Solo Leveling is a POWER FANTASY!

Well, that's a bad excuse. It sounds like a hentai and a power fantasy are the same in terms of writing quality and motivation.
A good story is not just about someone's momentary good idea or satisfaction, but also a thoughtful execution of those.

If all it is, is a power fantasy, then its a crap story. Or, rather, a non-story. It doesn't have to be complex, deep or any other adjective, but it can't even present the bare minimum of what makes a story, well, a story - so its nothing.

If all it is, is a power fantasy, then its a crap story. Or, rather, a non-story. It doesn't have to be complex, deep or any other adjective, but it can't even present the bare minimum of what makes a story, well, a story - so its nothing.

@SlopGuzzler69 It has a beginning, a goal the MC is working towards, a mystery that is being revealed and an ending. I don't see how that's a "non-story".

I also see people constantly complain about how bad the story is but I have yet to actually see someone say why. I'm actually getting the feeling this is a case my boss always told me about when it comes to QA testing a game. Which is, that what people are complaining about isn't what's actually bothering them. Like, people complain about the story as a whole, but I think there's just something specific about the story or characters they don't like, but instead of actually thinking about what that is, they just scream story bad.



That's exactly what I'd like to make people aware of.
Joining a hype often backfires because people have unrealistic expectations. The difference between the anime SL community and the manhwa/novel SL community is like day and night, simply because most manhwa readers knew what they were getting themselves into, anime watchers didn't.



And that's totally fine.
I hate harem to death, that's why I avoid any anime that's even remotely close to a harem. I'm avoiding pain and others avoid being confronted with me pointlessly hating about something I was bound to hate in the first place, and everyone stays happy.



Can't really comment on that since I avoid harems like the plague. I don't know if harems have actually good stories or not. I know of SOME mangas people keep gushing about how amazing the story is even though it turns into a harem, but since I didn't read them I can't tell.
I guess you could call it a fanservice. Although I don't know if calling something a fanservice makes sense if it's literally the setting. That's like calling a shortstory about a "psycho killer MC" fanservice.
It's simply the story the author wanted to tell. Calling something a bad story just because it's not teaching you some life lessons or have some deeper meaning to it doesn't make it a bad story. It's just a story you, personally, don't enjoy because of whatever reasons.

A bad story has plot holes, a lack of a goal, or is inconsistent, only to name the most obvious things. SL has none of these issues. What RUINS a story for you is a totally different matter, because that's up to taste and what a person values about the story.
To me SAO's story is absolute garbage, but most people love the story. Why? Because there are just very specific things about SAO's story and characters that annoy the hell out of me and ruin the whole story for me.

Again, I'm not saying SL is perfect. It certainly has aspects it's lacking in. But it's certainly not objectively bad.

@SlopGuzzler69 It has a beginning, a goal the MC is working towards, a mystery that is being revealed and an ending. I don't see how that's a "non-story".

I also see people constantly complain about how bad the story is but I have yet to actually see someone say why. I'm actually getting the feeling this is a case my boss always told me about when it comes to QA testing a game. Which is, that what people are complaining about isn't what's actually bothering them. Like, people complain about the story as a whole, but I think there's just something specific about the story or characters they don't like, but instead of actually thinking about what that is, they just scream story bad.



That's exactly what I'd like to make people aware of.
Joining a hype often backfires because people have unrealistic expectations. The difference between the anime SL community and the manhwa/novel SL community is like day and night, simply because most manhwa readers knew what they were getting themselves into, anime watchers didn't.



And that's totally fine.
I hate harem to death, that's why I avoid any anime that's even remotely close to a harem. I'm avoiding pain and others avoid being confronted with me pointlessly hating about something I was bound to hate in the first place, and everyone stays happy.



Can't really comment on that since I avoid harems like the plague. I don't know if harems have actually good stories or not. I know of SOME mangas people keep gushing about how amazing the story is even though it turns into a harem, but since I didn't read them I can't tell.
I guess you could call it a fanservice. Although I don't know if calling something a fanservice makes sense if it's literally the setting. That's like calling a shortstory about a "psycho killer MC" fanservice.
It's simply the story the author wanted to tell. Calling something a bad story just because it's not teaching you some life lessons or have some deeper meaning to it doesn't make it a bad story. It's just a story you, personally, don't enjoy because of whatever reasons.

