Solo Leveling: Arise has become the most popular anime of the Winter 2025 season, with no debate about it. Sung Jinwoo is, without doubt, one of the most overpowered characters with huge plot armor, but that hasn’t made anyone hate the character.
If anything, the anime has modified the manga’s verse to make the story more palatable. Along with serving plenty of action scenes and aura-farming moments, Jinwoo has also shown an extent of character development.
Solo Leveling anime has humanized Sung Jinwoo | Credits: A-1 Pictures
The original webtoon might be the best at creating an indomitable protagonist, but the anime is helping Jinwoo become more human.
Solo Leveling anime has developed Sung Jinwoo’s character beyond the webtoon
Once readers of the Solo Leveling webtoon watch the anime, they will be able to notice the differences between the two. The webtoon makes Jinwoo a cold and calculating character with plenty of grey morality mixed in. But at the same time, Jinwoo is a cold and hardened protagonist in most of the story.
However, in the anime adaptation, Jinwoo has more feelings. Sure, the anime has actively erased some of the grey sides of the character, but it has also added some human tendencies in Jinwoo. The anime also shows how Jinwoo began changing emotionally after killing humans for the first time.
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Webtoon fans miss the various dumbfounded expressions of the character and the goofy faces that he makes. But the anime has more than made up for it by humanizing the character more. The anime also improved the fights and showed Jinwoo struggling in some situations, which makes the scenarios more engaging.
Why a change in Jinwoo’s character made Solo Leveling anime better
Jinwoo’s struggle against Beru makes him more relatable | Credits: A-1 Pictures
Cold and emotionless characters have their own place in anime. But it does not take long before the same characters become boring. One-Punch Man‘s protagonist, Saitama, is the most overpowered character in the anime verse, but the anime still shows his struggles in plenty of fields.
It is these struggles and turmoil, along with plenty of comedy scenes, that make One-Punch Man so interesting. Otherwise, the result is that fans would soon get bored of the character’s stone-coldness. In the webtoon, Jinwoo is often shown as someone who is overly confident and can achieve almost anything with little struggle.
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Thankfully, the anime has changed it to keep its audience engaged. Otherwise, the show would have just been one buildup after another, with no bass drop. The biggest difference is that Jinwoo never struggled to beat Beru in the manhwa, while the anime showed how much he had to push himself.
Solo Leveling anime is available to stream on Crunchyroll.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
