What's your favorite headcanon?

[Eldan]

On the matter of the Silmarillion being elven propaganda, then it is extremely badly written then given just how terrible the Elves come across in it. Seriously, the elves mess up badly so many times that they tend to make things worse rather than better, a few crowning moments notwithstanding.

I didn't say propaganda, I said legends. Look at some other legends. They are full of the people concerned screwing up terribly from time to time.

[LibraryOgre]

Loki did not arranged to have Baldur killed and then confessed.

Odin did, and then staged a frame up to get rid of Loki

What reason would Odin have to kill Baldur, of all people? By all evidence, everyone loved Baldur. Surely he could find some other person to get murdered by Loki?

The Mod Wonder: This goes into the realm of religion and should be dropped, now.

[archon_huskie]

CHANGING TOPIC!!


I imagine that being born with the ability to use magic in the Potterverse, works similar to the Raven's Duology by Patricia Briggs.

In those novels, there is a group called Travelers, (basically seen and treated like the Romani). Their magic is based on hereditary descent. But there is a maximum number of magic users allowed in the world at a time. Imagine a signup sheet with 4000 slots on it. When you are born your name is written in one of those slots and you are a magic user. When you die, your name is erased and your slot is available again. If no slot is available when you are born, then you don't become a mage. In the Raven's Duology, the Travelers are being exterminated by racism and other evils things. So people with distant family connections (my great-grandmother had a child with a Traveler) start being born with magic abilities because the number of living Travelers is less than the number of slots on the sheet.

To make this idea work in the Potterverse, when wizarding families have lots of children, the number of squibs born to them increases because there are too many wizards. But after a large number of wizards and witches are killed off, say after a war, then the number of muggle-borns increases. The muggle-born aren't muggles, they are descendants of squibs. None of Harry's classmates ever mention having a squib as a sibling or a relative. That's because the first wizarding war and Grindelward's war reduced the number of wizards and witches in the world greatly. Harry's year only has about 60 students: 7 boys and 7 girls in each of the 4 houses. (7+7)*4=56, yet Hogwarts is supposed to be able to house 1000 students.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

None of Harry's classmates ever mention having a squib as a sibling or a relative.

Yes they do: one of Ron's uncles is a squib that has gone off to live with muggles and is an accountant. They don't speak much of any others because it is considered horribly embarrassing. But they do exist.

Harry's year only has about 60 students: 7 boys and 7 girls in each of the 4 houses. (7+7)*4=56, yet Hogwarts is supposed to be able to house 1000 students.

Harry's year has 40 students, ten in each house, not 14.

As to the broader theory: it is a constant refrain that the wizarding world has always had to breed with muggles and muggleborns to survive. Less outwardly said but shown with, say, Umbridge is that many families' claims of blood purity are invented by mixed blood individuals angling for social advancement. So if it is true that the number of people with wizarding powers is capped as per your headcanon, it is capped at a significantly higher number than the number of people the wizarding society can sustain.

Grey Wolf

[Traab]

Yes they do: one of Ron's uncles is a squib that has gone off to live with muggles and is an accountant. They don't speak much of any others because it is considered horribly embarrassing. But they do exist.



Harry's year has 40 students, ten in each house, not 14.

As to the broader theory: it is a constant refrain that the wizarding world has always had to breed with muggles and muggleborns to survive. Less outwardly said but shown with, say, Umbridge is that many families' claims of blood purity are invented by mixed blood individuals angling for social advancement. So if it is true that the number of people with wizarding powers is capped as per your headcanon, it is capped at a significantly higher number than the number of people the wizarding society can sustain.

Grey Wolf

I think the subtle allusion for class size is, a LOT of people died or fled during the war with voldemort, meaning less kids were born or in england to go to school. I wouldnt be surprised if harrys second year and up had more and more students starting their first year as that would roughly coincide with voldemorts defeat and more people willing to bring a kid into the world or just celebrating a bit too much afterwards causing a population boom.

[Spacewolf]

That would make sense as head cannon, however the real reason is that Rowling is pretty consistently awful with numbers and didn't think it out. Which does lead to quite things that don't make sense when you actually think them through. (not unusual for authors though.)

