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Asocial Behavior and the Cowboy Plot Structure of Early SAO

One of the things I think they did really right with SAO, especially in the beginning, was the structure. You'll notice how Kirito does not gather a group of friends. In fact, he never gathers a group of "Nakama" until the second season. Instead he spends all his time adventuring alone, and in the episodes we see, he teams up, usually with some beautiful girl, and solves some episodic issue on his own. I usually tell people it's like an old western where the cowboy comes out of the wilderness, saves everyone and then disappears back into the wilderness despite the cries of the bartender's daughter for him to come back.

Now this is somewhat unique in Japanese animation, that is the level of Kritio's solitude, but Clint Eastwood has done this schtick a million times. What makes it special in SAO? The answer, of course is the context. This happens in an MMO and our MC is a hikkikomori super nerd. Lets start with Kirito's character and what he brings to the set up. So far as we can tell, Kirito had no life before SAO. he says that during the six month of the beta, all he did was go to school and play SAO. We see no friends of his in the game or afterwards so we can safely assume he was a loner in the strictest sense of the word. And he does not appear to have made any friends amongst the beta testers indicating that his adventures within the beta were totally solo. Kirito was the monster at the end of the tunnel after whom none dare follow.

Kirito is a lifeless game addict and in any normal social situation he would drown like a kitten at sea. But here he is depicted as the lone swordsman out of the wilderness, the black beater who solos the front lines. But what keeps this from becoming just an escapist fantasy is that Kirito remains alone. Over and over again he leaves alone. Not because he was universally rejected or because he hates people. Its clear he loves company even if he doesn't know how to deal with group conversations. He seems to thrive on the attention he receives from his female partners as long as he's alone with them. The real reason Kirito is alone is not because he wants to be alone, its because he doesn't feel worthy of his friends.

Look at Kirito's attitude in the first episode, when he's hanging out with Klein. Kirito is clearly the superior warrior, put if you pay attention to their conversation, Kirito never strays from the topic of the game and as soon as Klein mentions his friends Kirito seems uneasy. He immediately becomes more distant and though Klein promises to talk to him again and offers to introduce him, Kirito thanks him for not doing so ans If yu ask me, I'd say that Kirito never expected to hear from Klein again. He's been though this a thousand times, friends in an MMO have a great time adventuring together, then one of them has to go and they promise to meet again, but they forget and never see each other again.Kirito sees it coming and he doesn't begrudge Klein for it. He just accepts that he'll never have any friends and smiles.

This is the point where I would like to mention the significance of this being an MMO. From my own experience in MMOs such as Guild Wars, Lineage II, RF Online, and Tera I can say that the general MMO experience is a single player one. Kirito is the exemplar of the MMO hero. The game is full of people and supposedly intended for multilayer. But 90% of play is about soloing the front lines and becoming the black beater who lives out in the wilderness and teams up only when it is absolutely necessary or just with one other person for a few hours to have fun. Active guilds or groups of friends who play together are rare. Its not unusual to have friends who play, but to have friends who are online at the same time as you and who are in line fo the same dungeons as you and at approximately the same level, these things are unusual. MMOs have struggle to solve this issue and bring greater sociality into the game world. But Kirito is the emblem f nearly very MMO hero up to the time of SAO's publication. His asociality mimics the structural asociality of MMO players.

Moreover, Kirito's attitude and asociality are common enough in real life, and that is the real value he shows us, that our social habits online mirror or social habits in reality. Remember Kirito's creed, you are who you are whether you're in the game or irl. You are you and the broken promises of friendship in MMOs and just a mirror image of th transience and fragility of friendship in modern society.