A bad story has plot holes, a lack of a goal, or is inconsistent, only to name the most obvious things. SL has none of these issues. What RUINS a story for you is a totally different matter, because that's up to taste and what a person values about the story.
To me SAO's story is absolute garbage, but most people love the story. Why? Because there are just very specific things about SAO's story and characters that annoy the hell out of me and ruin the whole story for me.

Again, I'm not saying SL is perfect. It certainly has aspects it's lacking in. But it's certainly not objectively bad.

@SlopGuzzler69 It has a beginning, a goal the MC is working towards, a mystery that is being revealed and an ending. I don't see how that's a "non-story".

I also see people constantly complain about how bad the story is but I have yet to actually see someone say why. I'm actually getting the feeling this is a case my boss always told me about when it comes to QA testing a game. Which is, that what people are complaining about isn't what's actually bothering them. Like, people complain about the story as a whole, but I think there's just something specific about the story or characters they don't like, but instead of actually thinking about what that is, they just scream story bad.



That's exactly what I'd like to make people aware of.
Joining a hype often backfires because people have unrealistic expectations. The difference between the anime SL community and the manhwa/novel SL community is like day and night, simply because most manhwa readers knew what they were getting themselves into, anime watchers didn't.



And that's totally fine.
I hate harem to death, that's why I avoid any anime that's even remotely close to a harem. I'm avoiding pain and others avoid being confronted with me pointlessly hating about something I was bound to hate in the first place, and everyone stays happy.



Can't really comment on that since I avoid harems like the plague. I don't know if harems have actually good stories or not. I know of SOME mangas people keep gushing about how amazing the story is even though it turns into a harem, but since I didn't read them I can't tell.
I guess you could call it a fanservice. Although I don't know if calling something a fanservice makes sense if it's literally the setting. That's like calling a shortstory about a "psycho killer MC" fanservice.
It's simply the story the author wanted to tell. Calling something a bad story just because it's not teaching you some life lessons or have some deeper meaning to it doesn't make it a bad story. It's just a story you, personally, don't enjoy because of whatever reasons.

A bad story has plot holes, a lack of a goal, or is inconsistent, only to name the most obvious things. SL has none of these issues. What RUINS a story for you is a totally different matter, because that's up to taste and what a person values about the story.
To me SAO's story is absolute garbage, but most people love the story. Why? Because there are just very specific things about SAO's story and characters that annoy the hell out of me and ruin the whole story for me.

Again, I'm not saying SL is perfect. It certainly has aspects it's lacking in. But it's certainly not objectively bad.

@SlopGuzzler69 It has a beginning, a goal the MC is working towards, a mystery that is being revealed and an ending. I don't see how that's a "non-story".

I also see people constantly complain about how bad the story is but I have yet to actually see someone say why. I'm actually getting the feeling this is a case my boss always told me about when it comes to QA testing a game. Which is, that what people are complaining about isn't what's actually bothering them. Like, people complain about the story as a whole, but I think there's just something specific about the story or characters they don't like, but instead of actually thinking about what that is, they just scream story bad.



That's exactly what I'd like to make people aware of.
Joining a hype often backfires because people have unrealistic expectations. The difference between the anime SL community and the manhwa/novel SL community is like day and night, simply because most manhwa readers knew what they were getting themselves into, anime watchers didn't.



And that's totally fine.
I hate harem to death, that's why I avoid any anime that's even remotely close to a harem. I'm avoiding pain and others avoid being confronted with me pointlessly hating about something I was bound to hate in the first place, and everyone stays happy.



Can't really comment on that since I avoid harems like the plague. I don't know if harems have actually good stories or not. I know of SOME mangas people keep gushing about how amazing the story is even though it turns into a harem, but since I didn't read them I can't tell.
I guess you could call it a fanservice. Although I don't know if calling something a fanservice makes sense if it's literally the setting. That's like calling a shortstory about a "psycho killer MC" fanservice.
It's simply the story the author wanted to tell. Calling something a bad story just because it's not teaching you some life lessons or have some deeper meaning to it doesn't make it a bad story. It's just a story you, personally, don't enjoy because of whatever reasons.

A bad story has plot holes, a lack of a goal, or is inconsistent, only to name the most obvious things. SL has none of these issues. What RUINS a story for you is a totally different matter, because that's up to taste and what a person values about the story.
To me SAO's story is absolute garbage, but most people love the story. Why? Because there are just very specific things about SAO's story and characters that annoy the hell out of me and ruin the whole story for me.

Again, I'm not saying SL is perfect. It certainly has aspects it's lacking in. But it's certainly not objectively bad.

