English Dub Review: Sword Art Online: Alicization – War of Underworld “Dark Territory”

 

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

As his mind enters the Underworld, Miller remembers a conversation with his father about the brains of bugs, which led a young Miller to wonder where the souls of humans might live, concluding they were in the brain. He would test this theory on a girl named Alicia, stabbing her through the ear with a screwdriver and then witnessing an odd bubble exit her head, supposedly her soul.

His and Vassago’s arrival as the Emperor and Dark Knight gathers the attention of every race in the Dark Territory (including humans are just darker skinned? Whoops.), but not everyone is happy to see him. Vixur Ul Shasta, head of the Dark Knights and lord of discount cola, sees his plans for peace going up in smoke. His fiancé, Lipia, tries to stop this by killing Miller through disguising herself as a concubine, but he kills her instead and watches her soul leave her body as well. He then absorbs it, seeing Lipia’s memories and pledging to take Alice’s soul once he captures her. Miller uses Lipia’s death as an example for the rest of the races next time he meets them, which drives Shasta to attack himself, though he is immediately poisoned. With his last act, Shasta enters Miller’s soul but realizes in his final moments that Miller’s soul is actually dead.

Meanwhile, Kirito and Alice arrive at the border between the territories just in time to see it start to crumble.

OUR TAKE

Aside from Akihito Kayaba from the first arc, I’ve been noticing a bit of a problem with Sword Art Online’s villains. Since the Fairy Dance arc onward, it seems like each main antagonist has been pretty comically irredeemable and black hearted. Sugou being a rapey and jealous rich guy who kidnaps people to preserve a fantasy, Death Gun being a jealous and eventually rapey “nice guy” who POISONS people to do the same, Quinella being a just terrible and sadistic person overall, and now we have Miller, who literally eats people’s souls and has no soul. And aside from Miller so far, most of these villains have pretty much been this bad in order to build up Kirito as being the best guy in the world (which I expect to be the case here once Kirito wakes up). At least Kayaba had some dignity to him even if we never really figured out why the hell he made his apparently popular game into a death game for no reason.

And it’s not even enough that Miller is the worst guy to ever exist, he has to kill off other bad guys who would otherwise be pretty interesting because they have even the slightest bit of moral ambiguity. So SORRY VOICE ACTING VETERAN STEVE BLUM, you have to go and die because you can’t fall in line with the dark overlord of super evil even though your plan to attempt peace talks might have been kinda cool. And with this being Sword Art Online, of course we have to use another female character as a tool to kick this off. I mean look, I get that we have to really establish the antagonist for the rest of the arc to be a super threat worth taking down, but with the deaths of the two even remotely good members of the Dark Territory, my emotional investment in them as an antagonist force has significantly dwindled.

Having an antagonist, at least in my opinion, is not just about having the worst possible example of human beings being ready to get knocked down by a paragon protagonist. If they are so easily hateable as this that the only thing worth seeing about them is getting eventually killed, it basically makes them a cardboard cutout whose demise will ultimately teach neither the protagonist nor viewers anything of note. The ideas that the villain represents should be ones that society is tempted to fall into while the hero should represent that we can rise above those, no matter how difficult. I don’t know how many people you know who eat souls and kill people, but I doubt they’re going to find much identification in Miller. Or if they do, I’m not exactly looking forward to their feedback.