Fridge / Sword Art Online Abridged

Remember that Fridge and Headscratcher pages are Spoilers Off due to being post-viewing.

Fridge Logic

• In the original series, orange players are players who have committed some sort of crime (such as stealing, harming or killing other players) and have an orange cursor over their head. Since (Kuradeel's) cursor changing was kept in the abridged series, wouldn't that mean Kirito and Asuna also have orange cursors for killing Rosalia and Kuradeel respectively? That would mean other players would be more wary of them if they could see they had orange cursors, but this isn't the case outside of a few justifiable exceptions.
  • However, Because of how dysfunctional the SAO community is portrayed, it's more believable that the majority of players would have orange cursors. Also, orange cursors don't distinguish between what crimes the player may have committed, so anything from mass player killing to stealing back an item that may have been stolen from them to begin with could be the cause. Having an orange cursor wouldn't ostracize Kirito and Asuna any more than it would any other player, but that still means trust between players is a rare commodity in SAO.
  • In fact, players would probably be more suspicious of green players because nobody would believe anyone could survive in the game without committing SOME crime, even if it's killing in self defense. They may even suspect green players to be very clever and dangerous player killers hiding their orange status like Rosalia did in the series proper. Cue mass amounts of innocent green players being killed under false suspicion.
  • I believe it was explained in canon that if someone attacked you and turned orange and you retaliated you didn't lose your green cursor, since Rosalia was partied with her guild and they had already attacked Kirito him killing her wouldn't affect his standing.
  • In the original series, there actually are a few methods through which an orange player can return their cursor to green. The main one being taking up a side quest from NPCs a player can find at random and accepting whatever quest that they offer. Though the difficulty of the quest differs depending on the crime committed. And if you're a repeat offender, the quests to remove the orange status will only get harder. Also for your first three infractions, the orange status will only last a few hours. Asuna and Kirito may be disturbingly violent and increasingly unstable, but even they tend to not go further than snarking at or insulting even people who have openly verbally antagonized them, so long as nothing worse has been done. And even though most of the players in Aincrad are incredibly stupid, few of them are outright sadistic enough (like Kuradeel, Rosalia's guild, or the members of Laughing Coffin) to want to attack or kill someone unless provoked. So it's actually fairly believable that a good number of them would still remain in the green.
• While I get that Kayaba created the glitch that kills the players in his sleep deprived state, when he caught up with his sleep; why didn't he just release a patch for the game? Sure, it would obviously result in more work for him but you'd think he'd quickly correct that rather than thousands of innocent people dying.
  • When he caught up on his sleep, he was too deep in his own lie to quit in good conscience and out of the 10,000 players that were ensnared in it, 2,000 of them were already dead. What time he had was being used to keep the rest from killing themselves, especially since Kazuto didn't want to form a guild even if you excluded the one that drafted him and was utterly destroyed by its leader's incompetence, and time spent managing the less-than-cooperative player base was time he could not spend at an admin console to unfuck this mess. Kayaba may have caused this disasterpiece due to being subjected to horrible crunch, but the players only made things worse. By the way, have you noticed that this game has a real arson problem?
  • I think that games don't usually let you play them when they're applying a patch, so he'd have to log everyone out first.
• In Episode 5, Kirito claims he was trying to "power-level his alchemy" by eating weird plants. But come episode 10, Asuna declares that SAO doesn't have any magic, specifically citing alchemy.
  • Given that SAO is a Bethesda game, and in Bethesda games alchemy refers to brewing potions and can be increased by eating weird plants, it's possible there is an actual alchemy skill. Asuna citing Heathcliff's "Misogynist Alchemy" is more in reference to the classic lead to gold alchemy of the real world.

Fridge Brilliance

• The first joke of the series involves Kirito being annoyed at the ads littering the game. However, this knock at the overabundance of advertising in video games is never brought up again. Chances are, these companies using SAO to promote their products were quick to cut ties once the game started killing people.
  • And, more importantly, the only people who could see the ads were completely incapable of buying anything anytime soon. No point marketing to people who are effectively comatose and unlikely to survive.
• Not to mention, it's very likely that Bethesda cut ties with Argus and especially Kayaba after the disaster started, going into damage control when word got out.
• In episode 1, Akihiko Kayaba makes references to movies that no one else gets. In episode 9, we find out that the player Heathcliff has this exact same habit. Also both characters have the same voice actor. This is acknowledged in-universe during Episode 11, as this forms the crux of Kirito's "Eureka!" Moment regarding Heathcliff's true identity; he remembers all the references Kayaba made up to that point.
• In episode 2, where Tiffany matter-of-factly states he picked "a woman's name," it would initially seem unusual that the most ostensibly normal person in the cast would pick a woman's name for no reason, until you realize that Tiffany probably made a female character and picked a name to match only to have his appearance changed to his real-life appearance like everyone else in episode 1.
  • Additionally, in the original series, he shared the Nerve Gear with his wife. They both wanted to play SAO but since he went before his wife he was the one stuck in the game. Thus when Tiffany created his character in the abridged series, he might have been playing on his wife's account.
