Personally I think it's pretty cool that the world of SAO was written pretty trans friendly in regards to auto-identification years before gender issues were really prevalent.

I always thought that was pretty neat too! The novel touches on the concept of how gender is related to neurology, which is a topic which research was pretty scarce at the point Reki wrote it. Hell, it can be a pain to find research on it nowadays if you don’t know where to look, and it’s still not a piece of common knowledge!

Kawahara also mentions the legalization of gay marriage in the US in the Mother’s Rosario novel, which I thought was pretty neat. I mean, I doubt SAO is the sort of novel that’s gonna have any explicitly canon LGBT characters, considering it hasn’t had any until now, but I guess it’s pretty cool to read about the setting and seeing these details, which were applied to that world so much before they were well-known subjects.

Also, I can actually conjure the mental image of someone from the cast going “It’s 2025, asshole! Get on with the times!” at bigoted comments, and I guess that’s a plus.

- Mod Fil