Sword Art Offline: How Not To Do It
Author’s Note: This is not an ARG. I am introducing a metafictional element to the blog because I want to. Nyeh. In all seriousness this is a lead up to letting my friends submit posts under psuedonyms.
The following article seems to have been recorded on a cellular device by someone later identified as Raven Blackwood, a man who is surprisingly un-goth for his goth as hell name. Alive and well, sitting in my office, looking mildly upset that anyone could think anything was wrong from ANY of this happening... I had Intern Johnny transcribe it for us, the voice recording might go up later, but...yeah, he’s. Really a chip off the old block. Fuck.- Bud Bear
Man... Sword Art Online is really mid. I watched a few episodes expecting the worst anime ever based around the worst video game of all time. Instead I got a mediocre anime about mediocre teenagers based on a convincing clone of Final Fantasy XI. The Anitubers hyperbolically claiming that Reki Kawahara must hate all video games and be trying to ruin them with anime, that they’d heard him say it at a convention (and people just believed that for some reason?) didn’t look at the Japanese MMORPG market before making vast sweeping claims about it and the author, which is no surprise given it’s youtube and their careers exploded from it.
Large language model generative content was poised to take us out because of idiots like this I tell you fucking what.
But I’m not a writer. I just kind of can’t do it, I can’t do the thing. I can think of stories that sound pretty cool but when I try to put them into words? Boy do they suck. And those who can’t do? We critique. Because I don’t need to have a pilot’s license to see a helicopter in a tree and realize the pilot might’ve fucked up. That’s a perfectly functional device (or in the case of today’s subject a perfectly functional character concept) that someone destroyed by piloting incompetently.
Kazuto “Kirito” Kirigaya is a helicopter in a tree.
I’ve seen quite a bit of people making headcanons that are more interesting than his anime presentation. His light novel presentation is more interesting, honestly, from the simple fact that you can see his internal monologue is half anxiety and half survivor’s guilt as a teenager and the government is actually using that to take advantage of him. But it really doesn’t fix him in the long run or make him interesting. He’s just a mega gamer boy who does mega cool gamer things and all the girls want to touch his mega gamer dick but he has a mega gamer wife who’s as much of a mega gamer as he is despite the fact that they’re both not even 16 yet.
The fandom, which is more of an antifandom, also tends to gloss over actual interesting commentary for making noises at a screen, shouting that it’s grade A garbagio and that anyone who ever liked it should be fed to a woodchipper. Really I don’t think anything like that should happen to them, but I think Uwo’s Lab should make them dinner for a few weeks when I win the made up lawsuit for my made up mental anguish for hearing the arguments they’re making time and time again that Sword Art Online Abridged somehow managed to make passably funny.
This essay is about how on paper, Kirito is a great character, and his poor showing is entirely down to execution and perhaps no study of the hardcore PVP style games that Kirito enjoys playing. I’m saying Kirito a lot so I don’t forget his name because the boy is a slice of toast with a black wig on. Kirito. Kirito.
Let’s look at one of the most memed moments in fiction history. Kirito’s domestic sequence with Asuna, where they’re married and have a house and they GASP HAVE PREMARITAL SEX AS TEENAGERS! You can really easily make this into a sequence that’s haunting and heartbreaking instead of two teenagers playing house and boning in the middle of a crisis... while still keeping it two teenagers playing house and boning in the middle of a crisis. You just have to change their mindsets, and be open about how viscerally dark their situation is. Forget the “One year’s worth of pent up semen” prose that’s probably more of a bad translation or transliteration than Reki Kawahara being THAT BAD at prose, even if it was his first work.
Think about the fact that they’re not even in high school yet and they think they won’t make it out of a video game they purchased for funsies alive.
Make them openly terrified of not surviving and openly... just trying to live as adults for once in their lives while they’re afraid their lives might end. Then? To drive the whole thing home? Have them break up after the Alfheim Online arc, MUTUALLY, when they realize trauma bonding in a life or death situation as 15 year olds isn’t a marriage. These are trauma bonded children and even if they get back together later in life they should be AWARE OF THAT. Put these CHILDREN who went through a DEATH GAME in THERAPY.
Y’know. After Kirito and his cousin who was raised as his sister save Asuna from being trapped in Alfhiem Online while some older guy tries to force her to marry him for some reason. I don’t remember the actual reasoning. It can’t be that her parents are trying to force the issue, that... that was just Abridged, right?
