Quote:
Originally Posted by ronelm2000
I think the greatest problem that was posed in Sword Art Online anime is simply because of A-1's Show and Tell distillation process. In a somewhat easily brittle series such as this with a high-tech audience, information, however, detailed it is, easily becomes plot points. Stuff like "what about this, what about that", and "why don't they do this/that" that were certainly pointed in the novels can't simply be pointed out at the anime first-and-foremost simply because the novels switched everything from 1st POV to 3rd POV. Sure 1st POV is hard to manage, but it serves to tell better than a 3rd POV simply because many of the details can be explained by it.
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Well, if this is the case, then it basically requires the audience to have an understanding and acceptance of the necessary compromise. That, due to format and time constraints, and the nature of the perspective shown, it's just not possible to provide explanations for every thing, but what is important will be shown and its meaning will be revealed in context over time. The sort of richness of detail and explanation is well-suited for a novel format, but it's hard to imagine how it could be suitably adapted into an anime format without adding a whole lot of narration that would break up the flow of time, and adding significantly more episodes to the show. And frankly, I don't think the missing details are generally necessary to understand what's going on or the key points as it relates to the characters, the on-going plot, or the overall messages of the story... it just provides a slightly richer tapestry that may help some people get even more immersed into the world.
Or, in other words, the audience needs to place some faith in the writers that the decisions they've made about what is most important to show are based on a good understanding of the story they need to tell and where they're going with all this. So far, based on the way the plot points have interconnected, I've been generally satisfied that this is the case (at least as someone who isn't doing any sort of comparison to anything else). For the things that simply aren't shown (because they're not the focus of the story), it may require some extrapolation, and I guess that can be a bit hard if the viewer is being a bit overly-literal about everything (as, to be frank, sometimes happens among a geek audience -- we live in worlds of facts not metaphors!
).