi Suzumiya? Probably not.
This is why it bothers me so much to watch a show full of cliche characters. Not only have I seen it all done elsewhere, but I’ve seen it all done better. I liked Claudia more when she was Tomoe Mami, I liked Julis more when she was Kashiwazaki Sena, and I liked Saya more when she was the last remaining original[Saya from Blood]- I mean, when she was Ezomori Nozomu. It’s bad enough that the characters in this show are a bunch of one-note, boring pieces of cardboard that I can’t relate to, but when you throw in that I’ve seen a million other characters exactly like them but better, it just becomes insurmountably tiring. And I haven’t even really talked about the main character guy yet– but we can dig into him a little more when we get back to following the show in a chronological fashion. Because apparently I’m still watching this shit.
Image may be NSFW.
