"Sword Art Online" Plans First Post-Alicization Novel

>>150788320
>Human territory has no emperor
>Still called Human Empire instead of Human Republic
I see Kawahara is living the IJA dream

>post-alicization arc
But Alicization arc is a perfect ending for SAO.

>>150789176
Can't give up that sweet sweet ¥¥¥.

250 YEARS OF GLOP

That sounds terrible.

So it's even more of a Kirito fap fic? Now he's even the legendary main character of a whole own world. This sounds stupid. How will this shit even include the real world? Will he spend the rest of his life in Underworld now?

SAO has been shit for like 20 volumes, why do you nigger still care?

What's even the problem and plot there? Everything is peaceful, no VR-stuff, no evil god. What is this even about?

>>150790187
Wasn't there a hard cap on how long a human soul can live even in accelerated time?

Has Progressive V4 been scanned yet?

>>150791481
Yeah. I think the VR and AR stuff would even provide enough fuel for further stories, but it doesn't work with the same fucking cast anymore. Kawahara will never let Kirito go though, so I should just forget about that. At least there is that GGO spin-off.

>>150791233
It's more about how it manages to become even shittier each volume

>>150788320
SAO in space when?
I want to see Kirito in a mecha

So this means a third season is possible viewable on the horizon?

I know that the terms Mary Sue and Gary Stu get thrown around a lot, but I honestly can't think of anyone in anime who's a bigger Gary Stu than Kirito.

>>150791754
Dont mind me!

>>150791744
Maybe Onii-sama. But is a close match

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>>150791901
Kirito beat onii-sama in a crossover thingy

>>150791920
Mahouka S2, when ?

Why can't he concentrate on Progressive? It's SAO too and it's about the most popular arc.

>>150792055
After the movie

>>150792110
For the same reason he's calling this new volume SAO 19 instead of making it a spinoff when it's a standalone story.
It would sell less.

>>150791744
How do you even forget about Yamato Kira? Kirito doesn't even come close to him.

>>150791855
>>150791901
>>150791920
Well it's settled then. Kirito is officially the biggest Gary Stu in anime.

>>150788320
Intelligent AI? tons of cyber worlds with sentient races sounds pretty good but how do they die? their data gets erased?

>>150792206
I've never watched Gundam admittedly so maybe I'm not the best judge.

Shouldn't Kirito age once in a while? His RL didn't really change since the end of the Aincrad arc. Or will Kawahara just bullshit his way around that part by accelerated time?

>>150792344
But don't they age as well?

>>150792344
They should make him taller

I cant self insert as a manlet

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>>150792286
>>150792212
Kira is literally the secomd coming of Jesus himself. Kirito looks like Guts near him.

>>150792381
Not mentally.

>>150792247

The AI have 'Fluctlights', which are identical to the human soul. When they die, the Fluctlight is extinguished.

Basically, they're all unique existences. You can't 'save' them or whatever - If they die, they're gone for good.

I can't help but reflect on how boring the story gets when there's no romantic or narrative tension. Kirito, as we all know, is invulnerable: He already has a canonical love interest, so it's not like he's going to fuck Alice or those cute apprentice knights who are just begging for a three-way.

All you have left is world-building. And world-building eventually becomes the magic system in Mahouka, a lot of words over nothing important.

>>150788320
fuck this hack, I want Eugeo back

>>150792247
They're not really AIs, they're actually human souls which Japan figured out how to clone and create a medium in which they can exist outside of the human body.

Kawahara the hack literally wrote a story in which the Japanese government decides the best way to counter Obama's drone fleet is to clone the souls of human babies to use as bootleg AI slave soldiers to install into UAVs that can operate better than any AI the Americans could code, and this is presented as a good thing.

>>150789176
It's not really an arc. It's more of a side-story that takes place during an Alicization time-skip.

>>150791537
Yeah, they work around that by sleeping most of the time.

>>150791179
>Now he's even the legendary main character of a whole own world
Here he's the "otherworldly mentor with legendary status". The story is from the Point of View of Ronye, instead of Kirito now.

>How will this shit even include the real world?
It won't. CotM was written to be pretty much a standalone story.

