Suguha “Leafa” Kirigaya: A vital piece to SAO, or SAO’s biggest turnoff?
Ever heard “Don’t watch SAO, it has incest”? Here to see if that’s true? Well, this article is for you.
これはゲームであっても、遊びではない。(This may be a game, but it’s not for entertainment). So spoke Kayaba Akihiko as he trapped 100,000 people into a game.
Isekai? Check. Stuck in a game? Check. Overpowered protagonist? Check. Swords? Check. Magic? Che… Actually, no check (at least, until the second half of season 1).
Sword Art Online, the anime to popularize all of these tropes and so many more. This anime lies within the anime fandom as famously controversial: Is it realistic for including explanations of how the bodies of those that were stuck in the game were kept alive, or is it shallow for not fully going into the depth that characters could have had? Was season 1 good, and season 2 bad? Or was it season 1 good, season 2 better, and season 3 bad?
Sword Art Online was the first anime that I ever watched, and, although I can’t remember why I decided to watch it, I know that I absolutely loved it as a child. Even as I rewatch it I find myself feeling a shiver down my spine every time I see Sachi, a surge of adrenaline as Kirito protects Silica, and a rush of tears as Sinon cries onto a toddler’s drawing.
But every time I return to Sword Art Online for that taste of nostalgia, I find myself finding another new flaw. “Whoa, why are they already 60 floors through?” I argue with the pacing, the author’s heart in me itching to know every behind-the-scenes detail.
I hope you now understand my dilemma every time I see people arguing on Reddit how “SAO is the best!” “SAO is a waste of your time!” While I love the anime, I can also see how it fails to reach so many different criteria. But for all of you wondering whether SAO should become the next anime on your list, or maybe even your first anime, I’ve decided to analyze why people can love and, at the same time, hate this anime so much.
So here we are again. Analyzing SAO’s perhaps most controversial character, and not for the story, but for the relationships that accompany her very being. Yes, that character is Suguha Kirigaya, game name Leafa. And yes, the protagonist’s name is Kazuto “Kirito” Kirigaya, and yes, he is Suguha’s brother.
Leafa is Kirito’s cousin/sister, one that Kirito barely talked to after finding out that he had been adopted into his uncle’s family. And yes, Leafa loves Kirito, romantically, and this incest is one of the reasons many people hate Sword Art Online.
For her looks, as the first player we’re introduced to who wasn’t trapped in Aincrad, she has a striking difference between her in-game character (hereafter referred to as Leafa) and her real life character (hereafter referred to as Suguha). This, if you think about the nature of online gaming, is actually what the characters should all be like. Rather, the people that were stuck in Aincrad (SAO) are the ones that are actually different due to a process that happened at the beginning of the story, which forced people to have avatars like their actual selves to bring out the feel that they were truly stuck in the game. But we can cover that in a different article about SAO’s world building.
For looks, Leafa has long, bright yellow hair and adorns green, matching the tribe that she is a part of in the game. In contrast, Suguha has short cropped black hair, and is often seen adorning either her school uniform or jersey. Both are charming, yet they charm in a different way, Leafa having a more brighter, flashier, strong-willed charm, while Suguha charms with her hidden rebellious side to her seemingly calm character.
Now, and while I know people might be angry at me for this, I think Suguha is basically a reworking of Asuna, the first heroine we’re introduced to in the story, and it might not be too much to say that she’s just a replacement for Asuna’s absence in the second half of season 2.
This happens because Japanese humor mostly plays around having two roles, a ボケ (Boke) and a ツッコミ (Tsukkomi). While I may cover the details in a later blog, for now I’ll briefly explain it. The Boke is someone who is dumb, who does randomly dumb things out of nowhere. This would be Kirito. And then we have the Tsukkomi, who butts in on the Boke doing dumb things, which acts to 1) point out that they did something dumb, and 2) make that dumb action funnier. This would be Asuna and Suguha. However, Suguha exceeds Asuna as a character in her rebelliousness and her strong-mindedness, which results in her playing a heavier part in her Tsukkomi compared to Asuna, who also is caring and loving of Kirito. And while this isn’t a bad thing, this ends up giving the audience a strange sense of both characters being somewhat shallow, as the author doesn’t go into the weaknesses of one character but rather uses another to fill that spot.
Compared to Asuna, however, Suguha might have more of a solid backstory and real struggles, which ironically lie in the fact that she is related to Kirito. Since this acts as a trigger for most of the audience, many find it hard to see the depth of her character. Suguha, as mentioned before, loves Kirito romantically. But she is also forced to swallow those feelings, as, well, technically that is incest, which is frown upon by society. And while this struggle is a plot commonly seen in anime and, at face level, similar in depth to Asuna’s struggles, the story treats it differently: While Asuna’s struggles are rarely touched on when she has the spotlight, we see Suguha struggling with her feelings up close, right when we are introduced to it and it still feels fresh in our minds.
Another difference lies in how their problems are solved. Asuna’s struggles lie simply in miscommunication, which are then solved through, well, communication. But Suguha is different. The author doesn’t let her have her problems solved so easily. The story forces her to fight with her feelings, struggle through the maze that the human life commonly is, and face rejection just when she thinks she’s made it. Suguha’s highs and lows are actually shared with the audience, and thus we can relate, we can empathize with this character.
So why do people hate this character? Simply put, it’s the incest. Suguha actually loves Kirito, and romantically, which is technically illegal in 31 states.
But does this really make this anime impossible to watch? Maybe not. If we take a look at the world, marriage between first cousins is actually only prohibited by less than 20 countries, with the USA being the only country to criminalize it. And while I myself wouldn’t marry my cousin, or feel romantic feelings for any of them (well, all of them are younger than 10, so…), I highly doubt having one character with incest makes any anime bad or unwatchable. In fact, there are plenty of anime out there that included incest that were bangers, but I’ll talk about those in a different blog.
Leafa also fails in a different way. Once she came to terms with the fact that it was okay for her to like Kirito, once the story solved her conflict, she faded away into the background. And Sword Art Online does this a lot. Once they finish fully creating a character, especially the female characters, they slowly fade into a part of Kirito’s harem, becoming one-dimensional side characters. And this might be a rather reasonable choice to make for some characters, like Silica and Liz, who both only got around one episode each of spotlight. But for a character who got close to half a season all to herself, having her fade to the back stage just doesn’t feel right. And the way she does so is too cruel to the amount of character building that the anime otherwise prepared for her. As I said before, Suguha was somewhat a filler for Asuna’s absence, and so, once Kirito meets Asuna again, the main heroine of the story takes a sharp turn back to Asuna, and Suguha is forcefully pushed back into the background, only getting a quick dance with Kirito in the later episode before being neglected by the bulk of the story, becoming a party member that’s rebellious and witty.
So what is our conclusion? Is Leafa a good character? Is she central to the story? Do we even need her? And I believe yes, Leafa makes Sword Art Online something that, without her, wouldn’t have been Sword Art Online. And while the story doesn’t do her quite enough justice once she plays her part, she, and her incest, is never, in no way, the reason why anyone shouldn’t watch Sword Art Online.
And my two pennies? Don’t think too much about the other characters that aren’t taking the spotlight when watching Sword Art Online. Watch it for its face value messages and story, don’t go too deep, and Sword Art Online will be one of the best anime of the genre that you’ll ever watch. Oh yeah, and maybe stop after season 2. But I’ll talk about that in a different blog.
P.S. One of the best anime endings so I’ve come across so far, Overfly by 春奈るな, is the ending of the second part of season 1, the part that stars Suguha. Change my mind by commenting your favorite anime endings down below, which I’ll rank in a future blog.
