Sword Art Online [spoilers]

In case people don't know, it's fake. The gameplay video is from the PSP game that was made. Even if it was real, Aeria MMOs don't tend to be very good if you ask me.

A Mary Sue character is almost never forgivable in professional fiction and that it shows up from time to time is no excuse. Kirito has almost no redeeming qualities (most of his "I'll never give up!" crap, especially in ALO, is done at the expense of someone whose life is genuinely in danger, so it's clearly just glory-seeking), is never shown having to struggle, and got so tedious that I kept screaming for his opponent to beat him. Trying to solo raid content and finally getting killed was even ruined because it took far too long for several hundred mobs to take him down.

Deus ex machina I can forgive (it's almost literally as old as time), but I don't appreciate my suspension of disbelief being ruined by nonsense. Why does the little ***win in SAO? There's literally no way he should have. His duel with General Eugene is a good example of how the rules (where most folks are getting wiped after a strong hit or two) get pummeled by narrative, and it's not even compelling narrative since Eugene was a monster-of-the-week and the fight was, again, at the expense of a real objective. The real icing was when he pulled out a small fortune immediately thereafter. He'd logged maybe 12 hours of gametime. Oh, and let's not forget that he was basically made the strongest player on the server immediately on login for no reason that is ever mentioned.

The total lack of character is something I might consider forgiving. Mary Sue (or Gary Stu, if you prefer) is boring and intolerable, but he's a standard audience avatar. Bella Swan and he are virtually identical by design. But the villains having almost no motivation was deplorable. As was the treatment of practically every female character, especially after the midway mark. A long history of treating women as objects doesn't make it somehow permissible in 2012. The way that Asuna was turned from a tough leader into a submissive *** into a plot element was criminal.

Speaking of objectifying women, ye gods, but the harem genre is irritating. The lolicon crap is hardly what I'd consider to be normal, even if it shows up in way too much anime. Given it is a show about MMOs, I expected it to be a sausage fest, but apparently a large majority of MMO players in Japan 202X are not only women girls, but also stacked. 14-year-old girls, especially Asian girls, do not have bodies like these and, even if they did, it is disgusting to have them prancing around in their underwear.

I'm told that the squicky squicky incest thing is common in a certain kind of anime. I'm not impressed. Let's not even start on the fact that children raised together will not be attracted to one another, regardless of their familial relationship (this has actually been studied), outside of serious psychological illness.

The predictable plot is the only thing that I'll forgive. Actually, it wasn't totally predictable since what should have been the season finale happened on episode 14 and then an inexplicable second season got tacked on, resulting in both major arcs being rushed (and yet ALO still plodded like a blind elephant with terminal alcohol poisoning). But it was really apparent what the end result was going to be to virtually every plot point. As I said, though, I'll forgive it because this wasn't trying to be innovative in that respect and generic does mean "representative of genre."

Seriously, you want to tell me that most of those objections are just things I'll find in any old piece of media? Crap storytelling, vague motivation, and awful characters are symptoms of bad stories, not all stories, and the loli/incest squick is emphatically not commonplace (praise merciful heaven).

There was so much more that could have been done to examine the premise and the first couple episodes looked like they would. The whole reason I watched the series was because someone claimed that it went into the kinds of conflicts that would arise from living in a death-game MMO (e.g., is it morally justifiable to sit around leveling up a craft skill all day while people struggle and die to escape?), but clearly they were lying their face off. If nothing else, a few episodes showing, say, actual character development for Kirito (he started at age 14 and ended at 16 -- those are huge years and it is rare for a story to cover that kind of span, making it all the more ridiculous that he doesn't change one iota) or, at the very least, doing the usual shounen thing of showing him actually work to get strong, would have helped flesh out what is a terribly bare-bones plot.

Seriously, what do you call a show that has almost no character and almost no plot? The animation isn't even impressive -- it's very middle-of-the-road with some glaring shortcuts taken for the action scenes that seem to be the only thing that keeps the show from falling over dead in a ditch. About the only thing worth the money was the soundtrack. That was alright, but the 90-second opening theme was a clear attempt to pad the running time.