To Be Hero X

Episode 8

One of my favorite things about To Be Hero X is how it layers its storytelling and world-building. On the surface, this is the story of a girl with a natural talent who is exploited by every single adult in her life except one (the reporter who found her after the plane crash). While her talent may be supernatural, children being treated like this is all too real. Parents of child celebrities—sports stars, actors, singers—all too often give in to their greed and use their children to better their own lives (whether the child wants this or not).

Cyan is a girl who ends up at the center of a cult. She's treated not as an actual person but rather as a figurehead. She's not allowed to have her own goals or hobbies. She's expected to play the role she has been given at all times—to sacrifice for the happiness of others without receiving any in return.

Her one friend in the whole world is the person at the other end of that spectrum—a boy whom the adults dislike. They expect nothing of him—well, nothing positive at least. This allows him the freedom to be his own person. He doesn't need to care about the rules of the cult and the religion they're building around Cyan. He sees her as the normal, lonely kid she is.

Part of growing up is testing your boundaries—rebelling as you move through your teenage years. Cyan's rebellions are tame as far as these things go: singing a pop song (after singing the hymn she was supposed to sing) and trying to play hooky for a day with her friend. But her father figure can't allow her even that.

As her believers have increased, so have his own, making him into a superpowered individual. The key to his powers is her—and so he can never let her escape. Heck, he can't even allow her to break the image of her he has built for a single day. And the worst part of all? He still sees himself as the good guy even after enslaving a child. We have a The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas situation here, and no one is walking away.

Then, on the other side of things, we have the world-building. Through our time with Lin Ling and Yang Cheng, we learned about the relationship between superpowers and popularity—i.e., the more people believe in you, the stronger you are. But here's the thing about Cyan. Her story starts with her not only as an orphan, but an orphan who is listed as dead in a plane crash. If anyone had a trust value of zero, it would be a “dead” kid with no family, living under a fake name.

Despite this, Cyan has a bona fide superpower. Her luck isn't random, it's perfect. She never misses. And I'm not talking about picking the card pack with a secret rare in it or which man is the best to marry. When she's dying of loneliness, she stumbles upon the one room where the perfect friend awaits. And when she needs to prove to herself that she can rebel, she randomly throws a marble at the perfect spot to do so. And all of this is unrelated to how many people believe in her at any given moment.

This means there are other kinds of superpowers in this world—natural ones instead of those caused by the collective consciousness (i.e., trust and fear). More than that, these natural powers can override the trust-created ones. Even as a preteen, over 10,000 people believe in Cyan—all believe her to be the perfect, masked, saint-like figure that will give them happiness. Yet, she suffers none of the side effects that Nice, Firm Man, or E-Soul do. She can remove her mask, sing songs far different from her normal ones, and generally act counter to her established “hero identity”. Not once do we see the kind of mystical force acting upon her like it did when Lin Ling tried to go directly against the Nice personality.

With her built-in luck powers, Cyan has something no other hero seems to have, other than Lin Ling: free will. And therein lies the tragedy. It is not the powers that control Cyan but rather the adults in her life who choose to exploit her for their own benefit and the nebulous “greater good”. While her first escape attempt may not have been successful, at least we get the sense from both Lin Ling and Yang Cheng's stories that she manages to break free and live on her terms.

Rating:

Random Thoughts:

• So we're taking the 2D animation route for Cyan's story… I wonder if this is a practical choice or an artistic one.

• The Calamity's real name is “Luo.” While I don't remember it being said out loud, it is shown in Chinese on his orphanage admissions paperwork.

• I wonder what exactly all the superheroes were doing that no one saved the plane. Was it a rivalry thing? Perhaps they simply had their own PR stuff to do and assumed someone else would take the job—we've seen how they're treated more like celebrities than heroes, much of the time, after all?

• The reporter's daughter is Queen—the number two hero in Lin Ling's time—whom he's molded into becoming the perfect, incorruptible, uncompromising, ideal superhero. My guess is that she has been carefully “constructed” to illicit both trust and fear, allowing her to use both sources of superpowers. Yeah... I don't expect this to turn out well either.

To Be Hero X is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.