SAO has flaws, no doubt. And when I’m about to talk about the things SAO does right, it’s by no means to excuse those flaws.

But when this show was pitched to me, it wasn’t pitched to be as “SAO is a flawed show that mishandles its female lead towards the end of its first season.” No, SAO was pitched to me as LITERALLY THE WORST ANIME EVER CREATED BY MAN’S UNDESERVING HANDS. The only reason why SAO is even in this essay is because it’s supposed to be the reason why isekai is the way it is.

And if that’s the standard, if I’m trying to assess whether or not SAO is the original sin of isekai… I have to say the answer is no. It’s decent sometimes. In a phrase: Sword Art Online is rancid horse shit and nuggets of gold sharing a plate.

SAO has, like, competently done themes? They’re on the nose, sure, but they’re clear and obvious. The second half of the season is about how games can set us free. It uses the player’s ability to fly in Alfheim Online to show us this idea. Likewise, Asuna is trapped in a bird cage. The fact that she’s in this game but unable to fly, unfree, can be read as a perversion of the potential of both games and fiction more generally.

The first thing Asuna does when she escapes is she heads back into the game and takes to the skies. On her own volition, she too has become free. In fact, everyone who was trapped in SAO with Kirito takes to the skies too to challenge the world of Sword Art Online on their own terms. They’re all free to do so and whatever else.

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It’s simple, but how many isekai fail to do even this?

Asuna’s character was certainly mishandled at the end. But, compare her to her competition. Most female isekai leads are either despised by the narrative (we’ll get to this one), slaves (we’ll, uh, get to those), or no-personality harem tropes (we’ll get to those too).

Asuna has character. She has a personality. I’ve heard it asserted that she’s useless but, at least in the first half of the season, that’s simply not true. She fights alongside Kirito. She challenges Kirito’s assumptions. She’s more than the two-dimensional waifu characters we normally see in isekai who validate very decision the male lead makes.

Kirito is boring, sure. He’s obnoxiously cool. He’s overpowered. He’s a male gamer fantasy. But he maintains an open and healthy relationship with a woman, and it’s one of the better parts of the show.

I’ve seen it complained that Kirito is a no-personality self-insert who’s always right. And after having consumed, just, an unspeakable amount of SAO, I can’t say that’s true. Kirito is Kirito. He’s a paragon, in the style of Superman or Paddington. He doesn’t have arcs because his role in the story is helping others realize their own potential. The secondary leads have the arcs and those arcs are pretty standard. The viewer is encouraged to be like Kirito (as we’re encouraged to be like Superman), rather than take his place in the story.

I mean, could imagine if Kirito was a proper self-insert MC? Kirito wouldn’t have half the backstory he does because it gets in the way of self-insertability. SAO’d be way worse and also your sister would want to suck your dick.

Don’t fuck your sister. (Used under Fair Use)

Things happen outside of Kirito. Kirito is strong, but he’s not literally the center of the multiverse. The circumstances surrounding the characters and their consequences are relevant and touching and thought-through. SAO maybe hasn’t thought through its premise all too well, but it has thought through the emotional beats of its entire cast thoroughly.

If you want to learn more about SAO and how well it portrays war and PTSD, I’d suggest checking out Posadist Pacman’s take on it. The fact that he’s an unironic posadist aside, he did a better job on this than I could have.

Just because Kirito is usually the strongest person in the room, that by no means makes him the best person in the room for every task at all times. In fact, by the end of the season, he can’t get through the final level to save Asuna without teaming up with the people around him. He gets the one-on-one fight with Nobuyuki, but only after he accepts that he might need help to do so.

Kirito is given a “seed” by Kayaba, a program that allows any person from anywhere to run their own VRMMORPG server on their own computers. Individuals and small companies take over where corrupt CEOs left-off, and soon, anyone will be able to make their own personal worlds and explore their own possibilities.

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SAO literally argues that the solution to gaming is to take it out of the hands of capitalists and under the control of regular people.

Same genus, different species. SAO isn’t Marxist, but that’s about as anti-isekai as you can get in mentality, which tends to favor individual action as part of the all too common hero fantasy. Most isekai argue that being rich and powerful, taking what you deserve, is a good thing. The typical isekai male-power fantasy has no room for democracy or horizontal power structures.

In early 2019, Kawahara Reki, the author of SAO’s source material, did an interview with one of the Japanese voice actresses for SAO and the author of the manga Bloom Into You, Nakatini Nio. In response to Nakatini praising Kawahara for the strength of his female characters, Kawahara responded that he plans to give his female characters more strength and more room to grow in the future.

He explained that, after traveling overseas and receiving criticism for how his work handled female characters, he decided to learn from his mistakes and write with (gasp) a bit more “political correctness”. Which is to say he stated he agrees that a character’s gender shouldn’t determine their role in stories, and women in fiction should be more than trophies for men to gain.

