The following contains spoilers for Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow- Episode 12, “Are You the King of the Humans?”, available onCrunchyroll.
Summary
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If you’ve been on the internet at all in the past few days,you have most likely seen the hypebeing built around Sung Jinwoo’s battle against the Ant King, the climactic conclusion of the highly anticipated Jeju Island Raid arc ofSolo Leveling. To put it succinctly, we may have just witnessed something historic, as A-1 Pictures delivered spectacularly inSolo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow-,episode 12 with some of the best animation we’re likely to see all year. It was a visual buffet that tricked you into thinking you knew what you’d be getting, before completely eviscerating those expectations with a world-class anime battle.
However, while the visuals were absolutely marvelous, what really carries the weight of this moment in theSolo Levelinganime is the attention to detail, and the treasure trove of themes that the contest communicated. Here’s why Sung Jinwoo vs The Ant King was a brilliantexploration of interesting thematic elementsthat have been built up over the entire series' run.
Setting the Scene
How Jinwoo and the Ant King Were Positioned Prior to the Battle
In episode 10 ofSolo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow-, we learn about the Ant Queen’s last-ditch effort to hatch a single offspring that is far more powerful than any generation of ants before it, and thus able to ensure the survival of their species, which has turned to cannibalism in the face of dwindling food on Jeju Island. It is due to the worsening conditions on the island that the ants slowly began spec’ing into traits like flight and bipedalism, traits that the Queen imparts to her offspring by way of phagogenesis, which means that she takes traits from organisms that she has eaten and gives those traits to her offspring, creating greater genetic variation.The result of the Queen’s intelligent tactic is the Ant King, a powerful bipedal ant with a black exoskeleton that wields many of the best traits of each of the previous ant generations, as well as the Queen’s phagogenesis now evolved into the Skill known as Gluttony. Through eating his enemies, the Ant King can pick and choose which of their abilities to add to his Skill Tree, effectively facilitating his own evolution in real time.
Upon his introduction, the Ant King as a character is placed in comparison to series protagonist Sung Jinwoo, with various parallels being drawn between the two, starting with colour palette. When he unleashes his first ever roar, the Ant King lets loose a red-purple aura, which positions the Ant King as an entity of similar standing to Jinwoo, whose aura glows purpleafter becoming the Shadow Monarchat the end of the first season. The parallels continued as the Ant King rampaged all over Jeju Island, slaughtering 7 of the 11 S-Rankers brought by Japan’s strongest Hunter Guild, the Draw Sword Guild. When the Ant King faced Japan’s strongest Hunter, Ryuji Gotō, the S-Ranker felt a similar sensation to the absolute fear and terror he felt when he challenged Sung Jinwoo to a sparring match. Unfortunately, the anime version of this clash completely downplays Gotō’s immediate reaction to Jinwoo to position this parallel between the Ant King and Sung Jinwoo, but having both perhaps would have better communicated the similarity.
Oh, the Humanity!
Who’s the Human and Who’s the Monster, Really?
The final parallel drawn between The Ant King and Sung Jinwoo occurs shortly after the Ant Queen is defeated by the Korean S-Rank strike team to “DARK ARIA”, the same soundtrack aswhen Jinwoo had to kill another human being for the first time, with the Ant King appearing when he hears his Queen’s death throes. Angered, the Ant King thoroughly decimates the group and even kills Healer Byung-Gu and eats his head, with Gluttony granting the ant the ability to speak as a result. The entirety ofSolo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow-episode 11 actually felt like it was following the Ant King as a protagonist, with a pronounced lack of Sung Jinwoo in the episode and an interesting focus on the Ant King’s mentality. Starting with the Ant King’s apparent anger at the death of his mother, a very human reaction, there are a few things in the last few episodes ofSolo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow-that appeared to humanize him. The fact thatCha Hae In suffered the most egregious injuriesfrom the Ant King’s solo’ing of the entire strike team is a testament to this, as after eating the Queen’s head, Gluttony gave the Ant King a good look at the Queen’s final moments. The dramatic turn of his head and fish-eye lens effect on his eye, mandibles covered in green blood, gave the impression of an angered protagonist, and DARK ARIA’s use was a great touch that communicated the Ant King and Jinwoo’s similarity despite being in opposition. The song is associated with Jinwoo being “pushed to the brink”, and thus acts as evidence of the Ant King’s emotional state in this scene.
