Climbing the Tower: Tower of God: Season 1, Episode 2
Sometimes, the chin just wins.
Originally published in “The Webcomics Weekly #102: We Have Boyfriends (9/1/2020 Edition)” at Multiversity Comics. It's been lightly edited to keep the article current and increase clarity.
Tower of God
Tower of God: Season 1, ep. 6 -11;
Episode 2 - “3/400 (three four-hundredths)”
Updates: Mondays
By SIU
What do you desire? Money and wealth? Honor and pride? Authority and power? Revenge? Or something that transcends them all? Whatever you desire—it can be yours if you climb the tower.
Now, maybe this will be upended in the coming weeks but it looks like Tower of God has been adapting ~5 to 5 ½ chapters of the webtoon at a time. “3/400 (three four-hundredths)” starts midway through chapter 6 and ends midway through chapter 11, which considering all that happens is surprising. Thus far, both the anime and the webtoon have been moving through these tests at a fairly brisk clip, though it feels faster in the anime.
The subjective experience of time in media is fascinating to me because reading six chapters of “Tower of God” both felt exceptionally long and yet was objectively shorter than watching “3/400:” 10 minutes of reading to the show's 24 minutes. The act of scrolling, the mental breaks between chapters, a heartier amount of dialog and narration, it all adds to the simulation of time passing in the world of the comic, in this case helping it feel longer without feeling like it’s dragged out.
The reverse is true of the anime. The choices made in shot composition, in extending action scenes and removing dialog, helps to make the events feel shorter but more concentrated. To wit: Two tests are accomplished over the course of 22 minutes and a third is introduced; the make-up of the tower is explained; the world’s magic system is demonstrated; at least 10 new characters make their debut; and climbing the tower is demystified a little with the introduction of the idea of a Ranker being clarified as someone who has climbed the tower, meaning not only is it attainable but it has been done before. These details are also explained in the comic, though far less well and in a more blunt, expository manner.
I appreciate Tower of God's approach to doling out information, with the anime preferring to let us infer significantly more from the character’s actions and reactions than their words. This is very noticeable in chapters 6 and 7. “Tower of God” doesn’t trust its audience, perhaps because the author did not trust their own art and because they wanted to get as much world building done as quickly as possible. In fact, this whole first season feels like the prologue to the main narrative, the Saiyan Saga to the Vegeta arc, the Preacher Season 1 to the comic’s first issue, where SIU is trying to figure everything out to set up the long game without having the benefit the anime has of knowing the long game.
The anime is also far less funny, which is a boon and a detriment. Lero Ro is more serious and imposing, Khun is aloof and mysterious with a wry sense of humor, while Anaak and Hatz are stoic and quiet. In “Tower of God,” Khun is a trickster who literally winks at the camera, Lero Ro goofily plays around with the Regulars before his test, while Anaak & Hatz are quippier and their interactions with Ship Leesoo have more back and forth barbs. For the comic, these are fine, as it fits the shonen battle genre, allowing the characters to be expressed through words rather than actions. It’s also clear SIU isn’t the best writer and so the general comedic nature of the characters is a shortcut to give them distinct personalities while keeping them enjoyable for the audience.
It doesn’t really work for me, so the anime made the right choice excising it. However, that makes the moments of unbridled silliness jarring and incongruent.
Rak and Ship Leesoo get the worst of it. Ship is frustrating in ways he isn’t in the comic, making me think he’s a fan favorite that got a bump for the anime, taking up way too much screen time with goofs that land flat and a running gag of “being ignored” that’s funny once. For Rak, the oversimplification trick on his face is funny sometimes but other times simply doesn’t work. The tonal whiplash isn’t so bad in the comic, thanks in part to a blurrier line between the regular style and the “gag style,” but the levity is important and it’s the quieter moments of humor that work as the bridge between.
There are also two big narrative changes that stick out to me, both of which were good changes. The first is during the second test when Rak, Khun and Bam first meet. Everything about this chapter is changed around, from the order of events, to the motivations, to who instigates each battle, to even the detail of how Khun knows the Black March is a weapon of Jahad. Favoring more action and less overt exposition, Tower of God clarifies and refines the characters as well as their actions while leaving room for mystery.
Little details help with this, like the pocket counting down the number of people or the amount of time remaining rather than showing elapsed time, or the test administrator box being more succinct and clear in its instructions. This preserves the tension of the scene, one which was heightened already by keeping Rak, Khun and Bam in conflict right up until the buzzer rather than them hiding as in Chapter 8.
There are too many moments of change in the second test to go into but the other one I wanted to highlight, right after the melee is over in the middle of Chapter 8, are the reactions of Bam & Khun and Ship to the follow-up parameters of the second test. In the comic, they’re shocked they have to team up, respectively, with Rak or Anaak & Hatz, which is a funny moment.
In Tower of God, the surprise is excised, thus changing the character's motivations and actions in the second test. Ship is all in on teaming up, the comedy coming from being shut down and ignored, which works rather well and is cleaner than the comic's version. Rak doesn’t want to team up but Khun and Bam have already had their bonding moment, allowing them to work better as a team even if they don’t quite realize it yet. It’s clean, effective and a great example of the adaptation’s strengths.
This refinement extends to the secondary characters as well, which is the other major narrative change: a whole bunch of secondary characters are combined or removed from Tower of God. This isn’t surprising as it’s an old film adaptation trick but what works about it here is why they did it. The gun guy is already known to us as an asshole. Why introduce a new character to antagonize Lero Ro when an already introduced bit character can be used more effectively. The same is true of the fighting characters who have their lines cut. The scene is shortened thanks to one character’s lines being given to Lero Ro - which accomplishes the job of showing how powerful Lero Ro is, in that the character is unequivocally silenced, and of keeping the scene tight and the test focused.
I don’t know if this will keep being the case but Tower of God is proving to be a very effective adaptation, surpassing the original. Will it fall apart? Will the translation feel less stilted in the webtoon? I dunno but I’m sure we’ll find out.
See you in two weeks for “The Correct Door.”