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Or maybe there are just 700 students perpetually stuck in the fifth year trying to pass that one infamous course.

It's an elective, but ones you pick it you have to pass it.

It never comes up in the books because they've stopped accepting new students into the subject several decades ago. It's hard to find good steam engine enchantments teachers these day.

[The Jack]

Large numbers of witches and wizards are homeschooled.


Magic users are an innately irrational bunch, it's required to work with magic.

[Rogar Demonblud]

That would make sense as head cannon, however the real reason is that Rowling is pretty consistently awful with numbers and didn't think it out. Which does lead to quite things that don't make sense when you actually think them through. (not unusual for authors though.)

I remember someone did a population study that basically assumed that the proportions of students to adults and British to the rest of the world were the same between Potter-verse and our world, and came up with a worldwide wizard population of just under eight hundred thousand. And Hogwarts canonically draws students from the British Isles, not just Great Britain, so the methodology is overstating the case.

[Friv]

[SIZE=4]To make this idea work in the Potterverse, when wizarding families have lots of children, the number of squibs born to them increases because there are too many wizards. But after a large number of wizards and witches are killed off, say after a war, then the number of muggle-borns increases. The muggle-born aren't muggles, they are descendants of squibs. None of Harry's classmates ever mention having a squib as a sibling or a relative. That's because the first wizarding war and Grindelward's war reduced the number of wizards and witches in the world greatly. Harry's year only has about 60 students: 7 boys and 7 girls in each of the 4 houses. (7+7)*4=56, yet Hogwarts is supposed to be able to house 1000 students.

I usually try not to dunk on anyone's headcanons, but I am afraid that I am going to dunk the hell on this one, because if this headcanon were true than Voldemort is right. The whole pure-blood bigotry in the last couple books is the idea that muggle-born don't properly deserve their magic, they stole it from the proper, pure-blooded wizards. If there are a set number of wizards in the world, and muggleborn are just taking extra unfilled slots that wizards should be filling, that means that if the pure-bloods start killing muggle-born they could actually make their society pure-blooded again and that is super-gross.

*EDIT* In terms of numbers, according to this site Rowling has specifically said that Harry's year had more than forty students, and the Great Hall in the movies had about 500-600 students in it as a rule. It is probably also reasonable to assume that Gryffindor and Slytherin are a bit smaller than the other two houses, due to having strict entry requirements, and Hufflepuff is larger, due to letting all students in equally.

*EDIT 2* To be clear, I don't think that any setting having a "population cap" of the sort described is inherently gross. It's only a problem in Harry Potter because it's explicitly one of the things the bad guys are trying to claim is true.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

*EDIT* In terms of numbers, according to this site Rowling has specifically said that Harry's year had more than forty students, and the Great Hall in the movies had about 500-600 students in it as a rule. It is probably also reasonable to assume that Gryffindor and Slytherin are a bit smaller than the other two houses, due to having strict entry requirements, and Hufflepuff is larger, due to letting all students in equally.

The problem with this is that Harry has classes with Hufflepuff (Herbology) and we know the combined number of students in that class (which is not an elective) is twenty, from the number of earmuffs present for the mandrake lesson. The same calculation can be applied to classes with the Slytherins, and the number of students in double classes (20) remains constant. So you'd have to headcanon that there is like twice the Ravenclaws as there is in any other house and, while technically possible, it really doesn't fit very well (especially when they get to year 6 and Ravenclaws start to show up in some of the classes, although at that point they are all electives... but you'd figure the knowledge-focused student would finally dominate at that point).

No, the short answer is that Rowling wanted to have her cake and eat it too: she wanted a small number of students in the year so that she could develop many of them (which she did), but she also wanted about 1000 students in the school. Not being an engineer/mathematician/scientist, she likely never realised the discrepancy until us nerds started doing the math she had not.

