Episode 22 – “Alice”
Hmm.
SAO used the Rinko and Alice’s press conference to do all its usual sci-fi philosophical and ethical sermonizing that it can’t when kids and characters are fighting for their lives inside a videogame. All the shouting and speechmaking inside there stays within the limits of relationship issues. The most important part of the question and answer session was whether an artificial intelligence like Alice should have human rights. My rule of thumb is that if someone can ask for authorities to respect their rights themselves, those rights are human rights. Alice asked and she was defiant about considering her “creators” inferior or superior.
The other fun thing about the press conference was that Alice openly declared she loved a human in a very girly way. That made the women present open their eyes wide. Never mind all that other stuff about industrial slaves and how it’s news that Rath’s AI’s are born and raised from infancy. The most important thing about Alice the AI is that she wants a boyfriend.
Lastly, from the moment Higa showed how fluctlight copies always go insane way back when the Alicization arc started, you knew someone would successfully survive becoming aware of their strange new conscious existence. Who else but Kirito Jesus could handle that? It’s also nice that King Kirito would have a different personality than the real-world Kirito because he’s two hundred years old and purely devoted to his digital world of Underworld. Higa turned into a fanboy of Digital Kirito after he was already a fan of Digital Akihiko running around the SEED Nexus.
Unfortunately, the timespan of how long Asuna and Kirito spent hooked up to the STL’s, or where they were, or how long it took Alice to go to them. If they were still on the Ocean Turtle, time in the real world. Rinko said last episode that Underworld had already gone 10 years in a matter of minutes, but only two hundred years passed after a few days? It doesn’t add up and frustrates me when I pay attention to these kinds of details because the show thought it was important enough to mention it. I wish SAO would try to add emphasis without forgetting whatever they made a character say previously.
Heh.
All this talk about AI's uses, self-awareness, human rights, and slavery is fine and all, but let's hear more about Alice's steel chest about to burst from all the love she feels about a certain human. We already know who that is. I wonder what Alice's interface with the world looks like. Does she have a videogame overlay so she can handle notices and alerts like how she just "knew" Kirito and Asuna were about to log out of Underworld?
SAO gave us some tantalizing clues about Kirito and Asuna's time in Underworld. He called her "Her Majesty" and he told Alice about her little sister Selka going into a deep sleep so she could see her sister again soon. I liked Asuna's reminder that while she was in the STL machine for perhaps a day or so, Kirito was bedridden for over a month. He's only 90% Kirito yet.
Kikuoka had a plan to fake his death so Japan would have to blame him for the strange goings on between Japanese and American forces. Exposing Alice right away before the higherups could cover anything up was good gamesmanship on his part. Higa, on the other hand, secretly copied two hundred year old Kirito. If anyone could stay sane as a digital copy of himself, it was going to be Kirito. Now there's two digital ghosts running around the SEED Nexus worlds.
Aw. Kirito finally had time to mourn the death of his best friend Eugeo. To him, it would have been mere moments from Eugeo's sacrifice and Kirito's brain frying to when he woke up facing PoH. Talk about a mind so malleable to go with the flow like that. And Alice gives us a little bit of dramatic foreshadowing so we have some meat for the final episode and how she's been coping with being in the real world. Sounds like she misses her boyfriend.
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