@Vedrun You're right, it's not just about the lack of story. In term of narration, dialogues, screenwriting, directing, storytelling, it's objectively bad, every aspect I just listed is below LOW TIER.

There is no bad story, but there is bad storytelling and bad directing/art direction, and SL is a textbook case of both.

When you play a video-game, like Megaman, there is a story aswell, but since it's a video-game, most of time spent on it, it's just platformer gameplay.
Would you record a Megaman gameplay and pretend it's an anime show, because there is a "backstory" behind the gameplay and a couple of cinematics between each stage? No.

This is what Solo Leveling is doing, there is a premise, and the rest is just mindless "gameplay". This is amateur stuff. This is the kind of manga I used to draw/write when I was 10 years old, just skipping the narrative parts and draw some cool fights scenes. This is embarassing to see an anime project like that, where dozen of people worked on that joke of a show.

It's sad because you seem to have good taste in anime otherwise, but I took a look at your stats, and 75% of your rating distribution goes into 7/8/9. You rarely go below that. Your mean score is 7.37. It means that you have low standards and can't gauge quality properly, it's ok, but you shouldn't blame others for having higher standards!

@Radical_Orion Uhm about that last part.. the mean score of an user doesn't mean anything. i for example refuse to watch bad shows. Why do people even watch bad shows. I only watch those who are at least acclaimed by a certain number of people. So of course, my mean is inflated, i won't give bad scores to good shows.

So modern worse SAO?

@Radical_Orion Uhm about that last part.. the mean score of an user doesn't mean anything. i for example refuse to watch bad shows. Why do people even watch bad shows. I only watch those who are at least acclaimed by a certain number of people. So of course, my mean is inflated, i won't give bad scores to good shows.

@Vedrun You're right, it's not just about the lack of story. In term of narration, dialogues, screenwriting, directing, storytelling, it's objectively bad, every aspect I just listed is below LOW TIER.

There is no bad story, but there is bad storytelling and bad directing/art direction, and SL is a textbook case of both.

When you play a video-game, like Megaman, there is a story aswell, but since it's a video-game, most of time spent on it, it's just platformer gameplay.
Would you record a Megaman gameplay and pretend it's an anime show, because there is a "backstory" behind the gameplay and a couple of cinematics between each stage? No.

This is what Solo Leveling is doing, there is a premise, and the rest is just mindless "gameplay". This is amateur stuff. This is the kind of manga I used to draw/write when I was 10 years old, just skipping the narrative parts and draw some cool fights scenes. This is embarassing to see an anime project like that, where dozen of people worked on that joke of a show.

It's sad because you seem to have good taste in anime otherwise, but I took a look at your stats, and 75% of your rating distribution goes into 7/8/9. You rarely go below that. Your mean score is 7.37. It means that you have low standards and can't gauge quality properly, it's ok, but you shouldn't blame others for having higher standards!

I agree with this principle of usability testing and also with the observation that this is what's happening with Solo Leveling. However, you and your boss probably don't tell the users that they're wrong, or ask them to explain the actual problem. It's the product's "fault" for eliciting that kind of user response, and the team focuses on fixing the product, not the users.

The story criticisms that you consider to be misguided and unfair are still valid responses, in my opinion, even though they may be overblown.

Maybe people can find the story bad even though it avoids the issues that you mentioned. The story may not have plot holes, but it's too simplistic and unimaginative to have any. The story may have a clear goal, but it does not provide a good reason for people to care about. The story may be consistent, but it's simply copy-pasting a well-established and proven MMORPG formula.

Maybe people believe a "power fantasy story" IS a "bad story". You yourself seem to be implying that power fantasies have some shortcomings that other types of stories don't. While you choose to overlook or accept these issues, they may be flat-out dealbreakers for some people.

In the end, this story that you call "not bad" has any number of reasons to be perceived as "bad". You can say you still enjoy it, but you can't just expect people to accept that it's "good for what it is".

@perseii you're right, people are free to say about the product what they want. I don't care about people calling the story bad without knowing what it is specifically that's bothering them, at least as long as they don't join discussions.

I wouldn't call the story too simplistic or unimaginative at all. Maybe you can elaborate on that a bit what exactly you mean by that.

What reason do you need to care about it? Everyone needs different reasons. Some just want to see him become badass, some want to learn the truth about the system. Yes we didn't get an overly long flashback to see the relationship between him and his mother, but that's not the end goal of the series anyway. The whole story doesn't revolve around him getting the cure for his mother. If you don't care about the story, then you're clearly just not the target audience, just like I'm not the target audience of Chainsaw Man, because MC's whole motivation are boobs, which is a dumb reason for me personally lol. But I don't go off in discussions about how bad the story is because of that.

