I've been watching Sword Art Online to try and give it a fair shot with fresh eyes so many years after it was the internet's punching bag. I've still got 3 episodes to go but I just finished the one where Suguha learns Kirito is Kazuto and has a breakdown because she's crushing on her brother, and I wanted to talk a little about that.
For years I'd always heard that Suguha was the usual harem anime incest character but I really don't think that's the case. Yes she has a crush on her brother but the thing is she's very obviously disturbed by this. She doesn't like it! She knows it's not okay and wishes she didnβt feel it!
When she logs into the game after visiting Asuna's hospital room and breaks down crying, her thoughts as narrator are that she's well aware that she can never tell anyone how she feels. When she meets this guy Kirito and starts to like him she's all "Finally I can put my fucked up feelings in the past and get with this guy instead", only it turns out they're the same person, which causes her breakdown.
She spells that out explicitly when she's yelling at Kazuto in her doorway.
What's less explicit and more implied is that she isn't actually feeling romantically toward him at all. In the scene, Suguha talks about how Kazuto pushed her away when they were younger because he learned he was adopted. Following that, he went into a coma for two years. So when he suddenly comes back and is all nice to her, the impression I got was she was attention starved and mistook this sibling love that she hadn't felt in years, if ever, for romantic love, and she doesn't know how to properly sort her feelings.
And then she starts feeling disgusted by herself for thinking she's in love with her brother, finds an opening when she meets this other guy, except oh look at that, they're the same person! And she just falls apart because she's back to square one.
It's way more compelling than any other character in this story so far.
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