That Year, That Zelkova, That Dual-Blade Style
"I wanna always be with you, I wanna hold you tight right now, I swear I will wipe your tears, I’ll give you everything I have"
Moving from Bilibili to YouTube—crossing the Great Wall to reach the world, as people put it—means that the algorithm starts from zero, knows nothing about you, and builds its model of your tastes from scratch. For the first few weeks it throws random things at you. One morning it served me “Crossing Field” by LiSA, the opening theme of Sword Art Online.
I hadn’t heard it in years. It placed me immediately: sitting in front of a 2008 Olympic-edition Lenovo desktop laptop, eating half a watermelon, watching SAO on an afternoon when the whole family was out. The laptop’s fan sounded like an airplane on approach. None of this was bothering me because the opening theme of SAO had just played and I was transfixed.
Kirito’s dual-blade style. The Starburst Stream skill. Sixteen consecutive hits. Even writing about it now produces a faint echo of the original sensation.
I was not wrong to love SAO. The Aincrad arc holds up: the death-game premise creates genuine stakes, the world-building is inventive, and—what I didn’t appreciate at the time—Kayaba Akihiko is a genuinely compelling villain. His goal was to create a world. The means were monstrous; the goal, I now understand better, was not. If I were Kayaba, I told a friend once, I would probably do the same. They looked at me with concern.
The best part of SAO is not the battles. It’s the cabin on Floor 22, where Kirito and Asuna play house—fishing, cooking, lazing in the sunlight, pretending that the death game isn’t happening around them. That interlude is what the show is really about. Everything before it is setup; everything after it is consequence.
Post-Aincrad SAO is a different story—or rather, it is several different stories, many of them not particularly good. The Fairy Dance arc is infamous for reasons that don’t need repeating. What saved the franchise, for me, was the Mother’s Rosario arc: Yuuki’s arc, which treats its subject—a terminally ill girl living most of her life in VR—with a directness and genuine feeling that the rest of the series rarely achieves.
Asuna, post-Aincrad, was not well-served by the writing. She started as Kirito’s equal; she became the series’ damsel-in-distress template. This is a waste.
But in that original moment, watching a boy swing two swords faster than the eye could follow while a song screamed about not giving up on the people you love—none of that mattered. The zelkova tree outside the window was yellow with autumn. The fan was very loud. I was twelve years old and this was exactly what I needed.