The Fall 2024 Light Novel Guide

Hero Syndrome

What's It About? 

Infected by a mysterious being called the Goddess and transformed into unthinking creatures of havoc and slaughter, abominations known as “heroes” wage an endless war of blind justice on monsters… never realizing that these monsters are actually fellow humans. Only Charon, an elite unit led by a young man named Azuma, stands a chance against these terrifying heroes. So what might happen when Kaguya, a headstrong young scientist, joins Charon's ranks and wants to save the heroes rather than defeat them…?

Hero Syndrome is written by Rei Ayatsuki. English translation by James Balzer. Published by Yen On (September 17, 2024.)

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

We all know the story by now: someone desperately unhappy in the real world is summoned by a goddess to a different one and granted the powers of a hero. It's nearly a joke at this point, as we've seen in series like No Longer Allowed In Another World and Konosuba. Author Rei Ayatsuki is aware of that, but their take on the self-aware light novel is much darker – in Hero Syndrome's world, “heroes” are people who have been transformed in their dying moments into hideous monsters by a goddess with highly suspicious motivations. It's even more insidious than that, which makes this book work. Everyone turned into a hero is shown a vision of their perfect world, with the goddess taking on whatever appearance is necessary for their buy-in. As they believe that they're fighting monsters or otherwise saving the world, what they're doing is killing humans in the real one. As a further caveat, only children (people under the age of twenty) can see heroes. That means that the ones who have to fight them are children.

It's all very self-aware and deliberately dark which works well. Ayatsuki doesn't lose sight of the fact that while Kaguya and Azuma are a scientist and a soldier respectively, they're also both teenagers being forced into a world that only they can function in but that is traumatic by its very nature. Both Kaguya and Azuma belong to the hero fighting organization as children orphaned by heroes, with Yuuri being one of the few survivors of a devastating hero attack that leveled an entire ward of Tokyo. Azuma is the leader of Charon, a ward made up of those survivors, while Kaguya is a researcher who is devoted to reversing the transformation of human to hero, something Azuma emphatically doesn't believe is possible…until he sees that, unlike everyone else, Kaguya can speak with the heroes.

Ayatsuki is playing with old and new tropes, with Kaguya's name standing as a symbol of how she straddles two worlds, like the princess from the classic folktale Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. Similarly, the unit name Charon is symbolic of what the group becomes – the link between the living and the dead, since humans only transform into heroes at the moment of death. The biggest question is who the goddess doing the transforming is and what she wants, although it must be said that even without that the idea of someone preying on dying children is enough to carry the plot. While I'd hesitate to call this unabashedly good, it is very readable and endlessly intriguing, to the point when it's easy to overlook some of the repetition and other light novel issues. Do I love that the artist decided that female combat uniforms should have miniskirts? Not even a little, but something about this book makes it the kind of story I want to read more of.