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Originally Posted by Reckoner
There comes a point where such a comment is just of the same corrosive nature as the US's ultra PC environment where anything and everything is construed as a slant against a gender, race, or you you name it.
We're talking about the same writer here that wrote AW. You know Haru and how he tends to depend on KYH at points of the story for psychological support and what not? Is this sexist against males now too?
Construing this as a sexist portrayal of women is laughable at best and isn't really grounded in anything. Sorry Enzo, I think you're stretching it here way too much.
When the story starts mentioning anything about gender roles in an overt way, then we can talk.
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To be honest you're overreacting massively here, parsing one statement I made in response to a specific citation of a different scene being sexist (which I argued was not) out of probably 20 paragraphs I've written on SAO in the last two days. Seriously - you're way, way out of line and completely out of context.
FTR, I still don't like that scene on its own terms. Asuna doing that was silly and demeaning and I don't give a rat's ass if that offends you. Making a comment about one moment in an episode isn't some kind of blanket political statement unless you come to the table looking to pick a fight.
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Originally Posted by Triple_R
I'll admit that this was lame. It was lame for Asuna to be portrayed like that in this scene. But I just think of it as bad writing due to it being really OoC moreso than it being sexist, per se. It's bad because it's OoC for Asuna - I doubt many people would care if someone like Silica was cowering behind Kirito, for example.
In other words, the problem isn't that a female character is cowering behind Kirito. The problem is that Asuna is cowering behind him, and that just doesn't suit her character.
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That's the basic gist of it. Kawahara's characters aren't a good place to look for larger social statements - I don't think there's a lot of deeper social meaning as regards to gender or anything else, because they're not really nuanced enough for it to make a difference - they're basically archetypal anime and MMO characters populating his richly-imagined universe. The social commentary in SAO (especially) and AW comes from the plot, not the characters.