  • He could have also potentially shared an account with his wife. Though we've yet to see him and his wife interact in the abridged verse, it could be that they decided to just use the same character so they can take turns doing quests and gathering items, rather than the much slower method of alternating between their characters and leveling up alone, seeing as having only one Nerve Gear would mean that they could never play in unison. The name could be a result of him allowing his wife to pick the name that they would use for their player account. Potentially also a reason he's so nonchalant about his use of a woman's name aside from his no-nonsense personality. If he loves his wife, he's not going to be ashamed using the name that she would have chosen for the both of them.
    • This seems more likely, because if he were playing on his wife's account and said account already had a character named Tiffany on it for him to play as, that would've meant his wife had logged in, created her character, then logged out, and he would've then logged into her account, which wouldn't have been possible.
    • Potentially further supported in his actual wording. He never claimed he picked the name. Kibaou merely commented that it was a "pretty masculine name", to which Tiffany refuted the claim and pointed out it was indeed a woman's name. Since he never claimed he was the one who chose it, it could well have been his wife instead.
• Why does the guide written by the beta testers (more like, Kirito) involve using other players to act as meat shields and sacrificial pawns despite being All Deaths Final? It's most likely written prior to the whole "death game" thing thinking that it's a normal game. If you can't die, then the strategy of sending annoying people to die and be sent back to wherever first is a valid strategy that discourages asshattery in real-life video game raids. Later revelations that the death game was a massive accident due to coding errors not patched out in time confirms this theory.
• Early on, Asuna's in-game fighting skills most likely come from her out of game fighting skills- she probably does sword fighting and historical battle tactics IRL, or LARPs or something.
• In Episode 3, Keita naming his guild "The Moonlit Black Cats" makes more sense when it's revealed he was involved with the mob, whose don is a literal black cat.
• In episode 4, when Pina is glowing while dying, and Silica is asking if he's evolving, making the not-so-subtle Pokemon joke, a song from the series starts playing. But it's not the evolution sound track, it's Lavender Town's. Of course. Lavender Town is the home of a Pokemon Graveyard.
• Rosalia taunts Kirito by saying how Silica recruited someone at her level. By the end of the episode, we see that there's more truth to that than she realized.
• Kirito's comment on how Silica "took Pina's final death well" reflects his reaction to his hopes of reviving Sachi being dashed. Instead of becoming a sociopath like him, only spurned into caring by trigger words and willing to kill someone who had no chance of beating him for running her mouth, Silica is actively dealing with the trauma in a healthier, if more destructive, manner.
• This might have been obvious to other people, but in episode 5, Asuna falls asleep next to Kirito because she decided to actually wait for him to sober up before kicking his ass.
• Tiffany acts rather snide at Asuna "handing a black man the murder weapon". If you pay attention, you'll notice he never takes the weapon from her, nor even try to.
• One of the Laughing Coffin goons gets fed up with Jeffrey's As the Good Book Says... shtick when he drops a line that's literally just made up with a stupid pun in it. If you pay attention, though, Jeffrey doesn't actually attribute the line to the Bible, but specifically to Jesus. We know he has a hallucination of Jesus in his head which he obeys, so it's very possible that the imaginary Jesus fed him that line.
• In episode 7 we have this exchange.
  Lizbeth: Look, do you wanna keep giving me shit, or do you wanna work out a way out of here?
  Kirito: Oh, don't think I can't do both. I am quite the multitasker.
  • After Kirito gives Lizbeth the ore they came for he informs her that it is literal dragon shit, and of course next episode we see just how good a multitasker he is.
  • Kirito's entire visit to Lisbeth's shop makes more sense in light of what's revealed one episode later. If he has one of the "gnarliest" swords in the game already, why go to such lengths to get another that's as good or better?
• In Episode 8, General Failure Corvatz claims to be "one of the greatest minds the ALF has ever known." In episode 10, we're introduced to other leading members of the ALF: Yulier, Thinker, and Kibaou. It would appear Corvatz wasn't lying, it was just a really low bar to clear.
• Kirito's ability to dual-wield kinda just showed up after confronting one of Rosalia's henchmen who had dual wielded axes. Chances are the ability to dual-wield was never intended to go live and that both of them were hit with a glitch that accidentally unlocked the dual-wielding.
• Episode 9 explained that after the Laughing Coffin advertisement that sent their location to every player in the game, they were raided and all but wiped out. This sets up a plot point that first appears in the next season, Sword Art Online II, where a flashback reveals that Kirito, Asuna, and the Knights of the Blood Oath were involved in that battle.
• In Episode 9, Heathcliff is given the distinguished title of 'Cheating Haxxor Faggot', foreshadowing how in the main series Kayaba, as Heathcliff, used admin cheats to move as fast as he did. That specific detail may not have carried over to the Abridged version, but it still applies because Kayaba as Heathcliff sets himself as an Immortal Object to prevent himself from getting killed.
