SPOILERS FOR SOA AHEAD! One of the best and most recent anime’s I’ve watched has been Sword Art Online.  I never heard of it before until at a friend’s birthday someone said how great of an anime it was, and that piqued my interest.  Soon after I got hooked and watched every episode.  Now, I watched both seasons and I personally only enjoyed season 1.  I thought season 2 got pretty weird with the fairies and the relationship between Kirito and his cousin (adopted sister) Suguha.  To me, the anime makes it pretty clear that they are very much like brother and sister, so to me the whole falling in love with your brother situation that Suguha was going through was kind of left field for me.  I was looking forward to Asuna and Kirito being together…not Kazuto and his sister (though it never happened).  I can understand her feelings, but at least to me, I would’ve thought that Suguha would’ve rejected her feelings for Kazuto right away, but it didn’t turn out that way.

But, aside from that, I can see why this anime has been so highly rated and one of the most popular for such a long time.  It combines so many great qualities of a great anime like character development, beautiful animation, a gripping plot, humor and action, plus it’s the best fusion of gaming and anime since .hack (will be writing a post on that one later on).

As a gamer, I loved the interaction between the MMORPG world and the real one.  The areas where .hack lacked, Sword Art Online improved upon.  Here, you get to see the lives of Kazuto (real life) and Kirito (in-game) develop as the series continues.  You want Kirito to succeed because he’s just a normal (well, kind of obsessed with SOA) kid who loves video games.  He’s spent hours into developing his character, leveling up and training yet he doesn’t display any arrogance or cockiness about it.

Humility is a strong character trait of Kirito, and that’s what draws us to him.  You don’t often see people with great power hiding it or not showing it off, instead they love to push people around and put it all on display.  As a great comic book character once said, “With great power, comes great responsibility”.  I believe what’s lacking in many people with power is the responsibilities that come with it.

We want power to be the king on the hill, to destroy all opposition and sit on a throne (have you wondered why Game of Thrones is so popular?).  Yet, I’ve always noticed that God’s Kingdom is like living the complete opposite of how this world operates.  We live in a world where the bigger the better, the stronger is the best and the weak lose out.  The poorer you are, the less intelligent you are, the less muscles or beauty you have, you are looked on as second rate.

Pride will lead you to disgrace and shame, while humility will give you wisdom and honor.  Why?  People aren’t too happy with prideful people because they are unwilling to help out, while a humble person (even though you could consider them “better”) will lend a hand.  It’s happened to me where I’ve been in a situation where I can show off how much of the bible I know, or how many books I’ve read about growing as an individual, my college degrees or how much money I make.  I’ve messed up and gone down the prideful road before, but I always ask Holy Spirit to give me the grace to be humble.

So let’s look to Kazuto/Kirito as an example of living a humble life, and do our best in our daily lives to help out others, even when we have much more experience in that area than they do.  They don’t have to know how much you know, just that you care enough to help.