Sword Art Online / Tropes A to B

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A

• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: In every arc in which he is the main character, Kirito ends up playing for more than fun one way or another:
  • All SAO players are trapped there and can only escape by A) Someone beating the final boss or B) Dying (for real).
  • ALO is just fun for everyone except the 300 players from the previous game trapped there, including Asuna, and a desperate Kirito trying to rescue her.
  • In GGO, Kirito's mission is to discover how people playing a supposedly designed-to-be-safe game are being Killed Off for Real.
  • Even the Caliber side-story is rather serious since Cardinal has drawn on Norse mythology for this quest, and failure results in freaking Ragnarok happening to the world of Alfheim Online. ^note  The system could roll back player data, but not field data, so it would permanently change the world map if they failed
  • The only time this trope isn't in play is in Alicization due to Underworld being a military VR research project rather than a game.
• The Ace: Ignoring his moments of angst, Kirito is usually this, which is rare for a Light Novel protagonist.
• Acquainted in Real Life: Suguha met Kirito as Leafa in ALO while trying to get over her crush on cousin/stepbrother Kazuto, and found herself falling in love with Kirito only to be devastated when she realized Kirito and Kazuto were the same person.
• Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: The series have lots of it:
  • SAO for Sword Art Online.
    • Aincrad for An Incarnating Radius.
    • Some guilds have acronyms they also go by: KoB^note Knights of Blood; DDA^note Divine Dragon Alliance; ALF^note Aincrad Liberation Force; WWFM^note Furinkazan. It derives from first letters of its translation, "Wind, Woods, Fire, Mountain", although no one really calls them by their acronym..
  • ALO for ALfheim Online.
    • OSS for Original Sword Skill.
  • GGO for Gun Gale Online.
    • BoB for Bullet of Bullets.
• Action Survivor: Klein and Furinkazan are this. Though they spend most of their screen time being Overshadowed by Awesome, they are all badasses in their own right; every member of the guild is a SAO Survivor, despite frontlining difficult boss fights such as the Skull Reaper and contending with the Laughing Coffin murder guild.
• Adaptation Distillation: The anime has moments of this, simplifying the scenes of the light novel. For example, "Aria in the Starless Night" cuts out most of the interactions between Kirito, Argo, and Asuna in favor of focusing on the boss fight.
• Adapted Out:
  • The anime adaptation places most Flash Back stories from later volumes back into chronological order, but First Day from volume 8 (and by extension the character of Coper) is skipped entirely.
  • In the light novels, there's an unnamed fourth member of the party consisting of Kirito, Godfrey and Kuradeel. He's killed off even more unceremoniously than Godfrey when Kuradel puts his murder plot into action.
• A Darker Me: Every game out there seems to feature at least one group of players that go around killing other players and stealing their items — even SAO, where death in-game means death in real life. Lampshaded when Kirito remarks that online players act very different from how they would in real life.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Mother's Rosario focuses on Asuna, her personal issues, and her budding friendship with Yuuki.
  • Ronye gets her own spotlight in Moon Cradle despite Kirito playing a more active role than in Mother's Rosario. Tiese is later involved in the second half.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • Near the end of Mother's Rosary, a montage of Yuuki's time with Asuna between when Asuna reconciles with her mother and Yuuki's death is shown.
  • Some bonus features of the Mother's Rosary manga expand on various scenes, from Liz, Leafa and Kirito challenging Yuuki to the other girls trying (emphasis on trying) to make a meal for Asuna and the Sleeping Knights
  • During the light novels for the Alicization arc, we learn exactly what PoH was doing in SAO^note Hired by a crime syndicate to assassinate someone that they couldn't touch in reality, by killing off the target's avatar in-game and thus making said target look like yet another casualty of Kayaba's Death Game., but not how he got into the game in the first place, especially considering the circumstances in which he became a SAO player.^note Said syndicate only found out about their target having dived into SAO AFTER the death game had already kicked off. So even though he was provided with the necessary NervGear and copy of SAO by a third-party, considering when he logged in, how was it even possible? We get an answer in the Sisters' Prayer side-story, covering the story of the Konno twins and one of the Sleeping Knights, Merida. It's here that we find out how PoH managed to log into SAO even when it shouldn't have been possible for him.
  • This is the main purpose of the Progressive light novels. Even in the original LNs, Aincrad was a massively skimmed-over footnote that trimmed out most of the 75 floors to focus on the short stories involving notable events and characters, so Progressive was made to try to go through the entire process and actually explore Aincrad and the involved cast more thoroughly. While it does enact Retroactive Continuity on some details like how Kirito and Asuna really met, the later main series books would go on to reference Progressive where need be, to the point that with Argo's return at the beginning of Unital Ring, you likely wouldn't even remember who the character was without reading up on Progressive or seeing them in the video games.
• Adaptation Explanation Extrication:
  • Some in the anime, loads in the manga. Want to know how Kirito and Asuna met? Or who those people he keeps flashing back to are? Or where the term "beater" originated? Read the novels or watch the anime.
  • In the anime, the eponymous Sword Arts are this. The book goes into detail on how they're activated, their names, and their role in gameplay. The anime just has the characters mention Sword Arts on occasion and never elaborates.
  • In the anime, Suguha's refusal to pursue her cousin/adoptive brother Kazuto seems to be mainly because she knows he doesn't return her feelings and that he's in love with Asuna. While both are true, the light novel also explains that in Japan, relationships between adoptive siblings are taboo, even if relationships between cousins aren't, so Suguha knows that the rest of her family wouldn't approve of her having feelings for Kazuto.
