What's in a Scene? - How SAO Became the Worst Anime Ever

sort out online is ass opt Edie and everything in between the whole thing stinks and I hate it but I didn't always as a matter of fact when the series first started airing I thought this is okay I mean I've seen better but I've seen worse - I'll see where this goes somewhere between that and this though that stopped being my response to the show at a certain point I could no longer form words and was mostly just vomiting blood for the duration of each episode and I'm not alone in that pretty much everyone over the age of 12 agrees that this show sucks what they don't agree on is when it started sucking when did sort art online get terrible some would say it happens when they lock the only likeable character in a rape dungeon and made Kirito sister wanna [ __ ] others would point to the gratuitous tentacle rape scene and boy gee whiz there sure is an excessive amount of sexual assault in this show then there's the I told you so camp who say it was terrible all along and all of the [ __ ] just made you realize that after the fact all of them are wrong all of you are wrong I'm right listen to me there's a precise moment when sword art online goes from being okay to being one of the worst [ __ ] shows ever and it's all this [ __ ] fault yeah you heard me your innocent daughter oooh ruined [ __ ] everything let me explain in the beginning sword art online had some stuff going for it not a lot the fight choreography was always pretty bad the cast was always bland and the premise was never original but it had a solid sense of tone we'd seen trapped in an MMO stories before but never with this kind of horror tinge to them the world of Incred had this oppressive air hanging over it from very early on there was this sense that just about anyone could die at any moment the first few episodes do a great job of establishing that and while it didn't break any new ground in terms of character writing it had some good standalone episode plots like the one where all Kirito friends got murdered and the whole murder mystery thing where they're trying to figure out how somebody was breaking the rules of the game and actually those were the only really interesting episodes but hey lots of okay shows have had less the main thing that the show had going for it early on was that underlying sense of dread it felt like something where nobody except for this one guy was ever really nobody important died after the first few episodes but that was fine for a while if the show was kill happy all the time that would be a problem in itself you've got to pace these things it's hard to get attached when characters are going in and out through a revolving door still by episode 10 there had been enough near misses that it seemed like Kirito and his harem might be a little too invulnerable it seemed like the right time to kill someone off to raise the stakes it's at this point that they chose to introduce Yui if you don't know congratulations you've saved yourself from a shitty show but Yui is a little girl who kirito and asuna find wandering around the woods near their home and decide to adopt as their daughter she's sweet and innocent and might as well be walking around with a timer counting down to her sad death now it's cheap and lazy enough to introduce a pure cinnamon roll character purely for the sake of killing them off but that's not nearly bad enough writing on its own to drag this show down to the total [ __ ] territory it now occupies the bigger problem with this is tied to what Yui is see Yui is actually a fully sentient AI which means that she's the only character in the entire cast who if killed could be brought back and that's very very bad for the show because if you E dies and is then brought back that renders the threat of death from a narrative standpoint permanently meaningless and remember as of this episode that's the only interesting thing about SAO death in media isn't interesting because oh they're dead that's sad I'm sad it's interesting because it inherently changes the dynamics of a story a character who is once a force in the narrative now isn't any arc that they might have been going through is cut abruptly short and from this point forward the writers can't rely on their presence to move the story forward or build up other characters most stories never pull that trigger and I'm cool with that because like I said it's hard to write around I'm okay with the show being a little toothless as long as the story is engaging in the characters are fun and there are plenty of ways to make your characters suffer without killing them off but when a show acts like death means something and then does something that very transparently reveals that the writers aren't willing to sacrifice potential plot lines it's like watching Mickey Mouse take his head off at Disneyland ruins the magic there are rules against this kind of [ __ ] if a character dies and is brought back you might as well write and then they got on a bus for a couple of weeks for all the [ __ ] difference it makes so obviously when the show was airing I was really dreading this prospect I was hoping that the show would pull something out of left field maybe fake me out and kill asana or Kirito off instead of do the stupid obvious thing that it was definitely going to do but then of course I got to the end of episode 12 and I watched kirito and asuna mourn for little baby Skynet and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be it was worse they don't just kill you off in the most right way possible they do it well immediately undercutting all of the dramatic weight of the moment because as Yui is being deleted Kirito pulls some techno wizardry out of his ass to store her in an inventory item and because of that dumb dragon feather episode we know that means she's coming back they could at least have left it ambiguous as to whether or not they could bring her back but nope can't let anyone think their wife who might not come back they might stop watching and giving us money but even that isn't the most asinine thing about this scene in this moment as they reach the game masters console in the depths of this dungeon Kirito reveals the heretofore unknown fact that he's a PhD level programmer thus irreparably ruining his character forever Kirito was already stupidly overpowered but at least it made a bit of sense