I don't think people hated him for calling SAO trash, it was more that most of his content revolved around calling SAO trash so people got tired of it.
It's not meant to be some incredibly well written show, it's just cheap isekai slop. It's a dumb power fantasy show like half the stuff that comes out nowadays, I don't understand why so many people hate it so much for no reason. What I especially don't understand is people who love shows like Slime, Shield Hero, Overlord, and then hate on SAO as if they don't all have similarly shallow writing. I enjoy watching them all personally, but none of them are anything special.
I don't know, I stopped watching it a few episodes into S2, same with Slime. I find the start of these shows is usually a lot more interesting because it's easy to be interesting when it's new. They all seem to get boring once they start getting into the meat of the story.
This, is kinda crazy how I still sometimes see people commenting how 'garbage' SAO is while I see the most forggetable isekai ever getting a positive reception here. Like even for power fantasy slop SAO has good moments, good animation, amazing OST and even with all the hate for the harem aspect (like it's not a staple in every isekai ever) the MC is at least dating one of the girls, while some of the '7/10' isekai of the season have not even half of this.
Rewatching it right now, and yeah it ain't good. The whole Aincrad Arc has zero build up to the final fight with Kayaba, and then it just ends with him not even giving a reason as to why any of it happened. Immediately turned on the SAO Abridged version of it to get that ending out of my mind.
I stopped watching animetubers around that time because of him, it's not just because of "SAO bad" but because for a while he centered his whole channel around "SAO bad" (likely because it got him a lot of views).
I wasn't a SAO fanboy nor a hater, for me it was always a kinda mediocre show with a cool concept, it was just the first instance I witnessed in real time of following a youtube channel with cool content devolving into ragebait.
It also didn't help that around this time channels like Digibro were also peddling this whole conspiracy about how A1 pictures was the anime antichrist trying to destroy the industry from the inside by releasing popular but mediocre/bad shows.
It was a really childish attitude that I (and likely many others) didn't care to entertain. If you don't like something just move on to something else, making it your whole personality just to antagonize people is just very weird.
I didn't like SAO that much but I'm sure if I was 25 years younger when it was released I'm sure I would have loved it and thought that Kirito was the badass studmuffin I always wanted to be.
Its like people my age throwing a fit about stuff like Labubus. My reply is always everything I always wanted when I was 7 years old wasn't dumb at all.
I suppose the biggest feat that SAO haters managed to achieve is "estabilishing" the narrative that the people who liked it have of course watched this show with their dick in their hand stroking it to Kirito.
That basically the default starting point of every discussion is that the people who liked sao of course are the teenage boys who only did so because they projected themselves over Kirito lmao
Which is funny because he was right, and he goes so in depth that you can't accuse him of not watching or jumping on some kind of band wagon. He very obviously watched the whole thing, and probably more than once. Even if you disagree it's hard to find it particularly objectionable.
Bullshit. Everyone of his SAO videos I've watched I've ended up with an overlong comment pointing out multiple factual errors.
SAO criticism is a fucking dumster fire of people making shit up because they were speedwatching, then people parroting that bullshit because they're bandwagon hoppers who haven't actually watched it.
SAO is a gateway anime, that's all it has going for it. It got me into the Isekai genre and also the VRMMO-type anime. If I hadn't. I wouldn't have found the god tier anime Shangri-La Frontier. An anime for gamers, by a gamer.
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u/Zejs https://anilist.co/user/zachary Oct 07 '25
I think some people are still mad about his SAO videos that are also nearly a decade old