Quote Originally Posted by Dark Dragon View Post
I think you're missing the point they're trying to make. The problem isn't whether or not it's believable for kids to not want to die. The problem here is SAO is a video game in which every character is equal.

There's several issues as to why this story arc is just stupid.
1. The author has never introduced any children characters at any point during the story before this.

2. It is expected for everyone to believe that the orphanage is run to help a bunch of kids survive in this world, yet that doesn't make sense in a video game context. The only thing that matter is stats, as Kirito has demonstrated in Silica story arc. The fact that all of the players here are children shouldn't make a difference as to whether they're weak or strong. A bunch of level 1 adults wouldn't be better at fighting a bunch of level 1 kids in a video game. This could've been easily remedied by adding a few meek adults and just say it's a safe place for people who don't want to risk dying.

3. It is again expected for everyone to believe that not one single kid that play SAO is capable of learning the game and getting to the "end game". That is bullshit if you've ever seen any children play video games. My 8 year old cousin beat Megaman 10 in about a week, i'm pretty sure you'll find that many adults would be unable to beat that game even in 10x that amount of time. Another thing is the fighting system in the game uses the system to auto-finish attacks so any advantage that an adult might have over a child is invalid.

4. This is part of 2, but there is a big problem with no actual adults being there. That's like saying she'll only help kids and anyone over a certain age is screwed and should go fend for themselves. With 2000 people living in that city, it takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to think that not a single adult there needs help in some way.
I agree that if they had worked in some people of other ages here it would have been more interesting. However, just because they don't have them doesn't somehow make the situation unbelievable. Maybe that person just likes kids and wants to take care of them and it was really awkward for other adults to be there. Does every place where people are living in this city have to have an even distribution of people or it just can't be plausible?

I don't really see what the fact that kids are good at video games has to do with anything. Some are, some aren't. It isn't like we've seen every single person in the game. There might be kids in the high ranking guilds, we've only seen like 10-20 people from any of them anyways. Maybe they all died, though. It is a shame the setting wasn't more thought out and shown like this.