• In episode 10, Kirito makes mention of Asuna regularly experiencing night terrors. In the SAO Progressive manga, Asuna is shown to have nightmares about how being trapped in SAO will make her fall behind academically and earn (more) of her mother's scorn.
• In episode 11, the players complain about the quality of the game with Schmitt making a short list of all the shoddy game mechanics. Now, anyone could have mentioned the same things, but since Schmitt was a professional video game reviewer in the real world, naturally he would be the most vocal and eloquent about the game's shortcomings.
• Kayaba's utter frustration with SAO's playerbase makes a lot more sense when he's revealed to be Asuna's guild leader, meaning he's watched someone who didn't even know how to open a menu a month after the game's launch become one of its top players, while thousands of other players just blundered along for years.
  • Also Kayaba has witnessed an ordinary cat rising in the ranks of SAO to become the Mafia boss of the game, even working with him at one point, which showcases a lot of skills even for a cat. Kayaba's Villainous Breakdown wasn't just belittling his stupid players, it was also an indirect Insult to Rocks for humanity.
• In the same episode Kayaba admits that in his sleep deprived state he referred to the night janitor, "Reki", as "The Face of God". Reki referes to "Reki Kawahara" IE: the author of SAO and therefore, quite literally, God.
• As pointed out in the YMMV page, its kind of odd that a death game like SAO would feature ads and microtransactions, but once you take Kayaba's confession into account, it makes perfect sense why they're in the game.
  • The Anti Poop-Socking comments by the tutorial NPC make sense from the same viewpoint.
• It's unlikely Kayaba noticed the player killing glitch before the game was released so that means players were dying almost immediately after they started playing. One can only imagine just how stupid those players were to die within the first hour of playing the game.
  • Actually, it could just be that they were playing things loosely or wanted to see the respawn system. After all, they didn't know they were going to permadeath.
• Seeing how Kayaba is now the world's most wanted man, he must not be getting much sleep. Which means, he's still more than a little sleep deprived when playing as Heathcliff, explaining why he doesn't bother changing his habit of making movie references or think twice about killing players with a touch of a button.
• So let's see, Episode 2 and Episode 6 feature players having trouble navigating the game's clunky and unintuitive menu, in Episode 3 we've got Non Player Characters who can be "recruited" as companions so long as players never finish their quests and who trap players in rooms by blocking the doors, in Episode 4 a dragon speaks in Dovah-Zul and refers to Silica as Dovahkiin, in Episode 5 Kirito levels his Alchemy skill by eating random plants off the ground, and in Episode 7 the dragon's roars sound awfully familiar too. So it should be no surprise when Episode 11 reveals that in this setting, Sword Art Online was published by "fuckin' Bethesda."
• Of course Asuna would use her real name as her character name. She didn't know how to play the game at first, and probably thought that it actually wanted her real name. Though, it also meant she thought that Klein was actually BallsDeep69 in real life.
• In Episode 12 we finally meet Suguha, and it's clear that Kirito's Jerkass and Deadpan Snarker tendencies when in SAO are lifted straight from his sister. It's stated multiple times that, when playing games, he can be who he wants to be. He wanted to be the bully rather than the bullied for once.
  • Suguha rubs in her superiority when it comes to combat, launches into a long, detailed and sarcastic story to mock her brother, and treats insulting and belittling him as a pleasant pastime. She's Kirito in Episode 1.
  • Introducing her character in this way accomplishes several things at once. As said above, it tells us where Kirito's anti-social behavior comes from. It also sets up a new goalpost for Kirito, in that we the audience want his development and heroics to be acknowledged and hope his sister will come to see him in a better light. It also gives Suguha a number of directions to grow and develop in her own right, hopefully to mature like her brother did the first season. It also eliminates one of the squicky elements of this arc, the incest issue. Suguha seems about as far from someone likely to fall for her brother as can be.
    • It does more than that. In canon, even after Suguha tried to push aside her feelings for her brother she still fell in love with Kirito, due to being unaware they were one and the same despite the two acting near identical. Here, Kazuto and Kirito act completely differently. To Suguha, Kazuto is submissive and an easy bully victim, things that Kirito is not at all. Making Leafa falling for Kirito but not knowing its her brother possibly believable while making Suguha falling her brother not just squick to us, but upon learning who Kirito is here, to her as well. And wouldn't you know it, Episode 14 delivers on Suguha squicking out over having the hots for her brother's in-game avatar.
• In the same episode we also meet Asuna's father Shouzou, who is stupid enough to mistake Sugou's name for "Versace" based on the brand name on his briefcase, enough of a sociopath to want to pull the plug on his comatose daughter but just image-conscious enough to restrain himself, yet somehow still a successful businessman who frivolously buys Italian cars and is on a first-name basis with his "Ferrari guy." In other words, he's just as much of an idiot savant in the business world as Asuna became when she found herself in Aincrad, and helps explain why she's so messed-up.
• During Sugou's introductory scene, he amuses himself by tugging on the comatose Asuna's lip to make her "talk" about how much she's looking forward to marrying him. Or you could say he's putting words in her mouth.
