Solo Leveling Season 2 Makes a Major Change to the Story

• There is faster story pacing in Solo Leveling Season 2 than in Season 1.
• Jinwoo’s changing personality in the anime reflects his struggles with decisions and their consequences.
• Other characters, therefore, obtain greater significance in the anime adaptation, thereby changing the authentic narrative structure.

The first season of the Solo Leveling anime was extremely successful and gave birth to a phenomenon that has dominated much of the conversation this Winter 2025 anime season, with the sequel to the anime airing on January 4, almost a whole month after the film compilation of season 1, with the first two episodes of the second season, hit US theatres on December 6, 2024.

Even within this taste of the season to come, a number of changes were made to the Solo Leveling narrative that may have major ramifications for the overall experience of the anime, especially when compared to the manhwa.

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Pacing and Tone:

The Anime’s Pace Has Gotten Faster for Season 2
The most affected aspect of the adaptation of Solo Leveling from manhwa to anime would be the pacing of the story, which in the anime was accelerated to cover the major story beats faster. Though it is done in such a way that retains much of the core developments, the shift in pacing also significantly impacted the personality of the series.

Readers of the manhwa will remember even more moments of comedy, brevity or silliness throughout the story, but the anime has taken up a more serious tone in lieu of the shift in focus on Sung Jinwoo’s personality. The pacing has only gotten faster with Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow-, in which the first two episodes adapted about ten chapters’ worth of content.

For instance, the first season of Solo Leveling adapted around 45 chapters’ worth. The anime also addresses the horrors taking place on Jeju Island much earlier than the manhwa does, even identifying the upcoming Jeju Island Raid Arc as one of the series’ most pivotal moments. As for the tone, as mentioned earlier, there seemed to be more humor in the manhwa to balance the dark violent moments scattered everywhere in the story, something missing in the anime, even more so as Jinwoo has become stronger.

Most viewers of the anime will detect subtle differences in the personality of the series’ main man, Sung Jinwoo. While the two versions of the character are motivated by similar reasons and suffer through the same traumatic events, there is far more grappling with his fleeting humanity in the anime version.

Jinwoo’s Changing Personality Develops Differently

Whenever he has had to kill another person, Jinwoo has done so, without fail, but in the anime, the weight of such a decision is much more obvious, especially right after killing Hwang Dongsuk and his slimy friends. In the manhwa, Jinwoo is partially desensitized to violence; he’s a guy who could dice up an enemy and have the cheekiness to drop one-liner comments afterward, or eat dinner with his sister like nothing happened.

In the anime, these decisions and their consequences to his character haunt him even afterward. Kim Chul’s death and subsequent “Shadow fication” are a major point in illustrating the differences between the two iterations of Jinwoo.

Originally, Jinwoo planned Kim Chul’s assassination. When Jinwoo saw that his torture inside the Red Gate drove Kim Chula to a breaking point, manhwa Jinwoo makes the A-Ranker attack him so that he can create another shadow that would assist him to defeat the head of the Red Gate, Barca.

In the anime, this fight was set up as a defense wherein Jinwoo was able to utilize Kim Chul’s hostility towards him in killing him and eventually turning him into the Shadow Tank.

Given that the diminishing of Jinwoo’s humanity is a central theme in this portion of the storyline, especially in the Red Gate, the concept that he killed another human for the utility which such an act would provide to him is an indication of a more ruthless and pragmatic Sung Jinwoo, however, given the fact that the anime is attempting to add a bit of depth to this “diminishing humanity” of its main protagonist, having Jinwoo outright kill Kim Chula in the way he did in the manhwa wouldn’t be quite appropriate.

The Big Difference

Other Characters Matter More

While there have not been total disconnects from the story beats fans have seen in the manhwa, or the web novel for that matter, the direction the Solo Leveling anime is being taken has really been setting it up to become a far-off experience from what it was meant to be when first started-though simple medium differences aside, of course.

In the anime, we are being told the story of an individual grappling with some of the major changes to his life and personality that have been brought forth by the System, which affects only him and thus isolates him from other people. This is further confirmed when, during the Red Gate arc, the Ice Elf Barca identifies Jinwoo as something other than human, which he then unwillingly confirms by killing and extracting the Shadow of another human being.

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Even more impactful than people perhaps will admit is how much more screen time the anime is willing to provide to those characters other than Sung Jinwoo, that will just have to be cut from something else in order for it to accommodate the addition within the narrative. It is driven much more by the characters and their relationships than the manhwa, and this added focus has also changed how the series interacts with the narrative arcs, leading to altered pacing.

Even with these factors apparently changing his personality, however, the Sung Jinwoo from the Solo Leveling anime is more of a soul struggling in silence regarding his predicament and possesses less “personality” than what was featured in the series itself. Manhwa provides much heart and humor amongst all the violence but a colder, calculating, and obsessed Jinwoo who goes absolutely berserk as he keeps gaining strength.

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