Title: Fairy Dance of Death
Author: Catsy
Rating: T
Genre: Adventure/Drama
Status: WIP
Fandom: Sword Art Online
Pairings: canon (eventually; still hasn't quite reached that point)
Summary: AU reboot of the entire SAO storyline, beginning from the premise that Kayaba Akihiko was obsessed with magic and Norse Mythology rather than swords and pure melee. As a result, he created the Death Game of Alfheim Online rather than the floating castle of Aincrad—a world in which PvP is not a crime, and the nine player races are in competition to escape.
Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8679666/1/Fairy-Dance-of-Death

Really surprised no one's posted this yet. Catsy's fics have all been really well-executed, and this one is no exception. It's a lot longer than his other stories though, at 32 chapters and with no end in sight. He tends to work in arcs, taking breaks in between, and the third arc has just started, so it should see fairly regular updates for a while.

I especially like all the attention he's given to the ALO magic system and how he's managed to blend the SAO death game concept with the mechanics (and population) of ALO. Most of the main players from SAO carry over (Kirito, Asuna, Klein, Argo, Diabel, etc), but a lot of ALO players from canon are retained as well (Yuuki, Alicia, Sakuya, etc) and it's interesting how he's blended the playerbases. There are some plot points carried over from both canon arcs, but most are entirely new and we see a *lot* more of the world.

5/5 from me

Edit: just looked through some of the Spacebattles thread and HOLY SHIT has he put a lot of work into the magic system. He took what was a pretty interesting concept in canon (having to properly pronounce words in the magic language in order to cast spells, elemental affinities) and expanded on the language, created spell combos and multi-element effects, and generally turned it into an actual valid magic system.

 

I tried this a while back, but only managed to get a few chapters in.

It just seemed very dry to me. Events were happening, but I just couldn't get emotionally involved in them. More than reading about regular people being forced into a tough situation and reading about how they adapt to that, it felt like I was just reading some fantasy story with all the characters effectively playing their in game roles as if they had grown up there.

The focus really seemed to be in about the battles and politics of the various factions of the world, which I struggle to get into.

 

I'm actually rather fond of this story, but I have to admit that it can be difficult to get into. Like many fanfics of epic scope and ambition, the first sections of the story are the roughest.

However, if you're the sort to enjoy the worldbuilding, politics, and faction war, then it's a lot easier to enjoy the first part.

4.5/5, with a chance for a higher rating if it ends up completing without some sort of major letdown.

 

Yeah, it's very much a worldbuilding/political fic interspaced with some battles.

 

I read a good chunk of this a while back, and it was pretty decent from what I recall. I might go back and catch up one of these days. My problem with it though (and with every sao fic I've read to date honestly) is that I have yet to see an author really manage to build a world where the death game is believable. And SAO fanfic doesn't really work if you aren't convinced that the characters could die at any moment.

 

Thanks for the rec on this!

To be more specific, I have the story planned as four such arcs--but now that I have a better feel for how much word count certain kinds of scenes tend to amass, I have been considering inserting a fifth arc in order to give certain aspects of the plot more "screen time" to develop before the finale.

Hopefully now that the upheaval that my life went through in the last year or so is settling, there won't be any more 3-month gaps without updates. At the current pace (32 chapters in 2 years), I would expect the story to be complete at some point during 2016.

One of the areas where I think I dropped the ball early on was in showing why so many people were acting the way they were. Among other reasons, one in ten players were beta testers, people who'd spent the entire beta getting into the faction conflict, developing rivalries, and settling into fixed ideas of what kinds of players tended to gravitate towards which races based on the playstyle and other aspects of those races. Think about how Alliance and Horde players tend to be in WoW, except magnified and given real-life stakes. Because beta testers were generally regarded as positive assets to their faction rather than being stigmatized the way they were in canon, the attitudes and biases of the testers were in a position to be very influential--and they were. I think I alluded to this in one of the first few chapters where Kunimittz makes a stereotypical comment about Salamanders that Klein calls out as being a sign that he's been talking to some veteran players.

Pile that on top of the shock of being trapped and then being told that your life now depends on beating the "others" to clear the game, and you have immediate factionalism with a sizeable part of the population as "role models".

But again, if I have to explain that, I didn't clearly show it, so yes, this is a fair criticism.

I'd go even further and say that this is a weakness of SAO in general. Like many other shows of its type, all the major characters have nearly impenetrable Plot Armor after a certain point. It has no compunctions about killing off characters, but the ones who die are mostly one-off minor characters.

Fanfic authors do have the freedom to change this, but you're not going to shake up people's assumptions without making a point of killing off a major character that no one expects to die--and in a series like SAO, without handling that VERY carefully you're going to drive away readers in a hurry.

 

I'd disagree with this, to be honest. There is no need for the main characters to die for the death game to be feel real (though having one or two of them die certainly will help bring that mood out). It's entirely possible to show, for example, the character's fear of death, their sadness at comrades dying, and their resolve in face of the situation. Most of these are generally ignored though in SAO fanfics, where the core conflict shifts more toward getting out/beating the game the best way possible.

 

Perhaps I miscommunicated what I was trying to say. It's certainly possible to show a character's fear of death, sadness, resolve and other in-character aspects of their plight. I think I've done a fair job of that in this story. What is far more difficult is to persuade the reader that anyone can die at any time.

Regardless of how immersed they are in the story, most readers are extremely unlikely to believe that--for example--Kirito, Asuna, or Klein are at any risk whatsoever of being killed off by the author. Unless you give them a reason to think otherwise, the reader's faith in the Plot Armor of the main characters simply won't allow them to actually worry about what's going to happen beyond their own willingness to suspend disbelief.

As a contrary example, George R.R. Martin accomplished this in GoT by brutally killing off one of the most prominent POV protagonists in his story early on, and because of the track record he's established it's safe to say that no one in that series has Plot Armor, and especially after the most recent book, readers of that series can genuinely fear for their favorite characters no matter who they are.

 

I think the singlehandedly most jarring and absolutely awesome parts about this fic is that from the very beginning, it went hard and kicked the beehive. From the beginning - and mild spoilers - the Salamanders were set on the others in a blitzkrieg and the effects lasted long, changing the place to somewhere Aincrad never could quite be, though it's not a linear upgrade as it is a change of pace. It was the thousands of deaths in the first months that was for Aincrad, that one thing that sets the pace and puts forth the hardline - shit is going down.

I think I'm slightly dissapointed that the faction war, the conflicts, are dying off. We're getting a good portion, certainly very interesting to how the factions and the characters deal with the aftershock, and it's great. But a small part of me wants there to be more. More chaos, more backstabbing, more insane plays and... well, more antagonists, or at least one that can be appreciated. It has appreciable heroes, but the enemies... often, the villains are what make a show iconic. Or a book, or any story.

More conflict to such a scale may certainly not be what is good for the story, but it's something I'd like to see regardless. At any rate, I'm really fucking interested in the fic; gets a 5/5 from me for sure.

---------- Post automerged 12-05-2014 at 12:08 AM ---------- Previous post was 12-04-2014 at 10:59 PM ----------

And I have to shut up about what I just said, because I just caught up with the story.

Damn.