(For clarity's sake, I'm going to split the first 25 episodes between a 'first season'[1-14, the original SAO] and 'second season' [15-25, Alfheim]. Yes, I'm a terrible Canadian philistine with no sense of cultural propriety. I watched the dubbed version too.)
I'm not a big fan of anime, but I had heard good things about Sword Art Online, it's on Netflix, and there's only two seasons so I knew I wouldn't get tired halfway through.
The first season was fine, a bit touch-and-go about how the game rules worked (do they feel pain or not?) but generally fine. The only worrying thing was the amount of fanservice -it seemed like every female character had a couple shots of her legs that lingered too long, a personal issue I have with a lot of anime (I'm too old to ogle teenagers, even animated ones). It came to a decent ending, setting up a new arc about coming back to the real world.
But that second season... ugh.
The Incest
Holy shit, the incest. A storyline about a middle schooler with breasts the size of her head wanting to sleep with her brother/cousin sounds like the kind of porn that gets people arrested, not the big arc of the new main character Suguha.
On a related note, the fanservice hit an all time high. I don't think there's been a single female character on the show who hasn't thrown themselves at Kirito, and we get plenty of lingering shots of their bodies. It's really weird to have the villain be a creepy racist when the animators were clearly loving the idea of Asuna in terror.
The Game
At no point in the show did I have any idea how Alfheim worked. I think that the 10 minute flight limit was the only hard point of data about the game- they mentioned that there were a number of different races, but 2/3rds of them never made an appearance, and even among the ones we see there was very little to distinguish them beyond aesthetics. The Sylphs were probably the most represented, but they never even said what kind of magic they specialized in (healing, I guess?). Not that the magic is well explained at all: Leafa could pull off a pretty good illusion while Kirito never tried it, and not only was there no explanation for Kirito turning into a giant monster it was never brought up again in the season. Similarly, I never knew how powerful anyone or anything was, other than Kirito being better than everyone.
There seemed to be no hard rules or benchmarks for who could do what and why, and I never felt any tension as anything happened. Even dying never seemed like the big deal the characters made it out to me; oh, no, your quest is going to take a 5 minute break while you respawn. That clearly requires dramatically shoving people out of harm's way and shouting at them to stay out of your business because you can't ask them to sacrifice themselves for you. How was "assassination" such a big plot point when all it could do was mildly inconvenience people? Heck, why was there a summit at all when they could just send messages to each other?
The General Character Arcs
This was the biggest disappointment to me. Other than the love story, it seemed like none of the character decisions and development of the previous season mattered. Asuna was a prisoner who didn't get to do much of anything other than toss a keycard (which led to some incredible reaches of logic by Kirito to surmise it came from her), which is pretty disappointing for someone who was such a badass in the first season (though she did have some weirdly passive moments there too).
Kirito, meanwhile, seems to have forgotten that whole "I need friends" thing that broke him out of the lousy 'lone protagonist' mould that seems to plague a lot of anime. He manages to save two nations, but it never occurs to him to ask them to help him go up the World Tree. He refuses to even take Leafa with him during the actual quest despite the fact that there's no reason or consequence if they fail and 'die'. He never goes to his friends from SAO and ask them for help busting out Asuna, despite the fact that they'd love to help if they knew, they're incredibly experienced players who may benefit from the same levelling glitch as Kirito, and the bar owner clearly has links to the Alfheim community. (I'll let the "play the game instead of going to the police about the forced marriage and rape of an unconscious girl," in the name of the basic plot of the story).
**********
TL;DR I just finished the second season of SAO, and it was a letdown in so many ways, really poorly put together in terms of storytelling, and the sexual content went from 'kind of weird' to 'seriously disturbed'.
I know you like anime, Escapists, and you've probably seen the rest of the show or maybe even read the source material. Tell me, does it get better? Does it actually do a good job of handling the psychological aspects of surviving a death game, or even just "What if you lived in a MMO?" Am I totally blind and misreading everything that happened?
I'm not a big fan of anime, but I had heard good things about Sword Art Online, it's on Netflix, and there's only two seasons so I knew I wouldn't get tired halfway through.
The first season was fine, a bit touch-and-go about how the game rules worked (do they feel pain or not?) but generally fine. The only worrying thing was the amount of fanservice -it seemed like every female character had a couple shots of her legs that lingered too long, a personal issue I have with a lot of anime (I'm too old to ogle teenagers, even animated ones). It came to a decent ending, setting up a new arc about coming back to the real world.
But that second season... ugh.
The Incest
Holy shit, the incest. A storyline about a middle schooler with breasts the size of her head wanting to sleep with her brother/cousin sounds like the kind of porn that gets people arrested, not the big arc of the new main character Suguha.
On a related note, the fanservice hit an all time high. I don't think there's been a single female character on the show who hasn't thrown themselves at Kirito, and we get plenty of lingering shots of their bodies. It's really weird to have the villain be a creepy racist when the animators were clearly loving the idea of Asuna in terror.
The Game
At no point in the show did I have any idea how Alfheim worked. I think that the 10 minute flight limit was the only hard point of data about the game- they mentioned that there were a number of different races, but 2/3rds of them never made an appearance, and even among the ones we see there was very little to distinguish them beyond aesthetics. The Sylphs were probably the most represented, but they never even said what kind of magic they specialized in (healing, I guess?). Not that the magic is well explained at all: Leafa could pull off a pretty good illusion while Kirito never tried it, and not only was there no explanation for Kirito turning into a giant monster it was never brought up again in the season. Similarly, I never knew how powerful anyone or anything was, other than Kirito being better than everyone.
There seemed to be no hard rules or benchmarks for who could do what and why, and I never felt any tension as anything happened. Even dying never seemed like the big deal the characters made it out to me; oh, no, your quest is going to take a 5 minute break while you respawn. That clearly requires dramatically shoving people out of harm's way and shouting at them to stay out of your business because you can't ask them to sacrifice themselves for you. How was "assassination" such a big plot point when all it could do was mildly inconvenience people? Heck, why was there a summit at all when they could just send messages to each other?
The General Character Arcs
This was the biggest disappointment to me. Other than the love story, it seemed like none of the character decisions and development of the previous season mattered. Asuna was a prisoner who didn't get to do much of anything other than toss a keycard (which led to some incredible reaches of logic by Kirito to surmise it came from her), which is pretty disappointing for someone who was such a badass in the first season (though she did have some weirdly passive moments there too).
Kirito, meanwhile, seems to have forgotten that whole "I need friends" thing that broke him out of the lousy 'lone protagonist' mould that seems to plague a lot of anime. He manages to save two nations, but it never occurs to him to ask them to help him go up the World Tree. He refuses to even take Leafa with him during the actual quest despite the fact that there's no reason or consequence if they fail and 'die'. He never goes to his friends from SAO and ask them for help busting out Asuna, despite the fact that they'd love to help if they knew, they're incredibly experienced players who may benefit from the same levelling glitch as Kirito, and the bar owner clearly has links to the Alfheim community. (I'll let the "play the game instead of going to the police about the forced marriage and rape of an unconscious girl," in the name of the basic plot of the story).
**********
TL;DR I just finished the second season of SAO, and it was a letdown in so many ways, really poorly put together in terms of storytelling, and the sexual content went from 'kind of weird' to 'seriously disturbed'.
I know you like anime, Escapists, and you've probably seen the rest of the show or maybe even read the source material. Tell me, does it get better? Does it actually do a good job of handling the psychological aspects of surviving a death game, or even just "What if you lived in a MMO?" Am I totally blind and misreading everything that happened?
