Quellist said:
I had two major problems with Sword Art Online (The first part). After the villian gives his big speech everyone is all "Ok, lets form clearing teams and start making our way to the top, many will die on the way" Instead of "Fuck you and your stupid game, we'll all stay safe in the town until pretty much the intelligence community of half the world figures out where you are, burns your ass to a crisp and gets us all out"
For the record: tons of people did. Its implied in the anime but, in fairness, its not made as explicitly clear as it is in the books but the majority of the population did precisely that.
Quotes from book one, chapter 4:
"The players split up into four rough categories.
First and largest of those groups, at nearly half the game's population, were those who chose not to believe Akihiko Kayaba's conditions for release and simply waited for help.
...
They stayed within the first city, using their initial allotment of money-measured in a currency known as col-bit by bit to buy food and cheap lodgings, grouping together in loose cliques.
...
But as time dragged on, there was no sign of help. ... Their initial allotment of money wouldn't last forever, and the waiters would eventually have to do something."
The other other three groups were:
1. "The Army" which was a huge group of cooperating players, around three thousand of them, kinda banding together for mutual protection and to try to clear the game in an organised way. But after a disaster on one of the major floor bosses ended up losing most of its most elite members and retreated to control the lower floors as a sort of totalitarian government. There's an episode about the problems in their higher ranks as I recall (its been a while since I watched the series), after which it became more humanitarian.
2. Outlaws. Thieves, murderers, bandits. Either stealing to keep themselves going (because hunger was a thing that was simulated) or just because they preferred to prey on people. Around a thousand people ended up like that.
3. And a miscellaneous group of a bit under a thousand; containing the most active people in actually trying to clear Aincrad. Half of this group (around five hundred) formed numerous smaller guilds (including the clearing guilds running the front line), a large part of the rest were crafters and traders (around three hundred) and the last few dozen were the solo players like Kirito. Most of the story focuses on people in this group.
Again though, its pretty poorly explained in the anime as I recall because they don't spell it out as explicitly.
