Anime Spotlight #55: Solo Leveling - Arise From the Shadow

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Animeister

My original Solo Leveling Spotlight marked the six hundredth post I ever published on Blogger, and it's kind of a fitting coincidence that I'm now starting the final week of Anime August (a month that I began by celebrating my fiftieth Anime Spotlight and my eight hundredth Blogger post with a massive look at My Hero Academia) with a second season update on Solo Leveling.

As a reminder, Solo Leveling began its English-language life as a web novel on Webnovel (duh) titled Only I Level Up, which proved popular enough to receive a web comic adaptation of the same title on the same platform (written by Chugong and illustrated by the late Dubu), and I managed to read all of it (with the exception of the side stories and the Ragnarok sequel series that were published after the main story concluded) before Webnovel's subscription and gacha-based customization mechanics started to get extra-predatory and I lost out on valuable content-creation time trying to hit daily reading thresholds while my alotment of free-ish coins and chapter passes quickly dwindled under inflation pressures. Sure, it helped me read more for awhile, but when a joy starts feeling like a job that costs money and half of the stuff you want to read was translated to English by a pseudo-bilingual grade-schooler and grammar-checked by a blind cabbage, it's time to dip out.

When we last left Sung Jin-Woo (flipped around and pronounced "Jinoo Song" and voiced by Aleks Le—Gamma 1 from Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero and Zenitsu from Demon Slayer—in the dub), he had long since outgrown the title of "World's Weakest Hunter" and the plot point where he must do Saitama's training regime every day or become giant desert centipede food, and things resume in Season 2: Arise From the Shadow with two major plot points that will define the course of the season.

First is the Season 1 cliffhanger of Sung Jin-Woo having beaten Vampire Survivors and gained a Necromancy Job that lets him extract and control the shadowy souls of monsters (and humans!) regardless of whether he was the one to kill them or not.

Second is the season-spanning Jeju Island Raid: a televised (because non-Hunters have no choice but to sit around and wait for a news/reality show broadcast to inform them in real time exactly how fucked they are, which is absolutely nothing like the real world in 2025, and sarcasm is priceless and exempt from tariffs in this economy) apocalyptic event/international dick-measuring contest/international branding exercise to decide which country has the strongest ant food. So of course, things get so bad that Sung Jin-Woo is forced to show his power to the world for the first time (the Korean Hunters' Association knows how strong he was before the Necromancer Job Change, but even they are still looking at him through their static archetype of what a Hunter is—fixed strength, rigid D&D/Final Fantasy classification criteria, class-defined stat ratios, etc.—and no one to this point knows how much stronger he is or what he's capable of as a Necromancer), and we get the classic shōnen protagonist walk-up that kicks off the ultimate clash of Aura Farm VS. Ant Farm.

The fight animation, as expected of A-1 Pictures, is as impressive and "webcomic come to life" accurate as it was in the first season. The music this season is an OP-only banger like last time,

"ReAwaker" by LiSA, feat. Felix from Stray Kids

while the ending song, in my opinion, has amazing instrumentation but the vocals sound like the tortured cries of fingernails on a feral cat made of chalkboards. I said in my Time Drops post this week that there wouldn't be a theme, but Stray Kids also handled the music for Tower Of God Season 2, which aired at around the same time as Arise From the Shadow. I'll showcase their contribution tomorrow. It was also a pleasant surprise to hear the first season OP (a hype, techno-rap-pop fusion that sounds amazing in English and Japanese)

"LEvel" by Hiroyuki Sawano and TOMORROW x TOGETHER

playing over the final episode's ending credits.

There are other plot points of importance besides the Jeju Island Raid and Jin-Woo's new Necromancer powers, such as the arrival of a Korean-American ex-pat Hunter who wants to avenge his asshole brother (it's built up more in the webcomic as a fight we should anticipate, and though it doesn't happen in either medium until comic Jin-Woo is way too strong for any of the tension to hit properly, it gets squashed incredibly fast this season with the sudden reappearance of Jin-Woo's monster-like father and the mounting threat of the Jeju ant colony),

the idea that monsters of a certain strength can speak (and all monsters are driven by a higher power to kill humans), and numerous unrequited romantic subplots that have given rise to Leveling Abridged videos (usually of the "incest and/or slavery and/or Adobe Acrobatics is 'funny'" variety)—the most interesting of which is Cha Hae-In, a Hunter who can smell the foul odor of reapportioned life force on other Hunters...except for Jin-Woo, so apply your understanding of Japanese/Korean romantic fiction to that and you can guess where her mind goes, though thankfully, the season doesn't dwell on this nearly as much as you'd think because Solo Leveling is a non-toxic incel power fantasy first and harem slop never.

The only other arc this season that I found compelling from an emotional and world-building standpoint was Jin-Woo's quest to climb the circles of a Hell Dungeon for the final ingredient to his mother's coma-cure potion. Seeing this season-and-a-half-long plot thread get resolved had big, "I've also been waiting for this!" energy, and it choked me up right alongside Jin-Woo when the moment came. In the process, though, there came an existential dread as, while he climbed through the Circles of Hell, Jin-Woo befriended a demon princess who was engaged in a Dragon Ball Daima-style class war with the other Demon Lords, whose rule of the Circles above had turned Hell into a more-er, badder-er, Tartarus saucier, Worchestershire, hellish-er place. They (mostly Jin-Woo, who doesn't try to use his Necromancer powers on slain demons for some reason but still kicks all the ass and gets a metal AF dragon shadow out of the bargain) topple the higher Demon Lords and help her father reclaim his throne at the top, but just when you think Jin-Woo will have some new allies in the demons, the notification comes in that he has cleared the Hell Dungeon, and it soon becomes clear that things will reset or be erased when he leaves, showing the true value of sentient life to the higher powers at play, because fiction (right‽).

Aside from all that, everything I said in the original review still holds true. Power levels are bullshit, dramatic tension doesn't exist because Jin-Woo's plot armor has all the drip, and no matter how hard the story tries to make the supporting characters interesting (or how often they are interesting), no one ultimately matters because Jin-Woo and his increasingly "difficult" series of fights against a gauntlet of city-to-cosmic-level threats take precedence over existential politics, character development, and compelling romantic subplots. Ergo, lots of aura farming, punching, and energy attacks that make the main character look cool (if divisive and selfish) at everyone else's expense. There is a live-action adaptation in the works, as well as talk of wanting to do a third season of the anime so it lines up with the Olympics (possibly in 2028) but nothing has been made official yet. I'd watch it because Solo Leveling is a visually impressive series if nothing else, and as popular as it has been, the stakeholders would be fools to stop now.

Seeing as how I'm a stakeholder (I know that customers and viewers are stakeholders thanks to my Marketing degree from WGU) and a fool, I'll stop talking about Solo Leveling: Arise From the Shadow now so that we can finish up the Hunter Registration as I ask you to please remember to Become A Ticketholder in my Hunters' Guild if you haven't already, comment your dungeon raid report at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can keep my S-Rank status, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest dungeon breaks of news on my high-level content.

Animeister,

Leveling Up,

And Out.