It’s a structure that’s common to a lot of shonen (teenaged boy) anime series, video games, fantasy novels, and heck, classical epics (Dante’s Inferno, anyone?): it probably has a name already that I’m too lazy to look up, so I’ll just call it a Tower Quest. A Tower Quest is where the protagonist works their way up from bottom to top (or top to bottom, if you’re Dante), building skills, gaining power, and encountering tougher and tougher opponents along the way until a final “boss” is encountered and a final treasure won: it could be immortality, love, riches beyond measure, or simply the title of Best, whatever that may mean in that context. But no matter what it is, it’s the ne plus ultra of that storyworld, which is why the story generally ends with the winning—because if it were to keep going, the prize would get un-won, so to speak, in the tedium and messiness of daily life.
Of course, there can always be a bigger and badder tower on the horizon—a.k.a., a sequel—and plenty of Tower Quest anime take this approach (e.g., Sword Art Online, Bleach, etc.). Another recent anime, Frieren, takes the tougher and yet gentler tack of following its heroes through the days and years after the Tower is toppled, as they return to their daily lives. But not so many take the bold approach of unwinning the prize while the Tower Quest is still underway. Hell’s Paradise and Solo Leveling both do, by vitiating the prize before it’s won—the first by turning it inside out and the second by showing how it turns the hero inside out.
Hell’s Paradise starts in an alternative Edo-period Japan with the failed execution of Gabimaru the Hollow, a notorious ninja assassin. It fails because Gabimaru just can’t seem to die, no matter how he’s assailed. It’s this quality that gets him recruited for a high-risk mission to retrieve an Elixir of Life from Shinsenkyo Island for the Emperor—in exchange for a pardon. The woman who makes him this deal is Sagiri Yamada, the only female member of an august clan of imperial executioners who sees Gabimaru as her ticket to respectability; she senses Gabimaru’s love for his wife—the abused daughter of the chief of his ninja clan—and believes she can leverage the possibility of reuniting the lovers to motivate Gabimaru to win her the Elixir. Each executioner in the clan is paired up with a powerful death-row criminal, and the six pairs are shipped off to Shinsenkyo.
At first the island appears to be fully the paradise it was named for, but it pretty quickly becomes apparent why no one has ever made it back with the fabled Elixir: poisonous plants, carnivorous monsters, and deadly butterflies abound, all of which rapidly turn their targets into human terrariums sprouting flowers from eye sockets and vines from fingertips. The upside of this horror show is that the surviving prisoners and their executioners, including Gabimaru and Sagiri, abandon their battle-royale assignment and start working together to make it off the island. The bad news is that, even if they do, it turns out that the Elixir of Life, while very real, doesn’t work the way the Emperor thinks; thus, there’s no way for the prisoners to win their freedom under the terms of the deal.
While this problem in itself is interesting enough to make me watch Season 2 when it drops, the real appeal is watching the characters’ ideas of the ultimate prize to be won evolve. Gabimaru had convinced himself he only deserved to die, after all the people he’d killed; however, on the island he realizes that the kindness and love his wife showed him are making him want to live so he can pay her back. Meanwhile, Sagiri starts to let go of the goal of winning the respect of her fellow clansmen (as they turn into human bonsai around her) and starts focusing on achieving the sword stroke that made her father the ultimate executioner, a stroke that through compassion and empathy locates the exact joint in time and space that can usher someone from this life to the next without fear or regret, only peace. Both of these changes bring the beauty of mortality, rather than immortality, to the foreground and make Hell’s Paradise worth a watch.
Unlike Hell’s Paradise, Solo Leveling didn’t grab me on first watch because it started out like so many other shonen anime that aren’t aimed at me, with the weakling kid who you know is going to magically get strong somehow and get the girl, yada yada. But when I revisited the series a couple of months later, I got drawn in by its unique take on dungeons. In an alternative near-future South Korea, for reasons unknown (at least so far in Season 1), portals to dungeon dimensions start opening up all over Seoul, and if people don’t go into them and kill their bosses, they and the lesser monsters in the dungeon will spill out into the city and start killing civilians. So, the government starts paying Hunters to clear the dungeons as a sort of civil defense force. They, and the dungeons, are ranked by difficulty/skill level: E for the lowest grade and S for the highest (Superior, one grade above A; they’re using the Japanese academic grading system). But interestingly it turns out that the dungeons and their monsters contain resources that can be converted into clean energy, materials for construction, etc. So, chaebols get involved, harvesting and industrializing these resources, sponsoring private teams of Hunters at higher wages than the government rate, including elite S-ranked teams who enjoy all the celebrity and lifestyle benefits that present-day pro athletes do.
Jinwoo is not an S-rank Hunter. He’s an E-rank, one so pitiful that even though he enlists for dungeon after dungeon to make money to pay for his mom’s medical care, he mostly just creates extra work for the healers on the team. And as you’re born with your rank, identified via government aptitude tests, Jinwoo has little hope of bettering his lot. Still, he soldiers on with an affable goofiness—until the day that he and his team enter an E-rank dungeon, take a wrong turn down a tunnel, and end up in an S-rank nightmare. Nearly the whole party is slaughtered, including Jinwoo. And then unaccountably, he wakes up in a hospital bed with the arm and leg that were torn off mysteriously restored, and a weird app window blinking before his eyes in mid-air. It claims to be from the System, a program to increase his Hunter rank. And as he completes the challenges it presents—magically turning underpasses and abandoned subway tunnels into ad hoc dungeons for him on cue—he starts to get stronger.
As his official government rank is still E, he has to hide his skills, or take on risky jobs where no one’s checking ID. This leads him into dangerous situations with even more dangerous people, but he finds he can’t let go of the exhilaration of getting stronger, the money it’s bringing in for his family, and the need to guard his secret—which some very powerful people are starting to sniff around. Pretty soon, the mom he’s working so hard to save wouldn’t recognize the happy-go-lucky kid she raised to care more about making other people happy than about himself. In his place is a guy who thinks S-rank is the solution to all his problems, and the list of things he wouldn’t do to get there is getting shorter by the minute. I felt pretty motion-sick at the end of Season 1, toggling between rooting for Jinwoo to beat the System and feeling like it might be turning him into one of the monsters he was fighting so hard to defeat. I think the series succeeds in achieving this effect because it’s so relatable. I think all of us, if we’re honest, have been in a situation at one time or another where we wanted to win so badly that we started to lose ourselves. That’s the dark shadow a Tower Quest casts.
The Rookery 