⭐Accel World Episodes 17 & 18: Watch Along & Analysis

Again with the Reki appreciation, you don’t see that much anywhere on the internet. If you go to anyone talking about SAO on YouTube there is nothing but people calling SAO bad and Reki a terrible author. And by that I do mean terrible, many paint him like the worst author of all times. I don’t usually start with hate stuff, but it kind of fits with this so ill do it anyway. I was simply around the internet and saw someone talking about how Reki writes good female characters. Of course someone came in and said that those character examples were bad (Referencing Asuna, Sinon, and Yukki) but after the original poster stood their ground on what they said, the person said this: “Now this had to be bait. Reki can’t even right a coherent plot to save his life, let alone good female characters.” (And yes, they wrote “right” instead of “Write”) A big thing that I always see people say, apart from a bunch of other things, is that Reki can’t write female characters. They mainly point out that Asuna was no longer a badass after the Aincrad arc, which apart from being wrong they are ignoring her arc in Mother’s Rosario, and say that’s proof he can’t write female characters. Anyway, back on the AW topic, Episode 18 starts one of the short stories of volume 10. I hadn’t watched this episode in a while but now that I see it again, I notice that the pace of that short story is a little fast compared to the novels. A small detail that I hadn’t noticed when I first watched AW is that Megumi also appeared in episode 1 and was the girl that came up to him when he entered the lunchroom part that was only for seniors. It’s just a small detail that’s not really important (yet anyway). As for how many novels are out for AW, there are 24 volumes currently out in English and 25 out in Japanese. The current release date for Accel World volume 25 in English is October 19, and I say current because there are times that the publisher delays the release for their novels for some reason. Volume 25 is also the end of the largest arc in Accel World, basically the equivalent to the Alicization Arc. It started in volume 17 making it 9 volumes long. For comparison, the entire season of Accel world covers 4 volumes and most of volume 10, so it’s more or less 5 volumes long. Though the Alicization arc was slightly longer at 10 volumes (9-18). Again, I want to remind you to not watch the Accel world movie. After catching up to the novels and watching the movie myself, I saw that the movie starts around the ending of volume 24 but the main story for the movie happens after volume 25. It has major spoilers for characters and other stuff. The story itself isn’t too good anyway, and you can feel that the studio had to cut down whatever Reki had written to make it fit (If he even wrote it at all). There are a few OVA’s that released but I’ve only watched 1 of them (I think there are 3). Also, if you want to catch up to a bunch of Reki content, I might be able to make a list of all the things you can check out. Granted, it will be a really long list. Honestly, I still haven’t read everything he’s released and with me having less and less time recently it makes it that much harder. I am currently reading Sugary days which takes place during that week in between them getting married in Aincrad and meeting Yui. Seeing Kirito and Asuna act the way the act really feels strange, it’s like seeing a new side of them that isn’t shown in either the novels or anime. Apart from SAO, AW really only has the novels and anime (Excluding games), so there isn’t much to do with that. His other series, The Isolator, has even less attention than AW so there’s not much there other than the five novels that are currently out. I guess ill fully go into detail about stuff when you reach the end of this series. Anyway, when it comes to perspectives in his novels, SAO is the only one that has a first-person point of view, but only for Kirito. Every other character in SAO has a third person limited point of view, only switching to third person omniscient during a section of the War of The Underworld part of Alicization. Accel World and The Isolator both use third person limited and tends to switch focus to different characters when it needs to. It’s not done too much near the beginning, choosing to stay on Haru for the most part, but later it does switch quite a bit. SAO is the same as in it focuses a lot on Kirito near the beginning but later it switches a lot more. Now for a fun fact. Recently, Reki released volume 8 of SAO Progressive. Through a ranking chart that measure sales for the first week on different LN series they showed that SAO was the number 1 most sold LN for the first and second weeks after release, selling 37,281 copies first week and 15,925 copies the second week. Compared to that, the second place slot was Eighty-Six (For both weeks as well) which is currently seeing a larger amount of sales due to the anime that was airing at the time and that one only got 19,218 first week and 13,503 second week. What makes this even more impressive is that SAO has no anime currently airing compared to a few others on the list. Since I know you are currently watching the slime Isekai, that one released a novel around the same time SAO did and sold 7,458 first week and 6,551 second week.

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