Chapter 412: Airing Of [Solo Leveling]
....
It was late 2016, and by any reasonable measure of productivity in the entertainment industry, Regal Seraphsail was having a decent release this year.
Two film releases.
One directed by him [I Want to Eat Your Pancreas], which had done what it did to audiences and was still doing it, the cultural conversation around it showing no signs of the usual post-release attenuation.
[The Incredible Hulk] film, which he had produced and written but not directed, had performed excellently, carrying forward the success of the MDCU universe, while also generating more interest around the future projects.
[John Wick] was scheduled for later in the start of next year.
[The Dark Knight] was also being held for the following year, which given the scope of what it was carrying felt less like patience and more like engineering.
For any other filmmaker this would represent the most productive period of a career.
But for Regal it represented a year in which two of his four active projects happened to have release dates.
The gaps between the films had not been empty.
[Friends] was still running as the number one show on television, its cultural saturation now so complete that it had become part of the ambient furniture of the era.
[Mr. Bean] had wrapped its run and had been absorbed into the permanent catalogue of things that would be watched and rewatched for decades.
Both had filled the spaces in the release calendar that films left open, which meant there had been no particular moment in 2016 when Regal’s name had been absent from the conversation.
But something entirely new was coming.
....
[Solo Leveling] was the beginning of everything, when it comes to the massive boom the anime industry will gain in the future.
And it can’t be any more special for Regal, people close to him, and his fans.
It was the first piece of creative work Regal had made public in this world, the web novel had begun serialisation before [Harry Potter] existed in print.
The story of Sung Jinwoo.
The weakest hunter in a world where gates to monster-filled dungeons had opened across the earth, who survived an encounter that should have killed him and emerged changed in ways he couldn’t yet understand, had been the foundation on which everything else was built.
The web novel had run to two hundred and seventy Chapters across fourteen volumes; and the coloured comic adaptation had extended to two hundred Chapters.
Together they had built an audience that was, by late 2016, substantial.
Now they are deeply invested in ways that anime adaptations tend to produce in their most dedicated readers, the particular intensity of people who have been living inside a story for years and are now watching it become something with sound and movement and colour.
So now within three more days the first season of [Solo Leveling] will be aired with a content of 14 episodes.
It has been produced under multiple production houses, [LIE Studio], and [Crunchyroll] being the major.
Each episode is going to adapt approximately three to four Chapters of the comic per episode, with some variation depending on the density and pacing of specific arcs, had been arrived at after significant discussion about what the material required versus what a first season needed to accomplish.
The season covered seven arcs, from the D-Rank Dungeon through to the Job Change, the section of the story where the ground shifted under Jinwoo’s feet for the first time in a way that readers remembered specifically and had been waiting to see rendered in motion.
The release format was decided to be a weekly.
One episode per week, which in 2016 was a format that Western streaming audiences were still adjusting to, the binge model had become the expected default, and weekly releases read to some as a withholding of what should be immediately available.
Regal had been direct about the reasoning: the format was going to be standard across his animated releases going forward and the sooner the audience relationship with it was established the better.
Weekly releases built the kind of sustained conversation that binge releases compressed into a weekend and then exhausted.
The show would be discussed in real time, episode by episode, which was a different kind of cultural presence than the all-at-once model produced.
....
The financial logic of the production was worth understanding clearly, because it was different from what it looked like on the surface.
The budget for [Solo Leveling] first season was fifteen point two million dollars. [Death Note] already in production, nearly complete and the next thing in the pipeline, was thirty-one point six million.
Ignoring the T.V airing in different media channels across the globe, both will be available to be streamed on Crunchyroll and Netflix respectively.
And the honest answer to the question of whether either production would recoup its budget directly from the anime itself was: probably not, or not quickly, and that was not the failure condition it might appear to be.
This was how the economics of animation had always worked, though the specifics had shifted with the streaming era.
The traditional model, in which anime productions were partially subsidised by manga publishers who understood that an adaptation multiplied print sales in ways that no marketing budget could match, was still operative.
But Regal’s situation was different from the traditional one in that both [Solo Leveling] and [Death Note] were complete.
The source material wasn’t ongoing, so there was no ongoing serialisation to boost.
The calculation was longer term than that.
The shows existed to build the audiences that would follow everything after them.
A viewer who discovered [Solo Leveling] through the anime and found themselves invested enough to seek out the web novel and the comic was a viewer whose relationship with the IP deepened in ways that paid dividends across every future project associated with Regal’s catalogue.
The anime was the introduction, and the merchandise; which for a property with [Solo Leveling] visual language was going to be significant, was a revenue stream that extended well beyond the show’s run.
And the halo effect on Crunchyroll’s subscriber numbers, on Netflix’s engagement metrics, on the general cultural footprint of both platforms, was the kind of return that didn’t appear on a production budget sheet but was very visible on a quarterly earnings call.
