I was under the impression that the ALO arc was still the first season, making the second season contain the GGO arc. And the whole sister love thing did annoy me, as welll as the helpless female that protagonist must save for the ALO arc. In fact all the females that just threw their love and adoration upon him in both arcs pretty much annoyed me.
Specifics on the females in spoilers
Silica the beast tamer in SAO after saving her familiar, Lisbeth the Blacksmith in SAO falling for him after questing for the crystal ingot, Kirito's Sister irl and in ALO, and the sylph leader and Cait sith leader at the diplomatic meeting. Although the Cait sith and Sylph leader was less love, more trying to attract a powerful asset to their cause so...
Yea... that is the problem with most of the anime that I've watched/tried out lately... too much haremesque love for the main male character. My tolerance for this sort of bullshit has been getting lower.
... I'm lost with all these acronyms for sword art online.
The worst part of it is that, if SAO had just stuck to the premise and dropped some of the harem-y bits (particularly the creepy ones with she's-not-really-my-sister-I-swear and Silica), it would have been pretty damned good. The situation it reached near the end with Asuna, Kirito, and Yui managed to be both emotionally touching and an interesting examination of a number of different things, including: Bonding in life-threatening situations, the effects of forcing teenagers into situations where they must act as adults, both martially and romantically, human-AI interactions, the question of whether artificial beings can have a "soul", etc. And that's leaving aside all of the juicy stuff you can dig from the rest of the setting. It could have been sort of like The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor with a conflict more interesting than "I need to make lots of money" and more interesting philosophical/ethical issues.
But noooo, there just had to be the really creepy romances and the stereotypical helpless-princess plot and the shift from no-magic-all-melee fantasy/near-future SF juxtaposition fight-for-your-life to no-risks-Fly-at-will-magic-bullshit masculine power fantasy. For once I'm in favor of death of the author, in a remarkably proactive sense. Biggest letdown I've had from anything in a long, long time. I absolutely hate seeing a good premise wasted because the author/animation team couldn't refrain from doing stupid things with it.