Sword Art Online Fairy Dance Arc
Came in here expecting the worse, and thought it was decent. It was watchable and I don't completely regret watching it. However, those who hate it, I fully understand why. There's a bunch of issues, it's hard to care about the tribulations of a certain character, Asuna's treatment is just fucking terrible, and episode 24 is a huge piece of shit. HUGE piece of shit. But like the first arc, the animation, fights, and music once again shined through most the major issues with this arc. The world building wasn't as great as SAO though. That's pretty much it for the good points, but those 3 points are pretty crucial in my enjoyment of this arc.
Now for the terrible. First off, I found it really, really hard to give a shit about Suguha. I gave a shit more about her high pitched annoying friend than I did her. It's mostly because I didn't care about her major issue, the fact that she had feelings for brother. OH WAIT, I'M SORRY, HER COUSIN. Doesn't count as family, I guess. When a character's whole existence is focused around something as pandering and shallow as unrequited feeling of incestuous love, it's hard to care about them, imo. Why do you love him again? Because he was nice to you when he came back from SAO? Sure whatever. I wouldn't have cared if her feelings were the entire secondary focus of this arc. Just ugh, you can tell the author was a teen when he wrote this (apparently). So yeah, no love for Suguha at all.
And probably the worst is the whole treatment of Asuna. Asuna was pretty cool character in SAO. She was decent when interacting with Kirito, but by herself, she was good. A good character in concept. It's sad to see her demoted to "creepy Princess Peach" status this arc. There was potential when she broke out of her cage, but all that went out of the window the moment she got captured by two scientists who had impractical tentacle slug avatars because why the fuck not. Then we get treated to a tentacle molestation scene for some reason. Awesome! :/ All leading up to the crowning moment of awesome of her getting molested by poorly written big bad in front of her hero, Kirito (all whille epic music plays, shit was weird). I'm fine with subject matter like this when it's treated with some decency and written by a competent writer, but we don't have that luxury here. Her molestation is used to power up the MC with the power of anger. I'm not even going to bother discussing Kirito teaming up with the guy who killed 4000 innocent people for shits and giggles. It's to be expected that Kirito gets bs power ups, so that didn't really upset me. Then afterward, Kirito is the one who need comforting after that whole ordeal? Fucking wow.
I swear the author has no idea how to end an arc. How an arc can be doing decently until the climax and shit the bed so hard is baffling. He did the same thing in the previous arc too. I'm just going to assume the next arc is going to have a bullshit climax as well.
All and all, I don't regret watching this due to the animation and music and seeing childhood dreams of living in an MMO world come to life like that. It's just when we get to the actual story and writing, it's just mediocre with an insulting climax. If someone wants me to ever recommend a MMO based anime to them, I'll probably recommend Log Horizon first. If they don't like it, then I'll recommend SAO as a backup. Hopefully GGO is better.
6/10.