Sword Art Online is one of those animes that divides the community; either you love it blindly without seeing the flaws or you’re too bothered by the poor writing to enjoy what should have been a really great show. I fall into the latter camp; Sword Art Online is bad.

I was really excited when I heard about the premise; main character gets trapped in a video game that will actually kill them in real life if they die in game. I found the way that they integrated the video game dynamics into the actual show was genius. With the menus playing a big part and the consistency of how the world worked it had all the makings for a great anime. I actually thoroughly enjoyed the show for a solid 7 or 8 episodes before it started going downhill, and the unfortunate part is that it could have continued to be good, even just had one bad episode if they hadn’t just started throwing the plot down the toilet.

The biggest issue I had with the writing of the show was the main love interest Asuna. Now, I, of all people love a good love story; I will even watch entire animes dedicated to the slice of life, romance-comedy genre. However, if I wanted to watch a slice of life anime, I would have gone and sought out one of the MANY other animes that did it considerably better. The biggest frustration that I have with SAO is that they could have reasonably kept all the plot points that made the final show and kept it from being such a colossal dumpster fire if they’d fired the writer who pushed the main characters into the pile of bullshit in the first place.

At the beginning of the show, Kirito is a selfish, manipulative, solo player who helps people out when it’s beneficial to him. The story line of him joining up with the guild and feeling the horrible guilt weighing on them when they all die was genius. It explained why he refused to join up with any other guild and justified his emotional constipation throughout the show.

Asuna joined up with the Knights of the Blood Oath and worked her way up to second in command after Kirito told her to piss off in the second episode. She started off as this badass character who started as a nobody with no friends and worked her way up to the second most powerful individual in the strongest guild. Now, don’t get me wrong, I still dislike her character type; tsundres are by far my least favorite type of anime girl but that’s more personal preference than anything else. At least the writing for her character made sense for a while.

Here’s where things start going downhill; for some reason, Kirito and Asuna become obsessed with each other. It would be perfectly reasonable for them to continue their relationship building as strong, independent characters who work together and fall in love eventually. But anytime writers put the love interest story line above the main story line, you know you’re about to see some trouble.

In a matter of one episode, both of their characters went from being strong, independent, badass individuals, to sniveling, “I can’t live without you”, weak little assholes. Asuna was a good character! And the writers fucked her up by setting the precedent that suddenly she was unable to take care of herself despite having made it as far as she did on her own previously. Kirito was also a good character and instead of allowing him to form a reasonable attachment to Asuna in any way, the writers shoehorned him into this codependent stereotype who suddenly wanted to give up his solo player ways and settle down, maybe adopt a weird little program child (Don’t worry, I’ll get to that).

Then in the second half of the first season, when Asuna gets trapped in Alfheim, she then deteriorates further into uselessness becoming only an object for Kirito to save. “Kirito will save me.” Bullshit, girl you are the second in command of the Knights of the Blood Oath, get it together and try to escape more than once. Kirito’s character does get back to at least some semblance of normal in Alfheim until he’s reunited with Asuna again and I must say that if the writers weren’t going to give me back the badass Asuna character they set up initially, I much prefer her without lines.

Now, I have to talk about it. I know. But I have to.

Yui.

What do I even say about Yui? I get where the writers were going with her character I suppose, but instead she just became another shoehorn to further the bastardization of the original characters into bad soap opera leads. After she became a pixie in Alfheim I was enjoying her character more until I realized that my enjoyment was just some weird version of Stockholm Syndrome where I was just pleased that I was seeing Kirito be a badass again so I sort of just accepted the weird pixie daughter.

The other thing that a lot of people take issue with in this anime is the whole incest thing. I get it. But that’s pretty par for the course as far as anime goes, in fact the fact that Kirito didn’t reciprocate makes it pretty tame. As fucked up as it is, I’m about as phased by that as I am about Asuna being a tsundre; just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean I haven’t seen it before in other shows.

The point that I’m trying to make is that SAO shouldn’t have been a bad show; it’s a shame that the writers screwed it as badly as they did. You can dislike a particular character and still consider the show good as long as it’s consistent; example being Mineta in MHA. He’s gross, perverted, and a nasty little asshole that people hate, but he’s consistent and goes through normal character development. In writing you can get away with a lot of stuff as long as it’s done well, but in SAO it wasn’t done well. It feels like the show was written by two different people who took turns and had wildly opposing views of who the main characters should be and that’s a shame.

Final verdict is, the world building was phenomenal, the art was beautiful, and I really wanted to like it, but it’s really difficult to like a dumpster fire.

3/10