The fifteen and thirty-one million were not expenses so much as infrastructure investments.
The shows that came after, including the one that only Regal, Kishimoto, and a small number of people who had been specifically trusted with the information were aware of, would be the ones that operated at scale.
[Naruto] was not announced.
But it was the reason the infrastructure mattered, which was being built now.
....
The people who had the most invested in the reception of the first [Solo Leveling] episode were not all in the same room or even the same country, but the weight of their attention was distributed across the same point.
Kun Gao, CEO of Crunchyroll, had the specific anxiety of someone whose platform was carrying the first major release of a production strategy that hadn’t been tested yet at this scale.
The weekly format, the Western audience, the adaptation of material that had its most dedicated audience in Asia, there were enough variables in the combination to produce a person who checked release metrics more than was probably healthy.
Sammy Park at Netflix was watching the [Death Note] indicators with the awareness that [Solo Leveling] performance was going to inform every decision made about the show currently sitting in post-production.
The two projects were linked in the industry’s perception of what Regal’s animation strategy was, which meant the first one’s reception would colour the context around the second one before it had a chance to make its own case.
Kishimoto, who was not supposed to be thinking about any of this yet because the Naruto adaptation was not supposed to be a thing that was actively on his mind, was nonetheless thinking about it.
Because the performance of the first anime from Regal’s catalogue was the clearest available signal about the environment into which his own work would eventually arrive.
Kento Nanami; Regal’s first Japanese friend.
The person from whom this particular Chapter of his story had originated, who had agreed to voice Jinwoo in the Japanese original. And despite not having any part in investments, he is really hopeful of the show doing well.
And the four hundred and thirteen people who had worked in the production, from animators to sound designers, voice cast across multiple language dubs, writers who had worked on the episode scripts, and the production staff who had managed the logistics of twelve episodes across two studios, were all, in their various ways and their various time zones, at the specific anticipation that follows finishing a large piece of work and waiting for the world to receive it.
Regal was confident and this was not a performance.
He had seen this story go from a first draft web novel Chapter to a two-hundred-Chapter comic to twelve animated episodes with sound and motion and a full orchestral score.
And somewhere in that journey the thing had stopped being his in the way it had been his at the beginning and had become something that belonged to everyone who had been inside it.
That was what success looked like, when it arrived.
He was confident it was about to arrive.
....
The release went up at midnight Japan Standard Time, which was the deliberate choice of a platform that understood where its most invested audience lived and wanted them to have it first.
By the time Western audiences woke up and opened Crunchyroll, the Japanese conversation had already been running for several hours.
Not loudly, the first wave of reaction from the dedicated reader community had the specific quality of people receiving something they had anticipated for a long time and finding themselves unexpectedly without adequate language for it.
Screenshots, short sentences and a lot of people simply posting the timestamp of a specific moment with no further comment, which was its own form of review.
....
The episode opened on water...
Different from what Comic or webnovel readers expected it to be.
A navy officer standing at the rail of a warship, watching Jeju Island in the distance. He asked his captain why they weren’t engaging.
The captain didn’t look at him.
"Let the hunters handle it."
....
Low-rank hunters were not just losing ground but dying, which looked different, the ants moving through them with the specific efficiency of something that had done this before and hadn’t yet been asked to try harder.
Giant, red, and a hunter went down to the left.
Another on the right, the ones still standing were doing everything they had and what they had was being used up faster than it was doing anything useful.
Then the S-ranks arrived and the ants started dying instead.
Three of them, the gap between what the low-rank hunters had been doing and what these three were doing was not a gap you could measure in numbers, it was the difference between two completely different categories of thing wearing the same name.
The healing light reached a hunter bleeding out on the ground before anyone else had moved, and the other two were already inside the ants, unhurried, the way you are unhurried when nothing in the room poses a serious question.
Baek Yoonho, a white ant the size of a truck, challenged him, he put it down, but more came and he put those down too.
The episode held on the face of a surviving low-rank hunter watching this happen.
Just for a second, long enough to understand what the face was doing.
Then it cut.
Ten years ago, gates appeared.
....
The world established itself quickly.
Gates without warning, magic beasts pouring through, immune to conventional weapons.
A portion of humanity awakening with abilities capable of fighting them.
These people became hunters.
Ranked E through S, the power fixed permanently at whatever level the awakening gave them; it never grew.
The ceiling was the floor, it has always been what you woke up as was what you were.
For now it is a construction site, two hunters waiting for a raid to assemble.
Kim noticed Jinwoo arriving and explained him to his companion in one sentence, the way you explain something that is both true and unkind and has been true long enough that the unkindness has worn off.
"If he shows up, it’s an easy one."
....
.
[To be continued...]
●──────●◎●──────●
Author Note:
Visit Patreon to instantly access +1 Chapter for free, available for Free Members as well.
For additional content please do support me and gain access to +15 more Chapters.
--> [email protected]/OrgoWriters