  • The anime adaptation removes a bit of backstory from the Phantom Bullet arc. Apparently, Endou and her lackeys were previously "friends" of Shino's, having taken advantage of her in order to crash at her apartment. When Shino gets fed up and puts her foot down, Endou retaliates by digging up the incident in which Shino shot the man who threatened her mother, informing the school about it, and using Shino's trauma to extort money from her. It also explains a significant part of Sinon's character- she does want friends, but after having her trust abused, she's hesitant to get close to others.
  • The denouement of the Phantom Bullet arc omits a fair amount of the exposition on Death Gun's motives and arrest. One somewhat significant detail that was cut out was one thing all of Death Gun's targets had in common- none of them were purely AGI builds^ExplanationFor example, Xexeed lied and said to put points into AGI, but he invested enough points in STR to use good guns, while Sinon is a sniper with a STR/VIT build. This is one reason why Death Gun didn't seem interested in killing Yamikaze, who mainly focused on AGI..
  • Alicization greatly shortens and simplifies the backstory of Vassago, particularly when it comes to showing how and why he logged into the SAO death game. The anime simply shows him laying down on a couch and logging in◊ which makes little sense as to how he'd still be alive after two years.
  • Alicization as a whole was frankly appalling at how badly it explained how Incarnation works, the very core of the story arc, which led to massive confusion among anime-only viewers when the ability started coming into far more frequent use in the later parts of the storyline. It was so bad one upset fan had to write an entire essay properly explaining it and showing what the anime had failed to do compared to the novels.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: Alicization is guilty of this, perhaps due to its rushed production.
  • In Episode 5, Kikuoka is present at the hospital where Kirito is taken to after he's attacked, and presents Mrs. Kirigaya with the paperwork for his treatment. Then at the end of the episode when Asuna meets him on the Ocean Turtle, he remarks how he's been stuck at sea for over a month. This is because he really was stuck on the Turtle the whole time in the light novel, and never met Mrs. Kirigaya at the hospital.
  • In Episode 6, there's an anime-original scene where Asuna meets with Silica, Liz, Sinon, and Leafa in Alfheim and talks about Project Alicization with them. Which brings up the question of why in the world would the JSDF personnel on the Ocean Turtle ever allow her to disclose information about an extremely classified black project to a bunch of kids over a presumably unsecured connection. Even more questionable is Sinon knowing about the Ocean Turtle and that it's under attack beforehand.
  • The latter half of War of Underworld's anime creates a major plot hole as compared to the light novels. Starting in Episode 39, when Chinese and South Korean players unwittingly enter Underworld, they are easily manipulated by Vassago because he is the only person who can speak Japanese, Mandarin, and Korean. The only person in the good guys who can come close is Siune, who is bilingual in Korean and Japanese. But because the anime uses Translation Convention and makes it so that everyone seemingly speaks and understands Japanese in Underworld, it ends up making the Chinese and South Koreans look really foolish to be blindly following the orders of someone so Obviously Evil. The anime awkwardly attempts to fix this by giving Vassago an Incarnation ability to seemingly speak directly into the minds of his audience, an ability that he never had in the source material, and which further snowballs into another plot hole, as one can ask why doesn't he use this ability on the Japanese players and Underworlders as well.
  • Episode 41 gives us a massive anime-original battle scene with Eiji and Yuuna vs. Vassago. Except the problem is that Eiji uses Incarnation to turn himself into his original "Nautilus" appearance from Aincrad... but he's supposed to be using an Amusphere to dive into Underworld. Incarnation can only be used by a real-world person if he or she is using a Soul Translator to dive. This is on top of the question of just how in the world can Yuuna, an AI, even be in Underworld in the first place. Reki Kawahara attempted to address this on his episodic Twitter commentary: Yuuna was able to be in SAO because she's locked to Eiji's ALO account as a Navigation Pixie, similar to how Pina was able to come into Underworld as part of Silica's account (that was also an anime-original element). And also vaguely insinuated that what Eiji did in the episode was not "true" Incarnation, but was more of the "proto-Incarnation" that we have seen Kirito & Asuna use before in the SAO death game.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Heathcliff appears in chapter 33 of the Progressive manga, which is on the third floor of A Incrad. He is also inspired to create a guild by Lind and Kiabou trying to convince Kirito not to start a guild to rival their newly formed guilds.
• Agitated Item Stomping: When Kirito initially discovers that the Holy Stone of Returning Souls only works within ten seconds, this is his reaction.
• A God Am I:
  • The reason why Akihiko Kayaba created Sword Art Online, with all of its "unique" features, in the first place was so that he could have his own little world where he could play God — a game that just is not the same without power over life and death. This even extended to him blocking the program that was responsible for keeping people sane; many of the suicides, murders, and descents into insanity that could have been prevented with Yui happened because she wasn't able to comfort those people as she was designed to.
  • Alicization: A certain character (Quinella) becomes this when she basically learns all the admin commands for the Underworld in the backstory. In quick order, she assumes supreme control of all of the Human Realms and sets up a bunch of Commandments for all to follow.
  • Alicization: Gabriel's end goal is to take over the Underworld and turn it into his tailor-made lab where he kidnaps people from the real world and physically separates their souls from their bodies so he can manipulate them to how he sees fit.
• A God I Am Not: Alicization — Unlike that certain character (Gabriel) above, when Asuna, Sinon, and Leafa sign on using their superuser accounts as the remaining 3 gods of the Underworld (with all their attributes and powers), they're very quick to point out they're not actually gods, just people. Not everyone believes them.
