With the way these two episodes have been going, Season 2 of Solo Leveling seems to be on an upward trajectory (fingers crossed). Like the first episode, the second episode featured some stellar music choices and amazing fight sequences, and although the best is yet to come (“Jeju Island arc,” please be good!), Episode 2 has the best battle of the series thus far, surpassing the Igris and Jinwoo fight back in Season 1.
“I Suppose You Aren’t Aware” Recap
After beating the Ice Bears, Jinwoo turns them all into his shadow soldiers and names the leader Tank. After the rest of his team gets slaughtered by the Ice Elves, Kim Chul escapes. He’s spiralling, in a state of denial, and claiming zero responsibility for being the one to lead his teammates to their deaths. When he happens across the lower ranked Hunters that he abandoned, he accuses them of hoarding supplies and being the ones to get everyone else killed. Jinwoo arrives in the nick of time to save the other Hunters and to fight against the Ice Elves and their leader Baruka.
Jinwoo summons his shadow army and though his soldiers seem to be faring well, he knows that even with Igris in the mix, he won’t be able to win against Baruka. Luckily, he creates a new shadow soldier: Iron, formerly known as the A-Rank Hunter Kim Chul. Jinwoo, Iron, and Igris work together to fight Baruka and in the end Baruka is defeated. Unfortunately, Jinwoo wasn’t able to turn Baruka into a shadow but he did get a nice weapon out of the fight.
Jinwoo is a coldhearted badass
When people complain about anime adaptations not being good, they’re not saying it needs to be a 1:1 copy and paste version, because otherwise it’s just a moving webcomic. There are things that animation can do that a webcomic cannot, such as enhancing a panel or a scene to deliver a harder impact. And that’s what happened in Episode 2 when Kim Chul turns into Iron.
The scene is tense with Baruka charging at Jinwoo in the front and Kim Chul attacking him from behind. Jinwoo is seemingly alone until a huge snowy plume erupts in front of him and out emerges a new shadow. Who is it? When did Jinwoo acquire a new shadow soldier?
The same scene replays but now we see what happened: he had Igris camouflage them with the snow before having him kill Kim Chul, giving Jinwoo the opportunity to turn him into a shadow. It’s a great scene, animation-wise, and makes the Iron/Kim Chul reveal much more hard-hitting.
The moment is subtle and isn’t as obvious compared to the webcomic, but Jinwoo had orchestrated the whole thing. He purposefully kicked Kim Chul’s sword near him, provoking the Hunter, thus giving him a self-defense claim when he kills Kim Chul, or at least a justification for his brutal murder.
It was a shame that the anime glossed over it, although I could see why they did since it put Jinwoo in a bad light and portrayed him not as the righteous hero that he is. But this is an important turning point of his character and further confirms with Kang Taeshik’s observation that with increasing strength and power, Jinwoo is becoming less and less human. The anime did, however, add in an original scene: when Jinwoo returns home, he thinks back to how he killed Kim Chul, and he’s not exactly disturbed by what he’s done.
While Jinwoo had killed humans before, this was the first time he did it to serve a personal purpose. Did Kim Chul deserve it? Maybe. Did Jinwoo have another choice? Maybe not. Is Jinwoo any better than the monsters that come out of the dungeons? It’s starting to be debatable.
This episode also raised some intriguing questions about the system. It grants Jinwoo the ability to power up with seemingly no ceiling and seems to give him the ability to understand the monsters’ languages. Baruka’s comment that he couldn’t “hear the voice” that normally told him to kill humans when he came face-to-face with Jinwoo seems to further solidify Jinwoo as being non-human.
At one point, the system glitched during Baruka’s speech and he repeated himself just like how a gaming system might. This is the first time something like this has happened and this was around the time when Jinwoo was pondering the mechanisms of the system and his identity as a “player.” The glitch may be the system preventing Jinwoo from learning something important–a sort of censorship. But what could that be?
Iron is an idiot but at least, he’s the kind of idiot you want as your hype guy. I legitimately laughed out loud when Iron started smacking Baruka like a whack-a-mole and it was hilarious watching him roaring at the shadow mages, as if he were cheering them on for how they helped win the battle.
I assumed that the shadows Jinwoo extracted bore the same or similar personalities as their once alive counterparts, and though we didn’t know Kim Chul for very long, he didn’t seem like a nice guy so it was surprising to see his shadow be such a goofball. Is this part of Kim Chul’s real personality or is this just an exaggeration of how dumb he is?
You don’t really get to see just how funny Igris is until he’s with the other shadows, because when Iron turned to him seemingly for approval, Igris turned and walked away, his body language practically screaming, “I don’t want to be near stupid.”
Solo Leveling -Arise- is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
