Review of Sword Art Online
Action, adventure, fantasy, romance, despair, the perfect chemistry for me. I've noticed the lack of desperation and tragedy in most forms of entertainment, specially in games and anime. Most things are designed for children but why? Since we're adults for the majority of our life and adults surely make these forms of entertainment, we can't be satisfied with the mountain of bunnies and rainbows for children who neither have a fully developed frontal cortex or enough experience with the full spectrum of entertainment and art to be able to compare and contrast while we scavenge for fully matured crumbs. Are we to create as ifwe pretend that entertainment and violence are linked even though no evidence is forthcoming? Then why hold back? If it doesn't make me mad, cry and feel love, power, retaliation and triumph while being shot out of a canon through a myriad of fantasy-tastic backdrops, points shall be detracted until creators fully understand what situations provoke the most psychological stimulation.
Tropes should not be a main focus for a review, it's ultimately the entertainments ability to warrant emotional investments and develop those emotions until they feel too extreme for the viewer's mind to be able to handle while forcing those investments to ricochet from one extreme to the next while providing beauty, fluidity, mystical creativity and coherent build ups, turn of events and releases throughout. Then we can worry about...tropes.
If you let yourself become immersed in this anime, whatever plot holes may be present will fly right over your head and that's why I ultimately value situational psychological stimulation and the ability to captivate over how actually complex a plot is or how there are no plot holes because at that point, unless the plot holes are massive and derail the plausibility of the entire story you might as well just be analyzing a show instead of maximizing your entertainment value. You would rate Attack On Titan or Code Geass a better show when it has less than a third of the situations you would rather be immersed in if you just critique and analyze how complex and clever it is and rate this show based on its glue (the plot) when you should be focused on what's being glued. Isn't that the purpose of glue in the first place? to bring together a bunch of the parts you actually want to see as a whole working piece?
It all depends on where you want to be and what you want to see and most importantly, how you want to feel and this had nearly everything I wanted in an immersive experience and I'm left wanting more. This is not just a story for the listener, this is the art of escapism. So I'll be the first one to say that the creators plucked a dream from my mind and let me walk right inside of it.