In my review of the first episode of SAO Alternative I noted how strange the mix of aesthetics were. That LLEN’s character design and the ending theme gave the impression that this anime was a moe show taking place in a gritty, violent online video game about grey guns and brown deserts. This week, the anime answered the question of what it was trying to achieve with this strange mix of aesthetics, and the answer is both remarkably simple and hilarious.
Karen spends the episode recounting her experiences in first coming to discover online games, and it turns out that while she is an introvert in real life, prior to playing Gun Gale Online she didn’t seem like much of a video game fanatic. We actually learn that one of her favourite hobbies is listening to music, and that she’s simply a college student who gets by just fine. What intrigues her about VR games, however, is that they allow you to occupy a new body. For whatever reason, Karen feels like she’s too tall, and is jealous of the shorter and cuter highschool girls, so her hope is that she could play a VR game just for the opportunity to become short and cute. There's nothing else she needs from video games other than to allow her to adopt this very simple, specific aesthetic for herself.
What follows is an extended riff on off of one major contrivance of Reki Kawahara’s worldbuilding in the original SAO. In the original GGO arc from season two of the anime, it’s explained that the new games which came after SAO actually provide you with a randomly generated character model upon account creation instead of allowing you to create your own character like literally every other MMO ever. Many people have already pointed out how stupid this idea is- that Kawahara would so severely misunderstand something so important about video games, that players like to express themselves however they want and that aesthetics are hugely important to their enjoyment of a game or their willingness to play as a certain avatar, is still staggering to this day. And the only reason Kawahara wrote things this way is so that Kirito could be randomly assigned a female character model for the duration of that arc, because he wouldn't otherwise choose to play as a female character under other circumstances. It’s actually kind of amazing how such a ridiculously huge plot hole was created just to facilitate such an arbitrary, useless decision, since it was very easy to forget that Kirito's GGO avatar was supposed to be a girl after a few episodes.
Instead of retconning this aspect of the worldbuilding, GGO instead chooses to use it as an extended joke and use it as part of the character building. Karen first tries Alfheim online, and upon discovering that she had been randomly assigned a tall character, immediately freaks out and logs out of the game in frustration, lamenting the fact that she can’t just create the short character she wants to play as. So begins a journey of Karen importing LLEN, her online profile, to over thirty games in hopes of being able to play the kind of character she wants to, until GGO finally gives her the character model she’s looking for. Rather than being able to create the character she wants of her own accord, or happening to stumble upon a rare character the first time, she simply rolls the dice enough times and plays the odds to get her dream character. This explains why someone obsessed with looking cute would play a game like GGO with an aesthetic antithetical to what she's looking for, too- she was just trying one game after another, and had no idea what GGO was when she first logged into it. She doesn't think the game itself is necessarily for her, but she decides to keep playing it because this version of LLEN is perfect for her, and she learns to enjoy GGO for what it is just so that she can keep experiencing a second life with the body type she wants.
Now that we know more about her, I think this makes Karen a much more relatable character than Kirito, as she is his total opposite in almost every way. Specifically, Karen very much comes off as a casual fan, someone who doesn't stake her identity on games at all, doesn't know much about them, and is only interested in them because there's one minor function present in them, one that the in-universe (and in a way, out of universe) game designers didn't even think about, that satisfy one of Karen's very particular desires. Her personality and motivations much better represent the reasons why people in the real world play video games. We don’t play video games because we’ll die if we fail to get good at them, we don’t play games to boost our own egos or to save the world from a threat extrinsic to video games. We play them to express ourselves, to socialise in an environment we’re more comfortable with, and to have some good clean fun without having to take everything so seriously.
Reki Kawahara must not think video games are very fun if he feels we need excuses to play them.
LLEN proceeds to get better at the game over a three month period, eventually gaining something of a reputation for herself. This leads to a character who calls herself Pito seeking out LLEN, and the two quickly become casual friends mostly by Pito taking an interest in the fact that she gets to play with a female player, when the vast majority of GGO has a male player base who tend to hit on her. We still haven’t met M from the first episode, but with the final moments of the episode hinting at LLEN first learning about the squad jam, I’m sure we won’t have to wait long to learn more information about him.
So the episode was largely setup and exposition, but it actually made me more confident for the future of the show. Since the first set up mostly used raw plot details and action to hook us, this episode actually gave us reasons to care about LLEN, and it displayed an attitude that’s more interesting in exploring the central characters and their relationships rather than trying to put them in real mortal danger, or explore gratuitous psychological traumas as was the case with Sinnon. Alternative may be about an action game but it seems to have more in common with a typical slice of life show than you might think, and that’s simply because here nothing that happens in GGO really matters outside of how it impacts the characters and their relationships, since they’re never in real danger. Making GGO the setting of a slice of life series also makes some of the dialogue pretty hilarious, such as how Pito talking about becoming stronger by feeding enemies to your guns would be disturbing in any context besides a video game.
Alternative feels like a good name for this show. It’s not what SAO should have been in the first place, since the goals of the two shows are quite different. Take away the death game premise inherent to the DNA of SAO and suddenly you’re writing a different anime about VR entirely, which is what Alternative feels like. Not a replacement, but something different. I think this anime has really benefited from the new writer, as he’s able to give this franchise a fresh take and poke fun at the original whilst being far kinder to it than the internet was. It sees potential in the original universe of SAO and GGO without deciding that it needs to reinvent that universe from the ground up.
I do feel that Alternative is of a much higher quality than the original anime, no doubt about that. So I’ll be looking forward to where it goes next.