Potato is yum

I loved Solo Leveling and I really do think it was a very important development in webcomics. It’s pretty hard to find a webcomic that hasn’t been influenced by it in some way. However, since Solo Leveling, we’ve basically seen an absurd number of what has been dubed a “Solo Leveling Clone.” I’ve met so many people that tell me, “Ohhhh, solo leveling is so overrrated.” which is actually such a BS take. People have to understand that before Solo Leveling there really weren’t that many OPMC webcomics with pretty much the only one being One Punch Man which was more of a comedy more than anything.

A lot of people look at Solo Leveling and focus on the supposed aura farming or the iconic “Arise” but miss what really made Solo Leveling a great story which was it’s uniqueness. When reading Solo Leveling in 2018, you could not say it was like any other story. You could open a random chapter of the webcomic and say, “Yup. That’s Solo Leveling.” Obviously this isn’t the case after the story became so popular because success is copied until it ceases to succeed. This is how we ended up with low quality clones of Solo Leveling that miss all great things and only focus on a weak ass idiot with a sister and a necromancer ability that does a funny particle effect when he says the word “Arise.”

Like seriously, why would I want to read a story just because I wanted to hear one character say a random ass word with a bunch of funny colors splashed on? I continued reading Solo Leveling because the world was cool. It was unique and brought something I had never seen before into a story. The story wasn’t exactly perfect and I hate the ending but it was much better than whatever aura farming slop we are getting right now.

I feel like a lot of new authors are just trying to pick out the best aspects of successful stories without realized that in the end what their writing is supposed to be their own story. It does make sense to pick out what made another story successful but only if it makes sense in the context of the story you want to write. Suddenly trying to introduce dungeon portal mechanics into your scifi cultivation story is probably not a good idea. It’s not a good idea to just make your main character a necromancer because, “People want to read a necromancer story,” because that’s probably not what people actually are reading that story for. If anything, readers are really bad at know why they actually like reading something but are really good at know why they don’t like reading something. Chances are, they liked reading that necromancer story because it had a novel take on the genre that made the reader rethink the way they read the story.

I really think the Solo Leveling anime really doesn’t help. The anime adaptation basically changed nothing about the story and retained much of the original feel of the webcomic. On one hand, this is great because it is faithful to the source material but it also misses out on the opportunity to innovate on the OPMC genre just like it’s source material did. I’m a little disappointed by this missed opportunity and I feel like the hype of Solo Leveling didn’t hit the same for newer consumers of the story like it did for us long time readers of the webcomic. I still greatly enjoyed the anime as I remembered how incredible the innovation on the genre was and realized just how impactful Solo Leveling has been on webcomics in the past few years.