>>150791481
But this side-story has been around for since Volume 1 was published, as a web novel. Remember that Kawahara wrote most of SAO without a single cent going to him as a result. And it's not like he had planned to "eventually publish it"; SAO was the first Web Novel to even receive a Light Novel adaptation, so he was pretty much writing SAO because he fucking felt like it.

>>150791754
>Kawahara decided to milk a shitty fanfic he made for some contest.
His Afterwords claim it was all Miki's idea. So go torch his editor.

>>150793536
>and this is presented as a good thing.
Wasn't the entire point of Alicization "AI are people too!"? Which basically means "RATH are the bad guys too. They're just less dickish."

>>150791855
Are you talking the anime or the manga? They're quite different.

>>150788320
FUCK

Go work on Progressive instead, Kawahara.

Oh, it's based on Cradle of the Moon, apparently?

Guess that means this Kirito is the AI copy Star King rather than the real thing.

>>150796402
No, this is still Kirito. This is before the Kirito/SK split.

Of course, real Kirito won't remember most of this, in 250 years.

>>150788439
Actually, that is a translation error

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>>150791561
I don't know but if it's not scanned, I'm drunk enough to offer to take pics of my book, page by page.

>>150793536
>the Japanese government decides the best way to counter Obama's drone fleet is to clone the souls of human babies to use as bootleg AI slave soldiers to install into UAVs that can operate better than any AI the Americans could cod
You have to admit, that every time Obama, McCain, and drones were mentioned, you got a mighty chuckle out of SAO.

>>150796402
Star King Kirito is after Kirito and Asuna go back to the real world. RATH only had enough technological know-how to save Kirito's Fluctlight, so he went off and did space shit.

Pic not related but maybe related.

>>150794198
Well that government dude who is in charge of the whole project has only ever been presented as a good guy, up to and including his previous allusions to the nascent police state he and his buddies are building in Japan by encouraging people to adopt backdoored electronic locks and installing CCTVs on every corner that actively scan the faces of all passers by to be entered into a police database searching for criminals. And he was very blasé about how parents were deceived into consenting to allowing their children to be soul cloned without being fully informed.

>>150796472
>>150797571
Wait, when does Star King happen if this isn't?

Nooo i want to see more of post alicization alice.

>>150797908
He's been presented as a "good guy" who does very shady things. And now a "good guy" who has ethics far removed from the main character's.

He's not exactly the mouth-piece of the story.

>>150798079
So at the end of Alicization, Kirito and Asuna are trapped in UnderWorld for 200+ years. In that time, Kirito becomes known as the Star King.

But once the two get out of UnderWorld, they have their memories of that time forgotten, but Higa makes a backup of old-Kirito first.

>>150798079
After the 250 years. All of Cradle should be occurring in the 30 real-life minutes immediately after the end of the big final battle in Alicization. Things are sped up so fast that time expands to like 250 years.

I guess technically, this should be a story in media res between the climax and denouement of the last volume of Alicization.

>>150798165
I thought that typically when people say "Star King Kirito", they're talking about the period of time after they've gotten out of UW and it's just Kirito's Fluctlight flying solo in AI-land.

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>Decide to read Progressive since /a/ praised it
>It actually fleshes out on the story quite well and explains some stupid shit like beaters decently

I guess the trade off though is that the Kirito x Asuna romance is even more forced now.

>>150798265
>I guess the trade off though is that the Kirito x Asuna romance is even more forced now.
Haven't read passed volume 1, but it seems people can't seem to understand how these two took two years to glop, and not like two months.

>>150798265
I think it still relies too heavily on forced conflict. That is to say, whenever the writer needs some conflict, he just gets Kibaou to say something stupid.

>>150798165
Wait, didn't they say there was a limit of 120? or 200? years or something a human mind could exist? Like, you couldn't just flee into Underworld and expect to live forever because the human brain (or soul) isn't made to last that long. Did Kawahara bullshit his way out of there again or is my memory fucked and it was more like 500 mental years?

>yfw SAO actually has an interesting hard sci-fi premise let down by sophomoric writing

I would kill to have Progressive written by a top-shelf writer like Asimov or Vonnegut.

>>150798230
But the title was acquired during the period of extreme acceleration
>>150798406
That was an estimation on the linit and they didn't have their hope high on they would made it but they did.

