Sword Art Online

Welcome to life.

And you guys thought I was joking when I said everyone dies in this arc.

Jesus dude, if that's your life, I don't even know what to say.

Yuuki's backstory is like that one time in Welcome to the NHK where Sato and Yamazaki try to create the ultimate moe girl, only with sad backstories.

I'm still confused. In the future, despite all the advances in technology, including the ability to go all Matrix for one's VR MMO games, no one has found a cure for AIDS yet? You'd think that would take more precedence over all other technologies and medicine.

The doctor said that AI Ds was very treatable. Yuuki just gt a nasty drug resistant strain.

Welcome to the story where a disease has plot armor.

"Good news: We can cure the lethal disease you have."

" : D "

"Bad news, you specifically are immune to the treatment."

"..."

Um...I-I understand Yuuki's plight and all, but...

SAO really played up Yuuki's situation and milked it for all its worth, huh? It just wasn't enough for her to have AIDS? Not only did she have AIDS...

• Her parents died.
• Her sister died.
• She was bullied.
• She was medicated at a young age.
• She's essentially a vegetable awaiting death...

It's as if the show is trying very hard to make everyone feel sorry for Yuuki. Like saying "Look at this girl. Look at her! Her life is so crappy and she's going to die, yet despite that, she has a smile as radiant as the sun! Surely you all will take pity on this kindred spirit!"

...

W-What I'm saying is, some viewers will probably look at this as some kind of emotional manipulation, see through the "trick", and look at Yuuki's situation with stone-cold faces...

edited 7th Dec '14 4:21:36 PM by Diamite

Misery Poker meets Sympathy Sue?

I can get the bullying and the meds. Sister died? Ehh...fine. They built it up enough for me, and she may have had the same condition since they were twins.

Now the fact that her parents died was complete overkill.

Considering it was her mom who got the transfusion, I think it's fairly realistic that the whole family'd get infected too.

What did this family do to the author to deserve this!?!?

Agreed, the outcome is perfectly reasonable given the premise, that the parent was infected in the first place.

@L Dragon: Curing diseases is hard. In the future known as 2014, with all the advances in technology including the ability to communicate real-time with people ten thousand kilometres away, no one has found a cure for the common cold?

By my understanding, we have in a way. What makes the common cold so troublesome is that it evolves very rapidly so what works against one strain usually won't work against next year's. By my understand, this and that are very different.

Pretty much. (Though multiple strains exist and trying to guess which ones will be the dominant ones can be a matter of luck as much as anything else. And some strains are nigh on impossible to wipe out because reserves exist in wild animal population. That's why bird flu and swine flu are called that).

The common cold is an extreme example, but the evolution or anti-biotic resistant microbes and quinine-resistant malaria are real problem here and now. I've even heard of HIV strains that are resistant to current anti-retroviral treatments.

It's not all that different. One point which makes HIV hard to deal with is the fact that a as a retrovirus, it has a rather high mutation rate. Not quite as extreme as the common cold, but pretty fast.

Though the general point I was making was simply that medicine is a tough job, and often there's no a priori way to tell whether a particular disease will prove difficult to tackle.

Still, what they're saying is "We can normally cure HIV but we can't cure your HIV" which, even if plausible, still comes off as BS in the world of writing.

It's the main reason why we need to get a flu shot each year instead of just once!

edited 8th Dec '14 8:23:28 AM by kyun

Not really. We throw antibiotics at everything now, so we're pretty much breeding resistant strains.

Well, the standard pattern of "Introduce cool character.....who will basically never do anything again" at least has a reason this time.

edited 8th Dec '14 10:30:10 AM by kiukiuclk

I completely missed the part where they said Mom got some of the blood too. I thought it was just Yuuki for some reason. Still feels contrived for the sake of the story, but I'll take it.

Now to figure out how Dad kicked the bucket. I'm guessing he either contracted it before being aware that the transfusion was tainted (what horrible timing...) or he died from grief.

I don't know how Japanese medical insurance works, but the cost of medications for an entire family may have driven their livelihood into the ground.

Mom got the blood transfusion because she had a c-section and the birth went poorly.

Why would the baby be getting the transfusion when it's the mom who had the c-section?

Well, if she had the transfusion during or before the procedure then it's possible for the baby to be affected by it (although during the procedure would be a tad unlikely since caesarians usually don't last long).

Babies can get HIV through their mother's breast milk.

I'm thankful for the information, but that has nothing to do with what I posted. o.o