Sword Art Online 7 – More Pink Hair

Don’t tell me someone’s gonna get pink hair in Tari Tari too.

Summary:

Asuna visits her old friend Lizbeth the blacksmith. Liz notices Asuna’s earrings and gets the idea that Asuna up and got herself a boyfriend. Asuna leaves though before confirming anything.

Later on, Lizbeth gets Kirito for a customer. Kirito tests one of Lizbeth’s blades and breaks it to her horror.

One thing led to another and now Kirito and Liz are off to slay a crystal eating dragon to farm materials to forge a mighty weapon for Kirito.

At the cold dungeon area, Kirito passes his winter coat to Liz and she starts getting feelings for Kirito.

They arrive at the boss area. Kirito tells Liz to hide while he does all the fighting.

And so the badly rendered CG boss dragon descends as the theme of Skyrim plays in my head.

Unfortunately, Lizbeth gets caught by the dragon and gets Fus Ro Dah’d into a giant hole.

Kirito jumps in to save her and now both end up stuck in a giant hole. Kirito tries to run up the wall but falls again and then this happens…

Kirito and Liz spend the night in the hole holding hands as they go off to sleep.

Liz wakes up to find Kirito digging.

Kirito tosses Liz the ignot they came for. He explains that the hole is the dragon’s nest and that ingot is its…poopy.

Wait, if this is the dragon’s hole *childish snicker*, then the dragon would eventually come back to – Aww crap.

Kirito carries Liz, penetrates the dragon *snickering*, rides the dragon *more snickering* and pulls out of the dragons hole *even more snickering*.

Lizbeth confesses her love for Kirito as they fall out of the sky.

The two return to the forge and Liz gets to work on Kirito’s longsword. Kirito tries it and calls it satisfactory.

Liz tells Kirito he doesn’t pay for it. He just has to make her his personal blacksmith.

Asuna bursts in out of nowhere and tells Liz how worried she’s been since she couldn’t contact her.

Liz tells Asuna she’s been with Kirito the whole time.

Liz realizes that Kirito and Asuna know each other. She pretends to be okay with everything but runs off.

Kirito finds Liz and tries to comfort her.

The two talk it out, make up and everything’s fine again.

Thoughts:

I actually liked this episode from beginning to end. Liz is quite the character. I love how this episode had some peeks into Liz’ thoughts. The thing is, I can relate to Liz since she’s a romantically frustrated girl and I’m…sigh. Anyway, her reactions were all so funny and cute but at the same time she didn’t come off as obvious fanservice like Silica. Sure, Liz may be just another girl in Kirito’s harem, but it’s not like she just instantaneously fell in love with Kirito. Her feelings developed gradually and the episode showed this. It started with Liz wishing she could find a boyfriend. Along comes Kirito who didn’t start out as some knight in shining armor. He was the prick who broke Liz’ weapon. Moving along, they end up doing a quest together and Liz starts to feel the romantic atmosphere of things. She starts seeing the boyfriend material in Kirito when he lends her his coat and holds her hand. Things reach a highpoint when Kirito saves her and gets her out of the dragon’s nest. All of these events pieced together to explain how Liz has feelings for Kirito. The thing with this is that Kirito came off as a generic male harem lead the whole time. He was always so conveniently nice and had no bad sides to him at that point. Some of Kirito’s original character showed when he forced Liz into hiding. That showed his genuine concern for the lives of his allies after countless experiences of seeing them die before his eyes. It makes sense. Now this episode didn’t go without imperfections. There’s a few things I have to pick on. First of all, it’s another huge time skip. Kirito’s got new threads and God knows how far he is into the game already. Another thing, and quite the biggest flaw in this game is that, once again, this show defies its own logic. Kirito and Lizbeth fall into a cliff and are left with less than  half their HP. Kirito and Lizbeth fall from the sky and they come out pretty much unscathed. Did they use a teleport crystal thingy? Maybe, but why couldn’t Liz do that before she fell in the hole? And another thing, Asuna notices the fact that she can’t contact Liz but doesn’t notice Kirito missing as well? Gee, some friend she is. Anyway, this episode deserves a B at the least. Too bad I’m not the type to assign letter grades in my posts. I couldn’t post the post-credits art either since they watermarked it. Dammit.

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