Solo Leveling practically dominated the winter anime drop in 2024 and has been consistently popular since its release. Giving us flashy fight scenes, beautiful art, emotional moments, and characters that you just want to pry apart with the jaws of life to see what makes them tick, Solo Leveling does do everything right to earn some steady attention. But so do many other anime.
What makes Solo Leveling stand out from the crowd? Why does it remain one of the more popular anime offerings, despite how a lot of anime tend to decline in popularity during their second Season? The answer, we think, lies with our protagonist, our main man, and the legend himself: Sung Jinwoo. Throughout the series, the guy is calm, cool, collected, and suave in the face of both paparazzi and dungeon bosses. Are these traits the ones that grab our attention and hold it by the balls? Or is there something else to the mystery of Solo Leveling and the runaway hype train?
How To Handle Power
Solo Leveling isn’t the first anime to have an OP protagonist. One Punch Man, Sword Art Online, and, of course, the OG godfather of all Shonen anime, Dragon Ball, all boast a ridiculously powerful protagonist. They all handle that protagonist very differently, with One Punch Man zeroing in on the concept of power not making a hero, Sword Art Online focusing more on community and reputation, and how that in and of itself can make a character powerful and Dragon Ball showcasing how one person’s passion can change the world around them. If he can be this good, then so can I.
So, how does Solo Leveling handle Sung Jinwoo, and why does that work exactly? Sung Jinwoo essentially fails to find a real challenge in his opponents after episode 4 of the anime. That’s it, the protagonist’s growth has been achieved, show’s over, we should all go home, right? Not quite.
The intrigue for Sung Jinwoo lies in his humanity. At the beginning, when he is E Rank and gets hurt regularly, it’s his altruism that both puts him in the line of fire and ultimately saves his life. This story does not pull its punches here either. The enemies are brutally cruel, to the point of being comparable to the mad enemies of Attack on Titan, but this cruelty juxtaposes with Sung Jinwoo’s sacrifice to such an extreme that you cannot turn away.
Following this, and Jinwoo’s re-awakening as an S Class Hunter, it’s not the combat that proves difficult for him by a long shot, but the hits on his humanity pile up. To achieve his ends, Sung Jinwoo is forced to become downright cruel in places, eventually achieving the power to absorb the shadows of his enemies, who then become his summoning army.
There is a wonderful moment in Season 2: Episode 21 that illustrates this strain perfectly. Jinwoo, who has finally woken his mother from the Eternal Sleep, feels anxious when his mother finds a picture of their family, including Jinwoo’s father. She claims that it’s Jinwoo’s kindness that makes him like his father, even though Jinwoo knows he’s crossed a line with his cruelty.
This sort of dichotomy is not unusual for an OP character. What better way to humanize someone unreachable than by making one of the oldest conundrums in the book, the nature of good and evil within them, their problem? Solo Leveling is much more subtle about it than One Punch Man, however, and the way that the notion of power threatens to corrupt someone who would give himself for his team in a situation that seemed genuinely dire is headily compelling.
A Growth Mindset
Solo Leveling’s Sung Jinwoo is also set apart by the way that his access as a player to the system motivates a growth mindset. By chapter 4, the story very much paints him as one of the strongest creatures around, and, with his dramatic design change, his facial expressions reflect this. He is no longer so expressive or earnest with his feelings, instead appearing bored in most interactions, or stoic, until he finds a powerful encounter where he engages a more focused or intimidating expression. Yet still, Jinwoo pushes for more.
The narrative highlights the fact that Jinwoo is playing by different rules, but it emphasises that he is still playing. Unlike Kirito in Sword Art Online, who continues to play by the standardised rules and therefore becomes somewhat deified, Jinwoo remains a more grounded character because he is still facing challenges that any human with Jinwoo’s level of altruism would rise to. Despite being S Class, despite having the opportunity to take a job for a small fortune, he chooses to level up, to motivate himself with the idea of saving his mom.
This all brings the audience back to the question of whether this character can retain his goodness, given everything stacking up around him? The excitement lies in the question of how much he will change and, at the end of this whole thing, if he comes face to face with an opponent that terrifies him as much as the smiling statue in those first precarious episodes, will he act in that altruistic manner again?
The OP Master
It’s so easy to make an OP protagonist boring. If they are flawless, if they come away from big combat situations without fighting through terrible fear or obtaining a scratch or twenty, then why are we really here? There is no spectacle here, there is nothing worthy of our attention.
Solo Leveling makes sure to weave together various story elements and character developments so that we are never bored, not for an instant. Everything that happens puts Sung Jinwoo’s situation into a new perspective. Every encounter invites a slide towards evil in a way that puts the viewer on tenterhooks, and the characters around him are both affected by him and affect him in turn, bringing out the altruism that set him apart as a player in the first place. Though he plays by different rules, his people don’t let him slip into a reality where they become meaningless to him.
The genius subtlety of Sung Jinwoo’s character flaws, the suspensefulness of seeing whether or not he will push himself so much he’ll lose himself and the delicate context of Jinwoo’s community in the wider world of Solo Leveling all come together to create something special, a story that really capitalizes on the idea of the OP protagonist without taking away from his humanity in the slightest. Sung Jinwoo of Solo Leveling isn’t a god. He isn’t even someone out of the ordinary. He’s just a kid who happens to be playing a different game than those around him, and it will be exciting, when Season 3 finally drops, to see where that game will take him.
