Crossover With Non-anime Series Fan Fiction ❯ Terdwilicker's Anime Reviews ❯ SAO: Sword Art Online ( Chapter 32 )

Battle Royale was a Japanese horror movie about students being forced to kill each other in a high school. Its about how inhumane people are when pushed by circumstances, and probably as a commentary on the lousy discipline in high schools and how rotten the bullying situation is. And that movie is decades old. It has been copied MANY times, including in the USA and EU countries. It resonates. 

Sword Art Online is a copy of Battle Royale, with players logging into a video game with a VR immersion system that affects your brain directly, but happens to have a failsafe built in such that if the helmet is removed without logging out, it activates intense microwaves and fries their brain to death. Instant Bacon, or the same effect of travelling beyond Earth's Magnetic Field to visit Mars. Anyone who tried that in real life would die as they left the magnetic shadow of the Earth. With lots of screaming and bacon sizzle. A truly horrifying death that never gets into scifi movies about Mars... because they are MOVIES. Ahem. 

SAO is all about man's struggle to survive and whether to choose friendship and sacrifice or greed and evil. And the students make their choices, often going for cowardice, waiting to die helplessly in the starter town. A few are climbing the levels to get to the end and face the game designer in combat, because he's inside TOO, and can die in combat because he's totally insane, as is required for the story. 

Eventually the hero triumphs, pulls an Aslan, and survives. The survivors are freed and the season ends. Okay, you think, that was really horrible. These people will NEVER trust any VR tech ever again, right? Wrong. There are multiple more seasons with VR tech and "you can die in the game bro, for real!" It is overplayed. It is lame. It wears poorly. Gun Gale Online is cute, but again there's "death in the game, surprise!" shoved in. Really, this series is by some demented serial killer that writes books instead. I think this is because Japan does not believe in Mental Health and considers it a fine reason for suicide rather than treatment, and that's why Japan has the third highest suicide rate in the world. Not joking. They're behind India #2 and Korea is #1. If they change things they might do better, but the grandmas own everything so probably not. 

I do not recommend SAO to anyone. It kinda sucks.