Genuinely confused, SAO has literally always had Kirito as protagonist. He is literally the main character of this game and literally the "eyes" we see the game through I think it's fair to assume the game is very much about him. Granted the content that everyone is looking for is NOT about him because everyone here all pretense aside just wants to see the SAO girlies get railed I think a big motivation for all the characters involved in the whole story (excluding Asuna surprisingly) also revolve around Kirito. Inoda wants to be better than him and part of the reason for getting Asuna (aside from just wanting to fuck her) is he wants to take what is Kiritos. Even in the most recent chapters Asuna is the one telling Inoda that he brings Kirito up more often recently just out of spite. All the side characters kind of revolve around him too (suguha wanting to fuck him directly, sinon having some master plan somewhere, alice wanting to cuck klein using him). Surprisingly it really is just Asuna who is fucking Inoda for no reason other than it was pity, then it was guilt, then it was pleasure, and now it is a necessity for her. The whole Yui thing I think is weird I genuinely hope she doesnt end up doing it with anyone since regardless of the explanation of her being 21 I don't think I can stomach her directly being involved at most an instigator/facilitator role fits more since even in lore that is exactly what she does.
In fact, if we start with the minor characters, they revolve around Kirito precisely because they are minor characters and their significance for the main events of the game is insignificant. But let's take the main three heroes of the game. Kirito, Asuna and Inoda.
Kirito is the main character of the game, but in fact he is just an avatar of the player in the world of the game - he has no opinion, practically no thoughts related to Asuna and Inoda, even now we mostly see that all his thoughts are about Suguha. that is, all of Kirito's significant motivation in this game has faded into the background. At the moment, he is just a "red rag" for Inoda to create a difficult motivation for him.
Asuna originally had all the features of a normal "conflict" object. Fujino had completely forgotten (or he just didn't care) that he was dealing with an independent person, so starting from the first part, he looks like just an object that has neither its own opinion nor its own thoughts. All of Asuna's thoughts that we see in the game lead to nothing. Just useless thoughts. No matter how much she thinks about the guilt in front of Kirito, or the wrongness of Inoda's actions, or that Inoda raped her, she still comes to a situation in which she silently runs at Inoda's penis.
And now - Inoda. Fujino prescribed too complicated motivation for him, too detailed a character for an ordinary NTR bully. Fujino gave Inode much more character traits and reasons for action than he needed. In most NTR games, the "NTR bully" is an impersonal character who has only one motivation - "I want to fuck this beauty," and that's enough, because the NTR game revolves around infidelity, loss, and jealousy associated with a pair of lovers, not with the NTR bully. In Fujino's game, everything revolves around Inoda.
You may ask, "Why think about highlighting the characters of Asuna and Kirito if they are characters from a famous franchise and we already know about them?" But the fact is that Fujino completely destroyed any difficult moments in their characters. What's left of Asuna and Kirito in this game anyway? A "kind" rich beauty and a strong online player? Because, in the original, Kirito wasn't such an amorphous brat, and Asuna wasn't a mindless whore. Fujino simply destroyed the "original" characters, and instead added a couple of standard patterns from any NTR game. It is against the background of these "mediocrities" that Inoda turns out to be an overly open, overly detailed character. There are too many of his motives, secret desires, and hatreds, apparently in the game.
In fact, this is a game about Inoda, everyone else in this game is just a background. But the problem is that, oddly enough, the NTR game sells better than Netori Harem, so Fujino was forced to make Kirito the main protagonist, the camera on legs and the avatar of the player in this game. You go here, you go there, and that's it. Kirito has much more thoughts about Suguha than about what is going on around him, simply because Fujino, apparently, did not initially expect to make him or Asuna a fully developed character. But the fact that Inoda is his creation, his heart, flesh and blood, Fujino did not hesitate to show us and even tell us that Inoda is like himself. That is, I can interpret this as saying that "Inoda is the most lively and well-developed character that we really tried to work on." Funny... especially if you understand that Inoda is, initially, the same copy of the usual NTR bully...
