Last year, I dropped watching Solo Leveling after seven episodes. Although the show lived up to the lip service I’d received from colleagues, I couldn’t ignore the nagging feeling that it was just another power fantasy anime that was all style and no substance. Despite my past reservations, I’ve given the anime another shot with my partner, who adores the series. Having caught up on its second season, I’m still not completely sold.
Solo Leveling, animated by A-1 Pictures, is an anime adaptation of the wildly popular manhwa of the same name. It's one of those anime that’s not quite an isekai while incorporating all of that genre’s worst parts into its otherwise interesting premise. The series takes place in a world where portals from another dimension are filled with invading monsters. To combat the threat of portals randomly opening worldwide, hunters, a chosen few bestowed with the power to wield magical items, form guilds, defeat grunts and bosses inside dungeons, and close gates. To further accentuate the RPG mechanics the world is operating on, hunters are given ranks, with S being the strongest and E being the weakest.
Our hero, Sung Jun-Woo, was once regarded as humanity’s weakest E-rank hunter. After surviving a near-death experience in a dungeon, Sung accesses a mysterious RPG interface that acts as a personal trainer, allowing him to challenge dungeons and daily objectives to raise his rank. By completing his dailies, Sung gains points to increase his aptitudes (which he exclusively uses to boost his strength until the system forces him to level up other traits with supplemental stat-boosting weapons), switch classes, and gain new powers. Should he ignore his regime, he’s penalized with demanding boss rushes.
Solo Leveling has the juice in the animation department, crafting some of the industry's best fight scenes in its first and second seasons. My qualm with it is that it has yet to develop beyond the base appeal of being a generic edgy power fantasy.
Rewatching the anime with my partner, I found myself intrigued by the potential for the show to explore how the existence of hunters could create conflict between the global elite and the lower-class citizens gaining wealth exclusively through their ability to thwart dimension-hopping threats. When I asked if the show would ever delve into this thematic hook, my partner said, "Not really." Still, the show does allude to this concept, with Sung's motivation being to earn enough money to send his younger sister to school and pay for his comatose mother's medical bills—all admirable goals for a hero to aspire to. Unfortunately, as he grows stronger, he loses any semblance of a compelling personality.
At the show's start, Sung is an over-apologetic wimpy kid. Despite being a great statistician from his years of fighting to survive dungeon raids as a low-level hunter, his voice lacks confidence, no one respects him, and he has the physical endurance of a Nature Valley bar. Then, like Anne Hathaway’s glow-up in The Princess Diaries, Sung becomes a walking caricature of the idea of the “sigma male” thanks to his solo leveling ability. Consequently, his voice drops four octaves, he gets taller, and he exclusively spews edgy one-liners like he took wisecrack MasterClass courses from Death Note’s Light Yagami. His aura is too tough, his dick is probably enormous, and every scene is dedicated to the women in Solo Leveling’s supporting cast wanting to be with him and men wishing to be him (or be with him).
I've seen this repeatedly with anime that give the game away with sentence-long titles and plot progression that speedrun past adversity toward the instant gratification of a hero becoming an overpowered demigod thanks to a generic RPG mechanic. Solo Leveling does avoid being a completely generic self-insert power fantasy: Sung exhibits a sliver of his former emotional depth as a do-gooder trying to help his family. Granted, it's buried deep beneath his edgy, eye-roll-inducing bravado, but the show endeavors to plant narrative seeds to elucidate Sung's flattening, with him explicitly expressing concern that he loses his humanity the more he kills monsters and wrongdoers in pursuit of strength. But instead of wrestling with Sung’s inner conflict, the show is more concerned with dedicating most of its time to how raw he looks whenever he squashes his foes.
At first, I assumed my gripes with Solo Leveling stemmed from how it reminded me too much of Sword Art Online. However, that assumption fell apart when I remembered Sword Art Online’s hero won his fights because he pulled exploits and skills out of his ass. In contrast, Solo Leveling shows Sung making conscious decisions and inquiries into his character build — for lack of a better word — so viewers can follow the logic of why he’d win his battles. Perhaps I just hate the concept of a hero leveling up being shorthand for how power fantasy anime creates conflict for heroes. This assumption fell apart, too, when I remembered how much I enjoyed how shows like Shangri-La Frontier’s whole intrigue stemmed from how its hero — a guy who loves finding exploits in broken games — is forced to complete a naked run without armor or items and becomes the series’ LetMeSoloHer.
Except for two instances where Sung had to strategize his way out of defeating over-leveled bosses in bonus quests issued by his enigmatic RPG system, every battle in Solo Leveling thus far has been a foregone conclusion. Whether Sung and his crew are betrayed by guild members or ambushed by ice elves, I never feel that Sung is in danger of losing a fight. Regardless of the posturing of his villains, he is destined to win, which does not make for captivating television, no matter how well-animated its stylish fight scenes are or the passionate performances of its talented voice actors. Because of this trend, the intrigue of bigger mysteries, such as why Solo Leveling’s RPG system is dead set on grooming Sung into a god among men, are on the verge of losing appeal due to the repetitive nature of watching Sung accumulate victories like an anime John Cena.
Whenever I have raised this concern with friends, they say Solo Leveling is "turn-your-brain-off" power fantasy entertainment and that I expect too much from it. Meanwhile, my partner insists that my opinion on Solo Leveling might change once it reaches its “Chimera Ant arc.” I resent being told I can only enjoy something if I don’t think too critically about it, but I will continue with an open mind, waiting for the other shoe to drop and transform the anime into the generational masterpiece its fandom hypes it up to be.