he was a beta tester so his base skill level being higher than most other players was justified and doing kendo in real life gave him good reflexes and he spent like the first year of the game solo queueing instead of socializing to reach his ridiculously high experience level that became less believable as he also proved to apparently be the most eligible bachelor on the entire Internet but you can at least justify that as girls having a crush on him for saving their lives rather than that coming down to any innate social skill on his part it's easy to justify a lot of things about Kirito because he has no defined personality at all but when you add to those traits the fact that he's got the scripting skills to not just hack the game from inside it but the custom write code in the space of a few seconds to store data as an in-game object I've got a call [ __ ] hacking game's requires time and at least some knowledge of the code there's no way Kirito has that even if the thousand are so carefully selected beta testers for sao we're data mining the [ __ ] out of the game they only had it for a little over a month during summer vacation and they only saw a fraction of the content it would be hard to get a full picture of how the game works in that timeframe under normal circumstances but sao is also the first game of its kind built from the ground up for incredibly complicated brand new proprietary hardware so already Kirito is doing something that nobody outside the company should know how to do but even if we assume that there's a command already in place to store a script as an in-game object think about what he's storing Yui is a [ __ ] AI the most complicated kind of program conceivable her code needs to be immense to account for the broad variety of situations she might need to deal with and it also needs to be capable of rewriting itself on the fly in real time Kirito is taking that huge complex code saving its current state of operation and converting that information into a custom item in a game whose script he must be figuring out in real time all in the space of a few seconds no not [ __ ] possible in this moment Kirito ceases to be a real human being and I lose all suspension of disbelief for this entire show it's just not believable that any person could be capable of pulling off the [ __ ] that we've seen him do up to this point maybe some of it but not all of it and especially not a 14-year old [ __ ] child also as if he wasn't special enough already the scene establishes a few moments earlier that he and asuna are the only people to ever experience love or joy in sa-l during the entire two years that the game has been running this is so [ __ ] stupid it hurts this scene amazes me for how thoroughly it manages to ruin the entire show it would be bad enough to ruin the whole story by implicitly admitting that they never plan to kill off anyone who's had any kind of character development ever again unless dying is part of their story arc but in doing so they also managed to make it impossible to relate to their protagonists from this point forward the show has no dramatic stakes it can't have any key Rito's been established to be able to do basically anything and we now know for a fact that no one important will ever really die and if you want a nitpick this CE raises a ton of questions - the big one being why why is that what Kirito did with his back-end access if he had the time to isolate a huge complex program and store it as environmental data and write a custom script to save that file to his personal computer why didn't he I don't know globally reactivate the game's logout function he had access to the [ __ ] source code and that would have been a lot simpler there was probably just one value he needed to set from true to false or maybe a few lines of code that had been commented out comparatively speaking it would have been easy and he'd have been saving I don't know upwards of like 7,000 people's lives but now preserving his wife's Tamagotchi is a lot more important than that there's been a lot of complaining in this video and not a lot of hard analysis but that's because there's not much in this scene to analyze this is one of the most flat boring scenes that I've ever watched in anything every shot is static and dull especially the obvious predictable reaction shots that it uses to ham-fisted Lee attempt to tug at your heartstrings and the set is a blank white room with nothing going on there's basically nothing to even look at here that said if nothing else I guess I can take solace in the fact that nobody was even trying when they made the scene that ruined the whole show but you know that's just like my opinion man and if you like sort out online and don't think it was ever ruined then please go to class like a good kid and stop telling me to kill myself I'm probably not gonna do it and you're wasting a lot of time that you could be spending contributing nothing to society although if you want to leave a comment that's not like actually an indictable offence in Canada feel free this really is just my opinion and I like to see people disagree with me as long as they're not complete [ __ ] psychos about it on the other hand if you don't like Sao then you might like watching me tear into it so peas in this video on the left assuming that you haven't seen it already which pretty much everyone watching this probably has or on the right you can check out my thoughts on the much better tomohiko Ito show erased and if you like this video or those and you want to see more like them then please hit that subscribe button and follow me on Twitter at G 0 FF due for regular updates on everything I'm making thank you for watching and thank you a special if you're one of the kind people on patreon who enables me to do this nonsense this is all your fault and I love you for it you're amazing keep being beautiful never watch Sao this is Jeff Zhu professional [ __ ] signing out from my mother's basement

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 3,429,669

Keywords: Mother's Basement, Sword Art Online, Anime, Analysis, A-1 Picture, Scene, What's in a Scene?, Critique, Film School, Tomohiko Itoh, Crossing Field, Rage, Hate, Reki Kawahara, Aincrad, Alfheim, MMO, Terrible, AI, Programming, Stupid, SAO, Sucks, Yui, Asuna, Kirito

Id: qZ9NlThB3SY

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 14 2016