Why does Kirito end up in the forest when he first enters Alfheim? In the Sword Art Online anime, we see Kirito enter Alfheim Online first in episode 16. Although he is supposed to enter the Spriggan base when he first arrives, he instead encounters something like a glitch and ends up in a forest. Is there any explanation in the anime or light novels for why this happened? I don't recall it being mentioned in any of the later anime episodes.





Note: from a plot point of view it's somewhat necessary that this happens since it gives him a way to meet Leafa, but this still doesn't really explain why this happens purely within the context of the SAO continuity.

In case it isn't clear from my wording and the inclusion of the first image, I am asking why Kirito ends up in the forest after some sort of glitch appears while he is travelling to the Spriggan base (where he was supposed to go initially). The accepted answer here gives the best explanation for why that's the case.
From Sword Art Online Volume 3 - Fairy Dance, Chapter 2 (emphasis mine):


  "[...]. Yggdrasil...she seems to be there. That place, you know
  it?"
  
  "Ah, this I know. Eh, eh, it's generally to the northeast, but quite a
  ways from here. If I were to convert it into real distance, it would be
  about fifty kilometers away."
  
  "Wow, that really is a long distance. That’s what, five times the
  diameter of Aincrad. Actually, why was I brought to this forest anyway?"
  
  Yui lowered her head for a moment at my question.
  
  "I think that your positional data was either damaged or confused with a nearby player, resulting in you ending up here. That’s just a guess, though."


In the screenshot, the pyramid like structure is the signature building of the Spriggan hometown. The blocky void above it is the glitch that "teleports" Kirito to the forest.

Yui raised two possibilities for the glitch:


Kirito's positional data was damaged

Since Kirito and Asuna was teleported to the sky outside Aincrad in SAO moments before the game shut down, and Kirito's character data from SAO was loaded in ALO, chances are that the positional data was also loaded, which sent him on a free fall nosediving trip into the forest 50 kilometers away from Yggdrasil.

While this matches the fact that ALO's map is much bigger than SAO (as seen in the above quote), it was quite a miracle that Kirito dropped right at the forest where Leafa was. As the map in ALO is much bigger, he might as well had ended up elsewhere in ALO.
Kirito's positional data was confused with a nearby player

Since Kirito and Suguha were accessing the game from the same IP address (which is quite common for IPv4 in real world), Kirito's positional data got glitched up and he was dropped in the forest where Suguha (Leafa) was, instead of the hometown of the Spriggan. The fact that he fell from the sky matches the fact that Leafa was having a mid-air fight.

I admit this is a bit stretching, but this is the closest I could relate a real life concept with the theory above to explain the proximity of Kirito and Leafa's position in the game and the timing when the glitch happened.


(Either way, I take it as an excuse for the story instead of general knowledge).