Grey Wolf

[Androgeus]

. So you'd have to headcanon that there is like twice the Ravenclaws as there is in any other house and, while technically possible, it really doesn't fit very well (especially when they get to year 6 and Ravenclaws start to show up in some of the classes, although at that point they are all electives... but you'd figure the knowledge-focused student would finally dominate at that point).

Or there’s more than one class’s worth of hufflepuff students. For instance at my secondary school we were split into 5 houses and each house had 2 forms of ~30 kids. We actually had more lessons with other houses than with the other form from the same house.

N.B. I totally agree that this issues is just because Rowling wanted to write a typical boarding school adventure with a small cast and wanted Hogworts to be special and thus the only school.

[Son of A Lich!]

I've been thinking about starting a youtube series on how to adapt tv shows/movies to Mutants and Masterminds, and one of the first I was going to do was Sword Art Online (right after Pokemon). After reviewing the setting of SAO, I think I came on a head Canon that I like much better then the real canon...

Kirito Cheated.

Kirito is a typical Shounen main character in the fact that he is over powered and obsessively passive about his abilities. Unlike most Shounen action series, Kirito's ability to survive the first season isn't really delved into. We are expected to just accept that he is really good at video games, and some brief things about him being a beta tester and practicing Kendo in real life.

The purpose of a beta test is to find the bugs in the system, before releasing the full game without the bugs and glitches. If Kirito found a glitch (Likely from a tutorial level) that allowed him to have his health regen set to an absurdly high level instantly without grinding, suddenly a lot of things make sense in hindsight. Especially if he never reported the bug.

He usually ends up taking on bosses by himself - He can afford a high risk, high reward play style when he isn't actually at risk of losing.

He tanks 5 mid-level players trying to kill him and they can't even accomplish a 16th of his health bar before he regains it. This is explained that Kirito is too high level for them to really threaten him, but even that doesn't make a great deal of sense - Leveling is capped by floor bosses, and this event happens way before they've cleared the 50th floor. Unless the level gains are so exponential that being 5 levels higher then your opponent can cause you to be thousands of times more health and HP recovery, at which point, PVP is a useless practice. Level grinding is the only way to play to be any good at it. This begs the question of how you could have a PVP guild, like the Laughing Coffins, when raid guilds are pushing the highest levels at all times - Everything is fine and dandy until you run into a Raid guild member and he can tank everything effortlessly.

He identifies Heathcliff as a the game developer on the basis that Heathcliff was able to beat him in duel. That seems really arrogant, but if Kirito glitched for super health regen, and Heathcliff found out about it during the live release, suddenly he can't turn off the game to fix the problem because it's a death game.

Also, Kirito forgets frequently that other people can die. I mean, Kirito has a guild that is killed because they went for an obvious trap, a trap that Kirito was able to survive seemingly easy enough, but nearly one hit KOed his guild mates. Now, his guild mates deserve a bit of the blame for that, but they don't deserve death. One would think that if Kirito was around long enough to learn the ropes of SAO, he would be constantly on the lookout for traps and wouldn't let the Midnight Black Cats go into an obvious one... but instead he just... kinda tags along. This is repeated when he's ambushed by... well every time he is ambushed, really..., taking Asuna to a dungeon for lunch, and a whole host of times that Kirito just wanders into dangerous places with an under leveled character. When you have god-mode activated, it's hard to remember that other people are still vulnerable.

Speaking of the Midnight Black Cats, their death was a traumatic thing for him. He says that he hid his level from them, but we always assumed that he was much higher level then they were. Most sources I've seen say that the game spawns enemies based on the groups total level and size, so if Kirito were twice as high as they were, they would face much harder monsters that Kirito could breeze through. But the game doesn't have a simple leveling system... it also has a skill leveling system (Asuna mentions that she's max level 1000 cooking) and it's implied that the health regen trait is leveled up as a skill, not as a part of leveling. So, if the Max health regen glitch was set above maximum (During the tutorial to learn how to play the game without dying (And note how important that would be if this was set up as a death game)), it would make sense that the monsters don't just check your levels, but also your skill levels. Kirito may not have been at risk of being killed by this amped up increase in mobs and traps, but the rest of the Midnight Black Cats were.

