Sentenced to Be a Hero episode 2 gives the Isekai resurrection trope a dark, brutal twist

Studio Kai’s anime original Sentenced to Be a Hero has taken the anime scene by storm with quality animation and compelling plot hooks from its nearly hour-long premiere episode. After laying the groundwork for its world and characters, the series uses episode two to strip away any lingering romance about what it means to be a hero in this world. The state weaponizes the title of “hero” as a death sentence, endlessly reviving fallen heroes as they lose fragments of themselves with every return.

Sentenced to Be a Hero follows two heroes, Xylo and Dotta, as they battle monstrous faeries and demon lords to back up the High Council’s Holy Knights through deadly missions. In this universe, “Heroes” are expendable cannon fodder, resurrected each time they die in battle to then get sent back into deadly missions to die all over again. On the surface, this sounds like a pretty sweet deal, given the functioning immortality, but there’s a huge consequence to constantly dying and being revived. Each time a Hero is revived, they lose a piece of themselves, making the entire affair more terrifying than it would seem. Although we heard about this during the first episode, the second episode shows just what happens to a Hero that’s been revived too often.

Xylo and the rest of his squad, Penal Hero Unit 9004, are sent on a perilous mission to clean out faeries from the Zewan Gon Tunnels. It’s there that we meet other Heroes, such as Norgalle, a large, loud, eccentric man who’s convinced he’s the King of the Federated Kingdom. He ended up in the unit after unleashing a large-scale attack against his “usurpers” and was deemed a terrorist. Standing in stark contrast to him is Tatsuya, a quiet, inscrutable figure whose repeated resurrections have left him emotionally severed from reality and little more than a shell who can’t speak. He’s served in the unit longer than anyone, and as Xylo explains, Tatsuya’s condition is a fate worse than death. When the party finally reaches the tunnels and is under attack, Tatsuya launches a berserker-style attack on the faeries until none remain. It appears the only part of him still left is his honed ability to kill daemons.

Heroes are tools to be used, broken down to little more than weapons, and discarded the moment they can no longer kill. The High Council also uses the system to frame people as criminals, as hinted at with Norgalle and shown with Xylo. Goddesses are weapons forged long ago to fight the demon lords, representing civilization’s last ray of hope in reclaiming the land from Demon Blight. Xylo was previously a Captain of the Federated Kingdoms Fifth Order of the Holy Knights, forced to kill his goddess partner to protect her from being assimilated and used by demons. To bury information on this and his troops’ official orders to intercept the 11th demon lord, the High Council manufactured a narrative of his troops’ disregard for authority and sentenced Xylo to become a Hero. It’s also why, in the present day, when the goddess Teoritta chooses Xylo as her partner, he’s so reluctant to accept her. Teoritta recognizes his honor, despite his reputation as a Hero and goddess killer.

In a climate of endless anime setups like KonoSuba and That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime that see the protagonist dying constantly with little to no repercussions, it’s refreshing to see an anime give death such a huge consequence. Even in shonen anime like One Piece and Dragon Ball, death is either utilized very sparingly or completely robbed of all its urgency when people are only a wish away from returning. Much as Xylo’s story reminds us of Jamie Lannister’s arc in Game of Thrones, and Sentenced to Be a Hero’s death mechanics remind us of characters like Jon Snow and Beric Dondarrion, the latter of which informed audiences that every time someone is revived through the will of the Red God, a piece of them is left behind. Although there is a force that brings people back to life in Sentenced to Be a Hero, the consequences of coming back not as you once were leave room for some interesting storytelling. What happens if Xylo loses his life at some point in the series? How might that complicate his sense of honor? Or his relationship with Teoritta?