Holy shit can't believe what has happened to this franchise after the phenomenal season 1.
The manga has more animation than the fucking anime. It's crazy out there.
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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It really is weird how arbitrary what gets good adaptations and what gets shafted is. Like how Solo Leveling is some completely empty, derivative slop published in the literally-unreadable long-strip format that reads like a OPM/Hunter x Hunter fanfic, but it got two seasons so far of absurdly lavish and incredibly stylish sakuga action scenes where between the quality of its visuals and its fantastic soundtrack the complete absence of writing or characters who are more present than the scenery doesn't get in the way of it being an enjoyable slop spectacle, while OPM started out strong and seemed very well received with favorable comparisons between it and JoJo's writing and has just gotten shit on since.
Solo Levelling being adapted and not the plethora of actually amazing webtoon pisses me off
Atleast they're making ORV. Although I'll be incredibly mad if it doesn't get the same treatment as SL.
It also makes sense to adapt Solo Leveling. It's the most popular manhwa and pulled millions of people into reading manhwa(including me). And it definitely has opened the gates for other manhwa to be adapted by Japanese studios.
What's ORV?
What the fuck they're turning that into an anime?
How many seasons will it even take lmao, that's like 5 seasons of content, thought they adapted tower of god and that has 800 chapters
Omniscient Reader is easily the best long running manhwa and it's amazing story wise. Makes sense to adapt it.
Part of it literally just the skills of the studios and random events. Not every anime can be produced by the cream of the crop studios, and studios have to bid for the right to adapt shows.
JC staff in particular are not known for sakuga type animation. They are known making mid tier adaptions and butchering the source material.
I wanted to call this unfair because the JC Staff stuff I've personally seen has almost always been good enough to finish, but looking back on it I can only really call Azumanga Daioh a favorite, and the rest has been... Yeah, middle-tier, but not necessarily "butchering", right?
From a strictly animation perspective JC Staff are middle-tier as well, but mid-tier animation is perfectly serviceable for certain genres, just not OPM.
The best thing JC Staff ever made was the konosuba movie and the fact that they butchered small parts of it actually improves konosuba because it's just the kind of show where you can make something really shitty and have the characters themselves fourth wall break about how shitty it is and the audience will laugh at that. It can get away with being a hot mess in places because the characters are all a hot mess.
Is that the "best thing" in the sense of specifically the best animation quality, or just best in all aspects overall? Because if it's best in all aspects overall, I'm surprised that's your pick.
Execution
Is basically to say all aspects overall, right? Though to be honest it took me a minute after seeing this comment before I realized you were saying "best thing in the sense of the execution of the work" instead of "I sentence Erika3sis to death by execution for writing this comment" — don't ask me why my brain went with that as the first interpretation, it's 4 AM and I just suddenly saw the word "execution" in my inbox with no context lol
It's because that sounds like a totally normal thing to see on hexbear.
See it's funny because this is a screencap from a JC Staff show
"Butchering" might be too harsh because they don't do that all the time. But I've seen it happen a few times and got annoyed with it.
Well, the first thing to do normally is completely disregard critical reception and consider it in terms of mass market appeal. Solo Leveling is trash, but it's an extremely popular manhwa (that you would be hard-pressed to call unreadable when it is a very popular format) that has all the hallmarks of the chuuni power fantasy bullshit of many other popular series. Also, for some reason, manhwa adaptations seem to be much higher-effort even though the big ones are often trash (like God of Highschool, though I thought Tower of God, which is even more of a HxH fanfic, was okay).
I do kind of wonder if there's some larger influence with the wave of "Cool Korea" media in the past several years, which is a very deliberate effort. Like, I'm not saying the RoK directly funded the production of Solo Leveling, but I do wonder if there's more to it all. I'm also not assigning a moral value to this, it's sort of whatever beyond the baseline abusiveness of the idol industry, which I don't think is much better in Japan.
Jojo has lots of problems and I think it's reasonable to find Phantom Blood almost all lame (aside from Dio being funny sometimes), but I would still compare it positively to OPM. OPM has some good sequences, e.g. I'll always love the Mumen Rider vs Deep Sea King fight, but I don't think the writing is all that special beyond the central gimmick of using ironic distancing to disarm people so they get sincerely invested. None of this is relevant to how they are funded though, because Jojo never got OPM season 1 level animation, or maybe not until Golden Wind, and it also had more of a dedicated fan base that was invested way beyond what was already out, with several hundred more chapters to cover, which has never been true of OPM because people only really follow the Murata comic, which has been only a little ahead of the anime, which I think represents a somewhat different investment prospect, because who knows if the manga will just go on indefinite hiatus? And whoops, it did!
