Recap

Back in the real world, Sinon tries to cope with crippling panic attacks brought on by a tragic incident in her past. Kirito parts ways with Asuna and his friends, making the transfer from ALO to GGO.

Jel’s thoughts

Sword Art Online’s questionable logic and broad, cartoonish characters have no business mixing with a serious topic like PTSD. That was painfully clear this episode as Sinon’s backstory was so poorly explained it felt disrepectful. Using a group of bullies to shake her story out is one of the laziest tricks in the book and just felt unnecessarily cruel. She didn’t even get to the actual flashback until she was alone in her room, so what was the point of all that? Actually showing the entire incident and then later using silly zombie imagery just felt exploitative, like it was all for easy shock value. Personally I didn’t even feel comfortable using screenshots of it for this post. It probably didn’t help that she spends her second panic attack in nothing but a dress shirt. Add on the implication that winning a game tournament will somehow “cure” her and the entire process made me feel a bit queasy.

The frustration continues seeing Sinon curl up in a ball and whisper “someone please save me”, as we all know who that’s going to be. As I mentioned last week, this is the worst possible scenario, building her up as some strong, independent character and then reducing her down to another helpless notch in Kirito’s bed post. While it might not be as bad as the ALO arc literally putting Asuna in a cage, putting Sinon in a mental cage isn’t much better. If they HAVE to go that route it would be more interesting to have her guy friend that’s clearly into her help her out and she could have more of a friendly business relationship with Kirito, but I guess that would make it harder for SAO author Reki Arakawa to imagine himself hooking up with anime babes. If you need further proof on that front, refer to the scene with the nurse volunteering to take care of Kirito as he logs into GGO. I laughed at that bit but for all the wrong reasons.

I’d love to wrap things up on a positive note but my mood is pretty sour after watching this episode. I guess I was wrong assuming Kirito was going to lie to Asuna about his new gig so I’ll give them half a point for that. I suppose I’m also making assumptions as far as Sinon’s endgame and whether or not she’ll really fall in love with Kirito, but could there be any other possibility? That rhetorical question is really dampening my enthusiasm for watching and writing more about this series. With Sinon apparently marked as DEATH GUN’S next target (oh wow, who saw that coming…), I hope we’ll get some more cool action scenes and less fumbling around with a serious topic.