And, Kirito didn't know that people couldn't log out after he was out of the tutorial level. At that point, People cant return to the tutorial and get the glitch to be safe as well.

Further, Kirito never seems to grind or do any real work himself. He just kinda goes head on to the next goal in his life without really worrying about the challenges in his way. Aside from other players and raid bosses, can you remember a time Kirito fought a mob?

Was there ever an official reason given that Beta testers and "Beaters" are hated by everyone else in the game world? No? Could it be that they had caches of exploits that made things harder on everyone else? infinite money loops that drove prices up to try to counter the hyperinflation, or rare spawn locations for items way above the power curve for that level?

Also, it makes a good bit of sense that the 75th floor boss glitched out Because Heathcliff and Kirito were both using exploits and the game didn't know how to read them. With the Death of the Midnight Black Cats scarring the back of his mind, and realizing that Heathcliff somehow beat someone that was using a hack, and that the game bugged out on the first dungeon that they fought in together, Kirito figured out that Heathcliff was hacking too.

Oh, and Kirito knew the exploits for the murder mystery, and how to hack Yui into an in-game object. Actually, the fact that Yui was paying attention to him specifically at all; she says that Kirito and Asuna were the only two who could find love and happiness in the game (... Sigh) but I think that comes from Asuna being a truly top tier player that Kirito didn't have to worry about, and Kirito being unkillable.

He just never had the guts to tell her that he cheated to get to where he was at.

[Tvtyrant]

I usually try not to dunk on anyone's headcanons, but I am afraid that I am going to dunk the hell on this one, because if this headcanon were true than Voldemort is right. The whole pure-blood bigotry in the last couple books is the idea that muggle-born don't properly deserve their magic, they stole it from the proper, pure-blooded wizards. If there are a set number of wizards in the world, and muggleborn are just taking extra unfilled slots that wizards should be filling, that means that if the pure-bloods start killing muggle-born they could actually make their society pure-blooded again and that is super-gross.

*EDIT* In terms of numbers, according to this site Rowling has specifically said that Harry's year had more than forty students, and the Great Hall in the movies had about 500-600 students in it as a rule. It is probably also reasonable to assume that Gryffindor and Slytherin are a bit smaller than the other two houses, due to having strict entry requirements, and Hufflepuff is larger, due to letting all students in equally.

*EDIT 2* To be clear, I don't think that any setting having a "population cap" of the sort described is inherently gross. It's only a problem in Harry Potter because it's explicitly one of the things the bad guys are trying to claim is true.

It doesn't excuse their behavior at all. Killing people to steal your super powers for your kids isn't anymore moral then killing them for their land or wealth, it just makes the pure bloods go from stark raving mad to selfishly evil.

[GloatingSwine]

I've been thinking about starting a youtube series on how to adapt tv shows/movies to Mutants and Masterminds, and one of the first I was going to do was Sword Art Online (right after Pokemon). After reviewing the setting of SAO, I think I came on a head Canon that I like much better then the real canon...

There's another one I like.

SAO is just a really bad videogame.



So all the incoherent crap that lets Kirito win is just because the game is degenerate and broken.

[HandofShadows]

Kirito Cheated.

I think it's stated someplace that Kirito actually does cheat, but just not in the way you think. He has a special ability that allows him to alter or break some of the games rules. Now this isn't something he is really aware of and it only comes into play under specific circumstances. (A required level of stress and the proper state of mind) This allows him to change some things and pull off a few of his stunts. Other times, he's just being good at the game and knowing how games work (as well as a super high reaction time). He actually is skilled with computers, electronics and coding. So no cheat codes, exploits he kept to himself or hacks involved. Now I said he had a special ability, but he's not the only one in SOA with it. Asuna also has this ability and uses it more glaringly at least once when she ran faster than the game would allow. (When the Laughing Coffin member poisoned Kirito and he nearly died). There are probably others with it as well, we just don't know they have the ability.

PS the most obvious time Kirito cheated was in AOL and turned into Gleam Eyes for the battle on the bridge.