• In episode 5 Kirito asks Tiffany to appraise Guilty Thorn. Tiffany tells him that appraising such an item wouldn't be easy before we see him access a menu and sit at a loading circle, to which Kirito remarks, "Wow. I can see you've really mastered your craft," in sarcasm. Later on in episode 7, we see Liz play a mini game (more like mega game) to craft Kirito's new sword as Kirito stands by idly while not seeing the mini game. This reveals that Tiffany was likely playing a mini game to appraise Guilty Thorn, to Kirito's ignorance, and explains Kirito's silence (and possible patience) with Liz later on.
  • And it probably explains why Kirito's level is so high, but he isn't aware of Tif and Liz's perspective: he never bothered leveling a crafting skill.
    • It turns out he actually did level a crafting skill: alchemy. (Albeit illegitimately.)
• In Episode 8, in Kirito's speech, he describes humanity as "selfish, ignorant, loud obnoxious pricks with...no redeeming qualities whatsoever". Kirito arguably fit more or less the same mold back in Episode 1.
• The whole fear of bad Metacritic score might sound like Insane Troll Logic on Kayaba's sleep-deprived mind, but considering what happened to Obsidian Entertainment when Fallout: New Vegas missed Metacritic rating by 1 point...remember that Bethesda is responsible for that and is responsible for publishing SAO in this universe!
• It would make sense that Alfheim is made by Ubisoft. In the realm of laughable bugs, Ubisoft comes after Bethesda]]. This was actually foreshadowed: the telefragged player had his facial features disconnected from his head, which resembled a graphical error in one of the Assassin's Creed games.
• Kazuto's frustration with the swarm of names he had to go through to get into Alfheim (XvX_K1R1T0_XvX_KillMe coming about many, many hours later) could be chalked up to a boatload of players wanting to impersonate the Hero of Aincrad (lots of players of real-life MMOs tend to copy-paste their usernames from real-life fiction, Kirito being among them). However, there's another facet of this: programmers tend to use bots to help test game functions in real-life games, especially MMOs, and Kayaba is confirmed to have a bot of his own via the Twitter post on Kazuto's wall. Who's to say that Sugou didn't rent out Kirito's name to countless bots, especially as a cheap means of jacking it to chopping them down as part of his fantasy of owning Asuna? After all, it's only been six months since SAO players escaped Aincrad ^note and Kazuto tore his dick in half; you can't expect everyone who knows about Kirito to have shaken off the trauma of the Aincrad clusterfuck in six months' time. So which is it? Knowing Something Witty Entertainment, it could very well be both.
  • Or more simply, Sugou ordered the creation of tons of dummy user accounts named after variations of "Kirito" in order to make the latter Rage Quit just in case he tried to play ALO. After all, Kirito was instrumental in forcing Kayaba to manually log-out every player in Sword Art Online. It wouldn't be too unreasonable to expect him to ruin Sugou's plans in ALO if allowed to log into the VRMMORPG — for example, by finding out about Asuna's imprisonment in the game along with Sugou's pending "marriage".
  • Episode 16 reveals that the entire Spriggan race is comprised of Kirito cosplayers, which is why the real one couldn't use his name. Why Spriggan? Because of the similar designs.
• How did Suguha figure out Kazuto's identity in here much, much sooner? Remember, his in-game name is "xVx_K1r1t0_xVx_KillMe", not "Kirito". Him blabbing out his signature namesake without even realising it instead of his actual in-game name gave the idea that she isn't dealing with one of the many "Kirito" impersonators running around but her brother. This also means that the other instances of "Kirito" are more likely to be bots than impersonators, because if Alfheim's been running as long as it has, Suguha would've run into one of them well before the real Kirito showed up.
  • Also, how did Sugou not figure that Kirito would eventually register to get into the game? Simple, Sugou probably figured that Kirito would try to do some variation of his name in both regular text, number and garish. It's the last half of the username, "_KillMe" that he probably never figured that Kirito would have added anything else to his name after the text, numbers and garnish. This is however no longer the case as of Episode 15, with him logging in being noticed by Sugou.
• In Episode 15, despite never meeting Kirito in real life Recon trusts him wholeheartedly while Leafa doesn't trust him at all and believes he's only there to gather blackmail material on her. It showcases their characters' personality perfectly, Recon despite all the bullshit he goes through believes the best in people while Leafa thinks that it's all about her.
• In Episode 1, all swearing occurs normally but behind a bleep until Kayaba disables the profanity filter. In Episode 13, Kirito ends up saying gee willikers instead of his usual swear, unaware of what he said until after he said it. It seems that, even in censorship, Kayaba was trying to cover things up while Sugou was trying to change what people say.
