Solo Leveling Season 2 Shows a Chilling First Glimpse of the Jeju Island Arc’s Main Antagonist

The following contains spoilers for Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow- Episode 10, “We Need a Hero”, available on Crunchyroll.

To say the Jeju Island Raid Arc is the most anticipated part of the Solo Leveling story would be an understatement. The anime rearranges its sequence of events to open the story with the third Jeju Island Raid operation, a horrific failure that left surviving S-Rank Hunters traumatized, and the island condemned by the Korean government. In Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow- episode 10, the fourth Jeju Island Raid operation commences, and while things appear to be going according to plan, the Hunters Guild advance team sent in to take out the Ant Queen discovers the husk of a gigantic egg deep within the nest, evidence of a unique threat.

The introduction of the Ant King, the secret boss of Jeju Island, is one of the best executed character introductions in the series, and was especially brilliant for capturing a deep sense of terror that bursts forth from within when one locks eyes with him. At this point, it’s not even a spoiler to say, with the utmost certainty, that many Hunters are going to die.

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The Queen’s Gambit

One Giant Leap For Ant Kind

Deep within the giant ant colony on Jeju Island, the Ant Queen sits in her nest, worrying about the future. They are running out of things to eat on the island, which is why the Queen has tried to commit more energy and resources to laying a generation of ants that will be able to find a way off the island, but mastery over flight takes a long time. She makes a very important decision: quality over quantity, which, those with even a rudimentary understanding of biology and evolutionary trade-offs will understand, is not a strategy that is common to insects. A longer gestational period, more often than not, is a marker of complexity and the kind of post-natal strategy employed by the species. Take humans, for instance; the usual gestational period, that is, the period it takes to go from conception to birth, is around 36 weeks. In that time, a human body will completely develop, but do the majority of its growing and development of basic functions outside the gestational period. This is usually attributed to the complexity of the human brain, which is also the reason for the complete vulnerability of babies, who effectively get hardware first and download the device drivers later.

In exchange for bigger brains capable of a multitude of functions, we lose the ability to perform basic functions ourselves in infancy, while many other species will have shorter gestational periods, and have offspring that are instinctively capable of functions like walking to better facilitate the survival of the species living in much more chaotic conditions than humans generally would. There’s also the nature of gestation, with species falling into three categories:

• Viviparous (juvenile develops inside parent, live birth),
• Oviparous (juvenile hatches from egg),
• Ovoviviparous (juvenile hatches from egg inside parent, live birth)

The point of this tangent is to say that the Queen did something rather unnatural by changing her gestational strategy. In laying one massive egg instead of countless regular ones, she bets the entire species’ survival on a single individual, rather than using the “spray and pray” method that bugs, fish and many other animal clades employ to mitigate the rampant loss of life incurred at the early stages. As we know, eggs contain nutrients for the growing embryo, and obviously, the bigger the egg, the bigger the animal, but nutrient density also then determines how much development is possible therein.

The Birth of a Tyrant

“The Light that Illuminates All”

In real life, ant colonies have various types of ant with different functions, but Jeju has had multiple ant generations, with the Queen being the last of the 1st gen Ants. The Ant King is of a new generation, and thus bears the various aspects of his predecessors, like the red hue of his freshly hatched exoskeleton. Most will be familiar with the concept of named or “Champion” monsters in RPGs, but biologically, the Ant King is a forced evolution spurred on by the introduction of humans to the ant diet. In Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow- episode 10, the Ant Queen watches as her greatest creation hatches; a large, humanoid red ant whose freshly exposed body quickly becomes sleeker and his exoskeleton sets in, changing his vibrant red hue to an ominous black. He unleashes a terrifying bellow and the Ant Queen feels a sense of satisfaction at seeing the hope of her species realized. The hatching scene was decently animated, and a great first look at the arc’s antagonist, but solidifies it as a great antagonist debut is how they use the depiction of his bloodlust shortly after decapitating one of the Japanese S-Rank Hunters, with his red eyes being the last thing we see before the end credits. Cliffhangers are seen as cheap ways to keep viewers invested, but in this case, this was nicely done, with it abundantly clear that the Ant King can one-shot S-Rankers.

At this point, the series is nodding directly at the Hunter x Hunter inspiration, with the Chimera Ant Queen in Yoshihiro Togashi’s legendary manga having done the same mathematics to lay more powerful offspring that are far more intelligent than the original ants due to the introduction of humans to their diet. In both cases, the Ant King is a symbol of hope for ant-kind, and the Queen’s proudest moment, and as we’ll likely see in Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow- episode 11, just like Hunter x Hunter’s Meruem, the Ant King will be away from the nest when the Queen is killed. In the manhwa, when the Korean strike team finds the Ant King’s egg, Byung-Gu says “What in the world hatched out of that thing? A Royal Guard?” Finally, and perhaps the most subtle, yet direct reference to Hunter x Hunter is the burst of light that emanated from the Ant King when he roared shortly after hatching. As some fans will know, like the aforementioned “Champion” monsters, his counterpart in Hunter x Hunter was named “Meruem” by the Chimera Ant Queen, a name meaning “the light that illuminates all” in reference to her pride in her son, whom she believed would “stand at the pinnacle of all species”.

Maybe that’s why he looked like Cell.

Solo Leveling

Release Date

January 7, 2024

Directors

Shunsuke Nakashige

• 

  Taito Ban

  Shun Mizushino (voice)

• 

  Genta Nakamura

  Kenta Morobishi (voice)