[Traab]

Speaking on the part about racial balance, I played dark age of camelot, a game with three factions and every race had unique classes. Like, all of them had a tank class, they just each functioned differently. Holy Crud did balance suck in this game. It was an endless series of patches as class after class gets nerfed, buffed, and nerfed, over and over and over again. Because it is just not possible to balance 40 classes across three factions. But even daoc had powerful classes for each faction, its not like ALL the classes were stuck in one role on a faction so the factions themselves were all playable. I cant even imagine if one faction had all the best gear, one faction could do all of the damage, and one faction couldnt do damage at all. Oh, and daoc was heavily pvp oriented so there was that bit of fun as well. Yeah wow, just terrible terrible games.

I had some nitpicks with the video like, he mentioned pvp being instanced and with everything at the same general level. Thats not how pvp worked for the longest time. At best you had instances where there was a confined level range but being level 49 fighting against a level 41 is still a huge advantage. Similar for dungeons, im not sure what dungeons level with you he is talking about, but in wow you needed to reach a certain level to survive in every dungeon. Yeah my level 20 could go to the first dungeon in a group, but try going to upper blackrock spire at that level and you are dead meat. I havent played in awhile so maybe they changed that too? I know they made the open world zones level with you so maybe they did that for dungeons as well, either way, thats after like, a decade of it not working that way. Another thing with dungeons, the older mmos, notably Everquest, didnt have instances for most of them. You just walked right into the zone and most of them were very heavily camped by other groups, which means that a full group of players would be at a specific location known for sometimes spawning a named monster to kill for loot. The entire dungeon is broken up into camps like that where you had to wait your turn. There was no heroically clearing your way from the entrance of the kobold den to its base where king kobold awaits your crew after an exhausting series of battles to reach him. There was a group of players killing him over and over, another group killing his grand vizier, a third killing his guard captain, a 4th just killing the guard barracks for gold and exp, etc etc etc. Even the raid dungeons were open world. There were guilds who made a game out of ruining your attempt to clear The Plane of Fear or whatever. Just running in there and messing everything up for the giggles. This was explicitly how things worked with the earlier MMOs. NOW thats a terrible design, but back then? Its how the game worked. In fact, im wondering if the sao creator took inspiration from Everquest for a lot of its features, here is the wiki page on its subscription rate.

EverQuest was the most pre-ordered PC title on EBGames.com prior to its release in March 1999.[51] The game had 10,000 active subscribers 24 hours after launch, making it the high-selling online role-playing game up until that point.[51] It achieved 60,000 subscribers by April 1999.[52] Six months later, around 225,000 copies of the game had been sold in total, with 150,000 active subscribers.[51] By early 2000, the game's domestic sales alone reached 231,093 copies, which drew revenues of $10.6 million.[53] Subscription numbers would rise to over 500,000 active accounts four years after release in 2003.[3] By the end of 2004 the title's lifetime sales exceeded 3 million copies worldwide[54] and reached an active subscriber peak of 550,000.[55]

By todays standards thats hot garbage. I think WoW sold more copies of its game in its first month than everquest ever did. I know it had far more active subscribers by then than everquest had at its peak. But back in those days these were incredible numbers that meant the game was a huge hit. So maybe its not so much that he is a moron when creating a market as he is working with outdated figures.

[Son of A Lich!]

There's another one I like.

SAO is just a really bad videogame.

So all the incoherent crap that lets Kirito win is just because the game is degenerate and broken.

Oh, SAO is a really bad game, and a bad anime to boot, but that just leaves the question unanswered in my eyes. I'm sure Kirito is supposed to be Jesus Kun of the series and no one ever stopped and asked why the plot was going the way it did to allow this to happen. I like the idea that the game was glitching out because it didn't know what Kirito was and he was a exploiting it's bad design.

I think it makes for a... unique... TTRPG however, if the inception of Players playing players playing an MMO RPG that will kill them doesn't rattle the brain too hard. In fact, it makes a lot more sense as a TTRPG then an MMO, but that's another discussion for another day.