So you want it to use a formula that's new but bad instead of sticking to what works? I admit I don't understand what you mean with "MMORPG-formula" here tho. Do you mean the leveling system?

I don't agree with this part. I think people are (and should be) allowed to talk about their feelings without clearly understanding or articulating it. We're not academics or critics. And discussion can help them figure out their thoughts, too. Of course, that's assuming they're joining discussions in good faith...

About what I said about the story:


I meant in terms of plot holes: "The story may not have plot holes, but it's too simplistic and unimaginative to have any." Solo Leveling doesn't get points in my book for not having plot holes, because it's almost impossible to have a plot hole; it takes the easiest and simplest route in telling its story, every step of the way. We follow Jinwoo basically the entire time, the rules are clearly spelled out upfront, there are no other characters and storylines that complicate or re-frame things, etc.

You (and a lot of people on this thread) call this "simple" and therefore a good thing, but less-charitable people can easily call it "simplistic and unimaginative".


True, and those seem to be good reasons for you to care about Jinwoo's goals. But you see that those can be somewhat.. "mechanical" reasons for a lot of people, right?

I believe a majority of people, action fans included, want the main character's journey to have an emotional core that resonates with them and makes them root for the character. People see what happens to Eren in the first episode and can feel his anger, frustration and desperation to train and fight titans, without getting himself and his friends killed. Alternatively, the main character can be so likeable or interesting as a character that people are pulled into whatever journey they're on, like a lot of the characters in Jujutsu Kaisen.

In this sense Jinwoo is a pretty weak character. His goal is to get stronger, mostly because he's just sick of being weak, and he has a bland personality and background. Simply having a clear goal may not be enough if people don't particularly like or feel for the character to begin with.


Fair. But personally I like that Denji is written this way, because every other character points out that his "goal" is stupid, and Denji himself quickly realizes that it is stupid, after all. And throughout the story he often grapples with the question of what his goal is and if it's worth it.

I can totally see people getting turned off, though, especially early on.

I don't see why you can't make the argument that this makes Chainsaw Man's story bad. You absolutely can, as long as you're prepared to read some angry responses.


Yes, I was talking about the leveling/power system. It's OK to "stick to what works", but that doesn't mean a formula can be copy-pasted exactly as is: inventory, skill points, daily quests, tank/dps/healer team comp, bosses, instances, raids, etc. Jinwoo interacts with "the system" through floating windows, even when looting corpses.

Sure, this way people can instantly understand how things work, but there are absolutely no surprises or any interesting spin here, and it can feel like the story didn't even try in this department.

(Looking back, I feel like this is a different topic from what you described as "story being consistent", but the MMORPG thing is a pet peeve of mine)

On a slightly-related note, I liked how the news reports on gates like it's a weather forecast, or how big agencies scout for top talent. While they're not exactly important or "new", they're small, creative ideas that can make the story slightly richer and more memorable.

@trinitroglycerin I think the thing is more that if you only really watch shows to make your mean score a 7/10, then wouldn't that make it your 5/10. Since the scoring is relative. Otherwise, how could you score a show properly if you don't actually have a good reference on what's bad, mediocre and good? Now this doesn't take away from the individual's experience, maybe they do consider every anime they watch a 7/10+ and that's completely fine. But then you'd not have that much reliability in telling other people what makes a bad or good show, since that individual's standards seems relatively low in comparison to other people.

I understand what you're saying though, and there's definitely some truth to it. Of course people generally watch stuff that's already considered good as opposed to what's bad and thus their mean score would be higher as a result. But I think the idea that a score of < 5 is considered "bad" is also skewing this. It could be considered bad, but not necessarily. Cause again, it's all relative. If I watch 100 movies and all of them are amazing and then I'm told to rate them. Then I would have to weigh some higher and some lower relative to each other. Meaning certain movies will land in 5/10 even though they were amazing. but a lot of other movies were just that much better.

But in the end, everyone is free to rate how they want. Even I don't have a perfectly consistent rating. I just wanted to give insight why the mean score might actually have some meaning if you're gonna go around telling people what a good and bad anime are supposed to be when you consider almost everything you watch good.

@Avicebrons Trust me, when i started watching i sat through a lot of trash, mainly romcoms, so i won't bother rating these shows that i don't even remember. To address your argument about these 100 amazing movies that i'm asked to rate i think i'd give all of of them a 8-10/10. That's just how i rate.

