The Spring 2024 Light Novel Guide

Classroom for Heroes

What's It About? 

When the hero Blade defeated the demon king, he lost all his powers. For him, this should have been a dream come true—finally, life as a normal student, without fighting or adventuring. That is, until he discovers his school is a school for heroes. He just wants to get by with a solid average, but as a hero with real experience, it turns out his idea of average is a little off...!

Classroom For Heroes has a story by Shin Araki. English translation by Kevin Gifford. Published by Yen On (March 19, 2024).

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

In some ways, Classroom For Heroes feels like a throwback. It's a magic school story featuring three color-coded heroines whose personalities nicely fit the stereotypes established at least as far back as Shakugan no Shana and more familiar from The Asterisk War and Chivalry of a Failed Knight, mostly in the juxtaposition of the quick-tempered red-haired heroine and the emotionless blue-haired heroine. (Yellow, in this case, is the loli bait heroine.) Misunderstandings abound as our hapless hero gets into situations that can be misconstrued, and school shenanigans ensue. On paper, it sounds very pat and not that exciting.

What saves this novel is that it's more about the characters, something the author acknowledges in the afterword. The magic school setting and comfortable tropes are there to form the book's framework; the actual drive is the characters themselves. That works, more or less: Blade, the hero, is a former Hero of the world-saving variety, and he spent his entire childhood from age three training to defeat the Overlord. Now that he's done with that, and his special hero powers are gone, he's ready just to be a normal teenage boy, and first on his list is attending school and making friends. The problem is, he's terrible at being normal (or “normal”) and approaches everything with the enthusiasm and finesse of a golden retriever plunging off a dock to chase a stick. Nothing matters but getting that stick, and he doesn't notice how much he's splashing the people around him while he goes after it. He's a loveable goof, though, so it's hard to be mad at him, even as he's blithely trampling over social norms.

Reading about him is simply fun. Whether he's patently Not Getting It or enthusiastically introducing himself multiple times to the same person, he's endearing, and learning more about his backstory as he comes closer to being real friends with the other characters helps to ground our understanding of him as a person. That's true for Earnest (red) and Sophitia (blue) as well, although they're a little harder to get excited about as characters because they're so pat. Yes, Earnest's burning need to be the absolute best at everything and her blazing mistrust of Blade make sense as we get further into the novel, but that doesn't stop her from being almost identical to every other angry, quick-tempered redhead in magic school light novels, and the same goes for the robotic Sophitia. Cu, the yellow heroine, could easily be a dealbreaker for some readers, not so much because of her personality but because of the situations she gets Blade into.

Still, this is an enjoyable read. Blade's social circle isn't limited to the three central girls, and the writing, while not brilliant, is good enough. It's worth looking past the deliberate similarities to earlier works and giving this a chance.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.