Fiction within Fiction; Horizontals stacked Vertically

    Sword Art Online is a series that tends to get kind of a bad rap (in the U.S., at least). This is due, in large part, to a weak animated adaptation that loses much of what make the original novels so strong--namely, Kawahara Reki's fabulous narration. While I could expound upon why I think SAO's criticisms are largely unwarranted, this week's post is a little more focused: I plan to delve into the significance of verticality and artificiality as symbols and thematic ideas within the Sword Art Online novels, in the context of an article written by author Michael Lucken regarding the same concepts in Miyazaki Hayao's Spirited Away.

But First, Some Context

    Sword Art Online, for the unfamiliar, is a novel series written by Kawahara Reki. The first volume was published in 2009, and the series is still ongoing, with 20 novels and several side works published so far. (If this seems like an absurd number, it is--Kawahara releases a novel about every two months, with about two or three per year being SAO.) The basic premise of the series is that in the year 2022 true sensory-replacement virtual reality becomes available on a commercial scale, and each story arc explores this concept from a different perspective, such as gaming, health care, and military applications. The first two volumes of Sword Art Online involve the (admittedly somewhat cliched) concept of characters trapped in a virtual environment in which the death of the characters' avatars results in the deaths of their actual bodies. The virtual setting itself is known as Aincrad, and it consists of 100 floors stacked on top of each other and connected by a series of towers about 100 meters tall. The floors themselves are massive--the smallest is 3 kilometers in diameter and the largest 10 kilometers in diameter--and have natural-looking geography and occasionally cities and towns.
    Spirited Away is an animated film directed by Miyazaki Hayao and produced by Studio Ghibli. The film centers around a young girl named Chihiro, who is trapped in and forced to work for a bathhouse that serves as a hotel and spa for spirits--monsters, ghosts, and the like--to visit in order to relax and refresh themselves. Much like Aincrad, the bathhouse is a highly vertical structure, with multiple massive floors stacked on top of each other and with many passages up and down. In "Miyazaki Hayao's Spirited Away, or, the Adventure of the Obliques," Lucken interprets the bathhouse as representative of modern metropolises: artificial, closed spaces, isolated from the natural world, and defined by fairly strict hierarchical structures. This is contrasted with horizontals, representing the natural, original state of things, and then reconciled with the presence of obliques, essentially symbolizing the desire for the freedom of the the natural horizontal state giving way to the necessity of having some form of man-made, structured society.
    Lucken goes into much more detail than I'm planning to, and there's more to it than that summary, but that's the gist of his argument. If you like Spirited Away, it's worth giving the article a read, though--it may give you something to think about the next time you watch it.
    The similarities between the symbolism of the two works is clear: SAO's characters are trapped within an artificial, vertical structure, and the only apparent escapes are through death (which, as with Spirited Away, is often associated with the lowest reaches of the tower) or by reaching the top of the tower, something which seems to be impossible and in fact never happens within the novels. Spirited Away, similarly, involves characters trapped in an artificial, vertical structure, and Lucken's analysis of the symbolism of Sprited Away's bathhouse can likely be applied to SAO's Aincrad, as well.

