Sword Art Online's Adaptation: Putting The Pieces Together


As much as I enjoy Reki Kawahara's Sword Art Online, I will admimt that people have legitimate complaints about it- Kirito's power level, how well-written the female characters are, and the use of rape in the story, among others, which I may discuss elsewhere. That being said, some anime-only watchers may not understand why the first half of the season was put together in the way that it was, which was a consequence of Sword Art Online evolving over time.

Some people criticize the Aincrad arc for being disjointed and possibly inconsistent. It should be noted that this is a consequence of it being patched together from stories that were written at different times.
  • Only Episodes 1, 8-10, 13 and 14 were adapted from Volume 1 of the light novel, the original story Kawahara submitted as a standalone piece for a contest.
  • Episodes 3, 4 11 and 12 were adapted from Volume 2, a list of short stories set in Aincrad.
  • Episodes 5 and 6 were adapted from Volume 8, which was published after the Fairy Dance(Volume 3-4), Phantom Bullet (Volume 5-6) and Mother's Rosary(Volume 7) arcs, in a volume that also included the Calibur story and an unadapted short story that was just after Episode 1.
  • That only leaves Episode 2, which is in some ways the strangest of the lot. It was adapted from Volume 1 of the Progressive spinoff, a retelling of the two long years that Kirito and the others trapped in SAO spent climbing the castle of Aincrad. It's unclear when Progressive is set to end, but considering that they're still on the single digit floors, and even Red-Nose Reindeer is a few dozen floors into Aincrad, there's a significant time gap between Episodes 2 and 3.
It isn't hard to see how this happened. After submitting the original story to the contest, Kawahara realized that there were many untold stories in that time, hence his decision to go back and create subsequent stories, as well as create a spinoff that would show the climb up Aincrad from start to finish. Having a two-year time skip from the beginning of the "game of death" to near the end was a strange decision, albeit one forced in order to tell the story Kawahara wanted to tell in a single book. Of course, such a decision probably wasn't the best idea for a long-term series, but the anime did the best it could to tell a cohesive story in the first half of the first season.

Compare Accel World(another Kawhara work), in which all the episodes besides 6, 7, 18 and 19 came from Volumes 1-4. Those four episodes came from Volume 10; the first pair was a story after Volume 1, introducing a character who wouldn't become important until much later, while the latter showed what Kuroyukihime was doing while on her trip in Volumes 3-4. The first volume, which covers the first five episodes, works as a standalone story, but also promises to lead in to possible follow-up volumes. Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime begin to rebuild Nega Nebulus and challenge the other Legions, while the identity of the person responsible for using Cyan Pile to try to eliminate Kuroyukihime is a mystery that has yet to be solved. Sword Art Online has less of a myth arc, apart from showing the legacy of the game of death, so it's clear that Kawahara had a better idea of what story he wanted to tell when he began writing Accel World.

In conclusion, I recall one Amazon.com review of Accel World saying that while Sword Art Online clearly came off as a first work, Accel World was significantly more refined, and that effectively sums up my thoughts on Sword Art Online. Kawahara improved his writing since initially writing Sword Art Online, and seems to have more of a vision for Accel World. As such, those who judge Kawahara to be a bad writer based on Sword Art Online should look into his other work, which may cause them to rethink their opinion, or at least concede that he's improved since he told the story of Kirito's adventure in Aincrad.

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