"Are you talking about the bar scene in the beginning of season 1? Obviously she chased after him as he left the bar but stopped"

Cause she had no that what she should do with him. Anime adapts many things bad. Especially Ais, even in her own sword oratoria series. Many other things are not explained as well. As example Bell couldn't leave Haruhime just like that because she looked similar to Ais or something like that or things about status. Many things got skipped and focused on fanservice

"I really don’t see that at all in the anime…😅"

Can't blame you when the adaption is terrible 😅

This relationship is hyped up a lot by the fandom but to be honest I think it has the worst chemistry. I don't who says she's around the MC more than others like you mentioned cuz it's pretty much an outright lie, she's the furthest from the MC and the main group. So much of her hype relies on Ais being "the main girl" that some people don't want to accept she barely gets anything compared to the other cast. I honestly don't even know where the hype comes from because literally, every other heroine has better chemistry than Bell and Ais. But every time I ask a Bell x Ais shipper it's just "just wait until Ais arc and you'll see why she's amazing!!" ...but that just means she barely has anything right now like I thought, right? The very fact that most people need to go to Sword Oratoria, a series that was stated to be "optional" by the author to even understand her is proof that she's not being done well, because why should I have to read a spin-off to understand the main heroine. I should be able to understand her in the main series if she's the main heroine.

First off, the reason Ais is kept so far from the main story is because of advice given to the author by his editor. Oomori was warned that if Ais were to be closely involved in the story then Bell would never really be in danger and she would be able to resolve the conflicts. While not exactly false, it at best incomplete advice and at worst detrimental. Most editors or critics worth their salt are going to recognize if there is going to be a main love interest or hero/heroine complementary to the main character they must be closely involved with the story and often interacting with their counterpart.

The author's solution to this problem his editor pointed out was Sword Oratoria. While not necessarily a bad way to go about it, it fail badly in two aspects. One, the imperative of that Ais be pivotal to the main story and narrative. The second that Oomori told fans that the spinoff was not required reading when that in reality turned out to be completely false.

Also, Ais isn't going to be in season four. She played no part in it except for a SS when Bell is dreaming while trying to rest in the dungeon.

Ais does have a connection to the primary plot of the main series. Her past is tied to the big bad of the story. The foreshadowing for that is supposed to be in season three when Bell, Ais, and Hestia are in the village in the mountains, but it fails to convey her connection in the anime, I'll cover the limitations of adaptions later. By and large the anime actually does show a fair amount of what is in the main series about Ais, but again there is that limitations thing again.

You are right though a main heroine should be a major part of the story, and not in the way a McGuffin is, which is what Ais often is.

Getting in the actual story stuff now. Ais is the daughter of hero Albert Waldenstein and the great spirit Aria even though spirits cannot have children, who live 1000 years before the story begins. (Yes Ais is sixteen and no we don't know how Ais came to be born)

Her father was killed fighting the One Eyed Black Dragon along with his friends and allies while her mother seems to have been taken by it. This happened in front of a seven year old Ais. Understandably she was badly traumatized by this. She suffers from PTSD, depression, and emotional numbness. She was somehow found 1000 years latter by the Loki Familia who ended up as her defacto guardians. Unfortunately they let her focus on a quest for revenge failing to help her heal and move on with her life in time. Her trauma is why she has a blank face and struggles to understand social situation, the confused look she has sometimes, as well as has fits of extreme anger sometimes.

Years, her relationship with Riveria and her friends would help her heal a little. But she never really makes much progress until she meets Bell and he triggers something in her psyche. That is what was the start of her interest in him. Then later, desperate to become stronger to take back her mother she tried to learn the secret to Bell's lightning fast growth by training him. While she had an ulterior motive she did truly do her best to train him. Though she never learns anything about his growth other than he is chasing someone she does develop a true and genuine friendship with him which grows as the story progresses.

