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I think you're missing my point. The man's face is not all she remembers and that's absolutely not what I was saying, since she remembers the blood on the floor, the blood splattered on her hands and gun as she was shaking, the look of terror on her mom's face, all of that. While you're right in assuming some of it would naturally come from guilt, it would stem from terror as well. The situation was traumatizing. She shot a deranged lunatic in a horribly distressing situation, killing someone who was, by all accounts, gruesome and deranged. She does not need to consider herself a guilty murderer to nonetheless feel some semblance of terror over killing in self-defense, especially at such a young age.

The crazed man, the robbery, the killing, the weapon, the holes, the faces of everyone around her, the blood, all of it would culminate to a fear of the weapon she used to kill the bastard and stop the crazy scene she was never congratulated or even consoled on years: the gun. Hell, as someone who gets a bit squeamish when blood and gore enters the picture, I sure as fuck would remember the grim visage and associate it with both blood and what caused it. The show highlighting the blood even more than the gun in the flashbacks is why I made the initial correlation the show didn't intend. Also, yes, her feeling terror and not guilt IS something that could stem from mental illness...like P T S D, which she seems to suffer from. Plus, if we go by what you were saying regarding her feeling like her phobia stems more so from guilt, wouldn't mean that she's killing to desensitize herself from feeling guilty over killing? Sounds...odd.

The problem lies in how the series itself only explores the terror and PTSD she has been feeling outside of like 1 or 2 scenes in the final 1/3 of the arc where she admits to feeling like a murderer and Kirito helps her get over that. If her guilt over the situation was explored to the point of actively feeding into her phobia, if it was something she talked with Kyouji about as he was getting her into exposure therapy and checking up on her consistently, if it was something of a constant in her life much like her PTSD was instead of a tacked-on element introduced in episode 11 of 14, I'd 100% agree with you and we'd not even be having this debate. After all, her character is littered with psychological baggage and part of the point of the arc is to explore that. If you pretty much have to infer that "oh she felt guilt too, that's an established part of her character" but they don't do much with it like they do with everything else regarding her, then it's a failure of the anime and you're pouring more thought into it than the anime adaptation presented or even implied. It also ends up raising more questions that the the text (in this case, the anime) does not contain answers for or even address, like my question above participating in PVP shooters where in-game avatars die so that she can get over her guilt by taking active agency in killing in a gritty, virtual setting.

That's why I feel Kirito consoling her and removing her of any and all guilt and self-labeling regarding her being a murder does not feel earned. That's why I disagree with your interpretation regarding Sinon's guilt and feel that the anime did not explore it to a satisfactory degree considering it didn't tie very strongly or consistently to her plight and character.

Yeah, we're not gonna agree on this but I nonetheless thank you for being mostly civil and productive in this admittedly cyclical debate. Haven't had a debate that interesting in a while, especially not one that forced me to engage in a creative exercise.

Yes. That incident was traumatizing so of course she would remember a detail like the feral face he made in his final efforts to get back up and presumably kill her. It would make a lot more sense for that to scar her rather than to serve as a source of guilt, especially when the show almost always notes how frightened she is and almost never writes her feeling any semblance of guilt over it beyond times when Kirito brings it up in order to help her get over it. If they had actually went out of their way to legitimately explore her guilt and make it known that she actuvely feels guilt over killing him outside of the last few episodes awkwardly trying to cram that in without really expanding upon it, then I would probably agree with you.

Are you telling me you wouldn't remember a striking, freightening face or image from a traumatizing or otherwise defining event in your life? Would you not remember a vivid detail in such a scenario? Even then, just because she knows it was her who did him in doesn't mean that she actuvely considers herself a guilty murderer and instead just finds that fact to be a yet another horrifying aspect of the incident she was in as his visage and the robbery both haunt her.

That's because the face of a coked up man still making violent expressions as he kept trying to kill her and/or get his gun to continue his armed robbery shocked him. Outside of that one aforementioned scene, we never once see her regard herself as a killer or murderer, or feel guilt regarding the incident. We don't see anyone in present day label her as such to mess with her, either, so again, it's not like it means much of anything to her character outside of existing as something for Kirito to solve the moment it comes up by chatting with her while she's in distress.

