Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online (Season 1) thoughtdump

rewatched this in prep for season 2, here's some very unorganized thoughts, they're not that good

Ep 6: lmao this episode took a deepdive into that SAO stupidity, like....ok, M and Pito are complete psychos so I pretty much shouldn't take anything they say seriously, but why is Karen just completely going along with this??? like, I guess all they said is that Pito is just interested in killing herself and M if they die and didn't explicitly threaten Karen in the same way, so I guess there's that level of safety? but if it were me (and im sure most people), I would not be interacting with these people any more than I have to. also, her goal of defeating pito in order to save her felt....inconsistent with what we were told about her character?? i thought her whole thing was that if she died in-game she would kill herself IRL, so how would defeating her save her? my best guess is because of their specific promise where if LLENN eventually beats her in-game they would meet up IRL, which is something she can't do if she's dead. so it's basically if she's killed by anyone else other than LLENN, she'll die. and the easiest way to save her in this scenario would be to beat her instead of convincing every other player in the tournament to throw the game and let Pito win. idk, still stupid but i guess that makes.... sense???

Ep. 10: ok, it seems my interpretation up there was correct. Which is a lot better than what it started out as. I just really don't like SAO's premise; the whole point of video games is that the stakes don't have to be that high for it to be investing. That's why I loved Bofuri, that despite it being a laid-back time, the fights are genuinely really easy to get into just because it's a really fun game. With this, it's not actually like SAO, and in fact I think the chances of Pito actually dying here are very slim, even in this absurd scenario. Either Pito kills everyone and wins, or she gets killed by LLENN; in both cases she survives. And because they've both been established to be incredibly OP, there's basically no worry of anyone actually dying IRL. And the whole setpiece in this episode of the gymnastics team fighting head on against Pito's team is a really great way to justify that! They can go as hard as they want against them; as long as they leave the killing of Pito specifically to LLENN, they can at least go all-out against her team and give LLENN the best chances of winning against her. it's kind of a high-risk high-reward thing tho, because if you take out Pito's team, should any other team get to her before LLENN can kill her, then they've just lowered their chances of saving Pito IRL. so it's kind of an all-in strategy that depends on LLENN being at the right place at the right time.

From LLENN's perspective, there's no real danger to herself; if she fails, someone else will die, of their own accord no less. So really, she's just playing a game! And if the gymnastics team failed their side of the fight, no one actually dies, it just makes LLENN's fight against Pito a little more difficult. And if LLENN loses her fight, Pito will probably survive anyways since she'll just kill everyone else in the tournament since she's so OP. so it has the set dressing of SAO of IRL death being a possibility, but in the scenario they present to us the chances of that actually happening are portrayed to be pretty astronomically low. as it stands, the whole thing just serves to make LLENN and Pito's face-off all the more climactic without actually making us fear for their lives, which is what I wanted from this show in the first place!

idk, does that make sense? i feel like i'm overanalyzing this for no reason, but the point is that despite the whole IRL death thing being annoying, the actual setpieces and OP power levels in the show kinda make that a non-issue and actually feels like they're just playing a game without the stakes having to be so high to justify its intense tone, which wow surprise surprise Kawahara, is all I really wanted from SAO from the very beginning. I still much prefer Bofuri for this kind of thing, and this show has other interesting things like the ways the LLENN character affects Karen's real identity—Bofuri pretty much completely ignores the IRL part of Maple's life, so this does have that above that show.

of course, there's also the theory that none of this is actually real, and both Pito and M are really good role-players. a scenario which i wouldn't be opposed to either, that obviously would make the stakes even lower than what i described here, lol. whether it's all roleplay or not, I think us pondering that question is a nonzero possibility to be the intention of the show; in ep 11, LLENN pretty much stops thinking about this altogether. whether it's all real or not is irrelevant when all she has to do either way is focus on winning. thinking about all this is what contributed to her hesitating to jump into the battle, and it was cool to see the gymnastics team and Fuka jump in headfirst as an example to LLENN