• At the end of Episode 10 after her apparent death/deletion, Kirito uses admin privileges to convert Yui's program into an in-game item and saves it to his NerveGear to hopefully revive her at a later time. Fast forward to Episode 13, where we find out not only was said item the only thing to convert into a usable item in Alfheim (besides Kirito's character stats) and that she was freed, Yui was never in any danger in the first place and had instead been trying to play a trick on her adoptive parents. He finds that Yui's is still alive but had been trapped in limbo for the 6+ months since her "death" which had been meant to only be a joke but Kirito had literally beat her to the punchline. Aside from the sad inability (and not vaguely horrifying implications of not being able) to communicate with the outside world, Kirito's actions most likely actually saved Yui's life. After Kayaba's defeat, the manual unlogging of all SAO players and the system wide purge, there would have been no way to save Yui due to the sudden ending of the game 25 levels early. As an in-game AI program she would have been tied to the system and gone down with it. As a data file saved to Kirito's personal game server, she survived.
  • Even in the source material, had Kirito not had access to an admin terminal at all he never would have been able to do anything to save her in the first place. Hacker skills or not, without direct access to the system programming, Yui would've still been deleted.
  • Yui's joke being explained in Episode 13 also explains exactly why Kayaba locked her on the day of the game's launch. When it comes to her role as a psychiatrist, she's apparently as badly programmed as everything else in SAO.
• The reason so many people have difficulty with the menu system is likely due to Keita kidnapping the tutorial NPC.
• Why can Kirito use Asuna's sword after she dies, even though player inventory is lost upon death? Because married players share an inventory.
• While undeniably awesome, Asuna's thrashing of Sugou's guards actually has some basis in common sense. In case you forgot, Sugou and Shouzou Yuuki bought the SAO servers to save the players for the sake of PR (and Sugou's plans) and built ALO using SAO's remnants, either directly through purchasing the source code from Bethesda, or indirectly through other means. Likewise, keep in mind that Kirito's stats transferred over even if almost all of his inventory didn't; who's to say other players didn't benefit in a similar fashion? Like Sugou's caged birdie? And for this same reason, Col to brain cells suggests that once Kirito accesses Kayaba's credentials in the endgame, that will include Kayaba's admin console, which will allow him to disable any admin perks Sugou will undoubtedly selfishly impart upon himself to shut down any potential threat to his being.
  • Speaking of Asuna, if she was so utterly rebellious against Sugou, why didn't she use her SAO stats to punch his face in then and there? Asuna's spiteful, but she's not stupid; remember that not only did Kirito lose to Kayaba in Episode 9, but his initial backstab attempt was thwarted by an "Immortal Object" effect Kayaba was under thanks to his admin console. Someone who was at the key events of the Aincrad clusterfuck would know that if Sugou had an admin console of his own, he would obviously give himself similar benefits to ensure nobody posed a threat to him. The best she can hope for without such access would be to sabotage his plans by any means necessary. Apparently Intelligence and Wisdom are Oberon's dump stats, or he'd have seen that coming.
  • Now that Asuna knows Sugou's true plan to use SAO's source code to set the stone to Take Over the World, and she would be his first test subject, Asuna is now doing whatever she can to disrupt Sugou's plan from taking off at all, even if it means traumatizing his guards and scientists so much they stop coming to work. The threats to his well being that she imparts upon him are merely smoke to cover up the scheme at large.
• In Episode 8, Kirito and Asuna eat the best food in the game. This food tastes so good that anything they eat afterwards, in the real world or otherwise, tastes terrible by comparison. In Episode 14, there is a call-back when Kirito sits down in a cafe to eat some of the food and says "Yup, takes like shirt."
• In Episode 11, everyone attributes Asuna's "I know" response to Kirito's "I love you, Asuna" as a reference to The Empire Strikes Back. However, this might not be the case. Back in Episode 8, Kirito declared his love to her after she told him she had sandwiches, to which he brushed off by saying "never mind, give it here!" So, she literally knew that Kirito loved her as far back as Episode 8.
• The opening to the second season has some meaningful lyrics. As this is the first season to focus on the real world (since the first was contained entirely inside SAO), this means that not only will Kirito live a real life, but know people "outside machines". It's also something that the arc focuses on: can Kirito live a real life with his wife Asuna between Sugou the devil and the digital sea of Alfheim?
• To compare, the first season's opening presents the world of Sword Art Online as a grand adventure, in spite of just how deadly the world truly is. At the same time, the song's title is "This is War", and it really is a war against the game as the characters struggle to break out of it. The last bit is how the lyric of "we will fight to the death" brings to mind the final battle between Kirito and Kayaba.
• It's rather odd how genuinely kind Kirito is to Recon, considering just how much ammunition he's got to work with. While you could just chalk this up to how far Kirito has come as a character, it might be deeper than that. When was the last time Kirito encountered anyone even remotely as pure as Recon? Silica. And considering how their little adventure ended, it's likely that Kirito has come to regret how poorly he treated her. So it makes sense that he doesn’t want to repeat his mistakes and push Recon too far.
  • Additonally, one of the things that poor Recon has to deal with is, since he uses a Nervegear bought from the family of a dead SAO player, rather than a newer Amusphere, he occasionally has moments where his machine glitches out and shows him his deepest fears. Who else did Kirito once know who had faulty equipment, low self-esteem, a kind personality, and a deep attachment to even after death? Sachi.