• A House Divided: The party that Diabel attempted to put together in Episode 2 nearly falls apart due to his friend Kibaou being very mistrustful of beta testers. After they defeat the first floor boss, the hard-earned celebration is cut short by Kibaou, who accuses Kirito of indirectly causing Diabel's death and again calls for a witch hunt of beta testers. Realizing the rift that Kibaou was causing, Kirito deliberately sets himself up as a Token Evil Teammate to focus the players' anger on himself, protecting other beta testers and keeping the disagreement from escalating any further.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Inverted in the Alicization arc. Scientists create a virtual world in which to grow military A.I.s but discover that they've developed into a utopian society where the concept of harming another is unthinkable. But also Played Straight: one of them discovers the world's built-in cheat system and uses it to gain eternal youth and become a despotic Immortal Ruler who will do anything to stay in power, including enacting laws making any actions that threaten to make one gain too much XP — no matter how seemingly innocuous or how slight the violation — punishable by death and enforcing them absolutely (except in reality, the violators are brainwashed and used as minions; the people are only told they will be executed). According to Cardinal, she also ceases to be human in any sense.
• Air Jousting: A large portion of battles in Alfheim Online involves aerial fights where players take to the skies with their fairy wings and clash with blades or magic. Kirito has a particularly dramatic one against General Eugene.
• All Crimes Are Equal: Downplayed by SAO's player cursors; any player who commits a crime gets their cursor turned orange instead of the usual green, regardless if that crime is Player Killing or just transporting a green player to the prison area (including if that green player is just sitting as bait for a guild of orange players). Possibly because of this, SAO players give the nickname "red players" to murderers (it may also originate from the 1997 MMO Ultima Online, where lawful players have a blue tag and minor lawbreaking bestows a grey tag, but serial murderers are identified by their red tag).
• Alternate Continuity:
  • The video games are this, diverging from the main story line with its own events. See this page for more details.
  • Memory Defrag, the mobile phone game, seems to be a hybrid of these. Though the main campaign follows the original SAO anime, up through the GGO arc, the extra stories seem to follow the other games, with Strea, Philia, Rain, Seven, and Yuuki being common characters, and Ordinal Scale also featuring. Both story lines are treated as canon, leading to unusual scenes like Rain and Seven being involved in Ordinal Scale. Special events and character stories also give completely original story lines exclusive to the mobile game, along with occasional original characters. Notably, Yui is a playable character with one event that changed her avatar to being combat capable. There's also an ongoing quest campaign involving Eugeo and Alice being brought into ALO, meeting the SAO gang early, and questing to retrieve the Divine Objects.
  • Integral Factor, an MMORPG mobile game, follows the Aincrad arc, but with one key difference. The story focuses on a customized Player Character rather than Kirito. The event mostly follows the canon plot (with stories adapted from Progressive), but with the Player Character and their friend Koharu being present, leading to some notable differences and the plot diverging at times. There's much more greater detail explored in SAO as a whole, with Time Skips being averted. Over time it further diverges from canon and seems to take after the game continuity with the introductions of Leafa, Yuuki, and Sinon into SAO, but much earlier so that it is its own standalone continuity.
• Always Someone Better:
  • Possibly invoked by Yuuki, the Zekken, who even beats Kirito, at least in single-wielding mode. Justified because Yuuki is the Guild Leader of the "Sleeping Knights", a group of terminally ill people, and specifically is the first user of the MediCuboid, which lets them play for an absurd number of hours, even longer than the SAO players who were trapped for over two years straight inside of a game and are otherwise the most experienced players on the planet.
  • Akihiko Kayaba was the someone better to Sugou, the Big Bad of the Fairy Dance arc, which prompts him to create ALfheim Online and launch his plan.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Downplayed. Two thousand SAO players die in the first month of the game before the front-line fighters cleared the first floor, mostly due to inexperience not only with the game's mechanics but with the concept of actually dying, as three hundred of them were experienced beta testers. Just to rub it in, there's a plinth where the resurrection point in the first town should be, bearing not only the names of the dead but the manner in which they died. By the time the game is cleared, only 6,147 players out of originally 10,000 are left alive. Survivor Guilt is pretty much universal.
• Amusing Injuries: Kirito is often on the receiving end of these:
  • He receives a slap from Leafa in Season 1 Episode 19, when he teasingly chomps on her hand during a conversation on what it was like for him to transformed into a monster using his Illusion spell, and having chomped on several Salamander players attacking them, and Leafa dared to ask what they tasted like^note "Like yakiniku/grilled steak right before it gets burnt". Given the slap appears in the same way recently taken damage does, it was apparently strong enough for Kirito to have taken some HP damage.
  • Kirito receives yet another slap similar to above from Sinon after he reveals his true gender to her in Episode 5 of Season 2. After said slap, the next scene shows a bright red handprint on his cheek as the two walk around the room with the other BoB contestants, although it quickly vanishes afterward.
• Anachronic Order:
  • Volume 1 proceeds more or less chronologically, while Volume 2 consists of sidestories that take place during the 2 years in SAO. Volumes 3 to 7 proceed chronologically, but Volume 8 adds more sidestories that take place in SAO and a week before Volume 7.
  • Volume 22 "Kiss and Fly," despite coming out one volume after the Unital Ring arc began, is a collection of 4 side stories set long before that arc that had previously been released (The Day Before, The Day After, Rainbow Bridge, Sister's Prayer). This is the first time in the franchise's publication history that an arc in progress was interrupted.
  • Averted by the anime, which seems to be doing its best to proceed in a chronological order by animating the SAO sidestories in Volume 2 and Volume 8 before the rest of Volume 1.
