Piece of Shit 24
Edit: So, I swear a lot. If that bothers you, then I you probably don't want to read any of this rant.
Jesus Christ. I can't believe I'm saying this, but this episode makes the Tokyo arc look like subtle nuanced art. It's not that I don't believe that someone could write a piece of dreck like this, because power fantasies are nothing new. What fucking appalls me is that not only have story editors, book publishers, anime produces, and presumably manga editors saw this story and found it perfectly acceptable (and perhaps exploitable) but that this is so fucking popular with "average" fans in Japan.
This episode represents the worst of humanity and our failure of a species, making the heteronormative and self-defeating misogynistic fantasies of the middle-aged women who read Fifty Shades of Grey seem normal by comparison.
So fuck it. Let's start with the big opening act that everyone was all a titter about. You have this horrendous scene where the bad guy shows off his depravity by disabling Kirito and having a pseudo, shitty PG-13, rape scene with Asuna right in front of him. Not only is it a fucking asinine way to characterize an already shitty villain, but this is supposed to provide some shallow motivation for the inexplicable power-up that happens minutes later.
Oh, there's some acknowledgement of the real world. The villain wants to bring his perversions to the outside by using Justin.tv to stream his childish pseudo-rape session to the internet. Those are the fucking stakes here. Asuna is going to be lose her purity and be put on display in public! That's what this man's evil schemes boil down to. This guy who stole these servers, set up this fake game in order to read the minds of thousands of players and run experiments on them - it comes down to wanting to fuck a girl and tape it for some revenge video bullshit.
So fine, the stakes are unbelievably low but perfect for the white knight moment. But what makes no absolute fucking sense is that everyone acknowledges the existence of the real world but choose to exhibit their agency only in this fucking video game. Hey, you fucking assholes, why not just kill each other in real life? Especially when your body is rendered helpless when you're jacking off jacking in to this video game? Because that runs counter to the wishfulfillment bullshit that HAS to play out in this shitty episode.
But let's ignore that, because we've ignored it for the last 10 weeks anyway. The worst scene in the history of fiction plays out and just as all hope seems lost, Kirito gets a power up from the guy who invented the game in the first place.
And this is when we enter the second phase of the episode.
So, I'm okay with revenge porn in principle. I don't seek it out, but if you make a movie about Jody Foster running around killing her rapists or Mel Gibson hunting his son's kidnappers, I don't really have a problem with that and I'll probably watch it. Hell, Tarrantino is the master of revenge porn and Inglorious Basterds is the porniest of revenge porn fantasies - being able to slaughter a bunch of fucking evil Nazis in person by cooking them alive and carving a swastika into the forehead of the one Nazi that managed to escape.
It's to no one's surprise that the second act of the episode turns to the most facile version of the revenge porn fantasy that I've seen in a while. After this callous and hamfisted attempt to remind the audience why the villain is evil and deserves to die, Kirito takes some video game Viagra and manages to regain his hard, stiff, sword. He then proceeds to carve up the villain in a moment that is probably meant to be cathartic to the loser fanboys invested in this storyline but ends up being just fucking laughable to anyone with any self-respect whatsoever. Do I need to say how fucking ridiculous it is that Kirito slicks the guy in half, tosses the top half of the guy's body into the air and then impales his head as he falls to the ground? I don't know who to blame for that, because maybe the director of the episode buys into this shitty power fantasy as well and wanted to perpetuate the emotion of the torture porn scene to its fullest extent.
Either way, we get perhaps the most anti-climatic ending to one of these scenes that I've seen in years.
Fuck you, you piece of shit protagonist. Just fuck off and die.
Oh, but that's not all! Now that all the masturbatory loser fanboy shit is over, we need to get back to the all important mythology. It's a no brainer that this shit was written earlier in the decade because here's a scene ripped off from the end of the second Matrix movie that, I presume, is meant to justify years and years (or volumes and volumes) of this fucking bullshit. Who is the guy who set this off and manages to get away with murdering thousands of people? Why did this guy sit around and let this happen, only to show up at the most convenient moment possible? Buy more of these shitty books to find out!
But hey, I'll give the guy one thing - at least this was better than any of the Mass Effect 3 endings. So congratulations, asshole, you're better than Mac Walters and Casey Hudson. Taste the fucking rainbow.
I just can't believe this episode. Not only is it a pile of shit, but it's made up of three different types of shit, mixed together in some horrific pile of shit soup that represents everything that is wrong with the fandom. Heavy handed writing, shitty wishfulfillment, and SyFy with a capital "S". It almost makes me want to watch Prometheus because when Lindelof screws me, I probably would hate myself less when he's doing it.
The last two weeks of Homeland made me believe that I was seeing the worst of television unfold before my eyes, but SAO manages to exceed my expectations of bad television. I assume that there are only two more episodes of this show and then I can walk away from this shitshow for good.