When Hestia is kidnapped by Rakia Ais goes after her for Bell's sake. During their time in the village Ais's reaction to the scales scare Bell. (The narrative puts an unusual amount of detail into it. That is called an irregular description, it is a method of foreshadowing). Later when Hestia is comforting Bell after Cam dies Ais is listening and calls to her mother. (Another small foreshadowing)

During the Xenos event having to fight Bell breaks her heart, but she like the rest of the world have only ever known monsters as creature who exist only to make them suffer and take those they love. Wiene shatters her understanding of the world and she has to try and figure out how to live with a new reality.

Throughout all of this Ais is slowly developing feelings for Bell which should eventually culminate in her falling in love with him.

I'll stop here on the story stuff.

Adaptions, I only got one episode into the second season before I decide I didn't like it so I can't fairly judge season two and three, and Sword Oratoria is genuinely a terrible adaption. However, I am going to staunchly disagree that season one is a bad adaption. It conveys most of the themes as best it can within the limitations of adapting the novel medium to visual medium.

In the literary medium author are limited to only what they can write and convey with language. Conversely that is also their greatest advantage. The narrative allows an author to directly convey what the want to readers with greater detail than can be done with visual mediums.

That is why much of the narrative in Danmachi is so harder to convey in the manga and anime, much of the most important parts of the story are conveyed in character narrative monologues and third person omniscient narration. Visual mediums pretty much have no good ways to really impart narrations that don't cause immersion problems. That is why you pretty much never see them in movies and tv shows. Ais is always blank faced, even when she is feeling bad. the only emotion she commonly expresses is anger.

The anime just went with it and kept the deadpan expression. In the Sword Oratoria manga Yagi took some pretty significant liberties to be able to show what Ais is feeling, sometimes having panels where something is only happening with Ais in her own mind while in the real world has something else going on.

For Bell's part it really is a simple as he truly did fall in love with her at first sight.

Colpo di Fulmine as Italians say. It means love at first sight, but it literally translates to struck by lightning. Bell was sudden and completely struck by love as powerful as any lightning bolt.

@Kevhunt06 Thank you so much! This really helped me understand Ais’ character and kind of how the anime it self works and also why she isn’t in it much.

Love at first sight isn’t really a big issue for me, just as long as it makes sense and the person they fell in love with is a genuinely good person at heart (which it sounds like Ais is).

I hope we get to see more of Ais than (like a true Main Heroine) in the upcoming seasons.

I feel like the main series (both LN and anime) do a pretty good job at selling Bell and Ais as a pairing. You could argue that, because the main Hestia cast gets much more screentime together, they look like they'd have better chemistry, but the story does have a good focus on showing Bell's attraction and respect for Ais and how that acts as a catalyst for all his ideals going forward. And you see that reciprocated through Ais herself, frequently demonstrating her own feelings and interests in him, even without realizing it's "love" specifically. Plus it helps that the two just have lots of very nice moments with each other, and them being infrequent makes them feel more special too.

As a character though, I will say that for a while outside of her relationship to Bell, she didn't do alot for me due to her intentional stoic persona. It wasn't until SO Vol. 9, and seeing her (incomplete) past, that it helped turn me around completely to her side. Her basically being a child traumatized to the point that she became a one-track minded sociopath, and how her journey has been essentially slowly regaining her humanity, is incredibly fascinating to me. Not to mention Ais' whole thing about becoming a warrior herself because no "hero" saved her, connects with Bell's journey of becoming a "hero", and presumably eventual conclusion where he realizes even those stronger than him can be in need of saving.

Have to disagree with that somewhat. The problem with their relationship(aside from the fact that they have practically no screen time together and even when they do it's cut short by Loki or Hestia) is their idealized view of one another, Bell more so than Ais, since I still think Ais has it better off than Bell and can still be understood but Bell is just something else. Honestly in Bell's case in particular it's a bit creepy. In V11, he sees Ais trying to cut him down and trying to kill Wiene right in front of him and yet despite that, in V12 all his thoughts about her are about how amazing she is and how he's got to be better when he thinks about her... Like what? I almost thought he reset like a robot to act like he was before despite what had just happened.