[The Jack]

I don't get how people can like SAO. Like a lot of Anime is called trash. Naruto is called trash, attack on titan is called trash, anything popular is called trash... but the trashiness of that stuff is really subjective. Naruto undoubtedly has many merits...

SAO is irredeemably ****. It sucks you in with a strong delivery of the premise in the first episode, and the rest of your time watching it is in hope that it'll revert to a quality somewhere between the first and only promising episode and your own imagined extrapolation of what could be done (better) in such a setting.
That's largely how I think the show is popular; That people watching it imagine something far more palatable than what's actually shown.



Have I bothered anyone here about my wine conspiracy yet?

[Traab]

That guy Mothers Basement also did a video on what sao did right. A lot of it seems to be timing. They basically hit all the current hot buttons from mmos being incredibly popular, crunchyroll making its big breakthrough, the popularity of death threatening and high lethality like walking dead so on and so forth.

[Son of A Lich!]

SAO also is a great for critics, on the basis that it is so universally hated on for it's terrible decisions and so many people went in thinking it was going to be an at least decent show. This makes it a great touch stone for many people to come to understand what a work of media's responsibility is in being entertainment...

Which was also lifted from Mother's Basement... Man, this anime really does turn a lot of heads quickly.

[Traab]

In all honesty, I think timing is the real culprit for its success and its failures. It came in at just the right time with just the right triggers to hit the start of a craze which let it really take off, which meant there was just that much more backlash when it all fell apart. If it had come out at any other time its likely it just would have been another forgettable anime, and not the near icon it has become. For good and for evil.

[Aedilred]

I remember someone did a population study that basically assumed that the proportions of students to adults and British to the rest of the world were the same between Potter-verse and our world, and came up with a worldwide wizard population of just under eight hundred thousand. And Hogwarts canonically draws students from the British Isles, not just Great Britain, so the methodology is overstating the case.

The population of Ireland is under 5 million, next to 66 million in the UK, so the difference made is pretty small.

I don't think it's actually confirmed which part of Ireland Seamus hails from, either, so he could be from Norn Irn*. He's the only Irish Hogwarts student I can recall. Though given that Hogwarts exists nominally outside concerns over Muggle borders and given the age of the institution, it would make sense that either Irish wizards/witches attend Hogwarts, or Ireland has its own school which takes students from across the island. Seamus's presence at Hogwarts would suggest the former, but it might be a matter of choice especially for half-bloods (which Seamus is).

*There is some circumstantial evidence that he's from Kerry though, which is in the Republic.

[Keltest]

The population of Ireland is under 5 million, next to 66 million in the UK, so the difference made is pretty small.

I don't think it's actually confirmed which part of Ireland Seamus hails from, either, so he could be from Norn Irn*. He's the only Irish Hogwarts student I can recall. Though given that Hogwarts exists nominally outside concerns over Muggle borders and given the age of the institution, it would make sense that either Irish wizards/witches attend Hogwarts, or Ireland has its own school which takes students from across the island. Seamus's presence at Hogwarts would suggest the former, but it might be a matter of choice especially for half-bloods (which Seamus is).

*There is some circumstantial evidence that he's from Kerry though, which is in the Republic.

Is he actually confirmed Irish, or do people just assume based on his last name?

[archon_huskie]

That enters a little movie v books issue as the actor spoke with an irish accent.

[LibraryOgre]

Wasn't Seamus a West Ham fan in the books?

[Grey_Wolf_c]

That enters a little movie v books issue as the actor spoke with an irish accent.

So does the one in the books (but that's because I consider the audiobook read by Stephen Fry the most canonical of all the means of consumption of Harry Potter)
This post is not to be taken seriously.
Grey Wolf

[Gnoman]

Is he actually confirmed Irish, or do people just assume based on his last name?

In Book 4, he and his family were in the "rabid Ireland fans" group rather than the "just came for the game" group like the Weasleys.

[Rodin]

On the SAO thing:

Little bugs me more than people trying to tell me why I liked something that they themselves hated. It's a search for a reason without a way to look inside my head.

I didn't like SAO because of MMOs getting popular (I've played one MMO, that being WoW, and started doing that way back in 2004 when it came out), or because Crunchyroll suddenly became big (been watching Crunchyroll since they went legit), etc. etc. yadda yadda.

