Solo Leveling is bad. VERY bad.

over the past few years I've been hearing whispers of this amazing light novel manwa manga intellectual property that needed to be made into an anime it was hyped up constantly into high heaven and when we started to get other man water turned into anime like Tower of God and God of high school I'd see it again all over social media they need to make this into an anime this is one of the greatest works in our lifetime I'm used to people overhyping things nowadays I really like Tower of God ended up dropping God of high

school I didn't let the noise affect my opinion on either of them in the 5year history of the channel I have never made a video specifically calling out an anime for being bad the Clos this was my nuto video but that was more of a criticism on a show that I love to death losing its way and becoming something B and this isn't even the worst show I've seen in The Last 5 Years far from it so why has this show in particular hit me so hard I felt that after half a decade I finally

had to make a video about how bad an anime is well let's start from the beginning with the show itself on paper this should be a story that I love and dive into in fact certain elements of the premise exist in a story I've been developing since before the first chapter of solo leveling ever came out the premise we given is nothing remarkable but it's a tried and true formula it's an eay Kai but the MC doesn't die instead the other realm keeps trying to get into ours and so we go into Theirs to Snuff

them out and keep them from invading via portals that randomly pop up a few select chosen people awaken special powers inside of them which turns them into hunters in comes the main character s genin wo he is given an Awakening but he was also crowned as the weakest hunter in history what's worse in the story you are unable to strengthen your abilities so whatever rank and power level you were given you are stuck with it to not waste time and rehash every single plot element let me just speedrun the next key events he goes on

a dungeon quest with a group of people after they clear a dungeon they discover another passageway and decide to go down it unfortunately at the end they are met with forces to go well above and beyond what they are capable of what should have been a d or E ranked Adventure is now an A or s-ranked Adventure s uses his knowledge to slowly figure out how to get out of the situation alive solving some riddles and traps unfortunately by the end of it nearly everyone who didn't die abandons him and leaves him to his fate

at first he was okay with it but as he looks death in the face his demeanor switches from I'm weak so I deserve it to you know what I have a family too so to hell with everyone else I want to [Music] live he wakes up no longer mutilated no sign of whatever he had to deal with he sees in front of him a screen to gives him quests and a penalty if he doesn't complete the quests he's the only one who can see it and as he discovers soon enough it's no joke but he

gets nice rewards for completing his quests and finds out he is able to do something no other Hunter is able to do he is able to level up his stats so now the man crowned the weakest hunter in all of humanity has a chance to train and strengthen himself maybe finally be able to compete with everyone else all right so that's the general gist of it a premise by itself won't make break a story the premise of goblin Slayer is so painfully simple on paper but the execution is fantastic but in Solo Loving's case everything

the premise the execution the characters the emotions the enemies every element is bad let me go into details now as to why first the structure of this realm of reality mixed with fantasy this story does one of the most annoying tropes that so many brain dead isekai copy and paste to try and cover up the lack of being able to tell a good story they pretend like they are in a video game everything is measurable we can assign power levels to people we can immediately rank the hunters and immediately rank the gates that open from

there people form a party they don't even try to be clever or subversive or any kind of attempt to at least rename what they're doing everyone has assigned MMO RPG role you have assigned tanks to the party that they call tanks you have assigned healers you can't even get clever with the moves you just call it things like taunt no effort even make the person do a taunt things just glow and the enemies are taunted the MC Su takes it to a new level where he has a pop-up screen and stats he even has a

statistic for fatigue which I guess his body runs just fine until he hits the magic fatigue number then things all go south do you know why so many WR ERS in the last 10 years or so have decided to treat their stories like an MMO game and provide things like stat cards to characters even in shows where such a thing makes no sense whatsoever I'm not going to sugarcoat it I'm not going to be hyperbolic it is not for plot device or anything thought out it is because they are lazy and inept they do not

know how to Showcase human aspects like emotions or failures or struggles so instead of having to find a method to properly communicate death with an audience you can just slap a number on the screen and say when this number Hits this then you will know bad thing happens picture this crap used in some other story imagine if in Lord of the Rings in the scene where Frodo fell and Sam had to carry him instead of using the normal dialogue the visual cues of the mental and physical suffering Frodo was going through we just had a

