[Suzerain of Sheol]

Originally Posted by Espy

SAO is nice and all, but um, the entire Fate series?!

I can think of a few good reasons why that would be terrible. The first one begins with "Gilles" and ends with "de Rais". Or, you know, random unexplained "fires" just outright consuming entire swaths of cities on a semi-regular basis. Or literally unkillable vampire illuminati. Or the mere existence of Shirou Emiya lowering the net worth of human lives by several orders of magnitude by the sheer amount of concentrated angst-fail he embodies.

I mean, it's my favorite series too, but no thank you. :P

Also I never got very far in SAO, but I think the world would look very, VERY different if the video game industry and market behaved in the fabulous ways it does in that show. Consumer and investor behavior would have to operate in a fundamentally different way, not to mention the things players actually find fun. And that's not even touching just how terrifying the entire premise is. I would think the fun goes right the hell out the window as soon as actually dying becomes a factor. That show is existential horror pretending to be fantasy.

I don't mean to make an essay out of this, but this is actually an issue I have pretty significant opinions on. My understanding is that the vicarious, cathartic enjoyment that comes from playing violent video games is directly enabled by the psychological distance the player is at from the content they're experiencing. It's fantasy roleplaying in the strictest psychological sense, it lets one exercise parts of their mind that wouldn't normally be stimulated in their regular lives, and to do so safely and without any sort of trauma (unless you're an arachnophobe like me playing Skyrim....)

This applies to anime and other media/literature that glamorize and naturalize violence, too. It skews the reality of the worst of all human experiences -- violent conflict and constant danger to one's life -- into something fun and adventurous. I'm definitely not saying that there's some sort of causal relationship between media and real-world violence, that's been rather thoroughly debunked, my point is more that it's in some way uncomfortable, and I think I'd even say offensive, to characterize warfare, assassination, and serial murder as the whimsical aspirations and fantasies of a childish mind. Violence and death should never be "fun" or "cool".

Which is not to say at all that I don't enjoy violent media, Espy can vouch for my tastes on that front, but rather that I appreciate stories that properly contextualize violence and conflict and don't make a joke out of some of the most serious and life-changing/ending problems humans have between themselves.

I guess, for me, it comes down to preferring the Devil one knows. I'd take this ugly, wretched world with its car crashes and wars and its decaying sun, over some postmodern faux-medievalist anarchist fantasy about the disintegration of 1st-world civilization into some pseudo-Darwinian death-world. Again, no thank you.