The anime industry has been dominated by the isekai genre (the escape to another world trope) since it blew up back in 2010. Staples like Re:zero and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime have been consistently popular throughout their run time, but recently, the general opinion is that the genre has become formulaic. Recent releases for isekai haven’t been doing nearly as well. Enter Solo Leveling.
Solo Leveling first graced our screens in winter 2024, and it went off with a bang. All anyone could talk about that season was Solo Leveling, where it had come from and what would be next for the protagonist, Sung Jinwoo, as things played out for him having leapt up from being a lowly E Rank Hunter, all the way to being S class without rising through any of those other established ranks.
The story of a young underdog acquiring the power to stand with the likes of gods isn’t a new one, but Solo Leveling went about it with a finesse and style that continues to set it apart from its brethren in ways that often feel like a breath of fresh air. Solo Leveling is certainly not an isekai, and it turned heads with what it offered its audience. But what made this the anime to break that stagnant stalemate, and where will it pioneer the way for anime to grow as the years progress?
An Intelligent Craft
Solo Leveling has an amazing propensity for using the most popular elements of other anime and splicing them together to create something unique and interesting. It takes the dark and gory cruelty of Attack on Titan to make its material thrillingly shocking, it takes the numerical leveling system of Dragon Ball Z to give a wider and staisfyingly mathematical understanding of strength in its setting, and it takes the beloved isekai genre, and incorporates that escapism element whilst tying it into the elevated stakes of real world consequences.
With isekai in particular, the protagonist is typically taken into a new world to play by those new rules. Ingeniously, Solo Leveling takes portals to other worlds and makes them easily accessible for that particular story arc. It also creates overarching rules that apply to these worlds as much as they apply to the original world that we are more familiar with.
It also plays with the idea that the rules you might be playing with aren’t the rules that really govern existence, introducing Jinwoo’s new rules as he becomes a ‘player’ so that he ends up involved in a completely different game to everyone and everything else, though he takes these rules with him into whatever dungeon he ends up exploring, much like the other Hunters do.
It’s a fascinating concept to have these worlds affected by something greater, and the real disconcertingness of this isn’t brought to light until halfway through Season 2 when Jinwoo meets the demon Esil. He asks her a couple of questions that skim the edges of system lore, and Esil, despite being from another world herself, is completely taken over, her eyes glitching with pixelated outbursts as she announces that Jinwoo has exceeded his allotted information allowance.
Seeing the system’s reach across these worlds with the implication that it’s affecting more makes the game that Jinwoo has found himself in perilous in ways that it hasn’t been before. It makes viewers question the sheer enormous scope of the world building in ways that you don’t usually find in isekai, and hopefully, as with the influences of Attack on Titan elevating combat stakes and Dragon Ball Z introducing the idea of numerical comparison, this subtle hinting at a wider scope will make furture creators think about their own wider setting.
Subverting Genre Expectations
Solo Leveling’s incredibleness isn’t just limited to the elements it’s able to identify and use from other anime. At its core, Solo Leveling is a power fantasy, and with that definition, there is an expectation from its audience to see a progression through struggle approach, at the very least, for the main character.
Solo Leveling, of course, does do this, but it makes it very clear from the beginning that Sung Jinwoo is already playing the god game. He is immediately set apart from his peers in every way, and fans get a kick out of him constantly blowing the S Rankers out of the water, disrupting the world of the Hunters, and then going on to continue to level up despite this elite status.
Sung Jinwoo has different goals and motivations from most of the main cast. He is set apart from them, and yet he isn’t alienated enough that the audience stops caring about his journey, because like the ‘flat arc’ narrative protagonist, his presence constantly affects and changes the world around him. His determination to level up speaks to Go Gunhee, the Chair of Hunter’s Association, as well as changing how Cha Hae-In looks at herself and her motivations in the new spin-off of the Hunter: Origin Series – The Pure Sword Princess.
Sung Jinwoo is OP in the traditional lens the audience initially sees him through, but it’s just that he is involved in something greater. And though he is, he never loses the grounding that he has in the real world. The balance is delicate, perfect, and a very prominent reason as to why Solo Leveling has resonated with so many people.
Changing The Landscape
Whatever Solo Leveling incorporates and however it subverts expectations, it is clear that the creators are doing a brilliant job of making sure it is the most entertaining piece of media on the market. They clearly love anime as an art form and are clever enough to take the most entertaining elements to weave them into a brand new kind of story, while keeping the balance for a character who plays god games while struggling with his humanity. Solo Leveling invites us to explore rich lore, multiple worlds, and gives us a cast of OP characters to follow and appreciate as they, relateably, follow and appreciate Sung Jinwoo’s grapple with his humanity.
It is exciting to speculate on how innovation like this will change the face of anime going forward, if we’ll see a true decline in isekai, and see a rise in power fantasy. At the moment, it’s thought that Season 3 of the anime might drop in time for the 2028 Olympics, but fans are still holding on to hope that it could be sooner. In the meantime, you can watch the first two Seasons on Crunchyroll, read the original webnovel over on Webnovel, or find the manhwa online.