screen show up showcasing fr's fatigue was about to hit 70 and his MP and HP was low so Sam says say my stats may not allow me to carry the ring but my strength and stamina are high enough that I can carry you this will cut away all the feelings of Sam making an internal decision pulling from deep within himself to make the choices he made instead he looked at the stat sheet and determine he could do something based on the stats and in Solo leveling case when it comes to a fatigue number like every

other stats the numbers make no sense whatsoever I'll explain it more when I lay out more of the story we'll come back to this this poorly written stupidity is showcased later on where s goes to a solo dungeon he explains to us that because fantasy he can see the names of the enemies he has to fight over their heads and the colors of the name determine the strength level compared to him no let's not find a way to show his struggles and his growth in a natural way that the audience can feel through subtle cues

let us just outright state that his level has increased and that a lot of the monsters names are now white that's how you know audience we had to literally show it via an explained color chart for you an MMO game has to do this because the player needs a way of knowing his strength compared to the NPC enemies and since the person playing the video game can't just sense it they need the visual cues this does not apply to this kind of media this is the reason so many games become effective with yellow paint syndrome

because apparently they think people are so incapable of figuring anything out anymore that you need to Splash ugly paints all over your map for people to know where they can go I mean with an anime how can you possibly gauge the strength of characters and enemies without giving us the hard numbers to back it up anyway back to solo leveling they lay out the colored names rule white means they are too weak orange means they are around the same level and red means they are much stronger than you s has a hard time fighting off

two red LEL enemies after killing one he soon has to fight something like a dozen of those red named enemies and he is able to defeat them all with only a scratch so imagine how anti-climatic it was when he faced off against the boss of this dungeon and the boss's name was in Orange they're around the same level of strength I mean hell I just saw him fight off a dozen red enemies sure you're bigger but so what this anime likes to pretend it's an MMO game and in MMO games there's giant enemies you can

take down with a couple of hits and humanized enemies that requireed entire raiding party so how tough can this enemy really be are you kidding me how is he getting smacked around so easily so the way he kills this thing his sword cannot cut through its scales but his physical strength has grown to such an extent that with his bare hands he can squeeze the scales and break them and kill the boss with this method alone earlier in the dungeon they showcased the importance of weapons when s tried to punch the wolves and it did

nothing so he got himself a sword via very convenient plot device and cut through them like butter now in the same dungeon on the same day he has leveled up so much that the sword becomes useless and he can squeeze to break open armored scales and from there he basically One-Shot the enemy with a hug I love Underdog stories tales with the weak pathetic loser who through his own effort rises from his shame and becomes something more history Strongest Disciple Kenichi is the best example I have seen of this in any anime or Manga where

we got to see him grow from weak pathetic loser to martial arts master over the course of 583 chapters how does this compare to solo leveling he goes from being the statistically factually weakest Hunter and they gave us the numbers to emphasize this on the number crunch he got a score of 10 when even the weakest e Hunters are usually at least a 70 he goes from being that level of weak to squeezing the giant armored snake to death in the span of a single dungeon run this isn't character progression or character growth in terms

of his psychological struggles he goes from having internal struggles and coping mechanisms with being so pathetically weak on top of having the horrific trauma of having faced mutilation and death and he overcomes all of that in a span of well it just happens so I don't even know how you would measure this in the span of a couple of sentences he enters the dungeon and faces his foot enemies at the end of episode 3 he exits the dungeon and One-Shots the defenses of a different boss on the other side at the end of episode 4

in what is basically the runtime of a single episode The Character change is so significant that if you changed his entire look into someone else no one would ever suspect that there was any overlap between the two characters this was not character growth this was a complete character overhaul a rewrite where the author didn't bother go back and edit a character before the rewrite for someone who values that Trope and character story archetype this was an insult hell he even physically looks different at the start of the next episode episode 5 I'm sure there's going

to be some explanation for this and I'm sure the explanation will suck from there the next part of the Story begins and it shows just how much we can just skip ahead of his character growth for the ease of time I'll skip you the end Su in a d rank kid get hired by a party but it was all a set up with the boss of this dungeon the the boss of let me cut away real quick and talk about other aspect I freaking hate that this story does and so many others do they don't