Yes, but I think the problem comes in when every single solitary scene of her reeling over her trauma, either we see the CGI blood cells as awkward visual shorthand for blood pressure increasing, or we see the blood on the floor (sometimes without even seeing the robber or the gun, though usually with one of the two elements kept in there). At some point, it stops being a purely diegetic detail and more of something so persistent as to not be a coincidence, even if it was more so just the director's favorite method of getting the point across more so than anything he probably intended anyone to read into. With Kirito, the visualizations of his trauma and the people he killed in combat varied every time. Sinon's didn't vary much and would always focus on very hypersaturated blood and/or her blood pressure. I don't feel like combing the show over just to count every single time this happens, but it definitely happened way too many times to be as innocuous a detail as the director probably considered it.

Thanks, though yeah, if I were to really sit down and think about a full rewrite and get to this subject, I would also probably expand on the idea that part of why she uses a sniper is that she doesn't see the blood and violence up close and personal, only seeing it through a lens zoomed quite a ways in. It would still take quite a lot of time for her to be able to disassociate regarding the gun and to not flinch too much to the in-game blood, but still, it's something that could theoretically be worked with. You're right that either phobia could have done the job on their own and that, again, the presentation of her scenes is what really caught my eye and caused my head to tilt when it's probably just the director's insistence on a visual shorthand and communicator. It's just that weird, unintended consequences occurred for my viewing as a result of me picking up on it. At this point, I'm basically being cyclical, though. I've basically hammered my point home into a dead horse that doesn't need to be beaten in with any more nails/points pounded into it.

That hardly factors into a single thing regarding her as never once until that moment circa episode 11 does she think of herself that way, nor does it come up afterwards. Might as well only be there for Kirito to console her.

Yeah, the initial scene of her freaking out over the gun was probably the best way of showing it as it introduced us to these fears and even resulted in some offscreen puking after a silent moment of her stashing the gun away and trying to process what just happened. It still has some of those blood quirks I mentioned before, though.

I think you fail to see the point. I know that it's meant to be a visualization that the gun is triggering her PTSD, with the CGI blood cells in the blood vessels being a visual shorthand --albeit a poorly communicated one from a visual standpoint-- that her blood pressure and heart rate are both going up. She's freaking out and hyperventilating. Still, it is also kind of redundant when we're already seeing her visibly change from stoic to panicked before our very eyes.

My point is that this, combined with how much the show likes cutting to actual shots of highly saturated blood in monochrome flashbacks, feels far too specific to be a coincidence considering how frequently the show does both, to the point where I feel like it was a missed opportunity not to make blood actually relevant beyond being an overused, oddly specific visual shorthand for her fear. She's focused on guns and her general fear, not blood, but every time she panics, blood is shown to be at the center of it, making me question why that was never factored into her personality and actual fears. This was probably not an issue with the light novels and is most likely a result of how the director, Tomohiko Itou, went about presenting these scenes. If they had used basically any other visual shorthand, or had just focused on her shifting facial expressions and visual panic like it does with Kirito, we would not be having this discussion right now and I would have never thought about it, let alone considered it enough of an issue to highlight in the review.

Ah, now we're getting firmly into the issue of rewrites, and personally, I feel it would be supplemental to her fear of guns. She would associate the two in many instances like the flashbacks and trauma scenes do on a visual level, and I'd make the game have virtual blood similar to Sugou's bleeding during his fight with Kirito in the Alphein Online game. That would be something she winces at every now and then, further showcasing that even in-game, while she can wield and hold a fictional gun by disassociating it with her trauma, the blood makes it harder to do so and that even with the months she's been playing, she still has a ways to go despite improvements. Her friend, Kyouji, could even remark that she was practically a deer in headlights when she first started playing and got into a PVP match, and that part of him playing with her every day was so he could ease her into this competitive world he himself has become so heavily invested (perhaps too invested) in.

Admittedly, this would be harder to resolve, as we'd have to conjure up a way, but perhaps in her demonstration with the prop gun, it could backfire, causing the BB bullet to ricochet, hitting her, which results in a nasty bruise that also bleeds. She would grunt and wince, but ultimately shrug it off long enough for the bullies who had intimidated her to not only come somewhat to her aid, but be impressed with how she's handling things. Much like with the scene in episode 14 proper, it would be somewhat of a first step to conquering her trauma in the real world considering that the exposure therapy has only gotten her so far. It's not a particularly amazing change and the detail itself is still somewhat superfluous, but her juggling of multiple traumas combined with her exposure therapy and her unwillingness to let the fear overpower her would be enough for both viewers and the other characters to really comment on her emotional strength. She could still shudder after the fact, but still.

