Solo Leveling Season 2: let's talk about what actually went wrong

Finished the Solo Leveling Season 2 finale at 3am on a Sunday last year and just stared at the wall for a minute. Not because it was great. Because something felt off, and I had to figure out what. I have spent the months since reading takes, rewatching specific episodes, and trying to be honest with myself about a show I genuinely loved the first time around.

So let me say this up front: I am a Solo Leveling fan. I read the manhwa during the original Webtoon run. I watched Season 1 weekly on Crunchyroll in 2024 like everyone else and I was completely in. The Cartenon dungeon arc made me believe A-1 Pictures had figured out how to translate manhwa pacing to TV anime. The OST was doing things. Sung Jin-Woo’s first big shadow extraction still gives me chills. I am not coming at this from a hater’s angle.

I am coming at this from the place where you love something and you have to admit it disappointed you.

What S2 got right, because credit where it is due

The Jeju Island arc, when we finally got there, was worth the trip. Episode 11 in particular — the Ant King confrontation, Sung Jin-Woo’s domain expansion of his shadow army, the way the lighting kept shifting between blood-red and that signature purple — that is a top-five action sequence A-1 has shipped in years. The opening sequence by the band Tomorrow X Together was great. The ending too. Hiroyuki Sawano stepped up where Sawano always steps up.

When the show wanted to give us a setpiece, it gave us a setpiece. The animation budget showed up for the moments that mattered. I want to be clear about that before I start complaining, because I have seen a wave of takes online that act like S2 was a disaster top to bottom and that is just not true.

But.

The middle cour problem

Here is where it falls apart. The middle of Season 2 — call it episodes 4 through 8, the lead-up to Jeju — is where the season loses its footing. The pacing genuinely sags. Some of that is structural to the source material; the manhwa itself has connective tissue between major arcs that is more about leveling mechanics than character drama, and “Sung Jin-Woo gets stronger in a dungeon” is not infinite TV.

Some of it is animation quality. Compare the storyboarding in episode 6 to episode 11 and you can see two different production realities. The character art in the dialogue scenes wobbles in ways Season 1 mostly avoided. Backgrounds get simpler. The lighting work that defined Season 1 — that almost noir treatment of dungeon interiors — gets replaced with flatter compositions that just deliver the plot. A-1 Pictures had Sword Art Online Progressive, Kaguya, Lycoris Recoil-adjacent work, and Solo Leveling all in the pipeline. Something had to give. Solo Leveling’s middle cour is where it gave.

The other problem, and I do not see enough people saying this: the source material’s power-fantasy structure starts to show its limits in this stretch. Once Sung Jin-Woo is meaningfully overpowered — and that happens earlier in S2 than S1 — the dramatic stakes shift from “can he survive?” to “how cool will the next fight look?” Those are not equivalent. Season 1 worked partly because Sung Jin-Woo was vulnerable. Season 2 has to keep finding artificial reasons to put him at risk, and you can feel the writing reaching.

The Cha Hae-In question, and the supporting cast

I have a complaint that is going to make people mad. The supporting cast in S2 is underwritten in ways that hurt the show. Cha Hae-In specifically — she is set up across the season as someone whose perspective matters, and then most of her actual presence is reaction shots while Sung Jin-Woo does cool stuff. The manhwa has the same problem, to be fair. But anime adaptation is supposed to be an opportunity to fix things the source rushed past, and S2 mostly does not take that opportunity.

The Hunter Association politics? Compressed. The other S-rank hunters? Mostly window dressing. Sung Jin-Woo’s family — his sister and his mother — get the emotional beats they need, and those scenes are some of the best stuff in the season, but they are isolated from the main plot in a way that makes the world feel smaller than it should.

This is the cost of being a power-fantasy adaptation. The fantasy is one guy. Everyone else exists to react to him. Season 2 leans into that harder than Season 1 did, and the show is worse for it.

What Season 3 needs to do

Season 3 was announced for production and as of May 2026 we are presumably looking at a 2026-late-or-2027 broadcast. Here is what I want, as a fan who is still in this:

Give Cha Hae-In an actual arc. Not a love interest checkmark — an arc. Use the anime-original space the staff has to actually develop her. The manhwa is finished; you are not bound to source pacing in the same way you were for S1.

Slow down enough to breathe in the non-action sequences. The best moments in S2 were the quiet ones — Sung Jin-Woo at his mother’s hospital, the brief scenes of him at home with his sister. The show forgot that quiet builds the loud.

Production scheduling. I am not asking A-1 to do magic. I am asking that whoever greenlights their schedule looks at the back half of Solo Leveling and decides that this show, specifically, gets the staffing it needs to land its ending. Because the final stretch of the manhwa is where the emotional payoff lives, and if it looks like the middle of S2 looked, it is going to land flat.

What I am actually going to do

Probably rewatch episode 11 once a month until S3 drops. Skip the middle stretch on rewatches. Recommend the show to friends with the caveat that S1 is the masterpiece and S2 is a flawed bridge to what better be a great S3.

I still love Solo Leveling. That is not a contradiction with being annoyed at it. The shows you stay loyal to are the shows you can be honest about. Anyone telling you S2 was perfect did not pay enough attention. Anyone telling you it was unwatchable did not stay for Jeju Island.

See you when S3 drops. Bring snacks.