even attempt to do anything remotely Beyond basic each portal leads to a dungeon the dungeons are just standard dungeons they are luckily enough lit up by Magic Stones the dungeon collapses after they kill the boss which you know is a boss because they have to call it a boss there's nothing like an open field or a forest or a beach or even a basic castle everything is just a cave they Tred to model us after an MMO but if an MMO pull this genetic crap they be raped over the Colts for being bad genetic and

lazy why would an anime or even wor a like noble with considerable more freedom and less Hardware restrictions not be held to the same standard pure lazy garbage anyway back to the plot sun and the d rank kid are set up to fight the C- rank boss God I hate these ranking systems and as the kid lets us know you must be at least a B- ranked Hunter to take on a C- ranked boss all by yourself so in the span of what feels like the blink of an eye the main protagonist has gone from

weakest hunter in history with a soft and meek personality to this cold hard and badass of at least B rank I'd say more than likely a rank at this point this is just episode 6 they are not the same character there was not any transformation or growth I will keep repeating it until every last person understands this and with the spider boss fight let's go back to the fatigue problem I mentioned earlier at the beginning when s decided for some brain dead reason to ignore a Giant floating screen in front of him telling him to

complete this Quest he had to deal with the penalty in this penalty he had to run for his life would be killed by these giant monsters for 4 hours four that is a long long time to be running Non-Stop and he has not leveled up anything so far he is still at the basest of base stats but he nearly completes running and dodging for his life for 4 hours after that event he is doing his daily quests giving him daily stats and he completed the dungeon and gained him 17 levels and all the stats that

go along with it why in his fight with the spider did his fatigue get so high so quickly his skills were massively improved and yet he hit that fatigue Limited in what seemed like minutes from the start of the fight to the fatigue meter there wasn't even a cutaway to imply a lot of time has passed these numbers these ranks these stats none of them seem to actually mean anything this isn't to say I hated every aspect of the story the way they handled the god stuff in the beginning I thought was pretty cool though

they did throw in some other BS that I keep seeing in anime that I absolutely hate now I'm no doctor but I did used to be a personal trainer and I did have a severe break in my right arm that led to nerve damage so I have at least a rudimentary enough understanding of things like pain and nerves to know that getting youring limb cut off is going to sting just a little bit seriously why do so many shows give characters these half-ass reactions like someone just gave them a small pinch when they lose a

limb you just lost the limb say ow something this is what I mean when I say these authors have no idea about the concept of human reactions and emotions you don't even know what you do when someone loses a [Applause] limb another part I liked was his face off against the six who betrayed them and him matting up and actually offing all of them instead of going down some long annoying oh no killing is wrong Trope and the Music Choice was [Music] excellent and that is it for the things I liked so then why single

out this anime specifically why why after 5 years did I make one of these kinds of videos where I Spit on the entire show is it because I just hate whatever is popular no I gush all over Dragon Ball to the point where I made a 4-Hour video on it unmonetized I almost made a video about Demon Slayer in the same way that I'm making this video now I think attack of Titan is one of the greatest works of fiction ever I don't personally care about one piece oino C deserves all the praise it gets

and probably will win anime of the year my likes and dislikes extend beyond popular it in genres so you can't just point to that but for solo leveling I can't say that it's popularity and people gushing over it has nothing to do with why I made this video in fact it may have everything to do with why I made this video I've gone and outlin the problems with it the bad structuring the PED ways it covers up inep story writing its nonsensical use of hard numbers in what seems like an open Magic system style a

show that's a whole other mess we're not going to get into right now you see folks pipul anime does not exist in a vacuum Dragon Ball forever change the face of Shonen As We Know It with many other shows trying to copy and create their own formula for the Epic transformation sequence some are great others not so much after Moka magika subverted the magical Trope and became Wily successful we had a Litany of edgy magical girl shows trying to out Edge the others all the while missing the entire point of the show they're trying to

mimic this isn't a complicated formula when something is very popular and talked about a lot others will seek that popular thing to either imitate and copy it or at the very least draw inspiration from it when I looked to turn a web comic idea into a web novel idea I decided to look at some of the more popular web novels and solo leveling was one of them of which I couldn't even get past the very first chapter I thought it was written so poorly now that my own writing was any better but anyway so what

