They recently added
Sword Art Online to the streaming service. Interestingly, they added it
after they added
Attack On Titan.
There were one or two things about Sword Art Online that were interesting, but for the most part I had trouble understanding why this show got so much hype.
On the one hand, the show breaks one of the most annoying tropes in American TV and Japanese anime: endlessly teasing the audience with sexual tension between two main characters, but never allowing the relationship to actually start much less go anywhere. Here we get to see an actual relationship unfold. Unfortunately, all of the romance elements appear to have been written by 11 year old girls (or worse, 11 year old boys). Mostly it's just treated as a cheap way to allow the characters to feel anguish when something bad happens to one of the other characters.
On the plus side, Asuna and Kirito are genuinely fun to watch in battle. I'm a sucker for the "battle couple" trope, but for some reason I rarely find battle couples satisfying to watch in actual battle. So what do they do?
Halfway through the series, they turn Asuna into a damsel in distress, and leave her a mere trophy for the hero and villain to squabble over. What makes this worse is that Asuna is a genuinely strong female character (with a stronger heroic impulse than the male lead), so watching the writers stuff her in a literal bird cage for the last half of the series was really frustrating.
Then on top of that, there was the "death game" aspect...
...which was maybe cliche, but the fact that people who died in the game also died in the real world ratcheted up the emotional stakes. Yeah, it was a cheap way to ratchet up the emotional stakes, but it worked. Unfortunately, this also went away in the second half of the series.
Oh, and the character responsible for all the horror and death in the first half?
Suddenly, the main character just talks to him like he's any other friend. Uhm, hello? The guy was responsible for more civilian deaths than bin Laden. Why would the main character treat him like anything other than the mass murderer he was? Stockholm Syndrome?
(as if Mythbusters and Lilyhammer have that much in common)