How it feels to gank as eve or twitch

I don't know about if it's why she's better, but this relates to what I was saying about saving her life. in the early days of sao, before the meeting to plan the boss raid, she walked into the dungeon and broke like, 3 or 4 rapiers fighting to get stronger without even stopping to eat or sleep. the only reason she didn't die was because Kirito found her as she collapsed of exhaustion purely by coincidence. The author also could not have killed off Asuna and had Kirito let go at that point, because of it's position in the book. he could have killed them both, killed just Asuna and had Kirito win but not bring Asuna back(which would have made it almost impossible to continue the story), or write it the way he did. If he had released Kirito he would have had to either skip the next 24 floors and go right to the final battle, or find some way to fill another entire novel with the content from the next 25 floors which would be a really repetitive, "explore dungeon, fight boss, save damsels in distress in spare time," thing. As far as Lizbeth's backstory, that entire thing was a small sidestory that was in the second novel. Right now the author is rewriting the aincrad arc in much greater detail, so we might see her backstory eventually, hopefully Silica's too, because you're right on how they could be and should be expanded more. Perhaps it'd be worth mentioning that silica was also a side story, just so you don't have to ask. As for how he should have been a leader, you are forgetting what happened right after the first boss battle. Taking the title of Beater pretty much made everyone in the game except for Agil and Asuna hate him, so nobody would want him as the leader, or even in their guild (which couldn't be formed until the third floor anyways). He was forced into being a solo player. Even nearing the end of the game people still had extreme dislike of him as evidenced by still being called a beater by Asuna's bodyguard as a way to sway her to not go with him.

On a mostly unrelated note, since you said you liked Angel Beats! you should watch Charlotte. It was made by most of the same people and is just as good if not better. Also, to the OP, sorry for hijacking your thread with our discussion

First off RIP OP but anyways... I like tragedy in anime (if you couldn't tell by Higurashi, Madoka, and Angel Beats! brought up) and was listening to Famous Last Words so killing off a great character felt good in my mind. I mean he could've done that and the commander would let him go because HE IS INSANE. The creator of SAO at a simplistic level is a psychotic sociopath. And seeing Kirito suffer because of Asuna dying would've excited him to say the least. That is why it makes sense why he could've and then rewrote the rest (also because I ship Liz x Kirito harder just sayin). Asuna I am ASUNing (get it assuming HAHAHA :D) work her ass off but I mean wouldn't LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE be working that hard day and night ESPECIALLY because other people had already played other games. I really don't get why he didn't turn Asuna into some secret gamer (like Umaru-chan from another anime) that was already really skilled in school and at games. Her character shouldn't have been a noob that was somehow really REALLY good at games she should've been someone who hid this hobby from her parents. Wouldn't that have drawn the story along?

Also Charotte eh? I'll get to that after I finish insert the 10 animes I still need to finish here

As far as everyone else working hard, the answer to that is a simple and sad no. Most people had never left the starting town (the name of which I cannot remember right now). Something that was brought up in one of the side stories (I think it was yui's, but don't quote me on that) was they spoke to a man sitting under a tree just outside the town who was waiting for a fruit to fall. he spoke of that fruit as though it were worth a fortune, but not only was it presumably inedible, it was worth a measly 5 col and dropped only a couple times per day. To put this in perspective, I'm pretty sure even the level 1 boar was shown to be worth more col, not including it's item and exp drops. Less than a third of the players went far past the safe zones on a level, and of them an even smaller portion were in the clearing group on the frontlines that pretty much included only portions of 2-3 big guilds, a couple small guilds like furinkazan, and 10-12 solo players. Also on a smaller note where I am by no means defending heathcliff, he did do everything in his power to keep people from dying in the game except for actually disabling the whole death thing (this is revealed to include fixing bugs throughout the course of the 2 years via some conversations between characters in the books). That being said he also did very little to facilitate the people's escape. Despite Heathcliff technically being the leader, Asuna was the one who did almost all the the planning for the clearing group's actions. I would really like to stop talking about this because I feel like we're gonna end up spoiling the entire series if we haven't already for anyone who hasn't watched the anime or read the books and stumbles across this. Also, we hit the limit on how far threads can go so I'm not notified when you reply anymore.