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joshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh · 1 year

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Hey I watched this finally! The first Progressive movie, Aria of a Starless Night. Pretty title.

My thoughts on the movie are very hmmm. I think, the music hard carried, it was really fantastic and elevated every scene. The visuals definitely had some really good highlights though, the production was kind of on par with just strong TV anime as opposed to full on movie? Quite a few goofy looking faces even in close ups, and a few awkward stilted animation moments. Oh well.

And then narratively this was, fucking strange honestly. There’s actually quite a lot it did really well - Asuna has a really concrete arc that’s reasonably well set up from even just the start of the movie, for a start. Her new purple haired girlfriend before Yuuki - Misumi - is a neat character that Asuna has quite a fun relationship with. I think the moment to moment writing is actually quite solid sometimes and the dialogue actually feels quite lively - there’s a secne where Kirito and Asuna are just talking about the walk towards a dungeon and it’s just fun to listen to actually. They also do Kirito quite differently in this movie - he’s not the protagonist and instead kind of gets to be almost a mentor figure to Asuna during her joker arc, because Asuna really goes through it in this movie which was wild lol. If they’re keeping Kirito as relatively flat as he is at this part of the narrative then relegating him to more of a supporting role works quite well.

Though... the one thing I couldn’t quite shake watching this movie is that. It’s all kind of fluff, in a sense? And what I mean by that is it still fundamentally retains every core plot beat of the original SAO story. So while the moment to moment writing is very much there? It’s still just surrounding what was originally and is still bad in original SAO. They still have Diabel refuse Kirito’s potion. They still don’t have anyone bring up that games change between beta and final release. They still have Kirito call himself a beater. They’ll do more to justify these things, make them make a bit more sense, but you know what they say about polishing a turd. Progressive doesn’t set out to change SAO - it just sets out to add more stuff around it. I think what it adds is certainly of value personally, but really, your mileage may vary. Because the things that sucked in SAO are still present and still suck here.

2nd Progressive movie is still on its JP theatrical run. Can only hope that when it comes out for the rest of us losers it’s a bit more willing to break away from the original storyline. I get that the Progressive LNs are Kawahara’s way of kind of “redeeming” the original SAO, but like they’re in their own canon anyway dude aren’t they? You don’t need to hold yourself to those early choices, do something a bit more interesting. We’ll see how it plays out.

#sao #16.11.22

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