The Influence of SAO

On the Patreon Q&A this evening, Thomas mentioned the influence of SAO on various genres. No, that’s not a new form of SEO or AIO — this is Sword Art Online, the most influential work of fiction of the 21st century short of Harry Potter . . . even if you’ve never heard of it.

I said in the chat that I’d write something up for the forum about what you can learn from it, so here I am. Better grab a drink and a snack, though, because I’m about to commit verbiage.

Sword Art Online is a book series that—

“Wait!” some of the patrons are crying out. “But Thomas said it was an anime!”

Yes, but it was a book first. These days, it’s pretty common for light novels (a Japanese genre roughly similar to YA in the US) to get made into manga, then anime; but SAO was part of that trendsetting. SAO, in fact, was one of the major titles that made anime mainstream in the US, and pulled in a major part of the light novel market into English translations due to demand. If you’ve wondered why the manga section at the bookstore (which includes light novels, though the covers are hard to tell apart) is so huge, it’s in part due to SAO.

And it started as a novel for a contest that the author missed the deadline for, and it almost never saw the light of day.

The anime is a faithful adaptation of the book (with extra material published later and incorporated into the anime); as Thomas implied, the first season is widely considered to be the best. It’s the book the author put the most thought into. You can tell the age of the story by one particular statement, though, saying that no one likes watching other people play. This was written before the rise of esports and Let’s Play streams.

The story follows Kirito, a Japanese teen who had been fortunate enough to be a beta tester for the hot new MMO game Sword Art Online. (“MMO” is short for MMORPG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. It’s a shared world with other players.) SAO is a super-advanced VR platform where, thanks to a helmet you put on yourself, you lose all sensation of your body and feel like you’re transported to another world. You’re not just using the screen; you’re inside the game itself. Kirito already knows how to handle the learning curve on the game, so he’s already comfortable with the system and is teaching another player how to use combat skills when they notice something strange — the logout command isn’t working. In fact, it’s not even there.

It’s soon announced, both in-game and to the world, that the creator of the game did it for one purpose — to have a world to rule over. They are now all trapped there. They can’t move their own bodies unless they log out; and if anyone takes the helmet off, it will fry their brains. If they die in the game, they die for real.

The only way out is to beat the game’s final boss: its creator.

What starts as a story of survival soon turns into a story of life in a strange otherworld, as Tolkien might have called it; or isekai, as the Japanese call it (which literally means “other world”). They’re still on Earth, and they never forget they’re in a game; but their perceptions of the real world are entirely cut off, and over the next two years an entire society forms with different factions among the players.

And Kirito meets a girl and they fall in love . . . which is the whole point of why Thomas brought it up in reference to Eastern-style romance.

I won’t spoil it, even the romance. This is probably the anime if you need to see what anime could be like. Or, if you prefer the book, everything is there too; the additional content in the anime merely serves to expand on character stories and life in SAO, rather than the core story of Kirito and Asuna and their struggle to break free. I will say that if you don’t understand some of Japanese culture and philosophy, the climax in the book is a little bit better than in the anime; and the audiobook is narrated by the voice actor for Kirito, so if you’re an audio listener you can kind of get the best of both worlds.

Now on to why it’s so influential.

You’ve probably heard of litRPG. The entire genre of litRPG owes its success to this one novel. Not its existence, but this is what made it explode. Everyone wanted to write the next SAO. Because SAO had the “deathgame” aspect, almost every virtual reality take on it involved some sort of trapped-in-a-game or forced-to-play scenario; one of the prominent early ones that didn’t (and it might not have been a clone of SAO at all) was the novel Ready Player One. That one is also a VR world, technically an MMO, and also has a strong romance element . . . but the romance isn’t central, and it’s definitely for adults. Still, Ready Player One also tends to get quoted as one of the early influences in the American market.

Today, litRPG tends to be very different, and the MMO style doesn’t show up very often as opposed to an isekai or full on epic fantasy vibe; but SAO fanned that fire hard.

So in addition to being one of the principle titles to make anime mainstream and kick off litRPG, it also primed audiences for more stories with not just detailed worldbuilding but also immersive and emotional character dynamics. It almost perfectly balanced action with deep emotional scenes, and never descended into parody. For a whole generation of young people just finishing up their fifth re-read of Harry Potter, and as they were getting shiny new box sets of the films, these were audiences that didn’t have a lot of competition for their attention when it came to stories that could hit this kind of note.

But they soon would. Because the US broadcast of SAO’s first season ended in December 2012. Shortly after that, due to negotiations with several publishers, led in large part by Baen Books, Amazon changed its self-publication royalty policies. In 2013, suddenly became possible to make a living doing this author thing without going through gatekeepers.

(Like, at the time, myself — yes, back then, I was a baby editor, and I got my start telling authors no, my boss isn’t going to publish your book. I was fully on board with the idea that editors understand quality better than most. Bless me, Novel Marketing audience, for I have sinned.)

Just think about this. This was only twelve years ago. And the early adopters were the people who wanted to try new stories that publishers wouldn’t touch. People like those who watched SAO and wanted more, and so they wrote the books they wanted to read. 2013 was the year the term “litRPG” was coined.

And just as they were the early adopters, they were also one of the first crowds to learn from their mistakes. They adapted to the new market. They learned the strategies. Today, litRPG is big, but still niche; but their techniques became the backbone of indie strategies.

The entire Novel Marketing brand owes a very large part, perhaps a majority, of its success to the popularity of SAO.

And it’s a direct influence on the next big revolution in publishing, which is already happening. Sword Art Online was originally published as a web novel on the author’s own site between 2002 and 2008. He didn’t invent the web novel, but his success from giving his stuff away for free inspired a lot of other Japanese writers to do the same. That, in turn, inspired a lot of Americans, too.

In addition to writing more of these stories, there was a demand for more translations from other Japanese works in the same genre. One of these was The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, which takes place in the MMORPG Royal Road. It didn’t have an anime or an official English translation, but there was a website set up for fan translations, named after the game’s setting.

Today, the web novel site Royal Road is the most influential web novel site outside of East Asia. Because of its origins, it is still considered by many to be primarily a litRPG site; but many of its most popular stories are outside that genre (including my own, a sci-fi that topped at #54 across the whole site’s rankings).

The success of Royal Road, Wattpad, and other web novel sites have already changed the future of publishing — and its present. Web novels are becoming mainstream, to the point that published authors are turning to that market to grow their own audience or to try new concepts. Amazon tried to reinvent that wheel with its Kindle Vella experiment, which failed because they didn’t understand the market; their competitor wasn’t Royal Road or Wattpad or ScribbleHub. It was Patreon, which is where the vast majority of web authors get their income before publishing on Amazon.

SAO didn’t directly cause all of this, but it was the pebble that created an avalanche. The recent past, the present, and the foreseeable future of indie publishing all owe SAO a debt of gratitude.