The Protective Attitude Lives On

Especially noticeable in Kirito and Asuna, the survivors of Sword Art Online (SAO) all carry a common trait carried into the rest of their adventures in the VR world: strategies to stay alive together. Throughout the anime, the effects of SAO continue to linger within the lives of those that survived the game.

When Asuna joined the Sleeping Knights guild, she questioned the safety of a party of seven taking on a boss raid alone. She found herself thinking about survival strategies, just as she did as the Vice Commander of the Knights of the Blood in SAO. She caught herself in these thoughts and realized that it was just a game for fun, not a means of life and death. Deep inside, however, she still carried that protective instinct because of the impact of the deaths she faced in SAO.

When the 10,000 players became trapped in SAO, it was no longer a video game. Death in the game meant death in real life, and they had to plan out how to survive. Countless players did not make it out of the game and lost their lives, and players like those on the Assault Team made their main goal for everyone to make it out of fights alive. They worked to lift each other up and make it out together. Laughing Coffin, the murder guild, felt the opposite. They killed players, even though they were told and saw that it meant real death. Their realities became twisted and lost, and they were too long gone to try to reason with. A team, including Kirito, Asuna, and Klein, confronted Laughing Coffin at their base. Players from both sides were killed, but the base was raided to help protect the innocent players that were vulnerable to murder.

Kirito vowed to never let a party member die on him again, not after Sachi and many others lost their lives in SAO. He was heavily shaken by the Death Gun incident because it resurfaced his memories of the three Laughing Coffin members he killed in SAO. At the same time, they had to stop Death Gun from killing players once again. Death Gun and his partner had been shooting players in Gun Gale Online (GGO) while simultaneously injecting them with fatal poison in real life. Kirito tried to protect the players, including Sinon. He also behaved this way when he first arrived in ALfheim Online (ALO), not long after the clearing of SAO. When Kirito traveled with Leafa, he made sure she would not die as his party member. He would never let that happen again, not after SAO. At that point, the game was not truly over for him. He still had to save Asuna, who had not woken up yet in the real world. Even after saving Asuna, Kirito never shook his protective nature.

The survivors of SAO suffer from trauma left by the game. For many of them, the lines are blurred between the real world and the virtual world. Just as Lisbeth says in her inspirational speech when recruiting ALO players to join the fight in the Underworld, the virtual world has become their real lives. They are living in that world just like they live in the real one. In SAO, Kirito thinks this way as well. He chooses to keep living each day, and he never sees it as a loss of time from the outside world. This mentality inspires Asuna to live the best days of her life in SAO. For these players, the virtual world is reality, just like the real world.