I'm an ace/grey aro SAO Alicization blogger that centers on the pairing of Eugeo & Kirito (YujiKiri), platonic and/or romantic. This blog is NOT SPOILER FREE.
Can you post the scene where Kirito gets defensive over Ronye and Tiese at Alice?
just to clarify, do you mean in the anime or the light novels?? i can post the scene from the anime but for the light novels i think @lost-in-yujikiri is probably your best bet
alicization is literally like “this is a story about hope and childhood friends and the memories you make when you’re young shaping you into the person you’ll become and there’s nothing you can ever do to be a kid again and you’ll never again have the innocence you had back then and life will cut you open and you’ll bleed on everyone you love but nobody will ever realise how broken you think you are until it’s too late and you can die a hero but you’ll never feel like you deserved that title” and we were just like “oh okay cool”
bro eugeo is so fucking cute… he escapes from jail and has to fight this integrity knight guy without a sword and using chains and this idiot is geeking out over his sacred art skills during the fight and then its also revealed that he was a dedicated reader of his academy’s newspaper.
weridest a1 picture decision in sao tourmanet arc skip! granted I didn't read it either but
I got into this a bit with other fans back when it happened way back in, what, 2018? But I genuinely have some mixed feelings about this decision because I do get kind of why it may have been skipped over. Spoilers for the LN ahead, be warned.
So, the tournament arc in the first half of Alicization was fairly enjoyable and provided a bit more context for the closeness that Kirito and Eugeo grew to have between leaving Rulid and going to the Swordcraft Academy in North Centoria, but it worked better as a written format.
Certain sections of this part of the story are written from Charlotte's POV; if you recall, Charlotte is a spider, and her identity as a spider is revealed in the novel in the same place as it was in the anime—in the library with Cardinal. A large part of pulling off an adaptation of the tournament in Zakkaria would have involved making sure that the animators could adequately conceal Charlotte's identity while still preserving a few key details that she was involved in.
I ran over this part with my dad, who has a degree in animation, and the conclusion was that some scenes would either have to be changed or they would have to choose to do the reveal earlier for the audience than for Kirito. The latter very much could have worked! We would have had a lot more context for why Kirito heard a voice in the garden, or why Kirito's hair randomly stood up running from Eldrie and Deusolbert in the rose garden.
On the other hand, though, I think the animators mostly wanted to keep Charlotte's identity as hidden from the audience in the anime as the books did, and to do that while animating the Zakkaria sub-arc would have been...a challenge. Charlotte is seen from the start to be performing some wind arts to take care of Kirito's upturned shirt, which could have been fairly decently concealed, I think. The true problem is that some narration is done by Charlotte during the selection process for the brackets in the tournament. Charlotte is the key element that keeps Kirito and Eugeo from sparring one another and knocking each other out of the tournament. Without her intervention, this looks like random, lucky chance.
Now, why does that matter so much to an animator, perhaps? It's easy to change the visual perspective of scenes to not be from eight little eyes peering outwards from Kirito's bangs, and it's not like stories haven't relied on bullshit random chance before. I think, however, the animators knew that people would call it bullshit that Kirito and Eugeo oh-so-randomly pulled opposite fighting blocks, even when this is still statistically possible. It gives the story a bit more credibility to the audience when we can preserve something like this, because Charlotte obviously felt the need to tip those odds due to them being bad.
I think another problem is that the animators likely knew the episode count from the start and had to make decisions on what to cut and where. The second cour dealing mostly with Cathedral climbing took up a heavy amount of space, and we see like, a one-battle-per-episode thing going on. Places where possible cuts to the story were most likely: cutting an entire episode dedicated to Zakkaria, which was more for character development than story progression; cutting maybe what brought Kirito and Eugeo to be Elite Disciples, which was short and all but introduced Incarnation; or perhaps shorten the battle between the group and Quinella, which likely held a lot of the battle-heavy appeal people want to see in an anime with "swords" in the title.
Making these decisions is by no means easy for a group of animators, as they are given a specific budget and episode count. I don't know how easy it would be to ask their boss for more episodes or whatnot, because a lot goes into confirming you get those slots. A-1 has to confirm that television stations have the timeslots to air these episodes in; when SAO was given permission for four cours' worth of timeslots, this was already pretty generous on behalf of the stations airing SAO. Those stations were taking a gamble that SAO would get them viewing hours, and four cours is a hell of a gamble when it comes to hoping people stick it out until the end. SAO could have benefitted from a fifth cour or maybe even a slight handful of extra episodes, but the animation company does need to negotiate as much screentime as stations will permit.
SAO was also aired split-cour, which means that cutting something like the anime-only bits in War of Underworld would not have mattered in the long run for something that happened back in the first half. Perhaps you might be thinking "well we didn't really need anything dedicated to Eiji and Yuna here" and you're allowed to think that! But it wouldn't affect the lack of Zakkaria any more, because the animators cannot just leave you hanging mid-story when there's several months between Eugeo dying and picking back up with the aftermath and a timeskip to Alice in Rulid. It's just not a good business plan.
To conclude, there's a lot of reasons why the studio may have decided to cut Zakkaria, some of which I can definitely sympathize with. While I will also state that it's 100% okay to be frustrated when an adaptation does not look exact or does not meet our expectations as novel readers, I think it's also important to remember why these changes are made. Think about this before jumping into being angry at the studio for these decisions. Some decisions are far more logical than others!
I do know there are SAO fans here who repost fanarts just so you can spread the love of your ships and I know it, I understand it, but if you read the images that I post below, please think twice about what you did and what you will do in the future. Your actions might actually contribute to these artists getting into real troubles with Japanese legal authorities due to their copyright laws.
Just so you know, recently a dedicated fanartist in our fandom Kohiru Mame had to delete her pixiv, as well as reported reposts of her artworks on Instagram. There are also artists who deleted their accounts or SAO works to escape the eyes of their workplace due to how widespread people reposted their fanarts. Please don't trouble these artists more with reposts on other sites.
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