One thing cannot be denied where Sword Art Online is concerned: it's good for starting arguments. I still remember all the debates my friends had about it when it first aired - and joining in myself, writing an angry 3/10 review of the first season. Looking back, I was young and filled with uncontrolled bias. I was obviously frustrated at its popularity, and reading over my teenage comments on the show's use of nudity, where I noted that it was exclusively female, betrays a confused frustration at the fact that we never got to see the rather cute male lead with his shirt off. So naturally when the second season's promotional artwork revealed that he spends the first half playing a game where his avatar looks like a girl, I decided to stop watching - which amusingly caused me to miss out on the fact that this season ends up having exactly what I wanted to see.
What's funny is that after revisiting SAO with a little more experience and a more complete process of self-realization (meaning some distance from those biases,) I think it might actually be worse than I realized as a boy. It suffers from appalling storytelling and flimsy characterization from start to finish. What really dunks it into trash territory is the handling of sexual assault. SAO eloquently demonstrates how not to do it when it comes to that, using it for cheap shock value and depthless cartoon villainy and having the victim overcome the associated trauma not just through revenge, which would be bad enough, but through vicarious revenge meted out by someone else.
I thought it would be fun to review the second season, as a chance to give my updated thoughts on the series as a whole while preserving my original review so that anyone can bring it up and embarrass me with it if I get too smug.
Watching through the early episodes, I was shocked to notice a substantial drop in the quality of the writing compared to the first season. The Gun Gale Online arc in season 2 seems to have psychological pretensions. I have to advise that SAO stay far away from this kind of subject matter in the future, because its writers have neither the patience nor the depth to make good use of it. It's the kind of psychological writing where everything is exaggerated to the point of meaninglessness. Newcomer Shion is established in a flashback where, as a ten-year-old girl, she mercilessly guns down a would-be bank robber, firing again and again despite the effects of recoil on her tiny body. The adults in the room stand around uselessly rather than help her with the disarmed and injured criminal. It would've been enough to have her shoot him once, SAO.
Of course, this experience was so traumatic that seeing the finger-gun pose makes Shion throw up from stress, which a set of mean girls use to bully her. It just comes off as a little absurd when it's an abstract hand gesture that's intended to represent the thing she's scared of, and the severity of the reaction makes it start to feel inhuman. She overcomes this trauma by playing an online game about guns, adopting an in-game persona that doesn't have the same fears. I don't mind that part because it establishes why this character feels the need to spend so much time online, something that was lacking in the first season but is generally better in the second. The problem is that it's so likewise exaggerated - it has no effect until she wins a tournament in the game, at which point her fears vanish almost altogether. When she tags along as a secondary character afterward, they never come up again.
Our protagonist Kazuto goes through something similar. It turns out he killed some of the player-murderers during his time in SAO, the guilt of which torments him with feelings of monstrous self-loathing. I feel I have to cite the rules, here, SAO: you're not allowed to pretend your main character went through a traumatic event during a previous arc if you didn't think that was important enough to show us at the time. Kazuto continually talks about how he repressed the memories and expresses guilt for that, which is funny because it's such an obvious band-aid designed to cover the fact that the writers simply didn't think of it until now. It's blatantly contrived and shows how poorly-planned and half-assedly constructed the storytelling in SAO is.
You know, I really don't like killing, but even I think Kazuto is being melodramatic. He slayed murderers in battle, where it definitively constituted an act of self-defense. There are different rules there. We see him go into fits of hysterics when he encounters one of their allies a second time, and it's hard to believe against the confidence and power he normally displays, just like the guilt clashes with the battle-rage he's shown before. It's nice that they're giving him some weaknesses and chances for growth, but I'm not sure if his characterization is better or worse after this season. The sudden trauma combined with his willingness to exploit his girly appearance when previously he was proud and honorable make me think he just becomes what the story wants him to be for its latest set-piece, rather than having a fixed identity.
Both of these characters get to a good place eventually. They start to appreciate what they protected by taking the lives they did, which helps them forgive themselves. Surprisingly, that's exactly right from a character development standpoint. It's just that they get there through such brute and painful storytelling, so much melodramatic whining, and such a crushing amount of expository dialog that the journey itself is worthless. Even more appalling is the motivation of the first-arc villain, Death Gun. He starts killing because he got bad advice on how to build his character in an MMO. I wish I were joking, and what makes it all the more asinine is that he's repeatedly shown to be able to accomplish a great deal in the game with that character anyway. When his identity is ultimately revealed, it's someone who is such a non-entity in the story up to then that it lacks any impact.
Death Gun's motives are part of a half-baked plot thread about people living too much inside games. I'm glad SAO is attempting to deal with this concept, because it's a question that has been hanging over the franchise since the beginning, but since it's only applied to our heroes in a very distant way it's not worth much as of yet. There's a little bit of token dialog about how it applies to Kazuto which indicates an idea with potential, which I look forward to seeing terribly mishandled in some later season.
SAO constantly contradicts itself. Someone mentions that the game console they use isn't connected to the heart, but it monitors the heart rate anyway. Kazuto and Shion sit in a cave while the game's live broadcast, which the killer's accomplice watches, reveals them, but they still successfully execute a plan based around hiding their location from him. They talk for ages about concealing their weapon choices from other players, but the live broadcasting of their matches immediately renders this moot and Kazuto goes around swinging his lightsaber in the lobby.
It's clear that the writers don't play video games, because elements like porting a super-powered character to a new game, which destroy the progression and balance of the games, are all over the place. The shooting-based Gun Gale Online apparently uses randomness to determine where bullets will hit, which would annihilate any shooter because precision aiming is the core gameplay principle of that genre. It also differentiates between physical and energy weapons, with physical being good against players and energy against monsters, which naturally gives griefers, who will build for physical weapons, such a huge advantage that PVE players will hardly be able to fight back.
