Quote:
Originally Posted by Starlightz
That's IS criticism of the episode's storyline, just saying. It's okay to remove small, unimportant bits / characters, but when they even remove important parts, which might lead to misunderstanding or downplaying some characters / part of story, I think we should be able to say the storyline was lacking compared to how it would be.
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No it's not and really all it does is further add to my argument.
Leaving bits and pieces (albeit important or not) from the source material is
by default a criticism of not faithfully adapting the source. I would like people explain to me why they thought the episode was poor, be it in the character of Kirito/Asuna or in the virtual reality plot itself
on the anime episode's basis.
For example, several posters have queried about how people in the real world are maintained - are they on life support, or do their families feed nutrients etc. THAT is an example of a valid criticism of the anime ep itself since that could be a major plothole if not explained. Of course, people are either merely speculating or deliberately not answering since that would be a spoiler.
What is exactly wrong with the character of Kirito or Asuna atm from an "anime-only" perspective regardless of how the source portrays them? To me they seem far better than your average milquetoast, whiny or bloodshot shonen male lead or your weak-willed or overly-violent female lead that seems to plague the industry atm. Kirito is shown to be quite gray from a moral point of view (neutral from an alignment point of view) and Asuna is no damsel in distress. Compare that to the characters in SAO's sister series Accel World, in which the quality of how the characters are portrayed in their respective anime versions (regardless of source) is the difference between the floor and the sky. But really going back to my question, what is exactly wrong with the character of Kirito and Asuna? Are they too passive, aggressive, "generic" or what?
I've also been seeing posts that are considering that this episode should be split into two. Imo, that's the worst thing to do for such a series. 2 cours isn't exactly a staggering amount of episodes, and there's plenty of series out there where 2 cours seemed insufficient. There's a lot of source material to cover here, and the last thing you want to do is to split this episode into two for something that imo not even that significant. It's the goddamn FIRST boss lol and there's like what, 100 floors?
Maybe I'm taking a different philosophy when it comes to anime. Some people seem to think an anime's job is to adapt as faithfully a particular source material. My view is that an anime's job is to portray its own story using a source as the basis. That's a primary reason why I enjoy anime originals more often than not because the production staff don't have to worry about this "pleasing the fanbase" factor and can just focus on the goal of making a good anime on its own right.
And yeh, the poster who mentioned HBO Game of Thrones vs Game of Thrones Books is spot on. The TV's version of Battle of Blackwater/Westeros was superb in its own right (was compared to Battle of Helm's Deep in Lord of the Rings), yet book readers decide to jeopardise its effort by complaining that bits and pieces from the book is missing. I mean FFS lol.