The first half of the episode is almost acceptable. I mean, the moments between Kirito and Asuna are super cliched but they are also among the thousand easy romantic bits you can only include in a story that includes actual post-confession romance. Seriously, even if you just stick to cliches, there’s more than enough material to fill up a dopey twelve episode season. It is endlessly frustrating to me that anime romance clings so defiantly to its state of arrested development.
I’m not gonna sit here and wonder why this is the case, though. It makes perfect, cynical sense – and it’s not because these writers aren’t smart enough to think of ways to create drama for an established couple. Frankly, most harems and romcoms aren’t well-written enough to think of meaningful obstacles for a non-established couple, so I doubt an inability to write worth a damn would stop them from trying the other situation.
It’s just that the non-established fantasy is the profitable one. The one that plays off audience nostalgia, the one that lonely fans can relate to, the one that maintains a “pure” love interest, and the one that allows for multiple romantic interests to always be “in the running,” allowing the audience to pick and choose their favorites or even create their own pairings of characters. To me, the most frustrating thing about all this is that from an economic and audience perspective, it makes total sense. They’re not “wrong” to write stories like this – yeah, it results in terrible, repetitive stories that never explore nine tenths of what make relationships compelling and endearing, but they’re not doing this because they’re stupid. They’re just playing to the crowd.
And yeah, it is easy to write the “will they or won’t they” nonsense, and yeah, the amount of existing precedent for that basically means you just have to reshuffle Love Hina episodes every so often to come up with a new Nisekoi. Basically every cynical way you could frame this seems perfectly reasonable to me.
So yeah, thanks, Sword Art Online. Honestly. Hopefully you being such a ridiculous mega-success will maybe give other writers the courage to actually respect their audience a little.
Which brings us to the second part of the episode, and it's just a nosedive in writing quality. The writers introduced a new harem member who is not a love interest, but still fulfills an important role: the daughteru. Yui is basically the cute loli with secret reality-bending powers that acts like a daughter surrogate for the couple, because having Kirito and Asuna just hang out and go on dates together is clearly not moe enough we skip straight to the moe-daughter stage of an established relationship. The way she's introduced is just terrible, Kirito and Asuna just pick her up like a stray puppy and Yui immediately calls them papa and mama. The story really wants us to care about this new character, which is also why the writers fried Yui's brain. She's like a Skinner box, but for a tv audience: the writers reinforce positive emotions in the viewers by showing a cute and adorable anime baby that you just want to protect, and then you slap her only a few moments later and everybody cries for her.
Another terrible moment in the episode was the final part. Remember when we were hunting player killers just a few episodes ago? Now we basically act like them, but it's ok because this time we are going against EEEEEVIL people, so everything is allowed. Of course, it's not like we can't do anything to them (just like how they can't do anything to the people they were harassing, so their threats amounted to absolutely nothing. Whoops, plot hole!) so instead of taking damage, they are treated to a mild knockback when hit by another player in a safe zone. This is about the same kind of effect as when you're in a fighting game and you're forced to crouch in the corner like a little bitch because you can't counterattack or reposition without getting hit. It's more frustrating than terrifying, honestly, and hardly a reason for the goons to run and cry out in fear like they did. In fact, what makes the goons' presence any bit threatening in the first place if they actually cannot physically hurt people? What's the point of showing up fully armored in front of orphanages if you can't even inflict pain?
Still, not that they care about consistency, this anime is clearly successful so why do they need to put up an effort to tell a believable story? They can just write what they want and people will lap it up and defend it. |