• When it comes to Episode 11 of the first season, of course the sword that would break during the big fight would be the one forged by Lisbeth. Not only was it literally a piece of shit (dragon shit in this case), her "best sword" in Episode 7 also broke with minimum effort when Kirito decided to test drive it.
• When Kirito calls himself "Viscount of the Spriggan Ziggurat", it was based on his knowledge of MMO starting zones as he spawns in after character creation falling over a Ziggurat.
• Yui faking her deletion in Episode 10 as revealed in Episode 13 makes significant sense as she's directly tied to the Cardinal AI for psychological purposes, and as Kayaba's mess with the bugs is the whole reason behind the death game, he might have programmed any essential AI to be critical to the game to prevent further deaths, thus negating Yui's deletion.
• At the climax of Aincrad arc, Kayaba accepting Kirito's terms at the 75th boss room instead of the intended 100th floor makes a lot more sense here. Not only is Kayaba's cover blown like in the original, the room exit is glitched and made inaccessible. There is literally no other way to advance!
• Episode 16 features a high-intensity duel between Kirito and Eugene, set to a suitably frantic song. But in that fight, Kirito learns not just the truth of the Spriggan genocide, but why he had to try so many variations to get his name. Moreover, Eugene realizes that he is in fact the real Kirito, and not some imitator. The name of the song playing? "That Person's Name is..."
• When visiting Tiff's real life establishment, Kirito has an absolutely terrible reaction to the awful drink that he serves him. To the point he's violently vomiting badly enough to short out a jukebox mere seconds after drinking the whole thing. It's probably because of the rabbit. Asuna has said plainly that the S class food made by a maxed out cooking skill is good enough to make any food, real or virtual, taste like absolute crap by comparison. And we saw that, to Kirito, food in the virtual world still "tastes like shirt". So if even really good food tastes awful after eating the rabbit dish, that must mean that bad food, like that drink, must taste unbearably disgusting.
• As it turns out, Yui has a hint of her creator somewhere in her programming. When Kirito and Asuna ask why Yui inserted herself into their lives like she did, part of her explanation is that she "wanted to know what love is, [she] wanted them to show [her]". While this may just seem like a slightly stilted set-up to a joke about Asuna being unintentionally racist, because it was a Foreigner reference, it makes more sense when you remember that the creator of the game that Yui was programmed for is constantly calling back to old movies. It would make sense if she's got a running knowledge about his taste in older music, too!
• For all of Yui's flaws, episodes 15 and 16 really go a ways in reminding us that she was programmed as a psychologist AI. Episode 15 has her use this in a far more... unsettling way. In that she uses her knowledge to punish Leafa/Suguha for threatening to harm Kirito by temporarily removing her face but leaving her consciousness alone while the audience can still hear her muffled screams of abject terror. But come episode 16, she begins using her powers for far more constructive purposes than emotionally and psychologically scarring the girl. Yui analyzes the faults in her and Kirito's relationship, encourages her to take the first steps in repairing and creating a healthier bond as she is the one with the power to do so, and gives her more gentle and emotional nudges to make the right decisions under her own power.
• The creation of the Heathcliff avatar is actually further proof of Kayaba's inability to handle stress. If Kayaba actually followed through with his plan to save everyone, his heroism would just be attributed to Heathcliff, not Kayaba himself. Even if Kayaba planned to reveal himself, nobody would recognize him as Kirito was the only one who knew who he was and it's not like anyone was going to forgive him any time soon for imprisoning everyone and causing the deaths of over 2000 players.
• The "Sword Arts" that were occasionally mentioned in the anime (and elaborated upon in the book) being even less remarked on here makes sense when you take into account how slapdash the game was on release.
• In light of the reveal in episode 17, Suguha's duel with Kirito at the beginning of season 2 wasn't just her working her resentment out and acting like a bully, but was likely a twisted attempt to reforge her relationship with the brother she once saw as her best friend.
  • It is also very likely she was inflicting on Kirito the very same kinds of beatdowns her grandfather did to her.
• Episode 17 reveals that Shoji, the primary target of Asuna's torments when she escapes, is actually a fairly terrible person, regularly stealing a disabled co-worker's medical yogurt simply because he likes the taste. Given how talkative he is with Kyle, it's likely Asuna overheard him complaining about his life and unintentionally exposing how awful he is, which is probably why she finds tormenting him fun. It also explains how she knows about his dog.
• Kirito offhandedly mentioned that he has asthma in his self-targetting "Reason You Suck" Speech. It's possible that his mother encouraged him to get into computers over kendo for his safety.
  • It also explains why people claiming that Kiritos' voice sounds like a girl is a serious Berserk Button for him, he doesn't like being constantly reminded of the fact he has asthma and as such cannot lead a normal life.
