We can’t wait to see what awful moral dilemmas Jinwoo finds himself in next.
Solo Leveling, a new anime based on a Korean web novel of the same name, follows the world’s weakest hunter as he fights monsters to protect humanity and also his mother, who’s suffering from a deadly disease. Sounds pretty selfless, right?
Well, Sung Jinwoo is pretty much the picture of sweetness at first. Every waking moment of his is seemingly dedicated to his family, except when he’s fighting in a dungeon. But even then, Jinwoo always puts the needs of others before his own.
That selfless streak is what gets Jinwoo into deadly trouble when his party stumbles into a dungeon that’s far too advanced for them at the end of the first episode. Cue a bunch of severed limbs and a whole lot more death as giant statues come to life and decimate hunters far more powerful than Jinwoo could ever hope to be.
By the end of the second episode, almost everyone is dead except Jinwoo, who tells Chi-yul to evacuate with Joo-hee while he holds the door open, effectively sacrificing himself to save them both. But when death is imminent, a floating screen appears asking Jinwoo to become a “player”, or die for real. Upon accepting this offer, he wakes up in hospital, with new daily missions assigned to him by this “System” that no one else can see.
And so begins Jinwoo’s journey to becoming a much stronger hunter than ever before. Perhaps even the most powerful hunter the world has ever seen… But as the System improves various physical attributes, including strength and stamina, it also seems to be changing Jinwoo himself at his very core. It’s not until episode six that the true extent of this becomes apparent though.
At the end of the previous episode, Hwang Donsuk and his criminal Hunter party had just trapped Sung Jinwoo and another Hunter named Yoo Jinho in the boss room, where they faced certain death at the hands eight legs of a giant spider.
“The Real Hunt Begins” begins, with our fave forced to confront the boss, a far stronger creature than he’s ever fought before. At one point, it looks like Jinwoo might have met his match, but he eventually emerges victorious with tons more experience points to boot.
Dongsuk and his team later return, expecting to find Jinwoo and Jinho dead. Assuming Jinho was the one who defeated the boss, Dongsuk asks him to join their party and kill Jinwoo, but Jinho heroically declines. That’s the last heroic feat we’ll see this episode, though, because the System then asks Jinwoo to immediately kill every enemy in the room. Failure to comply will result in instant death for Jinwoo.
Jinwoo has never taken a human life at this point, but before he has time to consider his options, one of the Hunters attacks and a bloodbath quickly ensues. With just the leader now left standing, Jinwoo easily kills him too, which seems fair given how much the guy sucked, not to mention that it was either Jinwoo’s life or his. But still, did Jinwoo have to take so much pleasure in killing him?
“No one will know what happened inside this dungeon,” says Jinwoo right before he kills Donsuk, deliberately echoing the same words Donsuk said earlier before his betrayal. There’s no hesitation or reluctance on Jinwoo’s part, none of the hand-wringing or guilt-ridden musings you might expect from such a sweet boy who’s been forced to commit such horrific acts.
Episode six then ends with the introduction of Dongsuk’s brother, Dongsoo, who will go on to play a big role moving forward if the Manhwa source material is anything to go by. But as anyone who’s read the original story will already know, that isn’t the only game-changing development that just happened this episode.
What might seem like a temporary lapse or something Jinwoo can overcome is only the beginning of a much darker shift for his character that will make him almost unrecognisable by the end (assuming that the anime sticks closely to Chugong’s original plotline). Every time Jinwoo gains a new level, he loses a part of himself, his humanity, and looking ahead, Chapter 34 of the Manhwa is a perfect example of where this is all heading.
The chapter begins with a famous Friedrich Nietzsche quote which goes: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Kind of ominous, right? Just you wait.
After a man named Kang-Tae Shik kills prisoners the Hunters were supposed to protect just to earn some money, the System prompts Jinwoo to kill him. And kill him he does, but not just in a quick, merciful way. No, Jinwoo decides to feed Shik to a goblin while he’s still alive, and then he just stands there and watches the meal unfold. If Jinwoo was the nice guy he started out as at the beginning, he would have found a much kinder way to kill this, admittedly terrible, person.
“I feel like something within me is lost every time I get stronger,” says Jinwoo, and he’s right, but that loss is our gain, because this moral quandary helps set Solo Leveling apart from the many dungeon-crawling animes that have come before.
Because yes, things aren’t looking great for Jinwoo’s future, but should we also discount all the good he’s done, too? You could argue some of Jinwoo’s later heroism is kind of self-serving, but what would you do in this position? Would you have sacrificed yourself like he did at the end of the second episode?
It’s not so easy, is it? And that’s why we can’t wait to see what awful moral dilemmas Jinwoo finds himself in next.