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Originally Posted by ahelo
If you say to me "well that was expected, it was hinted already an episode before that she was an AI so something like this shouldn't come off as too surprising" well sorry for being surprised (and not in a good way); but then again I'm sure most people here were surprised to at that turn of development.
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Well, sure, it was surprising, but to me more in a "that's one heck of a way to reveal the secret" way. I didn't know for sure that she was an AI or whatever else, but it was clear that she wasn't a normal player and certainly wasn't the cute little girl they portrayed her to be. When she vouched for the honesty of the assistant guild leader, that was another hint (along with the fact they took her along on this mission in the first place) -- for everything there's a reason.
But yeah, don't get me wrong -- it was a surprising plot twist... it's just that it makes sense when you step back and look at all the signs and put it in context. That's my view anyway...
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Originally Posted by Adigard
I remain concerned about how boring and terrible this show must be for the casual viewers. It's probably one of the greatest failings of the 'show, don't tell' idea that people always clamor for...
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If by "casual viewer" you mean anime-only viewer, I don't think it's really that hard. It's not like I'd read the novels coming into the show or into these episodes. I think the main thing is to just wait for the pieces to come together. I guess it helps to pay attention so you can pick up on some of the hints and signs, but I'm quite sure that everything will come together in a way that makes sense in the end, and most things make enough sense already.
Edit: This is like how I saw on a Japanese blog a few commenters complaining about the fact that the author clarified minor details about the episodes in his tweets each week, with the insinuation being "if your story is so obscure that it takes author tweets so that you can make sense of what's going on, then you've failed". But I think that's sort of missing the point. Sure, the little details that he mentions are interesting bits of trivia, but they're not "game-changing". The problem is you have a mostly high-tech audience and a lot of people who know a thing or two about MMOs, so they get hung up on details that distract them from the more important things going on in the story. (I realize I started something similar in the thread this week, but I really did mean it mostly as a joke...) That isn't to say the details aren't important, but they're not
more important than the story that is being told. In that sense I guess I would say that following this anime from an anime-only viewer's perspective may require not being too distracted by the things the anime doesn't cover in detail at that time. Perhaps it's almost a bit of an "uncanny valley" sort of thing -- the setting is a bit too close to reality for people to just dismiss it. Something like the same author's Accel World avoids some of these issues by setting itself a bit further out into the future using technology that is even less familiar than what we know.