This next post in my “Personal Themes” series is going to be a little bit different than the first one. The anime show that the post is going to cover is the first season of Sword Art Online, but unlike in the last post where I talked about the music I associated with the anime series in general, I’m going to talk about the pieces of music that I associate with specific characters and events from the series. I should probably take this time to warn everyone that this post will probably contain some spoilers for the first Sword Art Online anime, so anyone who hasn’t seen that series yet may want to stop reading now.
The fact is that I generally don’t associate the music of a single band or musician with SAO like I do with the original Yu-Gi-Oh!. That was mainly due to the Yu-Gi-Oh! saga having a similar feel to the music of Styx, or at least that’s what I perceived. Sword Art Online doesn’t really bring to mind the work of a single musical artist or group of artists for me, but there are some major parts of the series that do bring to mind specific pieces of music. The entire Aincrad arc that makes up the first half of the first SAO anime brings to mind the opening theme to the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, Conan the Barbarian.
The original Conan the Barbarian film is sort of a guilty pleasure movie for me. It’s kind of a terrible film, yet I can’t help but watch it whenever it’s rerun on AMC. At some point I should see if I could stream it from Netflix. Of course seventy or eighty percent of the reason why I like this movie is it’s awesome soundtrack, and these days the epic opening theme to the movie makes me think of the first arc of the SAO story. It would’ve been awesome of the theme was used to open the first episode. Actually I think the entire soundtrack to Conan would be a pretty good fit for the Aincrad arc of SAO, but that would’ve been a long video to post. It is a pretty cool soundtrack though.
Anyway, and some people reading this might find what I’m about to say to be a little odd, I kind of feel like this piece of music kind of personifies Kirito and Asuna’s relationship to a certain extent. There relationship was one that was forged by many life or death battles. They fought together against many virtual monsters and psychotic player killers, and eventually after all that time they became extremely close, turning into a sort of power couple in the world of SAO. To me, this opening theme evokes the forging of that relationship. Incidentally, I’ve been reading an interesting manga series called Sword Art Online Progressive. The manga covers a bunch of the stuff that the original version of the Aincrad arc skipped over and really fleshes out Kirito and Asuna’s relationship.
This next piece of music is one that I feel best reflects a moment in the thirteenth episode of the first SAO anime. It’s the part where Kirito and Asuna are alone together in the meeting room at the Knights of Blood headquarters before the final battle with the Floor 75 boss, the Skull Reaper.
This is probably one of my all-time favorite songs by the band, Genesis. I had interpreted the song as being about a couple spending one final night together before some major battle that would likely end in death. I felt that the song fit the moment of the SAO anime that I just mentioned that I made the following wallpaper based on it.
I have to admit that I’m pretty pleased with how this wallpaper turned out, considering what I had to work with. Anyway, after the Aincrad arc of SAO came to an end, we came to the horribly done Fairy Dance arc of the show. Asuna is reduced to the role of damsel in distress and Kirito has to dive into a new VRMMO to rescue her from a pervert who decided to use the victims of SAO for mind control experiments. As horrible as that story arc is though, the opening of it makes me think of another instrumental piece of music, the main theme to the movie Ladyhawke.
Ladyhawke is another movie I’m quite fond of, though it has been quite some time since I watched it last. But I do have the movie in my DVD collection. I found it a few years ago in the clearance bin at my local Shopko. I’ve even toyed with ripping off the premise of the movie for a Slayers fanfic that I’ve toyed with doing. Anyway, the movie’s opening theme reminded me a bit of when Kirito first entered the world of ALO. It kind of fits how Kirito entered this world that was a little brighter and more fantastical world than SAO on this noble quest to rescue the woman he loves.
We now come to the song that I best feels represents the ending to the first Sword Art Online anime series, and it also happens to be my number one favorite song by Phil Collins.
If memory serves, Phil Collins actually wrote this song about the story, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Most people seemed to misinterpret the song to be about some guy who had been on some long endless series of world travels. When I first heard the song, I thought it was about some guy who had been falsely imprisoned for a long time in some bizarre or futuristic jail, or was maybe about a guy who was a prisoner of war of some kind. After seeing the ending of SAO, I felt like that song fit all of the characters involved, especially Asuna. All those characters had been trapped in a virtual world fighting for their lives for over two years, and after Kirito defeated Kayaba and that scumbag who was holding Asuna prisoner, it all finally came to an end and they were all able to return to their old lives. I even tried making a wallpaper to try and capture the connection between the ending of the series and the song.
I really feel like I could’ve done a much better job with this particular wallpaper, though I only had so much to work with. That about does it for this post. Until next time, I hope everyone found this post interesting.