• Anachronism Stew: Played with a bit in Gun Gale Online. The game is a Cyberpunk style game set on a Post Apocalyptic Earth, (hinted at a theoretical World War III) where humanity has left the desolated planet behind in giant spaceships. The Hub City is formed from one such Star Battle Cruiser Glocken, and still called SBC Glocken, which for reasons not explained returned to Earth. Players even use Energy weapons regular used for hunting regular NPC mobs. But for Player Versus Player, they often use regular bullet shooting guns, all of which are based on weapons in Real Life guns that at the very least reached "working" prototype stages. And even then the stew thickens some more since the real world guns vary wildly. One player, Lion King Richie, uses a Vickers machine gun which in the real world, has long since stopped being made since the 1960s, after about 50-some years of production. Justified though, as being an FPSMMORPG video game, using real world weapons gives a readily available catalog of weapons to make available to players.
• An Aesop:
  • Never give up on anything that you consider to be worth fighting for.
  • Always own your actions; you cannot compartmentalize who you really are.
  • When people's lives are on the line, speak up, even if they'll hate you for it. Better that than spending the rest of your life knowing, "I could have saved a life that day, but I chose to look the other way."
  • Always honor the memory of those precious to you by being a decent and kind person who reaches out to help others in need, as Asuna does for Yuuki, not to mention Kirito does for both Sachi and Eugeo.
    • Dismissing the memories of anyone, however seemingly inconsequential and unaccomplished, will breed resentment for the loved-ones of those thus neglected. Such is the case of Doctor Shigemura in "Ordinal Scale", who was fully willing to deep-scan (and quite possibly murder) the memories of 5000 SAO survivors to reclaim even a phantom of his daughter Yuna, cruelly forgotten because she was not a frontline warrior.
• Anatomy of the Soul: The Alicization arc goes very deeply into defining what a soul is. Based on SAO's "Quantum Brain Dynamics" theory, there are light particles that act as a quantum unit of mind called "Evanescent Photons", which exist within the microtubules of a nerve cell. These light particles exist in a state of indeterminism and fluctuate according to the probability theory. A collection of these particles form a Quantum Field, which have been dubbed "Fluctuating Lights" (or "Fluctlight" for short) which is what makes up the human consciousness, or in other words, the human soul.
• And I Must Scream:
  • After Kirito cleared SAO, a few hundred players, including Asuna, remained comatose, thanks to the devs behind ALfheim Online intercepting their minds and experimenting on them in order to research mind control. Thankfully, by the time it ended, those who received this treatment, except Asuna, did not remember the incident at all.
  • Yui was created to monitor players' psychological parameters and offer them comfort. After the game began, she was not allowed to interact with the players, so for two whole years, she was forced to just watch as some of them went insane and commited suicide.
  • Vassago Casals/PoH is turned into a tree by Kirito and spends 30 years as such in the accelerated underworld before his brain dies in the real world.
• And the Adventure Continues: Alicization's epilogue has Kirito, Asuna, and Alice getting a call from Rath, logging into UW (which Kirito turned into a futuristic two-planet colony during his 200-year rule), and slaying an overpowered legendary monster with little effort. Oh, and they also met two spaceship pilots, who turned out to be Ronye and Tiese's descendants.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Many quest rewards and drops from monsters are clothing items that can be equipped. The Coat of Midnight^note from Episode 2, adapted from Aria in the Starless Night was awarded after the first floor boss was defeated, and Kirito quickly donned it to embrace his Beater persona.
• Androids Are People, Too: Or at least, the AI characters that exist within the various games, to the point Kirito was unwilling to go with a plan to use a town's NPCs as bait to distract a boss. And a good portion of Alicization's supporting cast consists of AI beings.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: The English dub of Episode 22 has Suguha saying "I love you" towards Kirito (real name: Kazuto Kirigaya, and her brother/cousin, hence: Kirito) before telling him to leave her alone due to not taking well of the revelation that he and Kirito are one and the same person.
• Animation Bump: There's a noticeable step up in animation during episode 13 of the second season during the climax of Kirito and Death Gun's duel, especially right before Kirito slices Death Gun in half.
• Animesque: Usually averted in the main anime, though they do come up in the Sword Art Offline shorts which are a great deal more Denser and Wackier.
• Anti-Hero: Kirito starts off as this, choosing to protect only himself while attempting to complete the game. He changes later.
• Anyone Can Die: Due to the GM making that the new rule, this is in effect, and they're also killed in the real world if their character's HP reaches 0. Even characters that you think are going to be mains because they appear in the opening wind up biting it.
• Apple of Discord: A particular guild (called, appropriately enough, Golden Apple) found a rare item that granted a substantial stat boost to its wearer. Some guild members wanted to sell it for money, while others believed it would be better to keep it for themselves. The decision was put to vote, and the majority agreed it should be sold. The guild leader went off personally to sell it but died mysteriously. Because of suspicions that the murderer was a fellow guild member, the guild fell apart. In a subversion, it was later discovered that the person behind the guild leader's death had a completely unrelated motive and took advantage of the rare item dispute to avoid suspicion.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: As the Phantom Bullet arc is set within an MMOFPS, guns are the primary weapons, with melee limited to general blade options. There's a Laser Blade Joke Item, but it's so expensive that no-one used it until Kirito waltzed into the Minigame Zone and won a shitload of money from a game where the computer blatantly cheats, combined it with his SAO-honed Implausible Fencing Powers and realized the game mechanics permitted him to turn it into a Lethal Joke Weapon by slicing bullets in half. Afterwards, the Kagemitsu explodes in popularity as players try (with limited success) to replicate his feats. Death Gun also carries an actual physical sword concealed in his sniper rifle, an estoc forged from the armor plating of a battleship, which he uses to engage Kirito in a Sword Fight.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • When Asuna's mother gets on her case about spending time with her friends and going to the SAO rehab school rather than putting all of her efforts into studying to get into a prestigious school:
    Asuna: [To her mother] Do you still feel ashamed about your dead parents, resentful that you were born by a farmer rather than a famous house with history?