Kirito and Asuna being ride or die besties after a disastrous relationship as trauma bonded kids feels a lot more compelling on the surface than husbando and tradwife who are still in middle school at least. I can’t back this up because I haven’t read many of the light novels but apparently where the canon currently is they have broken up. If your reaction to this is to tell me to grow up and that it’s anime and anime doesn’t do that, go away. You’re part of the problem.
Also yes I know I used Trauma Bonding ‘wrong’ but the point is they’re kind of mutually awful to each other in ways that were supposedly only solved by their breakup during the minecraft arc of the lite novels I’m not reading every single piece of Sword Art Online material for this blog post about ONE CHARACTER.
Yes I’m still angry at Hbomberguy (and thus every “Intellectual” critic on youtube) dismissing RWBY’s music as “Just fighty anime music!”, not because I particularly care for RWBY’s soundtrack but because it shows a remarkable lack of care for critical process when you dismiss entire mediums and genres as “Just (blank)” and that’s part of why this blog exists HOW COULD YOU TELL? From this RANDOM VENTPOST in the MIDDLE OF SOMETHING ELSE that’s TANGENTIALLY RELATED because it’s dismissed as “just anime” when the reasons it sucks are much more deep and profound than that? Proud of you for spotting it, Champ! I never left for the milk your mother locked me in the crawlspace I’m not even your dad I’m just a blogger let me out please... aw there he goes.
Anyway.
You can keep that sequence, that mini arc in the first series, almost completely verbatim. Just change the framing to two terrified teenagers larping what they think married adults do because they don’t think they’ll live to adulthood because they’re trapped in a mad scientist’s social experiment. It’s a really simple fix for one of the most infamous stories in anime history. Just lean into them being clueless teenagers LARPing adulthood.
I just spent a thousand words on an issue that isn’t even that big. The real issue is that Kirito isn’t really... much? In the personality department. He doesn’t have a “thing” beyond being “The hero”. He’s a passively nice boy who’s good at video games and went through a traumatic event that turned him into a secret agent who volunteers for the government who pay him a stipend to keep playing online games to keep an eye out and intervine in Death Game style crimes because copycats, remnants of Laughing Coffin, and other bullshit, so why does he have no personality? Why is he the Harry Potter of anime protagonists? A passably handsome nice young man with dark hair and no thoughts behind those eyes.
Y’know what character is a weedy little shit supergenius who a superadvanced government relies on for everything after meeting him that nobody in their right mind would call overpowered? Artemis Fowl. He’s even a passably handsome young man with dark hair and WAY TOO MANY thoughts behind those pretty eyes. As he is described in book. He’s also physically pathetic and only has his brain going for him, but I wouldn’t do that to Kirito.
Kazuto Kirigaya is the Potential Man of anime protagonists. He’s a bedroom coder on the level of some of the virtuoso minds his age from the ZX Spectrum bedroom coder craze in the 1980s. He lives in a dojo and is FORCED to study the blade while you were out partying, living with his cousin who was raised as his sister who he might not actually even be related to. That’s interesting all on his own. Does he... like swordsmanship? Is keeping his family’s school of swordplay alive even something he cares about? It does give him a tangible advantage in “full dive” online games after the Aincrad arc, too, so, did that make him care about swordsmanship?
We can keep all of his accomplishments, even the one where he was the first person to realize you could block bullets in Gun Gale Online just because he was the only person using Photon Swords because he... REALLY sucks at shooting! In his own words, he’s a terrible shot! Keep that! That’s actually incredible! He sucks so bad at the main method of play that he discovered a viable one that was completely ignored on his regional server structure because the Japanese servers just wanted to play with realistic guns? And he SUCKS at GUNS?! That’s got SO MUCH POTENTIAL!
It doesn’t really get explored he’s just cool lasersword guy now.
Potential Man. That’s Kirito. The entire problem continuing to be a complete lack of personality. If he had a personality for the story to react to...well, the writing would be different, at least. There’d be a chance for it to be good. And part of the main draw of the series for the audience is seeing all these girls pine over a guy that is just absolutely oblivious to it... which also doesn’t work if he has an established relationship that they’re also all friends with.
I got out of that lady’s crawlspace and went home while I was talking that so now I can- FUCK, I hear a chainsaw, gimme a sec.
Alright. Alright. Okay. We’re good.
