The Ever-Changing Story (Part 2a): Nobody can keep track of SAO anymore
This was too funny to pass over... So, I have a guilty pleasure. I love reading tvtropes.org because I love to see their take on what tropes are contained in media I consume, and while writing the previous article I started reading the character page for Asuna.
And today I found this gem:
"First Girl Wins: Asuna is the first of the many girls in Kirito's (virtual) life, and the only one to win his affections. While Sachi was possibly Kirito's first love, he actually met Asuna first." (from tvtropes.org)
If you know Sword Art Online (SAO) only from the anime series, this is true. If you accept Sword Art Online Progressive (SAOP) as taking place in the same continuity as the previous books, this is also true - at least if Progressive overrides things that were actually written before it. This is the magic of retcontinuity. A character's context is shifted but the character remains, changing the role they play in another character's life.
In Sword Art Online 1 - Aincrad the following things happen:
Kirito joins the guild Moonlit Black Cats, meets Sachi, then the guild gets wiped out, all including Sachi die. This is on floor 27 which at that time is close to the frontline.
If we take Asuna's word for it, she first noticed Kirito when she met him (on Floor 59), taking a nap. This starts her infatuation with him - it grows over the following weeks and months.
(There's a parallel between the two girls since both experience Kirito's presence as something that helps them sleep.)
If Sword Art Online 8 - Early and Late is your guide, Kirito was at least aware of who Asuna was, but then again supposedly anyone in Aincrad was at some point in time. But even then Asuna's rise to stardom must have been gradual and knowing "of someone" is not the same as "meeting them first."
But the makers of the anime felt that the gaps in the continuity of Aincrad were a bit too big, and so Kawahara gave them access to what became Aria of a Starless Night, the first part of Sword Art Online Progressive 1. Even SAO 8 predates SAOP 1 by full year.
So the "book chronology" is:
All the later books shoehorn events into the timeline of Aincrad as a retcon:
SAO 2 adds Liz/Rika and Silica/Keiko as characters and adds a story of Kirito's dark days when he can't get over his guilt regarding the death of Sachi. Includes Sachi "sending" him a letter to the future.
SAO 8 adds the Safe Haven Incident, beefing up the early phase of Asuna and Kirito's history together with a joint murder investigation. Another story introduces us to events on the first day in Aincrad that almost got Kirito killed by another player.
SAOP 1 one pulls the meeting between Kirito and Asuna forward to within a month after the start of the game.
To add further to the confusion, only Aria of the Starless Night is included in the anime, but not The Reason for the Whiskers nor Rondo for a Fragile Blade (both contained in SAOP 1), so for viewers of the anime Kirito and Asuna teamed up for the first boss battle then went separate ways. (And Kirito left Asuna behind. Surely the actual, official end of Aria was written after the anime was already made. But in SAOP 1 Asuna turns around and leaves Kirito. He doesn't just wander off and leave her.)
But then for readers of SAOP 1 this lasts only for a few days of in-game continuity - covered in the interlude The Reason for the Whiskers. Then, in Rondo for a Fragile Blade Asuna pulls Kirito into her party again and never lets go. The series has now progressed into eight light novels and that hasn't changed.
What has changed in regards to Sachi is the order of events. It has been turned on its head.
There is a character whose existence practically all happens off-screen - or when she's on-screen, she calls from the dead. Sachi.
If Sachi is Kirito's first love (which the anime heavily implies), then this has not been established in SAO 1 where we first hear of her. Kirito doesn't mention it. I have to admit, I have not finished the story in SAO 2 yet, so in this case I had to look it up. The events from the anime indeed seem to be taken from SAO 2 (according to a summary on the interwebs).
But that is already a story told from memory of another person, Kirito. Sachi reappears in SAO 22 when her emotional residue on the old Aincrad server calls for Asuna. Theosophists would be proud of that one - Sachi's emotional residue attracts Asuna's soul into a scene through a sort of out-of-body experience where she can convey a final message to Kirito, expanding on her first message from beyond the grave.
Sachi is a character of echoes, of reverberations. Her death makes waves. She goes on in a sort of half-digital, half-unexplained afterlife. She reaches out. Her love for Kirito finds a way to reach his soul.
We don't know if Sachi was Kirito's first love. But he loved her, and her death broke his heart. We also know that Sachi loved Kirito, and loved him enough to leave an emotional residue so strong, it creates an undeniable attraction in the digital world towards the spirit most suited for transmitting her message. Asuna loves Kirito, and so she becomes the conduit for Sachi's love to speak through her.
Sachi is one of the characters that unsettles me deeply. Her death in Aincrad is a hard thing for me to confront. Aincrad loves its drama, but it hides the cruelty of what actually happens behind the imagery of exploding into blue polygons. But with Sachi I can't help think back that this is a person that Akihiko Kayaba kills. An innocent, scared girl in the middle of her teenage years, lying in a hospital bed somewhere, having her brain fried by a burst of microwave radiation. She stands for all the Aincrad players that are slain, and if you look at it visually, slain in their sleep and utterly helpless.
