Review of Sword Art Online

I don't really have much to add as far as reviewing it as a show goes. It's a shallow, pointless series full of wasted potential, plot holes, plot threads that go nowhere, one note characters, tedious romance fanservice, generic slapstick comedy you can see in any other unambitious show, and deus ex machina moments that don't have the good sense to at least be entertainingly stupid. The action scenes, while fluidly animated, get boring real fast because the game mechanics are not well established, rules are broken constantly, and the main character is ludicrously overpowered in using brute force as his only solution. The artand animation are good, Yuki Kajiure's score is phoned in but still decent, and there are rare moments where it at least acknowledges interesting implications of its world that it never touches again.

Instead, I want to warn that the second half of this show (besides being utterly, irredeemably terrible even compared to the low standards of the first half) is some of the most distressingly sexist, misogynistic, utterly insensitive exploitative crap I've ever seen jammed into a mainstream series. If this was at least actual exploitation schlock like La Blue Girl, you'd just be getting what you paid for, but no. This series intended for teenagers gets incredibly, inappropriately rapey in ways that are offensive to a very real problem with society. The following are spoilers, but I don't want you to give money to these people, so I don't care.

Amongst other things, this show has an incest subplot (barely worth mentioning compared to the other stuff, sadly) and a rapist villain in his forties or fifties that has somehow convinced the parents of a 17 year old comatose girl to let him "marry" her without either her informed consent or the expectation she'll ever wake up. He has her mentally trapped in a virtual world where she's kept in a cage and emotionally abused by him constantly.

There are threats of brainwashing, a tentacle groping scene, and the penultimate episode has him chain her down and rip her clothes off so he can molest her in front of the main character while promising he's going to do the same to her in real life (apparently, her luxury hospital has zero security and no concept of visiting hours). None of this is explored in any meaningful way; it is using a topic that psychologically scars people for life as cheap shock material.

And I just wanted a show about a virtual death world that requires creative thinking in video game mechanics to succeed instead of one part boring action, six parts boring romance, and fifty parts "what the goddamn hell is wrong with you people!?"