  • When Sinon asks Kirito how he became strong:
    "If that gun's bullet could kill the real-world player, and if you did not kill, then either you or someone important to you would be killed, would you pull the trigger?"
• Artifact Title: The eponymous game and the struggle to clear it are merely the first story arc of the series. Justified because it was originally written as a one-shot series, being continued later. It's also subverted, as every bad thing that happens afterwards can be blamed on the game's existence, thus making it more of an outright Antagonist Title on kin to a Greater-Scope Villain.
• Artificial Intelligence: Yui looks like a cute little kid, but she's actually an AI created to watch over and take care of the mental health of the players of Sword Art Online called an MHCP...at least, that was her function until the death game started up, upon which her functions were suspended and she could only watch and listen to the players' despair and nearly be driven mad. Thankfully, Kirito and Asuna help her get better.
• Artistic License – Economics: Limiting the number of available copies at release to ten thousand is utterly ludicrous from a financial standpoint. Today even the average single-player game produced by a major developer will aim for much higher numbers to make back their money. Add to that how SAO would be significantly more expensive to develop than any conventional major MMO due to its use of pioneering technology, light estimates ranging from 400 million dollars ^{that is}41 billion yen to 1.7 billion dollars ^{that is}183 billion yen ^note To compare, SAO is a bit more expensive than Grand Theft Auto V, currently the most expensive game ever made (and the most sold as well) at its minimum, and more than six times at its maximum, one has to wonder how on earth any investor on the planet would ever agree to such tiny launch numbers for the game.
• Art Shift:
  • The Light Novels have a more subtle art style compared to the manga, which is Darker and Edgier.
  • The Big Damn Movie, Ordinal Scale, features a much more detailed and solid art style. This style carries over for the Alicization arc.
• An Ass-Kicking Christmas:
  • The Christmas event boss, Nicholas the Renegade, promises copious amounts of treasure, including an item that can revive the dead, to whomever can defeat him. This leads to Kirito taking down Nicholas single-handedly while Fuurinkazan holds off the Divine Dragon Alliance. It's in vain.
  • The fight against the 21st Floor Boss of New Aincrad occurs on Christmas Eve. Kirito and Asuna make sure to take part in it so they can buy their old house on the 22nd Floor before anyone else gets the chance.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Played straight in that great warriors are the ones making up the front-line guilds, and leaders are often picked for their fighting talent. For example, Heathcliff is the leader of the game's most powerful guild and is arguably the game's most powerful swordsman, thanks to his incredible reflexes, his impossible speed, his truly invulnerable shield, and his incredible sword. Of course, he turns out to be Akihiko Kayaba in disguise, so that explains a lot. Averted in that Kirito, a solo player, is also arguably the eponymous game's most powerful swordsman and is not the leader of any group outside his own... until he became the "Star King" of UW following PoH and Gabriel's deaths.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Though Kirito can most certainly play things defensively well enough, it's when he starts to go on the offensive that his opponents had better watch out, especially when he's Dual Wielding, as nothing but either their defeat or his own will stop him.
• Attempted Rape:
  • Sugou comes very close to raping Asuna in the virtual world. In front of Kirito. Afterwards, he plans on raping her in real life while she's comatose.
  • Kyouji tries to rape Shino after the Bullet of Bullets tournament. He did genuinely love her before the Death Gun mess went down, and Shino was even willing to reciprocate once she got over her trauma, but the combination of failing his college entrance exams and being rendered irrelevant in GGO drove him insane, prompting him to form the Death Gun conspiracy. When he comes to congratulate her on winning the Bullet of Bullets Tournament, he expects Shino to make good on her promise, but she's freaked out by his now obvious insanity, so he opts for Plan B: rape Shino and then kill her and himself. Shino manages to escape by struggling and Kirito showing up.
  • Almost happened to Ronye and Teise in Volume 11 when two goons attempt to rape them as "punishment" for defending their friend, only to be stopped by Kirito and Eugeo.
• Attractive Bent-Gender:
  • Kirito's GGO avatar, colloquially known as Kiriko, who numerous males have shown attraction towards, including Klein.
  • Thor disguised as Freya.
• Author Tract: The proper epilogue of the Alicization arc is one for atheism, pro-AI movement, and Creating Life Is Awesome.
• Ax-Crazy: Many a villain are like this.
  • After paralyzing Godfrey and Kirito with a poisoned drink he created, Kuradeel develops that look on his face as he gleefully hacks away first at Godfrey, and then nearly kills Kirito while both were helpless.
  • Kyouji comes pretty close too, when his Evil Plan is about to fail and Shino is helpless.

B

• Backup Bluff: Kirito does one of these in Episode 20 towards the commander of the Salamander army, stating that he's a Spriggan-Undine ambassador, and that attacking him and the Cait-Sith and Sylph meeting would cause four races to declare war on the Salamanders. The commander doesn't buy it but challenges Kirito to a duel anyway. After Kirito defeats him, one of his men tells the commander that he saw Kirito the other day with an Undine. Said man was the guy Kirito spared after he saved Leafa during their first encounter in Episode 17. The Salamander army then leave peacefully.
• Badass Adorable: Asuna, Sinon, and Silica all have their moments. They are very good players who usually will show their adorable sides when they are with Kirito or their friends.
• Backup from Otherworld: In Ordinal Scale, Yuuki's spirit appears alongside Asuna as she executes her Signature Move, Mother's Rosario.
• Badass Crew: Many of the guilds, particularly Knights of Blood Oath and Furinkazan. Later, the Sleeping Knights defeat a boss with only seven members, and each of them are quite skilled.
• Badass Longcoat: Kirito loves wearing longcoats ever since the first one he received as a boss drop. They all reach down to his feet and are always black in color.
