Review of Solo Leveling Season 2: Arise from the Shadow
What makes something art is what you take away from it, and after watching Solo Leveling, all I was left with was the typical "powerful hot dudebro guy is powerful and kills things very powerfully", but with too much animation budget. The fights were cool, the animators did an amazing job, it's just too bad they had to animate this slop with less flavor than plain yogurt. Remove the budget and what are you left with on paper? The world has a problem, and an even bigger problem is coming. A dude with a twink build is weak but needs to be strong for moneyand family reasons. He becomes a kind of chosen one, gets bestowed some mysterious power, then becomes handsome and powerful (and literally taller for some reason lol). This is an okay start but certainly isn't anything new. Could you not apply that sentence to dozens of Shonen series? But anyway, this all plays in the backdrop of several organizations that play really, really rudimentary political games you'd come to expect from isekai trash like this. Of all those boring-ass office scenes, all they amounted to was: There's five guilds, they engage in power struggles like nations do, a sixth one is trying to form, the MC is important in that balance of power, and we're keeping an eye on that there MC I tell you whut. Sometimes a third of the whole episode is nothing but these boring office scenes, and a third of the runtime is spent trying to tell me THAT?? That's it?? It's importance theater. A bunch of suited up stern looking anime tough guys look out giant office windows with their back turned to the other character, hands behind back in the most pretentious way possible, saying lines in this silly melodramatic tone that would otherwise read like they're out of the Wikipedia article on the show's plot. It's just silly. Again, if you take away the budget, if you take away how attractive the characters look and sound, if you take away the painstakingly animated blood and guts, you're left with utter silliness.
Do you think there are characters in this show? Really? Okay, here's a few lines from the show. I want you to name the character that said each line:
"That wasn't even a warm-up."
"What happens in the dungeon stays in the dungeon, right?"
"I have a wife a-and kids!"
**minutes upon minutes of explaining something**
**directly tells someone what matters to them in dialogue to artificially raise the stakes of them dying right before they die**
Answer? Several characters have said all of these lines multiple times because nearly every character is exactly the same. Calm, cool, collected, calculating, mysterious vibe, know-it-all, melodramatic, self-serving in a way that leads to their downfall, or comically selfless to where everyone likes them (but only if they're hot), and maybe a dash or two of bloodlust. Boom, 99% of the cast accounted for.
What happens when you can't tell characters apart from their dialogue lines? It means no one cares when they have fun, cry, die, or anything. Nobody cares. The show's producers used the poorly written characters and dialogue as an excuse to set up for the power trip fantasies and cool way-over-budget fight scenes. The audience feels the same way. These nothing characters and boring dialogue are the vegetables before the wagyu steak, the pauses to introduce a sense of pace between the cool fight scenes and power circlejerks. We look on in morbid curiosity as yet another nothing character with "a wife and kids" is decapitated or torn in half. "Fuck his wife and kids" we all say in unison. "Fuck them".
It's bad, thanks for reading.