I still felt the first season of SAO was great. Kirito may have been OP, but he was also a quite likeable character. The premise was solid and wasn't tired like it is now after all the copycats. I liked the individual stories and identified emotionally with the characters. It had light harem elements but firmly crushed the idea of a long-term harem by making it 100% clear that Kirito was only interested in Asuna and all the other girls understood and accepted this fact. The action sequences were great, the music was fantastic, and it had a creatively put together murder mystery in there. I felt Kirito's decision to hang out with the lower level players and not tell them his actual level was a very human thing to do, and his bad reaction to the consequences of this action was very moving.

I can get the design of the game offending some people's suspension of disbelief. It didn't bother me at all. I don't need a design document for the game. It doesn't need to make a super amount of sense - it was designed by a sociopath mad scientist, what do you expect? They gave enough details to set the plot rolling, and that's all I needed.

He identifies Heathcliff as a the game developer on the basis that Heathcliff was able to beat him in duel. That seems really arrogant, but if Kirito glitched for super health regen, and Heathcliff found out about it during the live release, suddenly he can't turn off the game to fix the problem because it's a death game.

No, he identifies Heathcliff as the game developer because Heathcliff cheats during the fight. Kirito fights Heathcliff for long enough to identify his level of skill, and then Heathcliff adjusts the position of his shield super-humanly fast to block an attack that should have been unblockable. Even then Kirito is only suspicious - it's only after the big boss fight that he realizes. The boss is able to kill anyone unprotected in a single hit, and deals blows Kirito himself cannot block. And yet Heathcliff is able to effortlessly tank the boss AND comes out of it with most of his health intact, without healing during the fight. The two instances make him suspicious enough to test for a god mode cheat.

-----

Now, as to anything AFTER the first arc: I hear you. Because dear GOD does the quality drop. There's still redeemable stuff (like Suzuha's tragic romance), but you really have to pick it out. In fact, one of my personal headcanons is that after getting Asuna out the show ends, because neither would ever want anything to do with VR again.

Still though...that initial Aincrad arc remains high in my regard for great storytelling. I understand not liking it, but that isn't going to change the fact that I loved it. And searching for some arcane psychological reason for why other people also liked it seems like a pointless exercise to me.

[Friv]

Now, as to anything AFTER the first arc: I hear you. Because dear GOD does the quality drop. There's still redeemable stuff (like Suzuha's tragic romance), but you really have to pick it out. In fact, one of my personal headcanons is that after getting Asuna out the show ends, because neither would ever want anything to do with VR again.

Still though...that initial Aincrad arc remains high in my regard for great storytelling. I understand not liking it, but that isn't going to change the fact that I loved it. And searching for some arcane psychological reason for why other people also liked it seems like a pointless exercise to me.

I think a big part of what worked in the Aincrad arc is also a big part of what failed for the rest of the show, or at least as far as I was able to make myself watch. The first arc spends a lot of its time playing with Chosen One / Mary Sue archetypes and ruthlessly shredding them. Kirito isn't actually special. He had some advance knowledge, lucked out against the first boss, and it set up a cascade that kept pushing him towards this incredibly dumb confrontation that Kayaba was obsessed with. Kayaba had this whole script for how he thought the world should work, and he wanted Kirito to be his big Mary Sue hero, but the truth was that seeing people die and being isolated was really harmful to Kirito's psyche so he kept not doing it.

And then in the end, it all falls apart on Kayaba because people aren't predictable, Kirito triggers the confrontation early, Asuna messes the whole thing up and Kirito manages to win despite it being technically impossible because Kayaba's game was a mess interacting with people's brains directly.

Only then, every other arc forgets that Kirito is not actually a superhuman badass. The other arcs turn him into the Super-Person that the first arc is doubting the very idea of, Kayaba's dumb dream gets re-framed as being somehow noble or worthwhile instead of murderous and impossible, and the harem elements get dialed up to 11 while the ladies lose all their agency. It was very frustrating to me.