In this sense Sword Art Online is more cruel than most any survival story to me. Some are more fair, more less. But whether it's Squid Game or Alice in Borderland, whether it seems a bit fair or an utter screw job, somehow these people fought with all they had against their fate. But SAO's villain kills teenagers, and in this case what feels to me like children. Sachi is the fearful child in all of us. Kirito wants to protect her also because we all would.
And any of the characters in SAO could have had the same fate, characters that we learn to love over the course of the series, like Silica/Keiko. People of a certain innocence and with lots of potential. That makes Sachi's story very hard to read for me. Sachi's power is that she doesn't make it. (Just like Yuuki Konno's story in Mother's Rosario is powerful because she dies.)
I love Asuna as a character, I love the whole Progressive series and want more books of it. But pulling her forward steals something from Sachi and detracts from her story. It creates a deeper rift than other aspects of this retcon.
Yes, Sachi's story will always be strong on its own merit. But by placing SAO Progressive in the same continuity as main series SAO, it takes away Sachi's role as the first girl to touch Kirito's heart. Now she is relegated to be a low point between two Asuna bookends.
The Hopeful Chant side story released before Ordinal Scale movie seals this. It's written as a top-down mid point between Progressive and the main series continuity. Mainly this story exists to "patch" Yuuna and Nautilus into the Aincrad continuity, but Kawahara used the opportunity to shine a quick light on Asuna and Kirito's relationship at the time the 40th floor was tackled.
According to this story, Asuna broke the party with Kirito at floor 25 to join the newly formed Knights of Blood, creating a continuity between the Progressive Asuna and the Asuna of the main series. But by floor 40 she is terribly conflicted and guilt-ridden about having abandoned Kirito (like she sees it). Even though this is pretty much in tune with what Kirito would hope she would do in the first place, it happens after four months of adventuring together in the early period of beating the game, thereby (top-down) establishing a timeline for as-of-yet unwritten Progressive volumes. (SAOP 8 has progressed as far as the 7th floor, so this leaves an 18 floor gap to the events supposedly ending the partnership between the two - and also that event is again only alluded to. It's unwritten as well.)
This changes the core of both Asuna and Sachi. Now Sachi becomes a filler in a gap Asuna left. There may be barely a month between dissolving the party and meeting the Moonlit Black Cats. But even worse for Asuna! Her inner life gets ripped out and rewritten.
Yes, patching in the 40th floor encounter between Kirito and Asuna seems to establish a mid point between "We were together all the time, then I left" and "I start chasing Kirito" for Asuna. But it changes all the inner stuff behind it. Originally Asuna came to Kirito only with her own baggage. She fell in love with him and decided gradually to act on her feelings, then basically "caught her man." But her inner motivations were simply those of an infatuated teenager. She was impressed with Kirito, and she realized that she was lacking love in her life, she learned to step out of her compulsive sense of duty to beat the game. She learned to love life. And nothing prevented her from acting on that impulse.
The Asuna Progressive leaves us with already has done all of that. And then she leaves. She makes a painful personal decision that might have hurt both of them, and thus puts her duty above her feelings for Kirito. Then she buries her feelings for Kirito under her guilt over her actions (the events of Hopeful Chant in regards to both of them). But then there is nothing connecting that Asuna with the Asuna that starts chasing Kirito. How does the Asuna of Hopeful Chant overcome her powerful guilt? How does she realize that she loves Kirito enough for other things to become secondary? How does she go back on her previous decisions? How does she decide to act?
The truth is that that Asuna would also need to be written. Hopeful Chant inserts an Asuna into the timeline that fits the retcontinuity of what happened before her but she does not connect to what comes after her. Instead of the thread flapping loose at floor 25 or at floor 7, it now hangs loose at floor 40. The story is still disjointed, the puzzle pieces do not match, but now the waters of character continuity have been muddled further.
Because it's "easy" (in relative terms only, of course) to break something up and to saddle a character with guilt and pain, but it's hard to get them out of that hole - especially if that character (Asuna) has a powerful sense of having done wrong by another person and no right to approach that person anymore.
And to make things perfect, that is another pulling forward of her character arc. That is the Asuna, internally, of the moment when Kirito kills Kuradeel. That Asuna of that moment wanted to leave Kirito alone because she felt she was incapable of protecting him, she was in her mind also endangering him. So she was about to give him a speech, out of her sense of duty, out of the pain she felt over almost losing him, that she will leave him alone. The Asuna of Hopeful Chant does that! She's an alternate reality Asuna that runs away from Kirito by failing to run after him. And Kirito is no shape to remedy that, either.
In other words, the events that happen later in original SAO continuity get pulled forward, the inner workings of the character are similar, but they lead to another outcome. Every time such a powerful retcon of the inner workings of a character happens, it just creates more character "plot holes" further down the line.
The reality is that SAO needs rewriting ever since SAO Progressive was introduced. By not making it an outright reboot, the timeline keeps fracturing under the paradoxa of retcontinuity. The makers of the Re:Aincrad manga seems to understand that almost better than Kawahara - the naming is telling in terms of what they think Progressive is. SAOP is not the telling of how SAO was beaten, floor by floor. It's a retelling of how Aincrad was beaten. And as long as it is not considered its own parallel timeline, it will keep pulling characters apart and forward in its wake.
