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Sword Art Online (whole franchise)


ShadowWolf

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Yes Season 2 has been in production for quite a while. I love SAO, in so many ways. It is one of the best fantasy series that has come along for anime in a long time and the character design and the art is superb. It is well designed and flows very smoothly and I think interprets the manga even better as a powerful story. It is classic anime at its best..and I look forward to much more.


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Synopsis: One year after the SAO incident, Kirito is approached by Seijiro Kikuoka from Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Department "VR Division" with a rather peculiar request.

That was an investigation on the "Death Gun" incident that occurred in the gun and steel filled VRMMO called Gun Gale Online (GGO). "Players who are shot by a mysterious avatar with a jet black gun lose their lives even in the real world..." Failing to turn down Kikuoka's bizarre request, Kirito logs in to GGO even though he is not completely convinced that the virtual world could physically affect the real world.

Kirito wanders in an unfamiliar world in order to gain any clues about the "Death Gun." Then, a female sniper named Sinon who owns a gigantic "Hecate II" rifle extends Kirito a helping hand. With Sinon's help, Kirito decides to enter the "Bullet of Bullets," a large tournament to choose the most powerful gunner within the realm of GGO, in hopes to become the target of the "Death Gun" and make direct contact with the mysterious avatar.

 

This week, SAOII Episode 3 has Sinon reduced from a potentially interesting figure to a gibbering wreck at the sight of a delinquent girl making her fingers into a gun, proving that Sword Art Online is the best at rendering otherwise fine concepts offensive to all sensibilities when filtered through the lens of Kawahara Reki.

 

Trauma, and using a sort of immersion therapy to ease it, is a concept that I could see a show like Sword Art Online handling with a degree of skill. Definitely not hard sci-fi, but this is the kind of development that Sword Art Online was tailor-made for, alongside showing all the girls lusting after Kirito. And, to its credit, its heart is definitely in the right place, even if the actual execution is insulting on a primal level.

 

Unlike with Asuna, SAO does a surprisingly competent job at making Sinon into something more than a walking, talking brick—not exceptional, but she’s somebody whose personality thus far feels like more than a pre-baked archetype, and whose motives are deeper than wanting to fuck the generic male lead. She’s still saved by a male at almost every opportunity, but her actually having agency of some kind is fucking revolutionary for SAO. If the narrative handled Sinon’s traumatic past with tact, and without having her spaz out at everything and anything resembling a gun, it would give her taking to Gun Gale Online some dimension, and make her seem like an actual human being. But this /is/ SAO, and it wouldn’t be SAO if it didn’t implement tragedy with the precision of a sledgehammer. A really, really inconsistently-applied sledgehammer made of guns, dramatic screaming, bad camera-work, and an inexplicable lack of pants when combined.

 

A depiction of trauma should be a serious matter, used to flesh out a character and their fears, or any toxic personality traits. It should not be overly-dramatic or butchered to the point of being unintentionally amusing. And so long as it’s applied consistently and with a degree of realism, it’s hard to fuck this up. But by starting out with Sinon spasming in fear at a finger-gun, and later a model that she keeps around, it sets the bullshit threshold too low too early, to the point where her fear feels too pronounced for her to function in a game around virtual guns. To have guns pointed at her in a semi-realistic setting without her combusting out of fear feels like too much of a stretch when she’s stopped in her tracks by some back-alley delinquent essentially just pointing at her.

 

It isn’t difficult to make the results of trauma reasonable within certain contexts, since people are bothered by different things to differing degrees. Sword Art Online is so bad at depicting actual, legitimately understandable fear.

 

Courtesy of The Cart Driver.

 

 

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I just finished the first two seasons. SAO 1


I'm waiting for the SAO II or season 3 to be dubbed.


 


 


THIS ANIME WAS ONE OF THE BEST I'VE WATCHED IN A LONG TIME. IT HAD ME ON SUCH AN EMOTIONAL RIDE THAT I WAS NOT EXPECTING. OMG! I'VE RECOMMENDING THIS TO LOTZ OF PEOPLE. SOOOOO GREAT!!! AS YOU CAN SEE I JUST MADE MY AVATAR AND SIG SAO LOL


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I told myself I wasn't going to watch this! I didn't think I was really going to enjoy the premise of SAO. I kept hearing hype about it and then this topic sent me over the edge, so I started watching season 1. Wow! Very entertaining. Definitely glad everyone kept talking about it to make me satisfy curiosity.


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Overall the show so far is a huge let down for me. On paper the story is pretty good especially with the way it all connects and the depth of what the characters are going through but it's ruined by the show's pacing. However, I recommend that you watch it. While it's definitely not on my rewatch list you may find that you either love really slow story progression based anime seri.s or aren't bothered by it. If that's the case, I reckon you'll enjoy it.


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