@perseii I get what you mean now and I do agree with most points you made. I don't call Chainsaw Man's story bad because I don't know what the story actually is besides "boobs" simply because I haven't watched much of it, so I have no right to judge it.

Ultimately, thinking about the things you said, I'd say SL is maybe really too niche (someone else pointed that out before too). It's catering to a very specific audience, like most BL does for example. Which brings us back to the target audience.

Every piece of media is catering to a specific target audience, like it or not. The broadness of the target audience differs, of course. But I think it's safe to say SL's target audience isn't as broad as, for example, most shounen animes like Hero Academia or Demon Slayer.
That doesn't mean you can't like it just because you're not the average target audience. But the chance of you liking it is much lower. In that case the anime usually has to do very specific things right for you to like it.

Where I have to disagree with you is the MMORPG-formula part.
I agree with this:


I disagree with this:

Going into this any further would be spoiler so all I'm going to say is that they definitely don't just stick to the formula (well they do because that's the whole setting) but they won't not do anything else with it.

That's also something I find annoying about the people complaining. People talk as if they know how it ends even though they haven't read any of the source materials. SL is a 270 chapter long novel. 200 chapters in the Webtoon. Episode 7 of the anime is around chapter 25 in the webtoon, probably a quarter of these chapters are very long action scenes. Yes the story is a bit slow, but it's better than rushing it. People already can't even keep track of the story up to this point, as proven by some comments.

People keep saying it was solely carried by the webtoon's art, but the novel has pretty high ratings as well, it's simply not as well known because less people read novels than mangas, especially action focused stories. I personally have only read the latter half of the novel because I struggle with remembering korean names.
It's popularity and high rating, for not only the webtoon but also the novel, already proofs it's not as bad as people make it out to be.

I advice people, instead of forcing themselves through every episode and then rage on the internet about how trash it is, just because "people hype it so that must mean I'd have to like it as well" which is already an error in itself (I usually never like anything that is hyped... that doesn't mean it's bad tho), either drop it and move on with the knowledge it's just not for you, or wait until the anime reaches the end of the whole story and see how people react then in order to gauge if you should pick it back up or not.
This advice was the whole reason for my original post in the first place. Not that it takes a genius to think of this yourself but you know... I was bored out of my mind, the only thing that can make me socially active.

Edit: Jesus, I didn't think it would quote the entirety of your reply to my comments but I guess I should've seen this coming, sorry about the novel amount of text.

I think the criticism boils more down to a bad story and characters. It's the same reason most people criticize almost every harem. For the most part it's not necessarily because it's a harem. But it's because almost all of them have such a bad story with bad characters and just filled with fanservice. Which sounds eerily similar to most power fantasies, Solo Leveling included, but the fanservice instead of being ecchi is being a mega edgelord.

It's basically self aware SAO without cringy melodrama, that ruined it. It's good as it is.

It's totally okay to be wrong. Don't worry about it.

@Piromysl do ur research. Solo leveling will never match the success of sao. All sao movies made money and had positive reception. Tensura tried to match sao and they failed hard at the box office.

Anyone who can compare can tell you that sao had more 3 dimensional characters, unique setting, unique plot, better lore.

Solo leveling has recency bias and that is it. Of course I knew you praised the konosuba spinoff as peak. Despite it being the worst spinoff ever written that bombed with under 1k discs.

@DEMSpirit You should discern something from being successful and appealing to lowest denominator from being good. There is a reason why we have dozens of lowest tier isekai trash each season, you know.

@Piromysl I know ur pissed that the konosuba spinoff flopped and failed in polls. Japanese vote with their wallet. We all know that spinoff was bad but anitube doesn't want to admit it.

@DEMSpirit That's a good one, Mr Strawman. Dunno who told you that, but I don't really care.

Yeah, it's pretty wild that author is milking the only arc of SAO that was quite good dry (besides maybe Alicization) with his Progressive untill there will be nothing left.
Also, you still did not answered the question why objective garbage like Gorilla Isekai, Smartphone Isekai and other AI generated schlock sells well and even gets sequel.
Because those shows, just like SAO appeal to the lowest denominator audience and are quite literally failing upwards.

I literally never said that about Megumin spinoff, so stop making up bullshit.
And don't give me that shit with Rotten Tomatoes being credible or having any merit, because those "critics" are no better than gake journalists and are infamous for being biased, unreliable known for getting paid for good reviews and overall are full of shit.