Hihi! Sorry if this is a bit random but would you maybe be willing to just. Talk about Alicization?
For context, I read and watched SAO a whiiile back, dropped it partway through the first volume of Alicization, then took it up again earlier this year, watched all of it, then read all of the novels – that is, except Alicization. As a matter of fact, watching both seasons of Alicization made me absolutely hate the arc, and I couldn't bring myself to read the LNs, so I skipped ahead to Unital Ring
But looking through your blog, it seems like you do like Alicization, and I tend to agree with your opinion on SAO as a whole so I can only ask myself if I missed something? If maybe the arc was done *that* dirty by the anime, or if I'm just not seeing it from the right point of view?
All this to say, if you have some time and are willing, I'd love to hear you ramble about Alicization, what you like about it, what the anime got wrong, and maybe I can learn to loathe it a little less :') No obligation though!! Feel free to ignore this message if you don't feel like it <3
it's not so much about what the anime got *wrong* as what it left *out* (as well as just... incorrect emphasis on things that aren't the point of the arc)
like fundamentally alicization isn't about the battles or the specifics of the setting, but it *is* about the central philosophical point of sao and even accel world as a whole
"the difference between a virtual world and the real world lies only in the different amounts of information"
alicization then asks the question "so what if the amount of information was identical?"
the underworld is, as far as perception goes, a real place. and on a fundamental level everyone in it is a real person; the only difference between a brain and a lightcube is the substrate, the actual minds inside are identical (sometimes literally copies!) (it's like the brain chips in gunnm/battle angel alita)
and yet despite it being real it's also deeply dependant, completely under control of people who mostly do not care for the lives inside the world they created
alicization is cosmic horror and takeru higa is an uncaring demiurge, and the people of the underworld are in existentially horrifying situations that wouldn't even be physically possible for peope irl
what is it like to be any of the "demihumans" in the underworld? their fluctlights are identical to a human's after all
what's it like having a piety module, or a sacred task?
what's it like to be born and half-erased and then ripped out of your world to exist in a metal body you didn't choose so the people who created your entire native universe can parade you around to debate wether you deserve rights as a person or not?
what's it like to be a child with an age in the single digits and be told that your job until you die will be to hack at a tree that will take many more generations to fell?
what's it like to be a copy of someone from our world who now has to live in this world, knowing that it will be centuries of in-underworld time before they will have any contact with baseline reality again?
imagine the matrix but instead of learning you're a human plugged into the network, you learn that there's no human body on the "real" end. your mind is as much part of the simulation as everything else. but there *are* people out there too. they made you. and most would hesitate to consider you equal. and your entire world's continued existence depends on them
on the shitty tech nerd on this floating island in the middle of the pacific hooked up to the reactor of a nuclear submarine. and there's the cube he built. you and everyone you know and everywhere you've ever been are in that cube. if it ever loses power you cease to exist. and it's all real regardless