>>150798265
The romance is actually less forced. What is more forced is Asuna's perfectness. Do you like her yet, anon? Because Kawahara really wants you to like her.

The part where she lost her sword on the fifth floor was actually really nice, though. It was a mix of fucking up and desperation.

>>150798383
It's not even Kibaou. Kibaou is even portrayed as mostly reasonable in Progressive. What is completely unbelievable about Progressive is how Kirito and Asuna always do the right thing to be first and/or best at everything. Even the fifth floor boss fight, which really started off as a fuck-up, happened to turn out best because they didn't have a full raid.

I'm eagerly awaiting the day when Kirito doesn't get the LA bonus.

>>150798406
Quinella lived for much longer than that, but sleeping for most of those years.
That's what Kirito and Asuna did too. They just slept for several days at a time to minimize how many memories that accumulated.

>>150798406
I think he told RATH to wipe those 200 years from his memory.

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>>150798555
>The romance is actually less forced
It is? I just finished chapter 5 and it's literally all
>This girl's sword skill is amazing. She's a beginner, but she perfected linear!
>I'm a solo player, but I feel drawn to this girl and want to see her grow stronger!
>Her dazzling eyes, her luscious lips, and her beautiful hair are otherworldly beautiful!

Kirito literally cannot shut the fuck up about her. Half of his internal narration focuses on how amazing Asuna is.

>>150798488
I would do the same. Or any VR related thing in that case. I fucking love this setting and subgenre so much but whenever it appears as a manga or LN series it's basically just high fantasy with a few game hijinks, you can barely even count these things as sci-fi since the VR or real world aspect is barely ever playing a role and I am not even mentioning the psychological stuff.

>>150798783
That's not romance. That's a teenager getting a stiffy over a hot girl.
Totally believable.

>>150798555
I fucking hate the LA bonus shit. It's not even a joke anymore, no matter how many thousands of hits the boss needs to die, Kirito is always the guy who hits him in that one very tenth of a second to get the last hit, even when there are 20 other people attacking the thing like berserkers at the same time. I cannot fathom how Kawahara isn't aware of the shit writing he does whenever Kirito is involved somewhere.

>how Kirito and Asuna always do the right thing to be first and/or best at everything
This is also what makes Progressive pretty bad, which is sad because it's overall a big improvement from the old series.

>>150798797
I thought fluctlights were plausible if the mechanism was fleshed out slightly. Also, playing up the diplomatic and political aspects of RATH, the Japanese government and its relationship to foreign powers would be nice. Instead, we got sloppy writing and paper-thin caricatures, plus a stupid fight between Japanese MMO players and American ones.

>>150798783
Well, that's what I meant. When someone's that super-special-amazing, it's only natural that it's easy to fall in love with her. The parts where Kirito's musing on how amazing Asuna is and will be in the future are cringeworthy, though the rest of their relationship is kinda nice.
>Kirito's "Christmas gift" to her
Oh, you smooth operator you.

If anything, it makes the romance feel less stilted than as presented in volume 1 and the other side materials.
>start reading volume 1
>"Who the fuck is this chick and why are they married now?"

>>150798631
>They just slept for several days at a time to minimize how many memories that accumulated.
I guess I can live for 1000 years then considering how shitty my memory is.

>>150792247
>but how do they die? their data gets erased?
Yes, the system the Japanese researchers built is literally designed to detect when the AI's "avatar" HP reaches 0 according to the videogame mechanics, then deletes the soul of the AI and dumps it from the light cube matrix.

That is to say, it's the Japanese government who are now murdering millions of people for dying in a videogame.

Will Cradle of the Moon finally contain another male character who is 1. relevant, 2. not a jerk and 3. not dead at some point?

>>150798994
>>150798555
Are you guys forgetting he was known as the LA-King during the beta? Faggot perfected the art of kill stealing.

>>150799137
What's the point for even making them die? Didn't they need them for their war AI stuff? What's the point of letting AIs die naturally? It would only make sense to kill bugged ones or at least provide some sort of explanation. Like that they shouldn't live long to avoid building an actual personality and too much knowledge which could make them harder to influence and rule.

>>150799246
Not enough space, I'd guess. It's running on accelerated time, that's a lot of cloned souls to keep around.

