Solo Leveling has a real issue when it comes to how many characters it has killed off so far, and that issue is no more evident than ever with Season 2’s latest episode. Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise From the Shadow- has featured a much stronger Sung Jinwoo than was ever seen in the first season. Thanks to all of the near death experiences he’s had over many fights, he’s now become the strongest Hunter in all of Korea. But due to his isolationist nature and the secret of his true abilities, Sung has been largely kept away from the other Hunters.
But while Solo Leveling has tried to make up for this gap by putting regular, much weaker Hunters in the path of danger in Season 2 to make Sung fight with more risk, all of the deaths this season really just amount to fodder that didn’t have much development before. This is most egregious with the anime’s latest example of this, however, with Byung-Gyu in the latest episode taking on the Jeju Island arc. There’s just no real reason to care that someone has died, even if we learned his name just an episode or so before.
Death Doesn’t Matter in Solo Leveling
Death was Solo Leveling‘s big hook in the beginning of the anime. The first episode revealed just how harsh of a world the Hunters lived in by quickly killing off Sung’s group, and leaving him for near death before being saved by the awakening of a mysterious new power. Death has also been a lingering threat as Hunters could be killed at any time, but it was only important when it was Sung’s life at risk. Solo Leveling has never really spent any real time fleshing out the members of its cast to get fans to care about them.
Deaths in Solo Leveling have never really amounted to more than just fodder to prove how deadly a new monster foe could be. That’s the case with the Jeju Island arc bringing Season 2 to an end too. The key villain of the arc, Beru, has been officially revealed with Episode 11 and quickly wiped out a few of Japan’s S-Rank Hunters to prove how strong he is. But it’s more about the action of killing itself to keep fans interested rather than caring about any of these deaths in the long term. These deaths mean nothing to Sung or the story’s future.
When it came to putting Korea’s own Hunters at risk, however, Beru suddenly started holding himself back. Rather than quickly decapitating all threats as seen with his initial introduction, he’s now just punching and injuring the Hunters who he should have a bigger grudge against. They just killed the ant queen, so you’d think that Beru would chop off their heads immediately too. But as the anime showcased, these named characters won’t be in any real danger because their deaths could potentially actually matter.
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What Does This Mean for Byung-Gyu?
Enter the biggest problem of the arc, and of the season overall, Byung-Gyu. First introduced during the final events of the Demon Castle Raid, it was explained to fans that Byung-Gyu was one of the S-Rank Hunters who had fought alongside Baek Yoonho in the failed third raid on Jeju Island. He had quit being a hunter because he and Baek watched a friend die on the island, but ended up being inspired to return for the fourth Jeju Island raid to support Baek. It was just too dangerous of a situation to let his friend go alone despite him wanting to quit entirely.
He’s then killed off by Beru in Solo Leveling Season 2 Episode 11, and is the only member of the Korea S-Rank Hunters to die thus far (and will likely be the only one now that Sung is heading to the island as well). But when putting in for context of the arc as a whole, fans were just introduced to Byung-Gyu so he could serve a purpose by dying. He was forcibly inserted into the arc to give fans a death to care about, but hasn’t been around long enough for it to actually reach that point.
Maybe he was around in the original webcomics for much longer, but Solo Leveling Season 2 has really only featured him in what amounts to basically a single episode of time before his death. It’s a cheating way to try and mine some emotion out of yet another fodder death that means nothing in the grand scheme, and now Sung is coming to clean house. Byung-Gyu might play a role in the future of the series, but as of now it’s a cheap death that we’re expected to care about. But it’s hard to imagine anyone does.
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