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NEWS: Sword Art Online/Accel World's Kawahara to Print Absolute Solitude Novels

That's all well and good if you're writing in a purely-fantasy setting where the power of loooooove (as a friend of mine loves to call it) can save the day. SAO does not occupy that sort of setting: it's set in a near-future realistic sci-fi realm, and as such can be expected to maintain certain standards of plausibility and logic. The events of that episode throw both of those out the window, with absolutely no explanations given.

"Microwave electromagnet" not being a thing aside, you have to assume that it would have been intended as the means of killing: microwave + human tissue = bad times. But whatever the exact mechanism, let's run with it: how did whoever manufactured these things not notice that they could be used to sizzle someone's brain? Hell, how did a brain-controlling VR device like that ever make it through any sort of electronics regulatory board in the first place, especially without some sort of manual override? Were we supposed to believe that a single man constructed an entire MMORPG, something that would take a team of dozens if not hundreds in real life, AND engineered the NerveGear hardware? How was it that nobody else had access to the game's source code and noticed things like the removal of the logout feature? And we're somehow supposed to buy that over the course of two years, nobody figured out how to disable these things without killing the player? (I can think of two or three plausible methods right off the top of my head.) All of these thoughts crossed my mind during the first episode or two, and the fact that none of them resolved smacked of an author who hadn't put nearly enough thought into the basic setting of his story.

I think you could probably throw Sachi in there too, which definitely pushes the number into harem territory. I mean I don't have a huge issue if you have a few people be interested in him at different times, but you start running into problems when it's primarily those attractions that define said characters. Even with Asuna, you have her say, "If you die, I'll kill myself," which is...not really the portrayal of a healthy relationship.

If by "personal preference" you mean "commonly-accepted standards of decency and/or basic respect for women," then yes, I suppose you could call it that.

Being creeped out by clumsily-handled molestation isn't so much a personal preference as it is a basic human emotion.

Is this your first anime or something? Japanese media's is pretty open about sex and stuff. Wanting to bone your cousins pops up a lot even in kids shows... and complaining about tentacle monsters in 2014 seems so passe.

These are the rules of the Virtual Reality this world uses. Accel World uses a similar concept, where the world around them is connected to their will, and mind.

That being said, if you did find out to release someone, don't you think the creator of the game wouldn't just kill someone else in exchange? I'm pretty sure this was stated somewhere (Actually, the Author probably said this at a Q&A), that if they could release a number of people, they would kill an equal amount of players. Do you want to be responsible for the deaths of many more people?

As for creating a game... Kayaba was the head of both creating the NerveGear, and Sword Art Online. He didn't do it alone, you're right, but have you ever seen a game's source code? If you were to make a few adjustments, it's possible no one on your team will notice for months.
The NerveGear also likely had a number of safeties, that Kayaba knew how to disable, because he designed the bulk of it. It's pretty reasonable to assume he could pull this off in his position.

Throwing Sachi in would be 100% speculation, and Kirito would have to be 100% dense, as in her side-story (in the LN) he said their relationship was in no way romantic.
Asuna is also pretty crazy in her own way. From the very beginning she's had little regard for her own life, and when the two met (omitted in the Anime), it was apparent that she was almost suicidal, in the way that she excessively grinded in high-level areas without any help.

Top Gun wrote:

If by "personal preference" you mean "commonly-accepted standards of decency and/or basic respect for women," then yes, I suppose you could call it that.

I don't understand your point here... You want one of the villains to respect a specific character? So if at one point there was a character, in any story, who was a girl, who happened to have been raped or assaulted at one point in her life, that story is degraded in value, somehow?

Okay, so the show is set in the real world, except for those moments where the author finds himself forced to use a ridiculous contrivance to resolve a certain situation. That's pretty much the textbook definition of "bad writing."

...
I suppose it's a reasonable possibility that Kayaba would hold something like that over everyone's heads as a threat, but as a counter to that, one could work up a plan in which all the players were safely disconnected simultaneously. It'd be a big technical challenge, but certainly feasible from a story standpoint. In an alternate-universe working of SAO, you could probably create a fun climactic scene out of it, too.

....
Possibly, but in real development for a game of this size, you'd need a whole team of programmers all working on a shared codebase, and version control systems mean that you'd see changes made by every other coder as they update the common codebase. I mean I guess you can spin a scenario where Kayaba privately makes the last code revision and then declares it gold without anyone else looking at it, but you're getting into some pretty unlikely territory there. I'd think that logout code for a game that takes over your brain would probably be one area where they'd want to quintuple-check that everything was in order.

And even if Kayaba designed the device, you'd definitely have some sort of outside governmental body examining the finished product...I mean you're talking about something that basically takes over a person's brain. At the very least you'd need some sort of physical fall-back if the software had issues. That's why I was so amazed in those initial moments when the players realized that the logout button was gone; it was like, "Wait, they can't do anything at all without that?"

Kirito may have felt that their relationship was completely platonic, but from the way Sachi was acting, she was definitely crushing on him pretty hard. I mean you generally don't ask to sleep in the same bed as someone you consider a mere friend. I guess I can see that about Asuna; it definitely would have helped if the anime had retained that detail.

No, I didn't mean the villain in-story, but instead the author writing it. Kawahara originally established Asuna as a fairly-strong female character, but then he not only removed all of her agency in the next arc, but went so far as to make her the victim of molestations that served no narrative purpose except playing to otaku's skeevy fetishes. There are some really widespread problems with the portrayals of women in many modern anime series, and in this respect SAO was a prime example. Have her be captured if you must, but at least do it with some dignity.

The only characters that DO fall for him are Asuna, Lisbeth, and Suguha. The end of the second Arc, for one reason or another, decided to throw in Silica as part of that list, despite the fact that her side-story only had her admire him as a brother, so one would assume she probably developed feelings later on. Who knows, though.

TUSF wrote:

The only characters that DO fall for him are Asuna, Lisbeth, and Suguha. The end of the second Arc, for one reason or another, decided to throw in Silica as part of that list, despite the fact that her side-story only had her admire him as a brother, so one would assume she probably developed feelings later on. Who knows, though.

So they switched this for the anime? From my recollection, he saw her as a surrogate-sister, but she seems very aware of the male-female dynamic going on.

Either way, the more LNs that sell well, the less likely bringing them over is to die-off, so it's a good thing.