Jan 13, 2024
The Side Story of Solo Leveling is mostly an average side story. Meaning that it has no merit by itself, it has no standalone narrative, thought or themes. It is simply a fanservice (the non-sexual kind) for fans of the franchise.
This set of side stories manages to do something special though, and that is that it kinda ruins the finale of the main novel. For the purpose of explaining how, spoilers of some elements of the main novel is included below, and you shouldn’t even be reading this entry unless you’ve already finished the main storyline in the first place anyway.
So, the main story ends
...
with everyone forgetting about Jinwoo’s heroism, and Jinwoo being satisfied with that as long as the world is safe. A fine, slightly bitter sweet ending. It’s not broken, don’t touch it. But touching it they did. Now one of the characters remembers the previous timeline. And actually another one does too. You know what, a bunch of characters are now allowed to remember it now. Surely the excitement of Jinwoo getting bunch of fanboys outweighs the detriment of rewriting our fine story conclusion, right?
Of course, that’s not where this ends, next one is that despite the previous alien invasion being so hyped and so difficult, Jinwoo is now so absurdly strong that previously completely unmentioned alien army is pulled out of ass for another would-be cataclysmic event just for Jinwoo to defeat them within a paragraph. There was literally no reason to do this, there were many more possible side stories to portray (for example I’d be interested in description of the moment Jinwoo’s family found out he left and when he returned years later), but no, the author just had to write something that completely diminishes the coolness of the previous main conflict.
As more of a pet peeve, Jinwoo’s shadow is now an actual place where the shadows do slice of life hijinks, have houses and trading system and whatever all? Like seriously Jinwoo already had most powers imaginable, there was no need to also grant him his personal dimension on top of that.
The one thing that I’ve liked is the story about Jinwoo’s new family, it actually has some interesting usage of the world elements used in a new ways that could possibly work as a standalone story, though to explain further I’d have to spoil this chapter so I won’t do that.
To summarize, this isn’t for anyone outside of Solo Leveling fans, but that doesn’t come as a surprise.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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