Solo Leveling
I actually love this story a lot. But I noticed a few flaws here & there that might bother new readers. First of all, Jinwoo is wayyyyyyy too overpowered in strength and intelligence. This has a repetitive story line until up to like 100 chapters and Jinwoo is just fighting enemies and beating the shit out of them throughout those chapters. Rinse and repeat. Normally, I would find this boring asf. However, I forgave it because the fighting scenes were too damn good. And also about the ‘system’. There were a few holes and questions that were left unanswered. I thought that once Jinwoo faced ‘the creator’ of the system, then he would ask how the system was created and all about those deities. But nope, Jinwoo beat the shit out of the creator and then the creator died and then the system got deleted and I am left confused. The creator only vaguely answered some things and then died. Maybe I just have a tiny brain but I still don’t get it. Anyway, after Jinwoo regressed back into time and saved the whole world, he met with that blonde girl again (forgot her name). I’m very excited to see their side stories. I love this.
Goodbye Eri
Explanation + Summary for those who are confused: “Goodbye, Eri” follows the story of Yuta, a young boy who captures the last days of his mother with his phone. Yuta does this on request from his mother, who wishes to stay alive even after dying. As requested, Yuta spends several days witnessing his mother’s life with a camera. However, he couldn’t bring himself to record her final moments. So, instead of getting inside the hospital with his father, Yuta runs away from the hospital. Following those events, nothing stays normal for Yuta. After spending so much time behind the camera, Yuta starts looking at his own life as an outsider, and Fujimoto very beautifully tells the story from Yuta’s camera perspective through his art. It’s one of those rare stories that leaves the ending on readers’ perspective. The ending leaves you thinking if what happened with Yuta was real or it was just something that Yuta imagined for his movie. Even after his mother’s death, Yuta doesn’t give up on all the recorded footage. He spends several hours editing all the stuff he has recorded and makes a movie out of it. But surprisingly, Yuta adds a bit of fantasy at the movie’s ending by showing the exploding hospital as he runs away from the building. Following the humiliation after his movie’s failure, Yuta decides to end his life by jumping off the Hospital’s roof. However, before Yuta could end his life, he meets Eri, the only person in the school who liked Yuta’s movie. Eri thinks that Yuta’s movie was amazing, but at the same time, it lacked something. So, Eri decides to guide Yuta on making a better movie to prove his worth to everyone. However, before asking him to write a plot, Eri shows Yuta several good movies, so he could find the required knowledge to make his own movie. After several attempts, Yuta decides to continue the story that started it all. He writes a plot where a boy was attempting suicide after everyone hated his movie. However, he finds a girl on rooftop who is a vampire. This vampire is dying of a mysterious disease, so she asks this boy to shoot the rest of her days with a camera. So, basically, Yuta decides to make a movie about everything that has happened in his life, but with a touch of fantasy. It turns out that Eri was really dying of a disease, and she loved Yuta’s mother’s idea of getting captured on the camera before dying. Eri thinks that Yuta captured her mother beautifully, and Eri wanted to experience the same thing. So, by filming Eri in her final moments, Yuta finds perfect ending for his movie, “Having filmed a death, the thing he couldn’t do for his mother, the protagonist regains his will to live and make movies, the End.” Yuta continued his life after Eri’s death and becomes a family man, but he never stopped editing Eri’s 2,728 hours of footage. Years later, Yuta loses his wife and daughter in an accident. He couldn’t bear the burden of losing anyone else, so he decides to end his life at the place where he and Eri watched the movies. Surprisingly, Yuta finds Eri in that same spot, who tells Yuta that she is, in fact, a vampire. The Eri Yuta knew really died, but she came back to life after three days. However, this new person doesn’t remember previous Eri’s life. Apparently, the previous Eri had her death filmed so the new Eri could watch Yuta as many times she wants. So, no matter how many times Eri dies and forgets her life, she’ll always remember Yuta through the movie. This whole plan would save her from falling into despair. Yuta leaves the room, and says his goodbye to Eri. At this point, Yuta realizes why he wasn’t satisfied with Eri’s movie ending, “because it was missing a pinch of fantasy.” Finally, we see Yuta getting out of the building just when it explodes in the background. Explanation: ‘Goodbye, Eri’ very smartly plays with your mind, forcing you to wonder what’s real or not. Apparently, Yuta was inclined towards fantasy to deal with his childhood trauma. Yuta’s mother was abusive towards him and his father. But even after all that, he showed his mother beautifully in the movie. Yuta ended the movie with a touch of fantasy to deal with his mother’s death his own way. He tried to remember her through the lens, which presented her as a good mother. Now, on one side, there’s a possibility that Eri was indeed alive, and Yuta did in fact say goodbye to her. But personally, I think that Eri wasn’t a vampire in reality, and she really died in the hospital all those years ago. Everything about Eri being alive was part of Yuta’s perfect plot for his movie. Yuta ended his first movie with hospital’s explosion, and said goodbye to his mother like he wanted to. However, he didn’t find closure with Eri’s death, the woman he loved. So, he decides to add the “Vampire” part to make it easy for him to find closure. Fujimoto Tatsuki's work is excellent. It leaves you with a multitude of interpretations, almost cryptic-like. It leaves many unanswered questions for the readers to decode. Weird how a coming-of-age story about a boy would captivate me like this. I am not a picky reader, but stories that force me to think for this long deserve five stars. Support the author on official platforms. Happy reading, everyone.
Assassination Classroom