Review of Solo Leveling Season 2: Arise from the Shadow

Watching this show felt like sitting through a series of Let’s Play videos on Youtube: a meaningless waste of time but somewhat entertaining. If you replaced Jinwoo in this show with Rudeus from Mushoku Tensei, all the people screeching about how good this show is would go run and hide back in their basement. You'd ruin both shows at the same time. Replacing the core of Mushoku character development and storytelling with a bland nobody with zero personality at the same time replacing the core of Solo Leveling's power fantasy since nobody wants to go around fantasizing about being a pedophile. This is the new brandof isekai where instead of fantasizing about killing yourself/getting run over by a truck and reincarnating in a brand new world, OP with no problems to trouble you, now you fantasize about going into a 'dungeon' and coming out OP af with special treatment from god himself and nobody can ever reach your heights except you.

You can never get genuinely invested in anything Jinwoo does because the outcome is always the same old predictable, boring smut-fest. There are no stakes in a show where the only possible outcomes for a fight are win or lose because Jinwoo is always going to win.

There are no characters in this show besides Jinwoo and so there’s nothing for us to latch onto besides his trials and tribulations which frankly shouldn't even be classified as such. This show treats side characters as disposable props rather than fleshed-out individuals with a not so subtle dig at their “no potential for growth” status contrasting Jinwoo’s. Characters exist solely to highlight Jinwoo’s superiority or to be rescued, stripped of their agency. Female characters feel especially lackluster as they exist purely to be cheerleaders for Jinwoo’s power trips and validate him, regressing sexist tropes back another 100 years.

The animation is superb as is the case for most of A-1 Pictures’ works. They’re a fantastic animation studio.

Villains are the lifeblood of a show and they make or break shows for me. There are no villains here, except mindless monsters and one-dimensional ‘bad’ guys. So bad.

The glaringly obvious rip-off of Hunter x Hunter is disgusting. The author basically wrote fanfiction for what if the Chimera Ant arc had Superman appear out of nowhere and solve all of our problems for us.
OMG wHaTaGrEaTiDeA

Remember when all the critics complained that Demon Slayer was nothing but a simple story with flashy animation? That series somehow still had 750 times more character and structure than this.

If you stripped away all of the slick animation, you’d be left with a PowerPoint presentation titled, “Why I’m Cool:” By Sung Jinwoo.