• When we first see Suguha playing as Leafa in SAO in episode 13, she's surrounded by a group of men with whom she's apparently roleplaying a scene of sexual predation where she's meant to be the fairy princess who's about to be assaulted by all of them (as much as can be allowed in the game). Unusually for Suguha's characterization up to this point, she's apparently roleplaying the role of the damsel in distress completely willingly (she's just not doing a good job of it). By episode 17, though, we come to learn that a part of Suguha's trauma from the training from hell from her grandfather is that she strongly rejects her own femininity and anything to do with weakness. Considering how dominant she is with Nagata, with whom she has an actual sexual relationship of some sort in the real world, allowing herself to be placed into a submissive victim role in a completely fictional context may be some sort of outlet or coping mechanism for her to explore a feeling of vulnerability without anything of real world consequence happening to her and where no one involved would know who she really is.
• In Episode 5, Kirito asks Tiff to "check out this weapon before Asuna starts a full on race war." In Episode 14, we learn the race to the top of the World Tree is called #Race War. The reason the top of the World Tree is inaccessible is because Asuna is being held prisoner there, and is the reason the game exists as it is to begin with. So in a manner of speaking, she did start a full-on race war as Kirito had once feared, just not exactly as expected.
• Although Kayaba has an immortal status in the game, he's still shown to be fearful in the fight against the final boss. While you could make the argument that Kayaba is simply a deceitful coward who's only confident behind a computer screen, you could also interpret his fearful reaction as him doubting the game's programming. SAO is riddled with glitches and he might have got the idea that his immortal status won't protect him as the boss might kill him through a glitch despite his immortal object status.

Fridge Horror

• In Episode 3, Keita reveals that every guild member he has except for Sachi is an NPC he conscripted by never finishing the quests connected to them; this includes the Non Player Characters that supervise the tutorial. In Episode 11, one of the players complains about the tutorial NPC going missing, and Kayaba is particularly irate about how a couple thousand players died, in incredibly stupid fashion, in the first months alone. How much worse would Keita feel if he lived long enough to learn this fact and realize his exploitation of the system led to all those deaths?
• Kirito temporarily regressed into a sociopath after he failed to revive Sachi, eager to bait innocent people and kill indiscriminately until Silica influenced him out of it, as well as being haunted by it throughout the first arc. What is going to happen to him after Eugeo's death in Alicization?
• In Episode 6, Kirito expresses a keen amount of disgust at Grimlock for killing his Wife for not staying in the kitchen and Episode 10 shows him being a Papa Wolf about Yui. Episode 4 shows Kirito being full on willing to commit murder for pushing three relatively minor buttons. What's he going to be like once the climax of Alfheim and Alicization rolls around...?
• In Episode 11, Kayaba kills a player for (rightly) calling him out. With a push of a button. Given that he hates humanity as much as if not more so than Kirito, AND he's a Psychopathic Manchild, AND he has the entire game population hostage, he could have killed everyone instantly if just the right (wrong?) buttons were pressed.
  • To be fair Kayaba's whole intention on keeping everyone trapped was a poorly conceived method of a heavily sleep-deprived past idea on how to stopgap things until he could solve them and keep the players hostage. His whole reason for interacting with the players in-game at all was to try and save at least some of them after so many killed themselves from sheer idiocy only a month in. He had no desire to kill people en masse, most of his actions at the end were out of frustration and being personally goaded by Kirito. Also, the guy he killed was a mafia member, so he at least gets a free pass on that.
• Some meta-horror from Episode 11, whose twist reveals Bethesda is the publisher of SAO, the feature which kills players in real life is a glitch, and Bethesda (or Zenimax, their sister company that handles their online games) wouldn't give an already-overworked Kayaba a deadline extension to fix the problem. Now, this show is a parody, but given the glitches and bugs Bethesda's games are already notorious for, we can only imagine how bad things would be if those games were somehow lethal.
• Kirito irritates Kayaba into a fight by comparing him to Cartman, imitating the character's voice and mannerisms. In response, Kayaba deadpans that Kirito is "Truly, a voice of a generation". Makes one wonder about Kayaba's opinions on the sort of people of the South Park era that saw Cartman's actions as something to be lauded.
• Everyone seems to think Keita is an Unwitting Instigator of Doom for taking the tutorial NPC. But there's one problem. As Keita flat out says, "it's not a good tutorial." With such brilliant advice such as "To jump, jump!", would the NPC really have helped, or just delayed the inevitable?
  • Considering the sheer stupidity of most SAO players, that tutorial probably could have saved at least hundreds of lives. How many players might have fallen to their death because they were pressing a mental A button to jump instead of actually jumping?
    • Not to mention the Nerve gear is a brand new technology, people can’t -as Klein put it - “ALT F4 this shit” and Considering Asuna’s difficulty with the menus, it’s entirely possible that was included in the tutorial Keita obviously didn’t finish.
• Keita seems to generate a lot of Fridge Horror, doesn't he? Well, perhaps for good reason - that damn hat he wears, from what little we see of it, seems to be impossible to resist. Even for Kirito. All he has to do is put it on and ask, and people jump to it. If he weren't so comically inept, Keita could be SAO's equivalent of Kilgrave.
