I wonder if the artist wanted to show us how her death could possibly happen and look… or if all these rectangular sparkles are there just for the scene to feel “digital”.
thehx said: Btw, the cheapest way to increase the "value" of your story is to put some drama in it. This seems to be a common disease of all arts nowdays.
What do you consider a story with no drama? Actually, what exactly do you consider drama, and how is it a disease?
Well, speaking about "necessary drama" (such pattern of thinking always throws me in facepalm-despair, just like a certain sensei), the whole situation with SAO players is a big joke (that is not the way you act when it is about living and dying -- maintaining zero-or-almost-zero death count is fairly easy, even if just NOT ALL of the players are total idiots), so every death in that world is an unnecessary drama. I will not speak about realism (for such situations, shall they happen IRL, will be solved far quicker than it is possible for any player to reach a potentially dangerous level, if he or she did not have a deathwish from the start), but, IMHO, the only author's correct guess was that nobody will accept the fact that their HP bars mean their lives. Regarding the relation of the drama and the disease, I honestly think that any irreversible consequences (tragic ones, I mean), mean "drama". Any sort of farewell is bad enough, to me. For real drama, we always can just watch the news, right? In a good old film, a character states to the author of the story, "It is a shame, to kill characters to touch the cold hearts of those who do not care". Thinking of it, one could notice that any bad memories, including those of drama in books and shows, are far more easily remembered. In short, putting in the drama out of the blue (most of it is really out of the blue), is a cheap move to "touch the cold hearts".