Sword Art Online: The Series that (Supposedly) Created an Entire Genre by Ian

            Sword Art Online (SAO) written by Reki Kawahara is one of the most influential pieces of media to hit Japanese (and American) markets ever. Originally published as a Japanese web novel on the author’s own website in 2002, it is often credited with “creating” a sub genre of portal fantasy (fantasy world is accessed via a portal) called “isekai” or “other world” where characters typically get sent to another world (as the name implies). This genre is extremely popular with multiple isekai anime airing every season with even more unadapted manga and light novels (basically Japanese novels; abbreviated LN) being made. So, did SAO actually contribute to the amount of isekai being adapted to anime form or is this all just the Mandela effect? The short answer is it’s complicated. The long answer is…

            First I will briefly summarize SAO. SAO takes place in the hypothetical year 2022 (remember this was made in the 2000’s) where VR technology has progressed to the point where one can put on a headset and almost transfer their consciousness to a digital world with a fake body. Now as awesome as that sounds, it goes horribly wrong when the first game that was built to use this hardware ended up trapping all of the players in the game where if they die here, their real body dies, too. The only way to escape this death game was to beat the game. While this plot may sound a bit unoriginal, back when it released, along with when it eventually got an anime adaptation in 2012, that couldn’t be further from the truth. SAO was everywhere, it’s world had a way of sucking you in and it was clearly made by someone who deeply understood gaming and what makes a game enthralling. Unfortunately, while the setting and potential may have been unparalleled at the time, the writing was a very, very different story.

            Put simply SAO is garbage. The main character feels like a piece of cardboard, the side characters are somehow even worse, and the only “good” character is the victim of some of the worst character assassination imaginable. And that’s not to mention the plot with more holes in it than a piece of swish cheese or quite frankly disgusting depictions of very serious topics in the second arc. But all of these issues are to be expected (to some extent, not really sure what happened with some parts of the second arc) as the entire first story arc was a writing contest submission the author wrote on a whim (with zero experience writing anything), and, to top it all of, the final product ended up being too long so it was never even submitted. When viewing it from that perspective, all of these glaring issue start to make sense, but with all of these issues, how big of an impact did it really have?

            SAO undeniably had a large impact on fantasy anime and manga. After it aired MANY more novels and manga with similar premises started getting anime adaptations, quite a few of those were even isekai. Although, I am skeptical to say SAO “created” isekai for two main reasons: isekai was around before SAO and SAO is not even considered isekai by most fans. The reasons SAO does not meet the isekai criteria is largely due to how the players (at least those that survived) end up escaping the game and in like 99% of isekai, there is no way back. Also, in my opinion, the world feels much more like a game than “another world” (which is very much in the shows favor). Instead of “creating” isekai, I would more so say it set the stage for isekai to become as prevalent as it is, which brings up another important aspect of the show: timing. The show came out at the perfect time

            In conclusion, SAO has an extremely interesting history, as if you look up anything related to in now, you will find primarily criticism and people calling out the blatant bad writing. But if you look back to 2012 (the anime’s release), you can clearly see people widely praising the show with no where near as much criticism. This history becomes even stranger (and more fascinating) when you see how it largely popularized a genre it isn’t technically even a part of. All ing all, I guess failed writing competition entries really can revolutionize an entire media form.