So here’s where I had a good long think and decided I’m going to change tack away from salvaging Kirito specifically, and talk about how you can avoid the problems with Kirito, and his best portrayal that I have personally experienced. Because for some god damn reason this is a genre I care about seeing done right. Even if I haven’t seen it done right since the .hack multimedia project, and even it has huge glaring issues that were not all artifacts of the time. So these are just going to be a list of disconnected tips. I swear I’m not going to call you a HUGE TURD at any point for writing something that potentially doesn’t appeal to me specifically!
Tip one! Your character needs a strong personality, even if it’s a deeply unlikable one. The point here is to cement the character’s role in the story... because if you have a perfect gaming megahacker operative... he might not be well suited to be the protagonist. Is he a stern mentor figure despite being a teenager? Is he a little shit taunting the less experienced gamer protagonist? What kind of things does he like, what kind of movies, books, does he engage with other media, is he a content creator for the game the story takes place in and around? Is he a positive or negative figure? Is he sponsored by the game’s devs or publisher? All of these questions could help you nail down a personality for the character, which you need to fucking do because KIRITO IS PRIMARILY A FAILURE BECAUSE HE IS DEVOID OF PERSONALITY!
Example of Good Kirito Specifically: Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet lets him, directly, be kind of a little shit about wanting to hang out with the player character and their friend Kureha because Protagonist won an AI Companion (that appears to be sapient) from a tournament in his first time playing the game, thinking this made them INCREDIBLY lucky so Kirito was bound to get rare drops just being near them. He’s just kind of, for once, allowed to realistically be a teenage gamer about something. It’s nice! It’s REFRESHING, Karen!
Tip two! Power up your antagonists, don’t power down the protagonist! MMORPGs actually exist within a very rigid balance structure. Even if it’s a full loot open PVPVE sandbox game, gear tiering and level gating exists in some fashion, even if there’s no theoretical max level and you can keep gaining EXP endlessly... Other people are actually gamers and maybe even experienced ones! Your protagonist shouldn’t be the only one playing the game like real people play this genre! If you start putting the protagonist on equal footing by making him worse, that completely destroys even the semblance that it could be a real video game. As a lot of these stories go, only the protagonist is hunting for rare drops, building obscure skills for offbeat accidentally overpowered combos, or even just getting best in slot gear? This is an MMORPG. This is what people do on the daily, sometimes this is all that people play for. Stop having it be JUST the protagonist and his friends who do this!
MMORPGs attract powergamers. Even the roleplayers are powergamers, even if just to unlock gear they can use for cosmetic roleplay outfits, because the strongest gear in the game tends to look the coolest. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE is chasing the meta to at least beat the main story before they hang out with their friends. Even the game SAO’s first arc game was based on, Final Fantasy 11 (a pre-WoW game) was like that. In fact, with Aincrad Online and ANY given VRMMO fiction you may plan to write... think ahead. Aincrad Online was a limited stock, limited participation experiment. EVERYONE playing it would be a hardcore gamer, it would be a test for a core audience and not a general audience. So think ahead on the scale of the playerbase for your story and how that changes it.
Tip Three: Your game needs a distinct culture. Especially if the protagonists move from game to game. As an example...
Alfheim Online feels like a generic anime fantasy setting but I’m actually going to praise it? The multisided factional war that’s a race to the World Tree is actually... something to build a setting around. There’s potential here even if nothing gets done with it.
Gun Gale Online, though... while it’s the setting I’m most familiar with via playing the hell out of Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet... an EVE Online style player sandbox with some quests thrown in feels like it should be more cutthroat than it is. Especially since it’s ‘play to earn’ and subscription based, turning a profit on the amount of players who see the exchange rate and don’t care to cash out their in game currency to real money. This game has a posibility of breaking even on or even outpacing your subscription fee with in game income, and cashing out for real money.
Given that, I’d expect some kind of currency allotment with your buy-in (AKA purchasing a copy of the game) and some kind of cutthroat community outside of the “Bullet of Bullets” tournament scene. Fatal Bullet has a lot of textually player driven bounty hunting and I like to think that selling excess stock off to kiosks run by NPCs is likely a gameplay concession for the player playing a single player RPG. As far as any kind of actual in game economy goes... Gun Gale Online’s currency exchange rate is something like 100 credits = 1 yen, with a 3000 yen a month subscription fee, but most players unable to break even on subscription fees. Given that 3000 yen is essentially 18 USD it’s actually a pretty standard subscription fee (real life MMORPGs range from 14.99 a month to 19.99 a month for extra perks and all), that seems like it would lead to one of the most cutthroat and brutal gaming experiences of your life. If the original Day Z mod for Arma 2 was that cutthroat with nothing but survival and in game supplies on the line...
