In the anime Sword Art Online (SAO), video gamers are kidnapped by boobytrapped VR game consoles which use low power microwaves to directly interface their brains, but can be turned up to literally kill them. They are then forced to play a video game until they die or someone beats the game and frees the survivors. If you die in the game, you die for real, smelling of bacon. Its pretty much a horror story with lots of teen angst and most of the characters die.
In the anime Log Horizon, video gamers similar to SAO wake up in a game setting based on a post-apocalyptic version of Tokyo, and outside the city walls there are random monster encounters, like SAO they can't log out. They are trapped. If you beat the monsters, you get stronger. If you die, you get resurrected at the chapel in the city, but they start to notice that people who die more start to lose memories and become sort of like zombies. Not undead, but less like actual people. Its odd, and they don't understand what is going on. Stranger yet, they have noticed that the NPCs are probably self-aware AIs, and they aren't supposed to be, and the NPCs are starting to have goals and dreams of their own, but when an NPC dies, they stay dead.
How are these two shows linked?
The best fan theory is that the victims of SAO got recorded onto a server (its thousands of people, so SAO was the story of a mass-murder), and characters of Log Horizon are AI recordings of actual people. They're on a server, waiting because an AI is software, not wetware. It can't really die.
The server may have been shut down, left in a drawer or a vault, and there is no indication of how many years have passed before it has been turned back on again. Now these AIs are awake, in their game world, and whomever turned them on is trying to communicate with them, an ongoing theme in Log Horizon. What if the beings who turned the server on are basically Alien Indiana Jones, or the research lab where AIJ dropped it off is and they're trying to communicate with a lost/dead civilization found on formerly inhabited Planet Earth. The simulation and servers might be all that's left of us, thousands or tens of thousands of years in the future. Light Speed is still a limit, after all. Our signals have been spreading outwards since the 1934 Olympics, as shown in Contact, a terrible movie with some excellent scenes in the first part of the story.
Our signals will eventually spread to the whole universe, but the speed limit works both ways and it could be billions of years before aliens get here, do their archaeology, find the servers, fix them, and turn them on enough for Log Horizon to actually take place. The recordings of people have no idea. They're inside a simulation, and they were already gamers so they just think they're stuck in the game somehow and don't wonder about it more deeply. Its the memory loss aspect that is the clue. If you're aliens do you fly to the another galaxy for a couple billion years or do you record AIs of your best scientists into a ship with a 3D printer, arrive at the destination billions of years later, construct bodies and landing craft, and explore using robot probes with AI brains controlling them? Well, of course you would. That's what we do on Mars. Sort of. Someday we'll land some 3D printers on Mars and construct mining gear for raw materials and build all that stuff, including more rovers etc, to enable exploration without setting foot personally. There's a name for this btw. Its Von Neumann Probe. In scifi movies these often turn evil, called Berserkers because its assumed their mission was assigned by a dying civilization that wanted to wipe out all life in the universe, and build enough death probes to insure that. I'm assuming our aliens aren't here to kill us, merely visit our civilization.
Fan theories can rock. These are the sorts of ideas which on forums lead to great fan fiction writing, or original stories worth reading. Jon Scalzi has made a career of these kinds of ideas.
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