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leatherhead333 wrote:

Sinon spoiler[scoring the first two shots is reasonable since they were point blank. But the third shot she made was a little bullshit. She wasn't even looking and has never held a gun before. Not to mention she scored a perfect headshot. The guy was some distance away from her so either she has natural gun handling ability or.........well i don't know what else it could be.] I think it would have been more spoiler[believable if she just started firing multiple shots out of fear while the guy attempted to attack her again.]

Coincidence. The word you're looking for is coincidence. If you spoiler[shoot a bullet without aiming it is unlikely but very possible that it will hit someone. This is in fact one of the basic premises of gun safety. Frankly you're looking at it the wrong way around: she wasn't carefully trying to shoot him in the forehead (why would she? how would she?) she was just panicking and fired a wild shot that happened to hit him in the forehead. Which, given the circumstances, is probably a bad thing since it makes her a murderer? In her own head anyway. Yes, firing more shots wildly makes it more likely overall, but that doesn't make a single shot fired wildly any less likely to hit, taken as a single event.]

Taken as a a reflection of real life, it's the kind of thing that doesn't happen often but does happen. Taken as the backstory of a fictional character, it doesn't seem implausible enough to be worth raising eyebrows over. spoiler[She got a single lucky (unlucky?) shot.] The end.

Wow, what a useless Mom. Okay, so your young daughter spoiler[saves your life by biting the hand of the crazy/drugged up bank robber who is pointing a gun at you (after already shooting one person) and you don't a) help her out at all and b) at the end, stare at her like she is some kind of monster.] Sigh. Only in anime.

Yeah, I'd say we spoiler[now know the identity of Death Gun. Betcha anything the bank robber was his dad or something.]

This spoiler[long tease getting Kirito into GGO is starting to bug me, but it doesn't look like they can avoid it next time.] I don't remember Pervy Nurse from the original SAO - was she introduced in that recap thingy that came out at the end of last year?

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Ok, this is coming from someone who hasn't read any of the SAO novels and has no idea what is coming... please don't tell me

Haven't you seen the opening? Deathgun is clearly Kirito's father (#spoiler #notaspoiler).

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So this covers Sinon's tragic backstory. It's..........ok for the most part but a little part of me thinks it could have been done better.

I kind of agree, spoiler[armed robberies are probably uncommon in Japan, with good gun control, but they happen all the time here, as do accidental shootings and self defense shootings. A little PTSD wouldn't be unwarranted, but her complete emotional implosion seems a bit extreme. The finger gun didn't bother me though, since if she did end up with such an extreme overreaction to guns, even symbolic guns being pointed at her could set them off. ]

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As good as these eps. have been, they are dragging on the backstory a bit to much. The light saber action in the opening gets me pumped up then they have a slower paced character driven ep like this. Not that I don't like Sinon as a character, but I wish they would have shown her backstory broken up over a couple eps.

I tend to agree. I wish that they'd shown more of what is likely to be the next episode during this one, and pushed the backstory flashbacks into a later episode, once the main plot is really in motion.

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Coincidence. The word you're looking for is coincidence.

Exactly, I was thinking of it the same way. This, btw, is the cause of tons of RL conspiracy theories, that something unlikely happens, and people say "the odds of that specific thing happening are too low for it to be random," when the reality is that random stuff happens constantly, it's only noteworthy if you specifically predict a low-chance thing, and then it happens exactly as predicted, like calling a miracle shot and then making it. Just taking a random shot and having it end up in an ideal location is not particularly miraculous.

According to every anime I've ever watched, Japan doesn't have have anything even remotely resembling a mental health program, so good on Sinon for trying to deal with her issues on her own. Laughing

Ohoni wrote:

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Ok, this is coming from someone who hasn't read any of the SAO novels and has no idea what is coming... please don't tell me

Haven't you seen the opening? Deathgun is clearly Kirito's father (#spoiler #notaspoiler).

What are you talking about? Death Gun is clearly Kirito's split personality's subconscious' evil android possessed clone alien creation time traveler from the past >.>

Oroboro wrote:

According to every anime I've ever watched, Japan doesn't have have anything even remotely resembling a mental health program, so good on Sinon for trying to deal with her issues on her own. Laughing

according to jdram that i watched. They have counseling Service/mental health care in Tokyo. Too bad Sinon wasn't from Tokyo.
Next week Kirito will give Sinon some counseling.

Clarste wrote:

leatherhead333 wrote:

Sinon spoiler[scoring the first two shots is reasonable since they were point blank. But the third shot she made was a little bullshit. She wasn't even looking and has never held a gun before. Not to mention she scored a perfect headshot. The guy was some distance away from her so either she has natural gun handling ability or.........well i don't know what else it could be.] I think it would have been more spoiler[believable if she just started firing multiple shots out of fear while the guy attempted to attack her again.]