• Badass Boast: Sinon delivers a small one in the Episode 1 of SAO II: "1500 meters? That's like tossing a wad of paper in a wastebasket." That range is within the top ten longest confirmed sniper kills.
• Badass Family: Being some of the nicest kids you'd ever meet, it's very easy to forget that the Kirigaya family are NOT people you want to cross, in any world.
  • Asuna and Kirito are two of the front-most frontline warriors from Aincrad; in addition to bringing that skill with them to both ALO and GGO, two years of full-dive means they are the epitome of Weak, but Skilled in the real world.
  • Their adoptive daughter Yui is mostly a non-combatant since the end of SAO, but as an AI, she is an effortless hacker who is capable of investigating security feeds in the span of minutes and breaking into government databases. She is Mission Control incarnate.
  • Kirito's cousin/stepsister Leafa is not only more then capable of keeping up with the rest of the family in VR, but is Strong and Skilled in the real world, being a quarter-finalist in the middle school kendo nationals and with no extended full-dive to sap at her muscles.
  • Finally, Asuna's surrogate sister Yuuki is described by Kirito as "a product of the full-dive environment". She is hands down the World's Best Warrior in VR - any VR world, no matter how unfamiliar she might be with it - and is the only one Kirito has never been able to beat, despite suffering from the final stages of terminal AIDS.
• Badass in Distress: In episode 10, Kirito is betrayed and poisoned by a rogue guild member intent on murdering him, but Asuna is able to save him just before his HP runs out.
• Bad Santa: "Nicholas the Renegade" is a special event boss monster who can only be fought on Christmas Eve.
• Bag of Spilling: After Kirito converts his SAO character to ALO, he discovers that his SAO equipment isn't compatible and has to discard all of it. It's almost a moot point since he retains his absurdly high stats, and with ALO being a level-less game, he can still defeat most players with just his starter/store-bought equipment. He also gets to keep all the money he made in SAO, which becomes a plot point later on.
• Bait-and-Switch Gunshot: SAO II episode 9 ends with a Smash to Black and a gunshot. Episode 10 reveals what happened.
• Bare-Fisted Monk:
  • The American GGO player who won the game's first BoB tournament goes on to win the fourth tournament using this as his build; his main tactic is to use CQC to beat-down opposing players, steal their guns and use them against other players. Kirito suspects he may be an actual Special Forces soldier in real life.
  • Although it's rarely shown in action, Kirito's Unarmed skill is almost completely maxed out.
• Barefoot Captives: When Asuna is held captive by Sugou in a cage, he dresses her in a very provocative outfit which includes no footwear.
• Bat Deduction: When hiding out in the cave with Sinon during the BOB tournament, Kirito uses the time to logically break down Death Gun's methods and what that means for the players in the tournament. Kirito spends about ten minutes jumping to conclusions before invalidating the whole discussion by pointing out how many assumptions he has made.
• Battle Couple: Whenever Kirito and Asuna take to the field together, this is the result. Also, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, Thinker and Yuriel in ALO.
• Battle Royale Game: "Unital Ring" is this, combined with Survival Sandbox.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Justified within the game worlds, where characters of both genders recover from injuries up to and including dismemberment as their HP regenerates. Subverted in reality, where Kirito reawakens from two years in VR as an emaciated, atrophied husk, and only gets better after months of physical therapy. However, played straight in reality with Asuna, who looks ready to spring straight out of bed and into a fashion shoot in the same circumstances. The only nod to anything being wrong when she wakes up is mentioning her hearing still being shot and later that she has trouble walking. The novel averts this, noting that Asuna went through a grueling regimen of physical therapy just to get to the point where she could attend school.
  • The latter is justified by Asuna's family being rich enough to buy Argus, the company that produced SAO and the NERVgear. After that, the physical therapy necessary to keep her body from atrophying would be a drop in the bucket.
• Behemoth Battle: The climax of the Caliber arc has the NPC Freyja reclaim Mjolnir and reveal herself to be the Norse god Thor in disguise and promptly engage Thrym, the humanoid giant boss Kirito's party was fighting. Both the NPC and the boss are about fifteen meters tall, and Thor gets to land the killing blow on Thrym.
  • Jotunheim's world-scattered elephantic-jellyfish-versus-humanoid demon fights qualify too, seeing as players hardly come up to the latter's ankles.
• Berserk Button: Kirito gets seriously pissed off when ANYONE tries to keep him from Asuna. He gets upset when high-level players abuse their experience to troll lower-level players, but he gets downright murderous when people mess with his girl, a great example being the look on his face and the way he acts inside the World Tree. If the guardians could feel fear, they'd be shitting themselves.
  • Similarly, Asuna doesn't take kindly to people abusing their power and position in Aincrad, whether it's Kuradeel creeping outside her house early in the morning, or the Army in the Town of Beginnings. And the look she gives one character, Kuradeel, after his attempted murder of another, Kirito, is enough to shatter ice.
• BFS:
  • Occurs only briefly, but when Yui decides to fight, she summons a flaming sword more than twice as long as she is tall.
  • Kirito's has one in ALO as the first sword he purchased. It's pretty shoddy gear, but in Kirito's hands it is able to take on Legendary Weapons like Eugene's Demon Gram Sword or Sugou's Excalibur.
• Big Bad Ensemble:
  • In the Aincrad arc, aside from Kayaba who was the Big Bad, the Laughing Coffin provided the most trouble in the arc due to their Player Killing. It eventually got to the point where their kill count climbed into the triple digits, which led the Knights of the Blood Oath and other Assault Team members to set aside floor clearing and deal with them.
