Solo Leveling

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Look, I didn’t like the webtoon Solo Leveling much. In fact, I thought that the art was the only good thing about it, so I expected that I would like the novel version much less. In a surprising turn of events, the novel version was considerably more enjoyable read. So let’s take a look at how that happened.

Of course, it’s not like Solo Leveling turned into a high brow literature. However, I believe that the most important aspect of media is theenjoyment. The enjoyment meter is there first, and from it you backtrack and figure out why you did or didn’t like the thing.

First, ... to recap the faults that are present both in this novel and in the comic version, and how they could have been fixed.

Obviously, this is a wish fulfilment self-insert. So it’s not much surprising that it carries one of the most common flaws for such fiction, and that is the protagonist lacking flaws – or at least, the narration not being self-aware of those flaws. Jinwoo in the case of Solo Leveling is absurdly strong, hard-working, charismatic and popular – well liked not just in general but even respected by many antagonists, and the only people who don’t like him are the villains. This is made worse by the fact that a potential flaw is dangling by there, but the script looks to be quite unaware of it. You see, in first parts of the story, Jinwoo displays some near psychopathic tendencies. Despite the only reason he’s in the Hunter industry is his mom’s illness, the moment he gets actually strong he only cares about getting stronger and stronger. There is no mention of him having a thought about his mom at all until the system literally hands him an item that basically says “Hey this can probably cure your mom bro”. If this would have been acknowledged by the narration that Jinwoo was so poisoned by the visions of greater glory that he forgot about the reason he’s doing it in the first place, this would be amazing transformation from glaring fault to much needed character flaw, turning a minus into a plus. Alas, Jinwoo is framed by the story as always having been caring about his close ones.

Another problem that ties into the previously mentioned one is the lack of stakes. Excluding the intro in which the MC isn’t OP yet, up until the very finale there are only like two moments when it looks like Jinwoo might not easily win everything. And even those are fleeting, short moments that are quickly overcame, result in profit and have no consequences. In general Jinwoo “fails” only upwards, only when said failure would end up benefiting him. “Oh no I accidentally got myself in a situation that led to me acquiring another OP skill”, “Oh no the news of my heroism accidentally leaked to the general population” etc. At no point during the story you feel like there is even a chance the protagonist might actually lose, even in some small less-consequential manner. With the overpowerdness of this scale, I demand a long lasting injury at some point for the fights to have impacts. Yeah, it’s pretty hard when the protagonist is given regeneration and negative status immunity, but here are some of many possible solutions – a poison that works faster then the second or so it takes the system to register and remove it, or injury so severe that even with the high regeneration it takes the protagonist several days to recover (during which something important might happen which he wouldn’t be able to prevent). Hell, the regeneration is even a prime setup for getting captured and tortured. Just give me anything that makes the action fell less like a godmode.

The secondary cast is lacking. Most of them are completely useless for the plot other than being something for Jinwoo to defend. Any time someone is hinted to be able to even slightly rival Jinwhoo, they get quickly humiliated or even killed off just to show how Jinwoo is so much better. Please, just write in someone who is at least slightly useful even as an assist. Also, a message to any aspiring writers out there – unless you’re George R. R. Martin writing Elden Ring lore, please take care to not have cast with too similar names, because here like half of them have names starting with J and I frequently had to divine from the context which one of the character this one was again.

That said, characters are what gets us to the next section, which is what the novel did better. One of my biggest problems with the comic was how quickly it forewent the whole “Solo Leveling” aspect, which is to say that too quickly it became too focused on the shadow army, and too quickly it treated the shadows as separate characters. In comparison in the novel the shadows are for a long time treated very much as a mere ability that does something in a background while Jinwoo is still focus on the action and portrayed as the one doing the important work. It’s only later that some of the shadows display personalities and it is more earned at that point.

Action too is more entertaining in the novel, and this was very surprising to me. I’m still not completely sure what exactly caused the drawn action that one would expect to be better to feel sloggy and boring instead. It probably has something to do with more focus on the general strategy and mental process in the novel, and description that can inspire reader with more vivid imagination to imagine more interesting environment and action than the webtoon managed to portray. The overall vibe of the novel, action included, is just… less cheesy?

Lastly, some general observations regardless of novel/comic comparison.

I appreciate that the story took care to set up some conditions that caused Jinwoo to be unable to solve given problem *too* quickly. Meaning that even with teleportation, telekinesis, telepathic security system etc., the writer managed to not write himself in a corner that much and could still come up with some tension. Yes, I realize that this sounds like a contradiction to my point above about no stakes, so just to be sure I’ll clarify that it’s not Jinwoo himself who can find himself in danger – he’s still without a doubt going to win sooner or later.

That said, I wish the story foreshadowed the whole Monarch/Rulers stuff sooner, as it felt a bit shoehorned in and frankly quite confusing at first as to who is supposed to be who. Despite that, it’s still much better than having no real conclusion to the story (as many similar stories frequently end up doing) or simply handwaving the whole power system and leaving it without more then vague explanation on how it came to be (as even more stories of similar ilk unfortunately do). The finale of Solo Leveling is actualy quite nice, so much that I was really afraid it would get ruined when I noticed that what looks like a finely written final chapter is only in the first fourth of a volume, but luckily the rest of the final volume were short stories and the ending was not rewritten for a more sloppy one.

And regarding the writing, what I think contributed strongly to my enjoyment is that every scene moves the plot forward. There aren’t fillers, there aren’t unnecessary prolonged nothingburgers, the plot actually goes from start to end in pace. Yes, unfortunately at this point I’ve read so many mediocre or subpar novels that even something like this which should be the bare minimum for writing a story deserves to be specifically mentioned and highlighted, as many titles fail at this simple task.

So to summarize, as long as you expect young adult novel level of story complexity, you should have some fun reading this. It’s like a junk food of writing, and I like me some fine junk food once in a while.