Quote:
Originally Posted by iSuckAtWriting
But Sword Art Online isn’t a personal tale. Though the show’s first half does focus on Kirito and Asuna, it’s more about what they learn from the world and other characters around them than their own thoughts. Though the show’s pacing hurts it, it makes up for it with world building that can make these personable but simple characters something more. The show’s second half has none of this, and to make it a personal tale when it worked much better as a grand story becomes its downfall.
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It's interesting because I feel the total opposite. I think that Sword Art Online is entirely a personal tale, and the story consists of perspectives of the various characters on the world around them. I think that's why a large portion of the story in the first half consisted of vignettes. It got sort of woven together into a dramatic arc with a climax, but it never really had the time to develop the "grand story" beyond the personal impact on a very small list of characters. The world building that happened was almost by necessity rather than being the overall point, but there was just enough meat on the bones that people could gravitate to it (and that the original author could go back now and write a whole new novel series on it). The second arc continues in step with the emotional tone of the first by focusing on the theme of "stolen time/frozen time", and the protagonist's conflicting attitudes reflecting the dueling reality of a game with no consequence and a reality full of consequence, and the redefined lines between a game world and the real world. But even though the emotional tone stayed largely the same, the substantive content changed significantly along with the world itself, and that contrast was a huge part of emotional/personal conflict at the heart of the second arc.
But anyway, this isn't an attempt to discredit your review at all. What I've found over the years after reading many different conflicting opinions about this show is that a given viewer's reaction to the overall work depends entirely on what "hooked them" about the show in the first place. There can be a lot of different ways of approaching this work that result in varying degrees of appreciation of what happened after the first arc. It can be a bit of a rough transition, and there's no question that there are technical weaknesses in the execution. All in all, perhaps more than many shows, it's a case where subjective preferences and perspectives can make a huge difference in any given person's receptiveness to the overall work.