He admires how, in English for example, we have gender-neutral terms like “protagonist” and “antagonist”, and admires the fact that, in lesbian manga, anime, and light novels, both women can be protagonists, whereas in stories featuring straight romances, the man must be the “hero” while the “heroine” stands to the side. He recognizes that writing stronger female characters doesn’t have to mean downplaying male protagonists like Kirito.

A month before that, and here’s the best part, Kawahara apologized to the voice actors of his show for their discomfort in voicing a sexual assault. Kawahara recognizes that he’s used sexual assault as a crutch in the past since all the fantasy stories he grew up with did the same thing, and has since stated he wants to avoid using sexual assault like a plot device in his future work.

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Franchement c’est trop pur, ça (Used under Fair Use)

The writer of SAO has evolved over time, and SAO has evolved with it.

Yet, isekai in general hasn’t changed. It hasn’t kept pace with SAO’s improvements. If anything, isekai as a whole has been folding in on itself while Kawahara has been working to make SAO more inclusive and applicable to everyone. If SAO “started” this current strain of isekai, it’s since moved far beyond it.

I find it hilarious that the weebs who hated SAO never really had a problem with how the show treated women. They maintain that SAO hasn’t changed one bit and it’s still the same poorly-written mess it was when it started. If anything, the fact that SAO is “PC” now makes it worse in the eyes of anime fans.

The simple fact is this: SAO has never been like the standard run-of-the-mill isekai.

Kawahara Reki has read Alice in Wonderland. I mean, there’s an entire season of the show based on the story. It’s a story for another time. Still, if we see Alice in Wonderland as the archetypal other world story, Sword Art Online shares more thematic similarities with Alice’s Adventures in the Under Ground than it does with most other isekai. Specifically, Sword Art Online doesn’t reject the real world with its virtual ones.

SAO argues the exact opposite.

Alice in Wonderland argued that the reason why Alice’s dreams were so important was because it was a dream. It argued that there is an inherent good in fiction through its ability to provide joy to children and adults alike.

SAO takes that exact theme and updates it, broadening the definition of fiction to include technology. The anime again argues that the only reason why other worlds are important, the only reason why fiction is important, is that fiction, in a way, is real. How we interact with fictional worlds is real. The friendships we make online through games are real. SAO argues not only that we can’t escape reality, but that we don’t need to, because fiction is reality, and that’s what makes fiction great.

To call SAO “escapist” is to fundamentally miss the point, actually (which is hard to imagine for a show that has spent the last decade being torn a part line by line by every AniTuber up and down the block). You’re not running away from your crappy life to meet your other world waifu.

The game is your life, or at least, a valid part of it, she’s not a waifu she’s your flesh and blood girlfriend, and you should act like this is real life with ups and downs, not some game. This isn’t a case of 2D > 3D. This is using the fictional world as a tool to finding a real, meaningful, healthy relationship with an actual woman.

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SAO maintains that ignoring fiction and focusing on the real world leads to melancholy. By not being able to explore ourselves we miss out on a huge number of potential experiences and feelings. At the same time, throwing ourselves into fiction and ignoring reality is also untenable. Each and every one of our lives is valuable in some way and worth going back to after we play a game or read a book. SAO argues that leaving the real world behind is as impossible as it is immoral.

In episode 23, Kirito states,

Those two years I spent trapped in SAO taught me something. The difference between a real and a virtual world is slim at best. It’s a waste of time asking people who they really are. All you can do is accept them as is. And have faith in them. Because, in the end, whoever you think they are, that’s who they really are.

Again, the dialogue is, uh, not the best. That last sentence is kinda awkward. What with repeating “they are” twice.

But the point of isekai is that there is a difference between the virtual and real world. In most isekai, in the real world, you’re nothing. You’re a loser shut-in NEET who can’t get a girlfriend. There’s no hope for you. But in the virtual world, you’re a badass. You get all the girls. You’re a lv31 Magic Knight with a Spirit Sword.

SAO takes that and it says no. It says if you’re confident, popular, and outgoing online, you have that capacity in the real world too. That person that people like online exists off-screen too. And if you’re a harasser or an abuser online who gets a kick out of making people miserable in a virtual context, or if you justify gross behavior in a fantasy context, it’s not good enough that you say you’re not that person irl. You are that person irl, whether you know it yet or not. It’s all just you.

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At risk of sounding cheesy here, Kirito is an empowering protagonist to me. Not necessarily because he’s a “nerd” like me (we’re not very similar and I don’t game). But I found Kirito empowering more in the sense that I write behind an online persona, projecting a level of confidence and expertise that doesn’t translate in real life. I have accomplishments online that I tell no one about and it’s not always easy to think of them as belonging to who I am outside of… well… this world. The world of my online content which I’m apparently stuck in until I figure this out.

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