What further humanizes the Ant King isthe actual battle against Sung Jinwoo, in which, where we’d normally hear more of the series' protagonist’s thoughts, we actually heard more of the Ant King’s instead. This blurs the lines, as, from our perspective, the Ant King is the monster and Sung Jinwoo the human, but in putting us in the Ant King’s mind rather than Jinwoo’s, we get closer to him as a character and experience his changing attitude during the fight in real time, going from arrogant condescension to appreciation to outright fear. This also places the Ant King in the same position as Gotō when he faced Jinwoo, as well as when he faced the Ant King. The Ant King’s shock at Jinwoo’s strength created a situation in which the monster was the onefeeling like it was up against a monster, and that is a brilliant thematic detail, not to mention the moveset which increasingly incorporated the abilities of the Hunters he’d eaten, including Byung Gu’s healing, adding to the idea that Jinwoo is the monster as the use of those abilities is effectively the Ant King leaning on a party to take down a powerful Raid Boss. The Ant King’s attempt to flee, in which he almost looks like he’s screaming in terror, completes the subversion of human and monster in the battle, as Jinwoo pursues and eviscerates him without a shred of mercy.
The Colours of a Fated Battle
How Lines Darting About the Screen Added to a Brilliant Fight
The battle against the Ant King is not the first time we see Sung Jinwoo pitted against an opponent and the colour scheme is red and blue, with the last time being inthe dramatic battle against Igrisat the end of the first season ofSolo Leveling. Gamers might recognize red and blue as Player 1 and Player 2, which fits Solo Leveling, but this colour scheme specifically comes up in the most important fights Jinwoo has had. Red and blue generally communicate the idea of opposites. Where red is light of a longer wavelength, blue is light of shorter wavelengths, and these colours have long been associated with opposing concepts. Where red is aggression, passion and instinct, blue is calmness, serenity, and even logic. These opposing associations are brought to the forefront in the fight between Jinwoo and the Ant King, as their fight goes into overdrive, and they move so fast that they simply become brightly coloured streaks of light darting about the screen at times, with the points where they come together creating purple, the colour associated with Jinwooafter he becomes the Shadow Monarch’s vessel.
This is where the fight reaches a new frontier in its intensity, becoming a historic moment in the history of the series as the jaws of characters witnessing the conflict, as well as those of fans, dropped to the floor in unison. What’s amazing about these parts of the fight is how even just the lines darting about can communicate so much about the characters. Jinwoo’s blue lines move in more clear, logical and even graceful arcs, while the Ant King has a far more erratic movement that communicates a contestation between human and beast; with the subversion described earlier complicating this relationship, as the Ant King is the “beast” that appears more “human” as the battle progresses.
Why? I was born to be the strongest. I devour everything, growing ever powerful. I should be king, and yet…
Crushed Like a Bug
The Ant King is Dethroned
The Ant King’s last-ditch effort to sicthe swarms of ant dronespouring into the nest at Jinwoo completely fails as Jinwoo’s greatest Shadows mow them down, with Kargalgan blasting them with mighty fire magic that creates a terrifying sight: Jinwoo walking through a wall of flame to a shellshocked Ant King who tries to flee but is brought down with a deft flick of the Ruler’s Hand. The image of the Ant King lying on the ground, looking up at Sung Jinwoo with flames raging around them completes the positioning of Jinwoo as the monster, as the raging flames and his glowing eyes communicate an ominousness; a combination of elements the Ant King would most likely be able to understand as a vision of a great evil: “the devil”, and the battlefield as “Hell” given the human knowledge he gained through Gluttony. The Ant King’s desperation is clear as it abandons the elements that humanized it, like its bipedalism, to escape from Jinwoo.
The scuttering away like an insect indicated a return to base instinct brought on by intense fear, and Jinwoo’s evisceration of a no-longer hostile enemy shows an abandonment of the kind of emotional reasoning of a human. Even viewers had to deal with some feeling of sympathy for the insect, given the fact that we spent the entire episode in its head, but Jinwoo, the monster, killed it without a second thought, as if to answer the question presented bythe Ice Elf Barcaat the beginning of the season about Jinwoo’s humanity or lack thereof. It was a fight full of amazing detail and context clues that deserves to be lauded among some of the very best fights the medium has had to offer.
Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow- is available onCrunchyroll. The final episode airs on March 29.
Solo Leveling
Cast
A-1 Pictures' Solo Leveling is an anime based on Chugong’s popular web novel. Set in an unforgiving fantasy world where hunters explore dungeons filled with monsters, the vulnerable Sung Jinwoo gains a significant power boost after he is picked to be a solo player by the System.