Imagine if you could make 1 yen per 100 credits. That’s... not much money. But for every monster killed you earn a bit of cash. For every player killed you earn their BOUNTY, and stats don’t matter as much as they do in something like SAO or Alfheim Online. Bounties of MID RANKED players are a couple hundred million credits. You earn more Bounty the stronger you get. You also get everything that player had on them. This game should be as cutthroat and as “I only have a team because I brought my friends with me” or “I befriended my rival after killing them a hundred times” as the fake MMORPGs in every gamer manhua ever. Yes, entirely because there’s the possibility for a small number of players to make a legitimate living playing their favorite game by pipelining good and services through their groups. There should be huge player factions, not tiny friend group “Squads” as guilds. Gangs, private armies, mafia, cartels... The fact that none of this is explored in Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet and that you can make money from the game at all is a throwaway line is such a missed opportunity to develop an actual culture for the game!
This has gone on long enough, so unless I think of more things in the time it takes to write this, the upcoming tip will be the last one AND the most specific AND somehow generic tip that my very big brain spawned out of its globby goop dripping out my ear holes because I’ve been thinking of Sword Art Online for multiple goddamn days, dudes, dudettes, and dudividuals.
Tip Four: DON’T MAKE IT A FUCKING HAREM STORY, AND IF YOU HAVE TO....
Consider polyamory.
If that’s not an option? Don’t have the protagonist literally marry one of their suitors in the first arc and then pretend it’s still a harem story and anyone else has a chance of ending up with the protagonist. Very much don’t make everyone BUT the protagonist have a distinct personality with an actual inner life beyond what the main plot demands, and you need to, you abso-fucking-lutely need to MAKE THE PROTAGONIST SOMEONE WORTH DESIRING FOR MORE THAN THEIR SKILLSET.
This entire thing touches my body parts, specifically my brain, in a very bad way. The bad tingles. The ones that tell me very much that I know where your fingers have been and you’ve given my brain something nasty.
Abridged Kirito is a miserable person. It’s not until the first arc is over that we see why. But... Asuna is just as miserable. Also mildly racist and trying VERY HARD not to be racist. These are CHARACTER TRAITS. Kirito is a misanthropic nerd who is very much the type to unironically say something like “Transphobic? No! I’m an asshole but I don’t hate people for their gender identities you dickhead!”, they’re a perfect couple. The Abridged series doesn’t try to treat it like a harem because Asuna is insane, as anyone would HAVE to be to be into Kirito. It even makes it very clear as far as the series has gone that OBERON is the one who’s in danger with HER as she breaches containment, escapes her birdcage, and kills several people with her teeth because the evil pedophile CEO her parents wanted to child marry her comatose body to in the real world threatened to kill Kirito once he cucked him.
The sound of a door locking can be heard.
Alright, home and safe, but yeah back to the rant...
There’s clear reasons why Abridged Kirito and Asuna are together. It’s not clear for the canon versions aside from “Been through some shit together and don’t know how to leave for greener pastures”... which could be a compelling narrative if the text cared. It doesn’t. Instead we get them being vaguely sweet in eachother’s direction while the cousin Kirito was raised as a younger brother to after his parents died is among the girls pining after him. Suguha/Leafa is an interesting character... but that’s a writeup for another time (she’s the literal heir to their family’s school of swordsmanship, she should be the protagonist).
So do I have a point here? Am I just complaining about tropes I don’t like in a genre I only theoretically like while ALSO complaining about a guy being The Potential Man of all anime protagonists? That somehow shaped every bland protagonist ever that the (male) viewer is supposed to project himself on so he can pretend to be the one all the ladies really wanna kiss?
I mean I offered constructive criticism for the genre and some tips to avoid being like Sword Art Online, and I think I was pretty explicit that SAO is only mid, and one of the least egregiously terrible examples of the genre actually. Got corn in your ears?
Uh. Yeah. Ending it there I guess. I’m gonna go get a cup of coffee and take like twenty showers until my brain comes out clean. I’m going to wash my own brain.
(THREE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE WORDS?! I guess this is why the boss actually pays me... You’re welcome, Boss. Intern Johnny J.)