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Originally Posted by Guardian Enzo
I kind of disagree with your take on Grimlock and the mystery on a very fundamental level. You can say none of the characters "matter in the slightest" - but they were still the bulk of the last two episodes. Doesn't the entertainment value of those episodes and the quality of the characters written matter too, as well as the "point" of the arc? This is an entertainment, after all - and the journey matters just as much as the destination.
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You're quite right; when I said they "didn't matter in the slightest", that was hyperbole on my part. Of course they do matter. For my part, I was reasonably entertained by that part of the story... but I really felt that what was being conveyed "between the lines" was pretty clearly more important than the lines themselves: particularly points about how the game system works and the groundwork of Kirito and Asuna's friendship. I guess I can go with the explanation Trajan had above about it being "fact-building": in this episode, the mystery seemed to progress only in such a way that it served the information they wanted to convey about these other two storytelling aspects. It wasn't
really the story of the Golden Apple guild or the death of Griselda, but it was the story of Kirito and Asuna told through the lens/context of this particular turn of events.
In the end, I suppose it's the same as the previous episodes in that regard; most of the characters introduced in these short stories matter less for themselves, but more for what they contribute to our knowledge of the mechanics, and how they contribute to the backstory of our main protagonists.
To your points that criticized Grimlock's behaviour (or at least the way it was portrayed), I agree that it wasn't very convincing for me. The only rationale (that I saw someone mention previously as well) is that it was pretty clear that he had already lost it anyway. I think it would indeed have been more convincing if they didn't show him collapse after Asuna's statement, but rather let that just weigh on us and the other characters. In the end, they tried to show as if he regretted his actions based on that one statement alone, but I think he could have just stayed crazy to better effect.
Oh: another thing this episode introduced (I think) was the paralysis status effect. I assume that, as the name implies, it makes you unable to move. Hopefully you can still use a potion or something to clear the effect, otherwise solo players like Kirito had better get immunity.