  • Becomes Ascended Fridge Horror in episode 14 when Sugou explains that unlike Kayaba and Keita, he intends to use the Charisma score granted by the hat in a large-scale Mind Control plot... with Asuna being first in line. Any wonder she bolted at the first opportunity?
• It goes without saying that Kirito absolutely hates his sister Suguha, which isn't really surprising considering she goes out of her way to bully and degrade him in the worst possible ways. She even made fun of his catheter injury and his relationship with Asuna, which are deeply personal issues for Kirito. In episode 13, we get to see just how deep that hatred of his runs. When he sees her choking, he's literally giddy with excitement at the thought of her dying and although he still saves her (not that she expresses any gratitude), it's clear that he regretted that choice. Kirito despises Suguha so much that he was willing to let her die and even celebrate it. The fact that his relationship with his sister is so poor that Kirito has gone so far to genuinely fantasize about her dying is a major red flag. With all the abuse she heaps on him, it might only be a matter of time before Kirito decides he's had enough and go down a darker path.
• In episode 8, when Asuna knocks Kirito into the pillar, the game pops up a notice of a new distance record. Asuna knocked him away for accidentally groping her. Is this her first score for doing this or is Kirito just the guy she sent farthest considering that she caught her bodyguard breaking into her house? Keep in mind Asuna would be 15-16 at this time.
  • Rather anti-climactic explanation, but it could be just a location high score list as well.
• Despite being a children's edutainment game with a profanity filter that keeps kids from feeling pain, players are apparently able to have sex in Alfheim Online. It seems nonsensical for the developers to even make a mechanic for that....until you remember that Sugou created it, and probably put it in so he could have sex with Asuna. Just when you thought he couldn't get more disgusting.
  • On the other hand, Alfheim is explicitly built with the code of SAO, which definitely had a sex mechanic. So it is just as likely that someone just forgot to patch it out. Then again, maybe Sugou didn't patch it out for this reason.
    • The episode 15 teaser implies that the interaction was done in the real world instead of in the game, with Suguha and Nagata meeting up at school. The former tells the latter to go to the janitor's closet after she finishes her kendo practice, stating she has another "quest" for him.
    • This is confirmed by Word of God in the episodes “Post-Mortem” video.
• Oberon makes an offhand comment about paying for his goons' therapy bills and his guards are clearly terrified of Asuna. Exactly what did she do to them?
  • Terrifying them every day they work to perfect Sugou's More than Mind Control research?
  • The ending of Episode 15 gives us the sounds of one such attack. It involves a lot of biting sound effects. In Episode 16 Asuna describes her plan as "eat employees until they're too scared to work on mind control."
• In episode 10 we see that the entire floor, in the aftermath of Kirito and Heathcliff's fight, has fallen under the control of Fluffles and "The King Of Ashes". In the brief moment we hear what's going on, you hear Fluffles "apparently" declare a desire to see an intruder having something done to them with boiling oil. Bad enough on its own. The kicker though? The area they're in is a safe zone. Meaning that no matter what happens to them, the unfortunate victim cannot die.
• We learn in episode 17 that Suguha's issues with Kirito were their grandfather wanting to train Kirito in kendo, and forcing Suguha to go through Training from Hell under the assumption it would get her to quit. Suguha got through the training, but the emotional scars left her hating Kirito, her own femininity, and the "dumb nerd shit" that took up all of her brother's time. That's bad enough, but remember that Kirito had recently ALMOST DIED thanks to said "stupid nerd shit". She had to deal with him stuck in a coma for two years, not knowing if he'll ever wake up again. And when he finally gets out? Not only is he still playing video games but he also cares more about Asuna, a girl he found inside the death game, than his own sister.
  • And to add insult to injury, he came out with the entire country hailing him as a hero, which in Suguha's eyes, might've been proof that their grandpa was right to prefer Kirito over her.
  • Further damaging the affair, Kazuto admitted to himself while he was stuck on a respawn timer that he has a serious case of asthma, meaning that he couldn't get back into kendo even if he wanted to; this may be why his mother got him into that "stupid nerd shit" to begin with. All that is unsaid and shit, right?
• As for the brutal kendo beating Suguha gives Kirito in Episode 12, it now seems very likely she was doing to him what her grandpa did to her.
• If Kayaba's rant is anything to go by, players were still relying on lethally stupid tactics and suicidal overconfidence to win despite being told they would die in real life. It could imply that some players may have joined after the imprisonment, not realizing the consequences of doing so. Remember, Kayaba only made the announcement once and never again after joining the game to save everyone. In addition to this, if the corrupted blood incident from World of Warcraft is used as a comparison to Sword Art Online, some may have joined the game because they weren't taking the threat seriously (i.e. thinking it was part of a viral marketing campaign). Other players might have joined because they wanted to see what the fuss was about, and there might have been players who joined on purpose to kill other players or for the sake of a challenge.