Taboo Index

Synopsis

On a stormy dark day, Ronie and Tiese are unusually late for their report to Kirito and Eugeo. Kirito visits the trainee dorm to see if something’s happened as Eugeo sits tight. But Frenica visits and tells him that Tiese and Ronie went to confront Humbert and Raios’ regarding another abuse issue. Hearing this, Eugeo quickly heads out.

After storming into their room, at first glance Eugeo sees nothing out of the ordinary until he’s brought into the bedroom where Ronie and Tiese are tied up on their bed. Raios explains that when it comes to academy rules, the ‘higher law’ will take precedence, i.e. a Noble’s Judicial Authority and so it’s his right to do whatever he wants to punish the girls for their rudeness to him for confronting them.

As Humbert and Raios commence with their ‘punishment’ to the girls Eugeo fights the systems’ taboo index imprinted in his eye that forbids him from harming and stopping them. However with what Kirito said last episode on morality sometimes outweighing the law, Eugeo forces himself to draw his sword and swings, slicing off Humbert’s arm as his eye bursts due to denying the taboo index’s rules. This drains all of Eugeo’s strength and Raios picks up his sword to execute an exhausted Eugeo. But as always Kirito arrives last second to rescue Eugeo and slice both of Raios’ arms off. Raios demands that Humbert helps save him though that would kill Humbert as he was also bleeding and the taboo index forbids murder. Therefore when hit with that catch 22 i.e. let yourself die or defy the taboo index, Raios, as a fluctlight, can’t choose either and ‘crashes’ and dies.

Afterwards, Eugeo and Kirito are arrested and meet their integrity knight escort that will see them enter the prisons who is none other than Alice.

Thoughts

Right, so where do I start with this one. I guess firstly I saw it coming, the warning signs in the previous episode and also the massive warning flag at the start of the episode made it clear, not something you’d put up unless something huge was going to happen. I think I outlined my opinions very clearly last episode about this kind of scene so I won’t say anything extra. Although I am disappointed that in the end it was a plot device used to have them meet Alice again and in turn reach the central cathedral. There are a multitude of other methods that could’ve been used for Eugeo and Kirito to commit crimes based on morality and I don’t think that a repeat of something that was previously used was necessary especially given the over-exaggerated levels of detail that we didn’t need to see like the tongue…

I will admit though that this does have the most impact. You don’t use something like sexual assault and expect an episode to go quietly by. You use it because you want to emphasis the severity of an issue, this time it was the lack of morality and incompleteness of the Taboo Index allowing any deed to go unpunished as long as you can circumvent anything that’s actually ‘illegal’ according to the taboo index.

We then get the very important moment where Eugeo breaks free of such a flawed system and uses his own morality to decide his path at the loss of his system controlled eye, which I’m very glad was restored much later on. Morality in AI, now that’s a barrier in technology wouldn’t we all love to break, would add a lot more ‘human’ into an AI. That said, I’m more interested in what Azurica said to Eugeo, i.e. that he broke a seal she couldn’t, I can only assume this means that something previously happened to her that would require her to attempt to break this ‘seal’? There seems to be a lot of history regarding Azurica that’s been hinted at and I certainly want to learn more.

The other interesting thing that happened was the implosion of Raios after a failure to take any of the only two choices presented in front of him. I guess this was what the imploding of the copy of Higa Takeru in episode six looks like in the game itself. I was actually expecting him to literally explode in pixels like back in SAO so I was surprised he left a corpse. Though with the realism of the blood and limbs flying about this episode I guess I can’t say I’m surprised.

Anyways, I’m going to try and forget the discomfort from this episode and move on as we finally see Alice again. At first glance though, I get the feeling she’s a changed person and likely won’t recognise Eugeo. For whatever reason I don’t know and the likely case it’ll be to do with the fact that she’s ‘number 30’, we hopefully will find out more soon, unless I’m completely wrong in this prediction.