To Be Hero X

Episode 10

Going by the story alone, I'd say Cyan's arc of To Be Hero X has been the weakest of the show so far. There are no real twists or turns; it's rather straightforward and predictable. But that doesn't mean it doesn't do great things.

The characters are all complex and nuanced. Pretty much from start to finish, we have nothing but people who believe they're doing the right thing, even if they have to do some less-than-noble things to get there. This is true even for the reporter who found Cyan and the head of Cyan's hero agency. But, of course, the prime example of this is The Orphanage Director. He believes that exploiting Cyan is okay because it is for the greater good.

Yet, once Cyan escapes him, he's left with nothing but insecurities about being a failed hero and failed cult leader. All this emotional pain makes him try to find someone to blame. This is sadly a part of human nature. After all, it's incredibly hard to look at your life and realize you're the problem.

Worse still, this mindset of blame hunting is infectious—literally in the case of a world where fears compound and create super powers. In this case, once the Fear takes control, none of them are really in their right minds anymore—they are zombies who place everything wrong in their lives upon Cyan's shoulders. They live solely to hate her. If all this isn't an allegory for being human in the modern era, I don't know what is.

The other fantastic aspect of this arc has been the world-building, especially as it relates to superpowers. Time and again, we've seen that Cyan's luck powers are not based on the beliefs of others—they work even with zero believers. To prove this point once again, we even get to see her actual belief-based powers in action this week—namely, her super strength, agility, and various gadgets. Luck has nothing to do with them.

If anything, the big mystery of this arc has been the origin of Cyan's luck powers and what they are. This week, we finally get the answer. Rather than stemming from Trust or Fear, Cyan's luck comes from a different source entirely: the power of hope. A plane full of people who knew they were going to die all hoped with their entire heart and soul that the one innocent child on board would be lucky enough to live. And so Cyan became that. She was permanently altered to embody the hopes of all those people and thus became the luckiest person alive.

And when you think about it in the context of the series, this makes perfect sense. While it's been both implied and outright stated that Fear is treated as the inverse of Trust, this simply isn't true. Belief is a certainty about the state of the world, while fear is a nebulous worry for the future. It is hope, the want for something good to happen in the future, that is the true inverse of fear.

We can see this in the scene where she is riding on top of the box truck. She plays a chord on her guitar, which both “luckily” moves the oncoming cars into a formation she can through and also dispels the Fear infecting the drivers at the same time. Heck, in the climax, her throwing the glass ball and hitting the fire alarm “luckily” activates the flight recording, which cleanses Luo of his Fear.

While Trust can beat fear, as we have seen through Lin Ling, it is Hope that is its true weakness. While Cyan may not want to be a superhero, her unique nature makes her perhaps the greatest weapon against any Fear-based super villains—though, it's likely that won't mean much in the tournament to decide the next top hero.

Rating:

Random Thoughts:

• Following what we know about her powers, I don't see Cyan winning the tournament. Being the top hero wouldn't be “lucky” for her. It doesn't seem like she wants that responsibility, nor is she well-suited for it.

• This episode looks to be largely set in the year 37, as X has just defeated Queen in that year's tournament and is on his way to becoming the new top hero.

• When Cyan dispels the fear on the oncoming drivers and forces them to part before her, we get a graphical glitch like when X uses his reality-altering powers. I wonder if this is meant to imply that, like Cyan, X's powers are also Hope-based instead of Trust-based. It would also explain how he was able to beat Queen despite being a “nobody” with far less Trust than her.

• The last shot in this episode was Shang Chao's father going into Yang Cheng's abandoned superhero hideout… Perhaps he's going to help make a new hero in his son's memory.

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