Coincidence. The word you're looking for is coincidence. If you spoiler[shoot a bullet without aiming it is unlikely but very possible that it will hit someone. This is in fact one of the basic premises of gun safety. Frankly you're looking at it the wrong way around: she wasn't carefully trying to shoot him in the forehead (why would she? how would she?) she was just panicking and fired a wild shot that happened to hit him in the forehead. Which, given the circumstances, is probably a bad thing since it makes her a murderer? In her own head anyway. Yes, firing more shots wildly makes it more likely overall, but that doesn't make a single shot fired wildly any less likely to hit, taken as a single event.]

Taken as a a reflection of real life, it's the kind of thing that doesn't happen often but does happen. Taken as the backstory of a fictional character, it doesn't seem implausible enough to be worth raising eyebrows over. spoiler[She got a single lucky (unlucky?) shot.] The end.

When it comes to anime you've got to crack down on coincidences in some instances I'd say. If a string of coincidences continues to happen to a character it becomes less natural luck and more lazy writing. In theory it is entirely possible for those coincidences to happen but whether they are done in believable fashion is what matters to me.

You make a good point in this case but I never said such a sspoiler[hot was impossible just highly unlikely. A kid shacking in fear, with her eyes closed, handling a gun she's never used before scoring a perfect headshot on someone a good distance away is still hard for me to believe but I don't think it's impossible.]

Again, a kid in that position attempting a headshot AND making it would be unlikely. A kid firing it randomly and having ti hit someone in the head rather than anywhere else is not especially unlikely. The bullet had to go someplace.

Agreed with Ohoni. Accidental fatal shootings at that range, involving kids her age or younger being at the trigger, do pop up in American news from time to time, so a scene like this is hardly unbelievable to me.

Key wrote:

so a scene like this is hardly unbelievable to me.

As is the total inability of Japanese medical system to deal with the resulting trauma-induced mental condition that resulted.

A two-bit bully can scope her and play on her debility, but as far as we know she doesn't even get counseling sessions. She is left to treat herself at the advices of a classmate.

Oh, well. Present-day US is not much better.

Psych help costs money. Shino, from what we've seen, lives alone and is a student; she probably can't afford it. Of course she also owns what is probably an expensive gaming system for playing GGO, so maybe not... Confused

Key wrote:

Agreed with Ohoni. Accidental fatal shootings at that range, involving kids her age or younger being at the trigger, do pop up in American news from time to time, so a scene like this is hardly unbelievable to me.

Keyword there is accidental. This was technically spoiler[intentional since she shot him with the intention of making him go away.] Just to be clear the shot alone doesn't bother me as much as spoiler[the possibility that her mother left her afterwards which doesn't make sense to me.] As I brought up before why would spoiler[she be calling her Uncle instead of her mom? We haven't been given any indication that she's dead,] that's the part that bothered me most about the backstory.

If you want to know why she would talk to her spoiler[uncle instead of her mother], well her spoiler[mother was probably traumatised. She had lost spoiler[her husband, as far as we know from an accident], and then her daughter somehow fights off a robber, while a normal person would be scared she managed to take his gun fire three shots, one of which hitting bullseye in the head]. People in scary circumstances have been known to remember or perceive certain things differently. And as for Sinon spoiler[living by herself in Tokyo, they probably figured it would be best for her to get away from the place of the incident, and her mother who has probably become estranged].

Is it really that hard to believe that she got a shot right in the head? I was expecting it to spoiler[miss as I thought it was more cliché, maybe hit someone else, so if she shot wildly as you said, then it hitting at all] is more likely. I think from some sort of statistic standpoint it makes it more likely. I remember reading a while back some story about a kid spoiler[shooting his friend in the head], a terrible news story, but there is precedent. Look at it this way, she needed a traumatising past to make a character to be invested in, and spoiler[that shot] was the most likely one to give her a huge fear.

That's poppycock! Evil or Very Mad

When it comes to characters with traumatic pasts I am very weary. Am i supposed to like this character or am I supposed to feel sorry for them? There is a clear difference there to me. That's what separates good characters who were dealt a bad hand to bad ones. Revenge type characters tend to be the worst. They constantly have outbursts of rage whenever the subject comes up, are irritatingly moody and their impulsive behavior is almost instantly justified by their past.

Same thing with villains. They are typically given horrific pasts that instantly excuses them committing mass genocide or other atrocities. But I hardly ever feel bad for them. There are exceptions like Mogamet who is probably one of the better villains that I've seen. He did bad things but he showed what a genuinely nice guy he was more often than not. That's the main reason I liked him. Not because of the backstory. But because of the character.

The point is the more bad things that happen to a character the more i feel that it's being used as more a crutch for me to feel so bad for them that I can agree with all of their irrational actions and behavior. Thus why this backstory bothered me a bit. The process of seeing characters get over their pasts can be pleasing but not if it causes me to dislike they way they conduct themselves. So far that isn't an issue with Shino and I hope it stays that way.

Since when does a character having a terrible past automatically excuse them from doing bad thing? Just because it might explain their behaviour does not mean you have to like that they did that. Some people seem to think we are meant to forgive the designer of SAO because he helped at the end of the first season, while that is a fairly childish reason.

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