I understand Bell isnt the type to hold a grudge nor hold any hatred towards someone. But after the very person you love was about to kill a girl who you considered like your own family right in front of you, for better or for worse I would've expected some change, some level of difference in how you view someone who you essentially thought was perfect, hell even if it's minor. Instead it feels like he memory wiped himself to forget everything that happened in Xenos arc and even when they interact volumes later, not a single bit has changed at all, which is weird because the Xenos arc should've made them at least see a bit past the idealized views they had for each other, but it's just gone. I'm sorry that just doesn't feel like chemistry to me. When the story is about a boy who is chasing a girl yet the girl is pretty much doing all the chasing to make their moments happen, that's when you know something isn't going right. The only moment I've ever seen Bell do something by himself for Ais was V8 and even that was ripped away by "hahaha Hestia cockblock" Even the nice moments they have are so short and few between that the other girls have more and better scenes and this is if we are counting SO the "optional" series that we definitely don't need to read to understand Ais.

It does irk me a bit considering there were ways you could've made this ship work even if Ais couldn't fight Bell's fights. She could've been like Ryuu, who could advise Bell about the Dungeon while he needed it and as a top executive of the strongest Familia in the city I'm sure her advice could be even more useful than Ryuu's while Bell slowly coaxed her out of the shell she's been in for years by teaching her so many things she didn't know outside of combat since Ais is very clearly inexperienced in affairs outside of combat. and sprinkling these moments throughout the story so, we the reader still know Ais is there and what the main goal is. Instead we have her gone for so many volumes at a time, it's hard to even understand why we should even care for her in MS. SO is like a band-aid but it doesn't fix the fundamental problem of this ship since as an technically "optional" side story, he cannot develop them past a certain point in SO. Take Index's Railgun for example. Sure it features a main heroine from Index and it does show another side to her, but the thing is that Misaka has already been developed more in the actual work itself and it's not something I have to read to understand her character. Danmachi with Ais is not like that. Her MS character and SO character are so different that I need to read SO to actually understand how she's like with a clear image.

I would argue against the whole thing regarding Bell quickly forgiving her, because even beyond Bell himself not holding grudges, they demonstrate in Vol. 11 itself why that would be the case. Because all Ais is doing is acting on her primary ideals, fighting monsters, and Bell recognizes he's the one being the "hypocrite" and going against the norms by protecting them. And even then, she ends up letting them go when she realizes she may be wrong, and with the awkward reconciliation they have at the end of the book, Bell doesn't have a reason to feel wary about her, so him still looking up to her makes sense.

I will agree however that Sword Oratoria having basically all of her necessary character development, despite it supposedly being "optional" (when it really isn't), is an issue. Especially when most of the love interests have all their character development in the main series, as a reader it'll make you feel they're better options than the one who alot of their emotional context is missing. Though I personally don't mind it on a ship level because since the beginning it's always been about Bell's deeper feelings of Ais, and indifference romantically to all the other girls, so that's always been about to me throwing in interesting character drama rather than asking "who will Bell pick?"

Right, but it doesn't change that Bell got to see a little bit outside of the doll-like mask Ais puts on for the first time and almost even reached out to her after she let them go. Forgiving her for the incident is one thing, but the fact it hasn't even reflected in the slightest in his mind is where I start seeing things are weird. He was even somewhat worried about her after the fight right? He noticed a bit of her inner darkness after she stopped right? So why is he still pretending like Ais is this perfect idol that can do no wrong? Even minimal change in their interactions would have been fine and it didn't even have to be a change for the negative, it could have even been about the aftermath when he thought she seemed so weak at the end and trying to be with Ais more to understand why she was like that and added a bit more to their dialogue about how they felt after the fight in V11 not just "Uh training?". But afterward, she's basically put right in the same idol pedestal she was, before not a single bit of change occurred when it was a good time to do so.

Even in Ais's case we see in SO11, that she reflected a lot on the incident between Bell and Wiene and even spent 2-3 days shut in her room thinking about it all before going to Bell to try and reconcile. Like why is it that only Ais actually seems to mind this incident and she goes to him to apologize, while we haven't seen Bell so much as thinking or reflecting about the fight between him and Ais after when it should've been an extremely important moment for the both of them? This goes way past "letting go" it's almost like memory-erasing that point. I don't think it's ever even brought up from Bell's side after V11 even once.