>>150799246
>What's the point for even making them die?
Resource limitations, devs want to replicate to some extent an actual human society. Not much point in raising AIs with no concept of death if you're planning to then order the AIs to kill people for you.

>>150798631
Quinella's brain is not biological

>>150799246
I would say it's too bring back the semblance of a consequence of death, like Aincrad, but it kinda falls short considering, as you say, it's Rath killing them. There are a few instances where fluctlight death isn't related to Rath at all, and more of a Matrix style "your mind thinks you're dead, so you die/have your soul corrupted"

The only real reason for this system would be limited light cubes (a numerical limit is actually given, too), so they delete them as they die, to basically reincarnate them. But I think it would be more efficient to keep them archived for a hundred years or so, to give enough room to study them.

>>150799532
Light cubes have a known limitation of 150 years of memory. It was assumed humans were similar.

>>150799554
>But I think it would be more efficient to keep them archived for a hundred years or so

What is that, like 5 minutes?

>>150800051
The usual "FLA" rate is 5000, or 1000 if people are logged in.
That would make it about 7 days at the usual rate, or a whole month (36 days) otherwise.
Not enough time to sift through 100 year's worth of deaths, but it's better than auto-pruning dead AI.

>>150800191
I think it's pretty clear that the RATH researchers are horrendously incompetent at best and criminally conspiring with the NSA at worst.

>let's clones the souls of human babies without informed parental consent and subject them to an unethical social experiment involving systematic mass murder, we and our sponsors could never be possibly tried for crimes against humanity once this inevitably gets out
>let's run our social experiment on a server farm that has external network connection capabilities so we can to dive into our experiment from Tokyo because we're too lazy to fly to our oil rig sometimes, no enemies of ours could possibly ever exploit this to jack in to the internet
>let's build the machine we use to dive into the experiment with no surge protection so any disturbance to the electrical wiring could easily fry the brains of whoever is using it, this couldn't possibly ever damage anybody who actually matters
>let's give all the test subjects dev console access instead of coding a proper magic system and give them more and more privileges as they level up, none of the subjects could possibly ever grind their way to sysadmin status

>>150800352
Also they totally failed to notice that Quinella existed, had commandeered the Cardinal process, and had been systematically abducting and brainwashing all the successful "able to break taboo" cases that they had been actively looking for.

The only reasonable explanation for that is that all of the people whose job it was to monitor the system and look for deviant individuals were just drunk 24/7.

>>150788320
>I guess SAO have given up on the videogame part altogether and is now a straight up isekai fantasy

"Fuck guys this Overlord shit is fucking rad and selling like hotcakes we gotta snuff this out"

>>150800516
except it's from last decade...

>>150800516
Nah. Cradle of the Moon was was written in 2009. 3 years before Overlord's first volume.

Also, it still takes place within a virtual world, but now that it's from the POV of an AI, it may as well just be a fantasy world.

So, not on Sword Art Online arc 5 yet?

>>150801332
It's still unknown how long this thing will be

>SAO is almost 15 years old

>>150800463
Didn't a guy from RATH work with Quinella and hide her existence?

>>150801419
>one guy

Any sign that they are colliding with Accel World?

>>150803493
Soon.

I'm betting the next arc will be called "Sword Art Online: Burst Link"

>>150792206
I honestly can't see that.
At the very least Kira was beaten, badly, once, even if the show tried to play it off as him not trying.

>>150805540
So was Kirito. Remember Aids-chan?

>>150805540
>At the very least Kira was beaten, badly, once,
And Kirito wasn't?

>>150806018
Or Heathcliff. Or that guy who paralyzed him and then was killed by Asuna.

>>150805540

Dude

Kira has like been in 100% death scenes MULTIPLE TIMES and has come back with zero explanation

i can only assume he is literally jesus.

>>150790187
NEVER STOPPED ME DREAMI- oh wait, wrong board.

>>150807729
>England in charge of not being an international embarrassment every year

>>150799015

The strangest thing is, the story keeps teasing rape. If you're reading this, there are multiple parts where you go "Oh man, this is where the rape happens" but it never does. Leafa does get briefly groped and drained by a dark elven sorceress, however.

Also, I really like the idea of an army of psychotic PCs being unleashed to loot and plunder and rape. That is an amazing idea, but unfortunately those people were just cannon fodder.