The trick I think is to foster it at every level.
Consider for example how the UK excels in sports despite being a small country. It fosters sports at every level, before school, in school, outside school, etc.
If we look at "Cool Japan" a notable element of the entire culture that they export comes from manga. Where do manga artists come from? They're fostered by manga clubs in schools, which are adequately funded by the school club funds, with a teacher offering insight and leadership to the club where necessary. The same can be said for music clubs, photography clubs, art clubs, etc. The foundational pillar of Cool Japan is putting state funds into creating people with an interest in these things, some of which will go on eventually to become creators without ever really realising the state did anything.
I don't know about the RoK, but I would guess that they're doing something to fund the production of people who are interested in becoming idols, and they're doing some things with their manhwa to foster the creation of more people interested in it.
There's also just the use of media to push it. Sometimes good art exists but never gets anywhere because it has no visibility. Use of media can bridge this gap by pushing to expose it.
Side note: Personally I think socialist states should reconsider investment in sports and consider using the investment in cultural products instead. I think it has higher impact, and I would argue that sports foster individualist competition rather than collectivist cooperation. All of that investment in competitive sport could instead be turbo charging Cool China or Cool Cuba or whatever.
I think it depends on the sport and on the cultural products, because team sports that emphasize teamwork are a real thing, and even individual competitions like chess can function as an expression of the work of countless people (see the dominance of the USSR for a long period), and cultural products can be incredibly reactionary or otherwise counter-productive. I think the main merit the latter has is the necessarily-greater range of expression, perhaps along with not being able to just be culturally perverted by accusations of doping.
Is it benefiting the country on the worldstage or is it just pleasing the citizens because they feel like #1 from the wins?
Sports feel more like a useful internal distraction than a way to manipulate the country's image or popularity abroad. Sports in the UK distract the population from their problems, and members of the country winning the sports makes them feel national pride. These are internal benefits rather than external.
If a country is stable internally and doesn't really need these internal benefits, the investment would be better applied to the external.
idk, I think it was a pretty compelling demonstration from the USSR, and I'm not a Soviet. Systematizing and collaborating are good, and it's good to have people trained on that basis knock down the western wunderkind.
I do still favor cultural exports, of course, though sports itself can kind of be that too, as seen from the soft power of America exporting baseball and basketball around the world.
Yeah socialists are going to say that because we're susceptible to nationalism brain when it comes to socialist states. What works internally on their citizens works externally on socialists who see it as part of the global communist project. That's not necessarily beneficial though, socialists are on their side anyway.
I uhh, don't get that impression that much. I feel like American sports are largely niche everywhere except like Japan and a handful of other places. With that said football (soccer) was probably a British Empire export so there's something to what you're saying about the sport itself being a useful export. Sports themselves are basically videogames before videogames became popular, videogames are more valuable exports now in my opinion, they're doing more for Japan than sports ever would.
The USSR was many nations, but anyway joke's on me for not anticipating this argument. The thing is, even neoliberal commentators on the topic can also have some appreciation for what the USSR did, even if they are credulous to cold war narratives, so long as they aren't obsessed with making the USSR the Great Satan of its day. I learned about the USSR's approach from a lib who admired it (I don't give a fuck about chess).
It's interesting. The internationalism of our project causes us to respond the way nationalists do to certain things within socialist states, but we do so in an extraterritorial way.
Content that people like is going to do this more effectively though. The treatlerites respond better to the treat machine than they do to this content. They won't want their favourite Chinese videogame being disrupted by the US going to war with China. Look at how much attacking Tik Tok ultimately resulted in pro-China sentiment. Produce a vast amount of culture product under a "Cool China" policy mirroring the approach of Japan and RoK but with the vast resources of China and it would become culturally hegemonic by virtue of the sheer quantity of high quality content.
Well, my point in even mentioning the "nationalism" wording is that nationalism frequently ties into somewhat more specific ideas than that some arbitrarily defined geographic camp is good, specifically about the greatness of your nation, i.e. your ethnicity and culture (or clusters thereof), which in this context is often proven by them triumphing over other ethnicities and cultures and, well, you can see why I think it's inclined toward brainworms and I'd want to make the distinction. When the project is substantially extra-national, it mitigates the aforementioned character in favor of things like what I already mentioned about Soviets demonstrating Marxist philosophy in its competitive approach, though sometimes it might just be a slightly broader umbrella of ethnic chauvinism, depending on the context.
