Solo Leveling Is A Show
Is it? It is!!
After shelving it for a few months, I decided to finally return to the second season of the anime Solo Leveling and see if it would change its trajectory from its rather disappointing direction. For context: I took a break three episodes before the end. And I have to say… nah, it didn’t. The show was pretty disappointing to me, but I feel that is because it poorly handled audience expectations. Or perhaps I simply got the wrong impression when the show began.
But what am I even talking about?
Season 1: a good start
My favorite part of Solo Leveling was easily its beginning. As the weakest hunter, the best treatment Jinwoo can expect from his peers is pity, and he’d be lucky to receive even that. People look down upon him simply because he is weak, disregarding his admirable traits and the entire reason he became a hunter (to save his mom, which I would consider a kind thing to do). He is seen as little more than a burden upon everyone else.
Not to mention, his near-death experience was visceral and had me at the edge of my seat. But as brutal as it is to watch, I think what made season 1 click for me were the things it said about society (or at least, how I interpreted the show). Once Jinwoo is able to access the System and become stronger, his quest for power starts off as cathartic and hopeful but takes a more cynical turn as the episodes burn on. I fairly vividly remember the episode where Jinwoo and his little brother figure whose name I can’t remember are stuck in a cave, and are threatened to die at the hands of other hunters. What made that episode stick out to me was the fear of it all—not necessarily just for the hunters who were about to get their asses wiped, but at what Jinwoo was becoming.
In his quest for power, Jinwoo finds little remorse in the killing of other human beings. Granted, I think he is justified in this case since it is basically self defense. But I feel this episode was a great moment for him to cross a line toward the means to his goal—power—while crossing a line away from his humanity. All the while people start to respect him more specifically because he is more powerful. I really appreciate that the show went out of its way to demonstrate this on a few occasions, because it is a problem our own society faces: we place far too value in a person’s power rather than their deeds, skills, or even conscience.
Season 2’s first couple of episodes even mirrored this trend quite well. There’s some dude in the dungeon who is a complete asshole that is genuinely awful to those around him, but is technically no threat to Jinwoo. And yet Jinwoo kills him without much thought because he would be useful in his shadow army. That’s scary! But in a good way. I felt things were not going to end well for this might-makes-right society.
When the story agrees with the thing it is supposed to be satirizing
And then the story just kinda… stopped. I mean, not really, it kept going for another 10 or so episodes, but nothing really interesting happens. Jinwoo manages to save his mom, and it’s a happy moment, and then that’s about it. Jinwoo forces a demon girl to give him directions to the end of the dungeon, all the while the demon girl develops stockholm syndrome and falls in love with her captor—WAIT WHAT??
Weird…
And then he beats the big bad ants in the ant island, kills Ant Darth Vader, and saves the day, and everyone respects him because he’s powerful, The End!
Like… huh? I swear, it almost felt to me as though the show took on a new writer halfway through or something, but I don’t think this is the case? It’s just… really weird how the show kind of pivoted thematically. From exploring the dangers of a society that places power above all else, and the ways this can slowly creep through and decay a person’s conscience, to… yay big strong man saves the day! And women love him either because they are damsels in distress who are attracted to power, or they simply want to be ordered around because they are attracted to power (this show is lowkey sexist).
If there’s one thing this show does well, it’s that it’s very well animated. And for what it’s worth, I’m not even necessarily opposed to an anime that boils down to little more than a sports event. By all means, there is plenty to enjoy from that if you are the right person. I think the issue I have with Solo Leveling is that unlike a show like Shangri-la, which makes it clear from the beginning that it is a show about a guy playing a video game and basically nothing else, this show tries to have interesting societal commentary at first and then completely drops it in favor of “wow look at the big strong man”, which just isn’t interesting to me at all. I went through most of season 2 expecting the cracks behind Jinwoo’s moral armor to show, and yet nothing came of it.
It is an issue of playing with audience expectations. But again, maybe I just saw something that wasn’t intended in the first place.
The part of the last few episodes that had me at the edge of my seat was actually when Jinwoo used Arise on the healer in the party. Ironically this was the part where 0 fighting actually happened. Since the main character’s love interest was basically dead, I expected he was also planning to simply turn her into a shadow to the horror of everyone there, showing that at the end of it all he only cared about power. It would have been a pretty drastic turn, but it also would have been captivating to see how Jinwoo’s lifestyle had corrupted him. But no, he just used the healer’s shadow to heal the love interest, and because he’s such a good guy, he even releases the healer’s shadow at the request of a person who once thought of him as nothing more than another hunter to order around. Again, I think I was hoping to get something WAY different from the show than what I actually received.
So I guess if you’re fine with mindless power fantasy shows, and you can tolerate a bit of sexism, then Solo Leveling is the show for you! Otherwise… meh. It’s all style and no substance. There really isn’t much else to say about it.