Just think about it, being unleashed into a fantasy world to wreak havoc. To do anything you want, and there are real people - REAL PEOPLE - being carved to pieces by you. That's an amazing idea.

>>150810993
I'm okay with not having rape or having only tension but not going through with it. More often than not, sexual assault scenes are ham-fisted and not really a staple of hard sci-fi.

There could also be exploration of deeper implications to falling in love with a Fluctlight (there was a throwaway paragraph about some Japanese gamer who was attracted to one of the Fluctlight swordmaidens), go all Bicentennial Man on this shit. My beef is that a mediocre literary talent like Kawahara has built up a nice setting but his writing does not fulfill the potential of it.

>more exploration of diplomacy, international law, geopolitics, scientific ethics in the background
>sensitively deal with human-Fluctlight relationships as the technology matures
>realistically characterise Fluctlights learning about the nature of the world outside and coming to terms with their artificial nature

>>150788320
how the fuck is this still going?

>>150811324

A real issue is that Kirito, as a character, can't develop further. He can't fall in love or whatever, because he's already married. He's also not physically challenged, because he's the best - just the best - at everything.

So it's completely extraneous on his part. He has no personal stake in things, not really.

Also, I don't know why, but Ronye and Tiese really turn my crank. Sure, Kirito's upperclassman is hotter, but both girls are clearly three-way fodder. The fact that they're almost raped several times just drives the point home.

Like, c'mon man! The setting is interesting, but what about the story? The hero's just 'there', and the only other guy who could've had development died. (Also, he didn't like the ladies anyway. Eugeo was probably gay.)

>>150811460
>can't develop further

As you rightly said, Kawahara has written him as a Gary Stu. Further to that, he lacks the ability to create a more nuanced character (or is crippled by the LN format which I doubt). Kirito can have all the traits he has currently, but if Kawahara was a good writer, I don't believe that should be any impediment.

To use an example, I just finished re-reading Hesse's Siddhartha. The MC is an genius Gary Stu who, amongst other things, told Gautama Buddha he was full of shit. Yet there is still a coherent narrative about Siddhartha trying to cast off the shackles of dogma and learning spirituality from the most unexpected sources.

>>150810993
>>150811324
How do fluctlights even have a sex drive when they're just a disembodied mind in a box with no source of hormones?

>>150811918

See, the virtual world is real to them. It's more like they're existing in an alternate universe. Also, the soul informs the body, so to speak - That's why incarnation 'works'. So these are digital copies of human souls, and they naturally have human bodies and drives.

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>>150788320
>SAO

Is this shit still going? Did he at least impregnate his waifu yet, or did she end up getting raped again?

>>150812314

The funny part is that Sinon and Leafa are so much better than Asuna. Asuna's just kind of bland.

I personally think Leafa's hotter, but Sinon has the more interesting backstory. The fact that they look different both virtually and in real life is probably every man's fantasy. (Because of course the busty imouto is a busty blonde elven vixen in the game. Holy shit.)

>>150812406
That whole 'look like in RL' was a fucking stupid idea for a VR setting anyway. The only reason why Leafa looks differently is because of the big totally unexpected twist that she was actually Kirito's sister.

>>150812478

No, the first one works. The main villain basically wanted everyone to live in his D&D setting, so he made them look the way they actually did in order to pull it off.

>>150812544
I still don't get why he's always depicted as a good guy now. At least the other fags only wanted to rape Kirito's shitty love interests, but he basically caused the death of thousands of people and yet he's like a hero for Kirito.
It would be interesting if Kirito would go down the same path one day though and become some moral ambivalent science fanatic. But why even dreaming about that, Kawahara will never let Kirito have any kind of flaw. Even his coma in Alicization was only there to show everyone missing him so much and waiting for his return. Really, fuck Alice, at least she should have had Eugeo as husband. All these feelings toward Kirito are just frustrating since he's already with Asuna. What's the point? We know that this faggot is God/Jesus and perfect, Kawahara really can't stop shoving this shit down our throats.

>>150788320
>I guess SAO has given up on the videogame part altogether and is now a straight up isekai fantasy.
It's been the case ever since Alicization started, web novel or LN version.
SAO ends at Mother Rosario.