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Originally Posted by ahelo
but for a casual viewer like me
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I remain concerned about how boring and terrible this show must be for the casual viewers. It's probably one of the greatest failings of the 'show, don't tell' idea that people always clamor for...
Quote:
Originally Posted by ahelo
I'm complaining that an episode like this needs way more buildup for it to work.
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Does it though? It's not simply a throw-away episode that introduced us to a new 'girl of the week' and then discarded her in a fit of melodrama. Heck, it's not even the first time we've had one of these throw away 'girl of the week' episodes... it's the world-building that, IMO, is equally important... since the show again adheres to the whole show, don't tell notion. It also, in theory, could shape Asuna's and Kirito's relationship going forward. They've got another thing that's only going to be real in a MMO setting... one they're supposed to be desperate to escape from.
Remember? Just a few episodes ago Asuna was perfectly willing to sacrifice a whole village full of NPC's to make a boss fight a little easier. I'm thinking she's feeling slightly different about this NPC, and that feeling is likely going to reshape her opinions going forward (or did we all forget that one already?).
+ It re-introduced the guy from Ep2 and told us what he's been up to, what a douche he's continued to be.
+ It re-introduced us to the guys from that horribly failed boss fight, and gave us hints as to why they'd do something so utterly stupid.
+ It reminded us that people can be callous jerks, even in a video game with consequences... and that ultimately people still find ways to cope, even when they're in a hopeless / hostile environment way over their heads (although some of that was in the final minutes of last week's show).
+ It finally answered a rather important question of exactly how a MMO game once full of 10k people could be running without a staff of employee's implicit in the hostage situation.
+ It reinforces the notion that the SAO game was designed to be a 'game', not just simply as a death trap for 10k unfortunate or unlucky souls.
+ This arc showed us, for the first time since the opening minutes of the show (ep1, remember?) what's going on with the people left behind in the starter town (also some of that was from last week).
So, if you simply throw away this episode, or the last, as some pithy little melodrama vehicle... well... nuff on that topic.
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Originally Posted by zRichard
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Yup! But since the anime did such a rather poor job of 'showing' that confidence, and didn't tell us it either... which is unfortunate. It's easy enough to infer, but it's really missing a hook to tie "enjoying murdering hordes of weak monsters" = "Hey, this boss is probably lvl. 60, this should be a ton of fun since I'm probably 30+ levels higher than it is".
Instead we just get the "Oh snap, I've done something utterly stupid."