18/5/18 - Favourite Character Praise Friday WITH A TWIST

Today, 9/3/18 is the tenth instalment the series of posts praising my all-time favourite characters for their quirks and flaws etc. called Favourite Character Praise Friday. I will be sharing these posts every two weeks to gush about fictional characters in a proactive environment. With this segment, I intend to demonstrate what makes characters great so you and I alike can use these facts to improve our characters!

HOWEVER, there is a twist! As suggested by my best friend, every fifth Favourite Character Praise Friday, I will be praising characters that I absolutely despise! This is to demonstrate how it takes great skill from a writer to create a character that the reader comes to hate and not sympathise with! I hope that I can create characters that readers hate just as much as I hope that I can create ones that readers adore!

So who is the subject of my second Hated Character Praise Friday?

Kazuto Kirigaya AKA Kirito from the Sword Art Online franchise.

I can admit that Kirito is not a character that seems to have been written with the intention of being disliked, unlike my previous Favourite Character Praise Friday WITH A TWIST segment on Daisy Buchannan from Gatsby. Instead, he appears to be a character likened to marmite within the fanbase, and so him being likeable, had not necessarily been intentional but I happen not to be a fan of him. 

And in saying so, why do I dislike Kirito as a character? 

His treatment of female characters when he is in a relationship with Asuna

During Sword Art Online, Kirito happens to befriend and become a potential romantic interest for the majority of female characters he happens across. Whilst in this game, Kirito happens to take a liking to Asuna Yuki. They end up getting married in-game and intend to pursue a romantic relationship in the outside world. However, despite his romantic feelings toward Asuna, he does not immediately discourage female characters from pursuing him as a romantic interest, explaining he is in fact, married to Asuna. This reflects badly upon him as a character as it demonstrates a general disregard of his wife and other women. 

Due to the constraints of the narrative, the viewer barely got to see Kirito train and gain power in Sword Art Online

In the first arc of the show, Kirito is overpowered. This fact is justified by the fact that he previously played this game during the Beta-Testing process. However, by episode four, he is on level seventy-eight. That is an immense level of progress that the viewer is unable to see. 

Now, as Kirito is, in essence, a marmite character, in the world of anime fans, I have decided to discuss why he is not complete trash! He does have redeemable qualities - quite a few too! So here are some of them:

The character of Kirito demonstrates that people with PTSD are brave for carrying on.

In Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale, the severity of Kirito's trauma is acknowledged when he realises that Asuna has forgotten the time in which she spent with him when they were trapped in Sword Art Online. But despite the anguish that he feels about his wife's situation, Kirito makes the decision to continue to work to keep the fellow SAO Survivors safe. He carries the burden of responsibilities that are unrealistic to force upon someone as young as him, takes them with grace and carries on with his life.

Kirito demonstrates that people can internalise behaviour from an online persona.

As someone who slowly seemed to become more like the figure that I attempted to present myself as when I was just starting off in the online writing world, I have to acknowledge that Kazuto and Kirito are two different sides of the same coin that slowly seem to merge together. After Sword Art Online, Kirito and the other survivors of the game had to catch up on two years of education, and so a school is erected to focus on teaching the people left behind after SAO launched. And so, Kazuto is surrounded by familiar faces and stimuli with the potential to provoke him to behave more as he had whilst in Aincrad. After all, having such an infamous legacy as The Hero of Aincrad, because Kirito was the one who released everyone from the game, he had a lot to live up to as Kazuto again. He, therefore, internalises more traits and behaviours of his online persona in order to keep up the impression that he is a heroic person.

Despite the facade, Kirito put on during his time in Sword Art Online, he was compassionate and did care for other people

On multiple occasions throughout Kirito's time in Sword Art Online, he made himself out to be a stony cold figure who would just move on with his life regardless of the people that happened to surround him. However, that was not actually the case, in several situations throughout the story, some of which the abridged series wholeheartedly mock, Kirito is seen to be going out of his ways to help others. Although he usually had motives on the side.
For example, when Kirito helped Lisbeth forge a new sword after he broke her best piece, he did it so he could receive that sword.
However, the most prevalent time Kirito is seen to help others is when he took on the Level Seventy Four Boss with the help of Klein and Asuna in order to save the lives of the people who went in before them. Those players had been marching for hours and were weary but were brought to the front lines and almost completely slaughtered by the boss. Instead of leaving them to die, Kirito intervened and saved a number of players' lives, even when he wasn't under any obligation to.