Quote Originally Posted by Rodin View Post
I am rather mystified over why there's so much bitterness over SAO and Log Horizon. If you actually like SAO, you're a heretic who must be burned. If you don't like Log Horizon, you're also a heretic who must be burned.

Why do the MMO series cause such vitriol? I'm fairly sure such divides don't exist for harem show #1896543, or even for the big shows like Naruto/Bleach/One Piece.
With SAO, the big thing is that the fanbase is huge is there's a certain contingent of it that just will not shut up about the series. I think that pretty much all series gets fans like that, but the problem with SAO is that the fanbase is large enough that the loudmouths form critical mass. It can get difficult to ignore them when they get going, so it means that in anime communities, you get this near-constant reminder of this series that you really didn't like. That behaviour will pretty quickly drive you to loath the series.

It doesn't help that now the "loathes SAO" camp also has hit critical mass now, which means that the SAO fanbase sees a constant stream of criticisms of SAO, which naturally gets their backs up, and they start sniping back, and it goes on and on.

Compare that to another anime that annoyed me, like Magical Girl Raising Project, and it's likely I'll never hear about that series ever again, and over time my annoyance can wane.


I can't explain why this doesn't happen with the Big 3. I've never seen any of them, so I don't know if there's anything specific in the content of SAO that draws criticism. Maybe it's because the ALO arc wasn't just bad but was outright offensive, but I'm pretty sure that I'd personally hate SAO almost as much even if I'd not subjected myself to the second arc.

Perhaps the problem is in betrayed expectations? I don't have a lot of interest in typical shonen tropes, so I never bothered with the Big 3. But the premise of SAO was really cool to me and I went into it having heard the hype and expecting it to be really good. By the time the Aincrad arc was over, I was only watching it for closure on the storyline, not because I had any interest in the series anymore. I only watched ALO because I specifically wanted closure on the Kirito/Asuna romance, which was the only thing I had any investment in left.