  • In the Fairy Dance arc, Sugou is the Arc Villain but for the most he's an Orcus on His Throne who doesn't act until Kirito is at his front door. For the majority of the arc it's the Salamanders who stir up trouble for Kirito and Leafa where the two are forced to battle them on several occasions. Especially General Eugene who led an ambush on the Sylphs and Cait-Sith alliance, forcing Kirito to take a detour in rescuing Asuna and deal with them first.
• Big Brother Instinct: It's mostly what drove Kirito to help Silica, who reminds him of his sister, and Leafa, who IS his sister... well, cousin, but raised as brother and sister.
• Big Damn Heroes: These happen from time to time and usually tend to be quite awesome.
  • In Volume 1, Asuna arrives on the scene as Kuradeel is about to kill Kirito, and schools him completely. In five minutes, she covered a distance that took Kirito's party one hour to travel. See Power of Love below.
  • In the climax of Volume 4, Kirito faces Oberon and gets thoroughly beaten, thanks to the latter's abuse of GM powers to give himself an Infinity +1 Sword and invulnerability. Then, Kayaba's ghost speaks to Kirito and inspires him to find a way to give himself greater GM powers and turn the tables on Oberon.
  • And on any occasion where Kirito pulls this off by himself or with his buddies. A great example is found in Volume 7, where he and Klein face off against a guild that's fifty members strong. By the time the guild defeats them, their numbers are depleted, and the duo have bought Asuna and the Sleeping Knights enough time to win.
  • Kirito pulls off an epic one when he's forced to save Asuna, Furinkazan, and the remaining party members of the Aincrad Defense Force from the level 74 boss and pretty much goes toe to toe with it, trading hits with the boss, and using his unique skill of dual wielding in order to beat it. And he defeats it with just a tiny fraction of his health remaining.
• Big "NO!": The robot cowboy in Episode 4 of Season 2 does one after Kirito manages to make it to the end and win the jackpot.
• Bilingual Bonus: Invoked in-universe. In the Phantom Bullet arc, Kirito, in searching for Death Gun, has narrowed the list of competitors in the Bullet of Bullets tournament to three possibilities, based on Sinon not recognizing their character names. Eventually, two are eliminated as suspects. The remaining one's character name is "Sterben," a German word that Asada describes as "a hospital word for death." This tips off Kirito that Kyouji, whom Sinon has mentioned is a doctor's kid, is suspicious.
  • Also inverted since in German itself, "sterben" is just an ordinary word with no particular association with hospitals. The association only exists in Japan because Japanese doctors used to sometimes use German so that the patients wouldn't understand.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • The Aincrad arc, considering the heavy losses sustained in the course of clearing the game. It's doubtful any of the survivors didn't lose any friends.
  • Red-Nosed Reindeer initially seems like a straight up Downer Ending after the deaths of the Black Cats, but on closer examination, it's this. While Kirito is nearly broken by the loss of everyone in the guild, the light novel indicates that listening to Sachi's recorded message prevented him from becoming a Death Seeker.
  • The Mother's Rosary arc. Yuuki dies, but after succeeding in her goal of getting her and her friends' names on the Monument of Swordsmen (twice, in fact) and leaving a permanent impression on ALO. Her friends in the Sleeping Knights are doing relatively well, with Siune^note Two people were expected to die that spring. Yuuki is the first and Siune is implied to be the other being able to recover and leave the hospital. Asuna reconciles with her mother, and manages to stay at the SAO Survivors' School.
  • Alicization. Alice ultimately managed to be retrieved by RATH to safety and Kirito managed to beat both Po H and Gabriel as well. Yet, not only many artificial fluctlight is dead, Kirito is trapped with Asuna for 200 years inside Underworld and when he finally log out many of their friends inside said server had passed away. He also had to lost Eugeo as well, which will forever haunt him and Kirito never stop grieving for him.
• Black Swords Are Better: One of Kirito's swords in SAO, Elucidator, is pitch black. His main sword in ALO is also black. He also receives a black sword in Underworld, which took a full year to craft by a master swordsmith and its "priority" rating (read: weapon strength) is actually one higher than Eugeo's Blue Rose sword.
• Bladder of Steel: In "Unital Ring" logging out will make the player stay in one place before logging in back.
• Bland-Name Product: The 9-Up advertisement in Agil's bar for 7-Up.
  • The first episode of Season 2 has an "iGlass" presentation given by someone who looks halfway between Steve Jobs and Larry Brin.
  • Ordinal Scale features a WcDonalds.
• Blatant Lies: Endou has an almost hilariously flimsy pretext for asking for money from Shino, saying that they did karaoke for too long (20 minutes after school let out), and don't have enough money for the train (they have cards), so they need 10,000 yen (Roughly $100). Shino sees through it, but it doesn't do her much good.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Unlike previous VR environments, Alicization's Underworld averts Bloodless Carnage and the lack of pain meaning losing health and getting injured becomes a more dangerous affair as Kirito learns in a fight with Goblins in Volume 9 when he is injured resulting in a bleeding gouge causing him tremendous physical pain.
• Bloodless Carnage: It's a game; of course it's bloodless. Averted when it comes to real-world fights like the one outside the hospital. Also averted in the VR environment, Underworld.
  • The anime manages to get away with gore under a technicality because of this trope. The Phantom Bullet adaptation for one gets away with digital amputation, digital shotguns fired point blank into a player's face, and even a player's model getting realistically torn in half from a .50 caliber round and letting us see his 'legs fly into the distance! But hey, there's no blood and it's only a game, so it's okay!
• Blood Knight: Kayaba must have figured some of the players were, because there's no other reason for a bonus dungeon to exist in a death game.
• Bloody Hilarious: How this show portrays the dismemberment of rapists; Sugou, Humbert and Raios all fall into pieces the second Kirito (and Eugeo) removes their filthy arms, crying and screeching like little girls as their macho-facade disintegrates in a hysterical crimson fountain. Made even more hilarious in Raios' case as having lost both his arms, he leaps like a spastic-frog to Humbert to beg for the same life-force he refused to give him earlier. Hop to, Stumpy! Shake a leg!