We could also make it so her (unfortunately) sexually violent encounter with Kyouji results in her being scraped a bit, adding to her fear before Kirito busts down the door to fight him. Then, her boombox beatdown of him could result in some bleeding on his end, causing her to panic for both herself and Kyouji, who she still wants to help in spite of everything, like in the show. She struggles to not break down but then lets herself succumb while admitting that if this were even a few months back, she'd probably be bawling or passed out right about now. That would be the final indicator that the exposure therapy has worked to some extent that she's handling the shedding of IRL blood in a violent encounter better than she would have expected since she's holding it together somewhat. Again, it's somewhat small and is still surrounded by some of the worst scenes in the entire show, but it's something.

I was doing this on mobile not long after waking up, which explains the typos, some of which I went back to fix on desktop.

I was referring to the flashbacks of her getting bullied in what I can presume is middle school, not the girls bullying her in present day.

Yes, I do expect that revelations of what a character has gone through would indeed factor into her character and actually have a purpose. It's pretty basic storytelling. You don't just include it as some random detail akin to "x character likes fleece bedsheets" or "y character has a Precure poster in the background" which can get away without being explored because they're not particularly relevsnt and defining personal information like "I was bullied throughout middle school over my traumatic deadly confrontation with a robber" would be in almost any other story that bothered to include said information.

You should probably read further in the review cuz I mention that exact same thing, but that nonetheless, it was a rather poor choice to focus so much on blood in particular when she's freaking out. The CGI blood cells look like shit, and the sheer specificity of blood in her situation compared to the ways any other character freaks out, like Kirito freaking out over Death Gun and his SAO trauma, would make it understandable that I come to the conclusion that they could have probably introduced a fear of blood in place of or alongside her fear of guns. Otherwise, why not find a more effective and indeed less specific way of showing her freaking out or hyperventilating whenever her PTSD was triggered. Plus, if the condtsnt attemtion to blood was the most horrifying way for her that it could be visualized, perhaps that should say something of her character and how she regards blood when it happens almost every other episode in the arc.

It indeed does beg a bigger question of how to implement the fear of blood, which isn't actually hard at all since she can just associate blood with the incident and have it so that any time she bleeds or sees someone bleeding IRL, it triggers her PTSD like whenever she sees or holds a gun IRL (or even sees a finger gun).

I had to think about which review you could possibly be referring to before responding

It certainly does not guarantee it, but especially considering she had absolutely no one outside of one friend to support her, and said one friend was already sending some big red flags, but nonetheless, it begs the question of why implement a scene of her being bullied for it at all if it doesn't even factor into her emotional instability or get any serious level of exploration beyond I guess confirming that those girls who were harassing her every now and then weren't the first people who bully her. She did live alone and did not seem to keep in touch with her family at any rate, so yeah. It is perhaps not a particularly glaring problem in the grander scale of the show, but it's still a legitimate problem with how Sinon's written and presented. A proper nitpick would be mentioning how bad the boss design must be for her to be able to just camp for an abundance of time in one spot to snipe a boss to death, and even that could still be factored into a discussion of a larger problem with the game design, which affects the quality of the worldbuilding. Actually, I believe I did that very thing in the review proper.

Perhaps you could consider me thinking it would make more sense for her to have a fear of blood instead of a fear of guns to be a nitpick, especially since the visuals are really what spurned that question with how she thinks about the blood more than the gun whenever hyperventilating and having flashbacks, and how they constantly show her blood cells in these moments. Still, it does tie into discussion of her character handling as well as the visuals, instead of just me pointing out some random ass error or minor leap in logic almost no one would notice or care about if they weren't thinking super hard about that kind of thing.

My 2017 self would have probably unironically thanked you there with only the mildest of hesitation and almost no question for it the remark was snide in any way while now I'm still panicking at the fact that both of my SAO reviews are probably in the top 5 longest reviews I've written. Still, thanks?????

oh my god, I'm regressing into the long-winded maniac I once was