Defending the Vertical

    One of the major themes throughout SAO (and even Kawahara's other writing) is the realness of virtual spaces and connections. SAO's protagonist, Kirigaya "Kirito" Kazuto, is well-informed regarding the technology that powers Aincrad and the virtual spaces he visits in later novels, and he often comments on the theoretical limitations of these spaces--particularly the social limitations of the artificial-intelligence-backed "Non-Player Characters." Even armed with the knowledge that what he is experiencing is artificial, Kirito asserts that time spent within these vertical, artificial spaces has as much value as time spent in the relatively horizontal real world; in other words, the artificiality of the vertical environment does not mean the vertical is inherently bad--only different. The artificiality of the vertical is more extreme in SAO than in Spirited Away, as SAO's Aincrad literally does not exist. It is the ultimate artificial structure, and yet Kawahara seems to assert (unlike Miyazaki) that such places still have value, and that true, meaningful relationships can be formed even within those spaces. Kirito's friendships with many of the other characters--especially SAO's heroine, Asuna--continue on even after Aincrad collapses at the end of the first novel, whereas when Chihiro finally leaves the bathhouse at the end of Spirited Away, it is with the implication that she will never again see the people she met within that vertical space. Even the characters sitting atop the vertical societies behave differently: In Spirited Away, Yubaba, the owner of the bathhouse, largely stays at the top of her tower and fully asserts her superiority, while SAO's Kayaba Akihiko, Aincrad's creator and the rightful inhabitant of its top floor, actively engages with the people on the lower floors, saying at the end of the novel that simply watching from above would be far too boring.
    With the third volume of Sword Art Online, Kawahara moved away from Aincrad, but he has returned to that setting relatively recently with Sword Art Online Progressive, a new project bridging a two year time jump early in the first volume of SAO. Kawahara has described Sword Art Online Progressive as something like a passion project, and his excitement for the series shows in the novels--they represent what I believe to be his strongest writing by a fair margin. The return to Aincrad causes Kawahara to once again address this concept of the vertical and the horizontal. Particularly noteworthy is the mention in these novels that Aincrad's floors were formerly one surface, and that long ago that surface was cut into pieces and stacked into a tower. If the vertical structure that is Aincrad is indeed symbolic of society, then this implies that vertical society is simply a reorganization of the horizontal, which would in turn imply that the world of the vertical is not fundamentally different from the world of the horizontal. Kawahara's frequent descriptions of the "natural" landscapes that make up Aincrad's floors support this interpretation as well--the beauty of the horizontal is still present, just arranged differently. Compare this with Miyazaki's bathhouse, which is physically and metaphorically separated from nature and which struggles to imitate older styles of architecture. Dangerous though Aincrad may be, it has much of the beauty of the natural, horizontal world, along with some unique charm possible only because of its vertical construction. Kawahara's interpretation of the vertical world is on many counts not nearly as pessimistic as Miyazaki's.
    There is an issue with this, however--namely that the history of Kawahara's Aincrad is entirely false, even within the context of the novels themselves. Aincrad was a virtual space created by humans for humans, and its "history" is simply a story coded in to the space by its creators. A more pessimistic reading would take Aincrad to be a flawed attempt to justify the vertical, rewriting its history in a way that everyone knows to be false and yet accepts, much like in George Orwell's 1984. The vertical is a world of lies, and SAO's Aincrad is a literal castle on a cloud (as the tower is floating in the air), and it steals the lives and livelihoods of those trapped within it.
    This contrast--the positives and negatives of the vertical--provides much of the tension throughout Sword Art Online. In a particularly pointed sequence in the first volume of Progressive, Asuna comes to the conclusion that the world she is experiencing--the world in which she is trapped--is fundamentally false, and as such her life is not worth protecting or living. It is Kirito who finds her and gradually brings her to decide that the reality or unreality of her world--or, alternatively, the artificiality of the vertical world in which she has no choice but to live--does not impact her subjective experience of her world and therefore should not invalidate what personal meaning it may hold. As a result of this, SAO does not need Spirited Away's obliques to balance between the horizontal and the vertical, as the two are not fundamentally different things so long as one is able to recognize their underlying connection.

Positivity is a Good Thing

    Part of why I love Kawahara's writing so much is he's an overwhelmingly positive, optimistic author. His novels have very real stakes and bad things happen, but the vast majority of his characters are fundamentally good, relatively normal people doing their best to help others and make their world a better place as they go about their lives--which is pretty rare, especially in science-fiction. His novels examine potential consequences of the technological advancements he proposes, but unlike Orwellian dystopias, they also spend a considerable amount of time examining the positives that result from these advancements. It's an overall optimistic view of the future--and the present--that stands out as fairly unique for the genre and makes Sword Art Online an enjoyable read.
    If Spirited Away can be read as fantasy with a sociopolitical focus, Sword Art Online can be read in much the same light. Boiled down to its simplest form, SAO--through broad use of symbolism--asserts that while our society and its structure are certainly flawed, the world we have built for ourselves is usually a good place to be, or at least no worse than it would be without our societal structures. Regardless of whether you agree with Kawahara's take on society, SAO's carefully-constructed symbolic layers go a long way towards making its worldview feel plausible. I would call it highly successful on that front.