• Bodyguard Crush: Deconstructed with Kuradeel, one of Asuna's bodyguards in SAO. Not only is he almost twice her age, he uses his responsibility for Asuna's safety as an excuse to stalk her and try to control where she goes and who she talks to. Asuna is completely creeped out by him and ditches him at every possible opportunity. In the end, he proves to be a far greater danger to her than anything he tries to "protect" her from.
• Body Horror: A chilling example close to the end of Alicization: When Kirito's Angst Coma reaches its worst moment, he starts to remember all the death that he has been witnessing AND commiting ever since the original SAO incident. Due to his Fluchlight being so damaged, Kirito can't take the trauma, guilt, and even shame anymore, and tries to commit suicide... by opening his chest wide open with his bare hands so he can reach and squeeze his own heart to death. And the audience gets to see (and hear. The sound effects are particularly horrifying) everything until Eugeo's memory finally stops him from consuming the act.
• Bonus Dungeon: Two have been featured in the anime.
  • In Aincrad, one appears beneath the Black Iron Castle on the 1st floor after some of the higher floors are cleared. It features its very own Superboss, the Fatal Scythe, which is far stronger than anything else seen in the game to that point, estimated by Kirito to have the abilities of a boss monster from the ninetieth level, a full fifteen levels above where they actually end up reaching before the game is cleared. Fortunately enough, Kirito and Asuna end up skipping it due to Yui's intervention.
  • Another one appears in Extra Edition in an underwater temple located within the southern Sylph area. Kirito and company don't know it is one until they meet an old NPC who gives them a quest to retrieve an item within the dungeon. Fittingly enough, as soon as they obtain it, the dungeon's Superboss the old man NPC, Nerakk, a.k.a. Kraken the Abyss Lord appears to take it. Though he does give the party a serious beatdown, he is interrupted by yet another Superboss, Leviathan the Sea King.
• Book Ends: Second episode of the anime, Kirito gives Asuna some cream to eat on the plain roll. She can't stop herself from gobbling it down. At the end of the fourth Light Novel (or first anime season/second anime arc) when they finally make it back to the real world, Asuna specializes in making food... that tastes nostalgically like Aincrad-food.
  • At the end of the first anime season, Kirito uses the World Seed to rebuild Aincrad and add it to ALO. He and both his SAO and ALO friends then resolve to finish what they started and clear all 100 floors. He even resets his stats so he can level them up all over again.
• Boom, Headshot!: In season 2 episode 9, Dyne gets a wall of buckshot to the face courtesy of Pale Rider during the BoB tournament.
• Both Sides Have a Point: In the Mother's Rosary arc, Kyouko is right that a good education is important, and the SAO Survivors' School is little more than a way for the government to monitor the survivors. On Asuna's side, she's correct that she has her own vision for the future and is content with attending the school. In the end, Kyouko lets Asuna stay at the school as long as she keeps her grades up.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • How Death Gun managed to get his L 115 A 3 suppressed sniper rifle, as opposed to Sinon, who was really lucky.
  • Also at the Alicization Arc, Kirito's opponent bribed the guard in charge of weapons to give him a better sword. Not that it helped.
• Breakable Weapons: Explained in Volume 2. When Kirito finds a blacksmith girl named Lizbeth and needs a new sword to practice on, he is given one, but when he tests it out, it breaks easily, so they go on a quest to slay a snow dragon to get the metal needed to forge a new weapon. This doubles as a Funny Moment because of the look on Lisbeth's face when Kirito effortlessly shatters what she considered her finest work at the time.
  • All weapons in SAO, ALO, and GGO require regular maintenance. Lizbeth has a deal with Kirito and Asuna where she'll maintain their weapons for free in exchange for them endorsing and using her gear, which rivals ultra-rare quest items.
• Break the Haughty:
  • Silica goes through this prior to her first meeting with Kirito. After leaving her party in a fit of pique, she gets lost, uses up all her healing items, and then her familiar Pina dies saving her. Pina gets better with some help from Kirito.
  • Raios and Humbert are two nobles who look down on virtually everyone else, especially Eugeo and Kirito. When they push their luck too far and try to rape Ronie and Teise, this results in Eugeo cutting off one of Raios' arms and Kirito cutting off both of Raios' hands. Raios is reduced to a gibbering wreck who, caught between preserving his own life and not harming Humbert's, dies from his Fluctlight collapsing, while Humbert flees.
• Breather Episode: In Episode 10, Kirito is lured into a trap, tortured, and nearly murdered by a guild mate, but Asuna shows up to save him at the last moment. They're both very shaken up, finally admit the extent of their feelings for each other, spend the night together, and decide to get married. In Episode 11, after a near-death experience, Kirito and Asuna take a break from frontline fighting and go on a vacation to the lower levels.
  • The second season's three-episode take on the Caliber arc is this; taking place after the Death Gun case is resolved, it's just about Kirito and his friends going on a quest in ALO for a powerful sword during the holidays. No murders, mysteries, or any real danger to be had save that if they fail, it kickstarts Ragnarok for the game, but even then, no one will be in any actual danger. Even the opening for the arc plays up the 'game' aspects of the game world to show that time, they're playing it as a game.
• Bulletproof Human Shield: In the Bullet of Bullets and Squad Jam modes of Gun Gale Online, corpses of dead players remain on the field for 10 minutes after death^note This is the amount of time that the "dead" player sequestered in a special waiting area before dumped back into the lobby., during which time their bodies are tagged as immortal objects. This of course has led to rather creative uses of indestructible corpses.

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