You mention a couple LNs, so how about Sword Art Online? They even have audiobooks narrated by the English dub voice actors. They have the books that cover the anime through the fourth season as audiobooks, but the others are coming. And the books themselves? There’s like ten beyond the fourth season. Two in Moon Cradle, one is Kiss And Fly, a short story collection that includes a Mother’s Rosary prequel (Yuuki started out playing Animal Crossing in VR!!! Except they call it Serene Garden to avoid getting sued… just like the “photon swords” (lightsabers) in Phantom Bullet…)), And the rest are the Unital Ring series.

SAO might be a good pick. Thank you! Are the LNs better than the anime? I liked it, back in the day, but in retrospect it’s a little weak, IMO.

They are! The biggest criticisms I’ve heard about SAO are the comparisons to .hack, and the rapey bits. In the LNs, they’re not rapey bits. I haven’t gotten to the one with Suguha in Season 4, but the one with their pages in season 3 was absolutely rapey, and it was a bit worse in the books than in the show. The scene with Asuna in season 1, and the scene with Ashido in season 2, were a lot different in the books. In the fourth book (the second Fairy Dance book), Asuna is taunted, I think her shirt gets torn, but Rapey McRapeFace doesn’t like, put his hand down her pants or anything like he did in the anime. As for Ashido (Sinon), the guy just comes over and tried to kill her.

As for the .hack stuff, Kawahara-san’s never beating those allegations. I mean, he wrote the original SAO web novel while watching .hack//SIGN on TV and has said as much. So there are a bunch of comparisons. But .hack didn’t do anything original, either. Like the original SAO English dub (that is, Abridged) said, it all goes back to Everquest (and other MMOs). But .hack was very shallow, and SAO really only treads the same ground because they’re both about the same thing. And MMO tropes really feel tropey because… they are. So .hack is based on MMOs, and SAO is based on MMOs as well, but because .hack//SIGN was on TV when Reki Kawahara wrote his story, and he liked MMOs and he liked VR, so that’s something he was watching at the time. Anyway, with the show, you have SAO season 1, mainly the Aincrad arc, and you have .hack//SIGN, and you can see the similarities, but when you read the book, it goes so much deeper. And then it’s harder to see the similarities because the differences are greater.

(Disclaimer: I like both. I got into SAO because it was like .hack//SIGN for all the things I liked .hack//SIGN for… but it goes so much further than that.)