does this mean with solo leveling well with the high pitch screeching of its rabbit fan base trying to convince people like me that this story is the greatest piece of fiction we will ever see that will cause other people to try and look at it for inspiration and as such the poison that this trash tier story contains will spread people will see the lazy system of just giving numbers and stats to everything of ranking things so the audience never has to wonder how someone might fail against an opponent no visual or verbal cues will need

to be given to indicate levels of strength using writing tools like showing a character looking down on another or a calm and collected expression versus a shaking and sweaty expression don't try and dig into to those elements of Storytelling no just slap on a leather or a number don't worry about red hings or clever subversions when two characters squar off let's just look at the power levels and let people know beforehand who is stronger you want to throw in a Twist well I may be the same rank as those other guys but I'm not like

those other guys stupid the Mindless and lazy everything's a dungeon system with conveniently placed light sources so lazy that would be consider consider it unacceptable for a Dungeon Crawler to be this basic and repetitive the senseless jumps and power that serve only to eliminate the character we started out with all of these things are a problem this is the perfect time to talk about something that has become all too prevalent in modern day Shonen and especially isekai the power fantasy I'm not inherently against the power fantasy tropes myself in fact it goes hand in hand

with the loser Rises up to become something more Trope that I love the difference is an execution the loser Rises up Trope involves a true sense of purpose hard work determination learning important lessons shortfalls unexpected walls in the journeys questions as to what it means to be strong or what it means to be a team or whatever version of why did I start walking this path to begin with where am I going these are all aspects of the power fantasy Trope and the way you play around with all of these elements is what makes the

otherwise generic premise unique but nowadays with these power fantasy shows where esy protagonist either dies gets reborn or in a show like this where he gains some kind of Awakening or unexpected cheat well it's just that a cheat I don't mean you get all cultural right now but it can't be avoided with this topic we right now live in an era where the average person feels powerless and hopeless more so than at any other point in my near 35 years of living and from what I know of American History this is arguably the worst point

in this country's entire history in terms of the average person feeling weak hopeless aimless with no sense of purpose or passion with the unfortunate caveat of no time in human history has the average person had so many distractions from this problem so the idea of a power fantasy will you gain the strength to just do away with all the bad things I get it I do this phenomenon isn't anything new in the 1980s there was a huge Boon of vigilante movies and it has been directly tied to the crime waves that were happening at the

Times the movies portrayed what people wished would happen this energy still continues there's a reason superhero movies became so massively popular there's a reason about 10 to 15 years ago it seemed like zombie movies video games and the like what everybody looked but this is not the time to impact those deep topics right now with all that being said while I get the idea of people wanting the power fantasy of if I could go back in time with the knowledge I had now or if if I could restart in another world with my memories and

the ability to use magic or even just if I had the strength to Vanquish all the evil I see and make things right it does eventually enter the realm of unhealthy Obsession and my God we have slingshotted past that point the main character is a perfect representation of this problem he no longer even resembles himself and this didn't happen over time it happened damn near instantaneously it effectively erased the person he used to be B it's not a growth it is a replacement and I fear that may be the part that most people are latching

on to sure as hell isn't a story that's for sure all of this will add fuel for more artists and writers to pick up these poorly done tropes and archetypes and make even more stories of broken premises and nonsensical characters so long as they have ridiculously broken powers to the point where there isn't really a challenge anymore they're just supermanning their way through the story of being incredible and amazing and loved by all with no discernable flaws of their own all the while being so generic and lacking any discernable traits and characteristics that anyone can

go ahead and project themselves onto the character so they can feel that sense of instantaneous power I get why people L onto this for the same reasons I understand why somebody who lost their job goes out to have a drink in the same way I understand why somebody who just lost their job might become an alcoholic but there is a world of difference between going out and having a drink and becoming that alcoholic I'm sure this video may have upset a great number of people and for those who were the most upset I have this

message for you support me by going to my website to dragna treasure and buying some loose leaf anime themed teas and coffee this isn't some third party sponsor this is me sponsoring myself sign up on our patreon like service the dragon's Wings to get discounts on the products we sell tickets for our monthly giveaways and so much more choose your favorite waifu and buy the tea that will most likely taste like her anyone who doesn't support me by buying some tea or signing up for dragon's Wings is admitting to being a nii Sanji supporter the

ball is in your court dear viewers aside from that like comment share and subscribe and I'll see you next time