Let's not even get into the missed opportunities. GGO's shooting-based combat gives Kazuto a new learning curve to deal with, but he imports his hyper-powerful character from another game, masters the dodging mechanics on his first go, and gets a lightsaber (complete with questionably-legal sound effects straight from Star Wars,) so that he doesn't have to bother learning to shoot. This is how SAO goes, we all know this by now.
The fight scenes in this are a tease. It has the most skimpy tournament sequence I've ever encountered, where even the main characters' fights are mostly skipped or cut down to a few boring seconds. Kazuto's first fight has him just hold his lightsaber against a guy until he dies - they could have at least had the decency to make the kid take him down with a flurry of quick swings. Later on, he's supposed to have fought and lost to a powerful player, which would've been a nice thing to see, but is only mentioned as part of a staggering flood of expository dialog. The overbearing exposition even interrupts major battles. When Kazuto finally faces down Death Gun they start by standing ten feet apart having a long conversation. The fights against giant boss monsters are mostly pretty dull with the beasts standing around gormlessly while the players wail on them, and it has an over-reliance on using colored lights against a black background to represent a bunch of characters attacking at once. There's even one sequence where a boss fight is about to begin and then the show just cuts to the aftermath. The teasing element almost seems intentional at that point, but it's frustrating rather than titillating. This series has something like five minutes of decent fluidly-animated sword fighting sequences scattered throughout hours and hours of interminable melodrama and exposition.
Has it come across that there's too much dialog yet? Because there really is way too much. Kazuto and Shion sit cuddling in a cave and talking about their feelings for like 2 full episodes (on camera, too, apparently to no concern on the part of Kazuto's girlfriend,) while an exciting battle royale allegedly goes on outside. The final tragic story-beat is another especially dense example of this, where the feeble storytelling is supplemented by a terrifying deluge of boring conversation painstakingly explaining what everything means and how we're supposed to feel.
I was a confused young man in 2013, but I feel I've come a long way since then. I wish I could say that SAO has matched my progress, but it still seems to be unsure of what it wants to be. The monumental exposition dumps and a later storyline about Asuna's relationship with her mother indicate an emphasis on drama rather than action, and the romance that was so important last season takes a back-seat now, with each of the leads having an independent arc in the spotlight with minimal interference from the other. The video game progression returns to the focus for a couple of episodes in which Kazuto getting a new in-game sword is treated as terribly important, which he then uses all of once before the end of this season. The dark psychological themes of the GGO section clash with the fluffy adventure story and cute-but-sappy children's tragedy that follow it.
SAO originally had the strong father figure of the "death game" premise to help direct and support it. I would still contend that the story should have ended after that - it has had real problems sorting out its stakes since then. In this second season, it's (also like me) a teenage boy who has been abandoned by his dad: uncertain, alone, and looking to whatever confident surrogate big-brother or new technological trend it can find to support itself, which is why the next seasons are about Augmented Reality and then a full-tilt conversion to the Isekai genre.
While it's still innocent, still attempting to be itself rather than following others to fit in, what does it give us to remember it by? It occasionally comes alive in small moments. Kirito getting beaten down by Death Gun in GGO, his body covered with little glowing cuts, while his real-world equivalent Kazuto lies shirtless in a hospital bed, breathing heavily and sweating from his cyberspace nightmare, makes him seem vulnerable for once and was the closest I came to empathizing with the little bastard. Shion confronting her bullies now that she's stronger communicates her growth by showing rather than telling for perhaps the only time in all of SAO. She and Kazuto have arcs that parallel one another, which is good narrative structuring. When Kazuto shows up to help Asuna during her solo arc it gives a little sense of the strength of their relationship and a chance for him to make use of the skills he learned in GGO and the sword he found in the previous arc. It has colorful high-detail backgrounds and cute character designs. The dynamic between Asuna and her mother has a shred of complexity for once and actually gets resolved in a mature manner through compromise. Asuna's mom is definitely the most compelling antagonist the show has and arguably its best character.
Asuna feels that her mother is stifling her self-expression, so she turns to the online world, where she feels free to be the person she wants to be. That's enough for me. It's definitely more compelling than the business about Kazuto distancing himself from his family because he found out he was adopted in Season 1, which was undermined by the fact that he was shown to have a close and friendly relationship with his cousin/adoptive sister. Likewise, Shion and Yuuki have sufficient reasons to withdraw into the online world. And it leaves us on the promise that sometime later, the same will prove true for Kazuto, which if done properly could finally give some justification to this whole sordid franchise by deconstructing the unexamined enthusiasm he has for technological escapism. We would be naive, however, if we believed that.
Asuna's mother disapproves of her relationship with Kazuto. This invites the question of how we as the audience would react in the same position. Kazuto goes a long way to rescue Asuna from a powerful man in Season 1, which I don't believe a lot of boys his age would have done, and if we take the cave-battle cuddling sequence in the innocent spirit in which it was apparently intended he has been quite faithful. He supports her in her endeavors and studies new technology (a growth industry) for his career, even using creative applications of his skill-set to help her and her friends. If he were asking to marry my daughter, I would give him my blessing - and silently resign myself to some very boring family gatherings. But unlike its protagonist, SAO is an abusive partner. It shows off its pretty backgrounds and animations, and it always promises to get better, but if we take it back it will inevitably come home drunk and slap us with its mediocre characterization and appalling storytelling. It would be better if we left it and tried to move on.