I think there's a limit to how well Cool Reaction can be made into Cool Communism because they have advantages with slop that we tend to not, but for the third or fourth time I do agree that China doing artistically-oriented soft power is a cool and good thing that it should multiply its efforts in substantially. I just hope it can avoid Cool Reaction slop, which it already sort of falls into with the fetishization of courtly dramas domestically.
I'm interested, not something I'm very aware of. What are you referring to?
The main thing I was thinking of was the Palace Drama subgenre. Here are some examples: https://www.newhanfu.com/30448.html
If you know the anime Apothecary Diaries, they're a lot like that. There are other courtly dramas, especially recently, but I really don't care for the genre in general (though I did like Apothecary Diaries), no matter which set of aristocrats are being represented (British, Korean, etc.), so I don't know all that much about Chinese dramas specifically, having mostly watched British ones before getting sick of it.
In my head, they share a common lineage with the worn-out rhetoric about "national rejuvenation" as though the country isn't more powerful than ever and, more importantly, the people are better off than ever. Looking at a lot of the aforementioned works, you'd think that less than 85% of the population of Imperial China was a brutally exploited peasantry.
Heading off an obvious objection, I really think these shows are different from other sorts of escapist fantasies. What bugs me about them is that, while we might metaphorically call them fantastical, more literally they are meant to be "historical fiction," and then have this zoomed in view of people bathing in the fruits of the workers' labor with no interest at all in the workers and the blood the palace is continually washed in, beyond usually the attendants and such within the palace itself. That grounding makes such works often have a very reactionary content not because they tell you that the peasants should be trampled, but because they don't even bother to address that question while uncritically enjoying the outcome of the trampling, which itself becomes an answer (and obviously I'd also apply this to more modern courtly dramas, like the ones centered on Queen Victoria, just with the proletariat being ignored along with the colonized populations, where applicable (oh, and also to corporate dramas, which are just capitalist courtly dramas)).
What I'm whining about is not universal to Chinese courtly dramas, and there are other drama subgenres that are a little less popular in China but still very popular that deal with all sorts of topics and often have a much more progressive character. I've seen it remarked multiple times that the popularity of courtly drama is due to them being a way to criticize The Regime without being Censored (insert Parenti quote), but there are actually "anti-corruption dramas" that take place in the PRC and are principally about fighting extensive corruption within the CPC, like "In the Name of the People," which was apparently a big popularizer of the subgenre. Obviously, that's not the full scope of what critics might want to say, but I think it's hard to argue that it's historically the main source of public backlash against the CPC, and you can wake me up when an American studio produces a film or show where the moral of the story is openly that America should be overthrown. Come to think of it, Star Wars is actually kind of a good example of how the aforementioned western commentators characterize those C-dramas and does end with the America stand-in being destroyed by a bombing campaign and the killing of the head of state.
Sorry about the volume of overly long replies I've subjected you to recently. I mean, I guess I'm not that sorry because I only cut this one down a little, but yeah . . .
Chinese animation industry has been popping off. To be hero x and lord of the mysteries were incredible shows that released this year. China also has a monopoly on coomer gachas.
Yes To Be Hero X is great but I think what's missing is content that is more distinctly Chinese. To Be Hero X could have been made by a Japanese studio with absolutely nothing changed to make it fit. There's nothing distinct within the show that identifies it as Chinese.
Good thing is that China has a fuck ton of popular Web novels that would become popular overseas if made in donghua.
With the recent success of donghua, there is a good chance to see a lot more stuff coming out. The problem is about promotion. Chinese studios seem to still not be promoting things heavily in overseas markets.
Subsidizing it to try to shift some of their animation industry from just quietly being the backbone of the broader animation industry to having their own original series does seem plausible. I almost wonder if there's not something similar going on with the Chinese animation industry, with how absolutely gorgeous things like To Be Hero X (which looks better than Solo Leveling and is also very well written with like an actual story and characters and themes, when Solo Leveling has none of those things) are.
I just remember seeing people praise OPM season one as being a standout in the way jojo was in terms of creativity and how fight scenes played out. I don't think that actually holds up fully, but I do get why someone would argue that it was closer to something like jojo than to the generic shonen slop of the 00s.
Watch Lord of the Mysteries. It's really good looking and has a very good plot. The first 3 episodes are very rushed but it's great after that.
I've heard that it looks fantastic but is hard to follow/doesn't make sense if one hasn't read the books its adapting.
Definitely True for the first few episodes but it's great by the end.
I'll check it out at some point then. I still need to finish watching To Be Hero X.