This review will contain spoilers for the Astrea Record novels, novel 18 of Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, and season five of the DanMachi anime.
I’m not sure that Fujino Ōmori ever intended for Lyu Leon’s background to be as significant as it is. In the early novels of the larger DanMachi series, the tragic tale of Astrea Familia’s fate feels like a pretty standard depressing backstory, an excuse for Lyu to be the unemotive elf girl in Bell’s potential harem. As the series has gone on and expanded, Astrea Familia has become integral to both the overarching plot and to Lyu as a developing character. We’ve seen her suffer their loss in both the main series and in the three-volume Astrea Record spinoff novel series. We saw her leave Orario and return with Astrea in volume 18 of the main series. But we didn’t know what happened in the interim. This book is here to change that and to fill in the gaps left by the other novels.
Taking place in the middle of volume 18 of Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? and the second half of the anime’s fifth season, this book follows Lyu to Zolingam, the far-away city Astrea retreated to after the deaths of Alize and the others. Lyu has more or less known where she was, or at least knew that Hermes knew, because he’s been conveying her letters to her goddess, but until Syr’s true identity was revealed, she wasn’t able to muster up the wherewithal to see her. Lyu lived as if she were frozen in time, still bearing the burden of her self-imposed guilt, failing to understand that that’s not what Alize and the others wanted for her, or at least unable to move past it despite knowing. But when Freya bewitched Orario and declared a war game for love of Bell, something changed within Lyu. Omori never really overtly states what that is, but it seems logical that it was the dual loss of Syr and the fear of losing Bell that forced her heart to start metaphorically beating again. The Lyu we’d been seeing was one still smarting from losing Adi seven years ago and her star sisters five years ago; although she started to wake up a little in the dungeon with Bell, this is the moment that truly jolts her. Lyu knows what it feels like to lose everyone you love. She understands to a degree what Syr is thinking. But she’ll also be damned if she lets Syr make the same mistake of wallowing in her pain like she did or if she lets Syr and Bell go without a fight.
Of course, it’s not that easy. Lyu is afraid to return home to her goddess for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that she’s worried that Astrea won’t forgive her for sending her away. If we look at the Greek mythology associated with the goddess, that makes sense; Astrea was said to be one of, if not the, last gods to live in the mortal realm with humans before finding them too terrible to bear any longer. Lyu fears that her actions have done just that, and they’re not assuaged by discovering that Astrea has begun a new familia in Zolingam. If the goddess has Cecille, Iseline, Schau, and Uranda, why does she need Lyu anymore?
The greatest strength of this novel is in seeing Lyu be vulnerable. She’s held herself so tightly for so long that it’s a relief to see her let it all go, and this is truly the first time I’ve felt like Omori has successfully shown the adventurers as children to the gods’ parent. Astrea is fully Lyu’s mother in this book, gently guiding and soothing Lyu while also carefully disciplining her and the other girls, and that’s precisely what Lyu needed. Astrea sees Lyu as her daughter, and she wants what’s best for her. In Astrea’s home, Lyu is a child struggling to grow up. While a lot of the main section of the book (it’s divided into three: “The Locus of the Stars,” “Girl in Twilight,” and “A Simple Moment From Five Years Ago”) is spent on Lyu learning to control her new level 5 and then level 6 body, the meat of the plot is really about Astrea helping Lyu to move forward emotionally.
Readers of novel 18 and viewers of the anime’s fifth season will remember Lyu’s new power, Astrea Record, and how it calls upon her fallen sisters. That’s powerful enough in itself, but Astrea helps Lyu to understand that her sisters have always been with her. Lyu can access this power once she understands that. It’s not her acceptance of their deaths, but acknowledgement of their continued presence in her heart, that creates it. Lyu wasn’t ready to inherit their justice before. She is now.
As you may have guessed, Familia Chronicle: Episode Lyu’s second volume can’t be read as a standalone. While you arguably could read it without Astrea Record or the first Episode Lyu novel, you need to have either read volume 18 of the main series or be current on the anime. (And for the second story in the book, Astrea Record IS required reading.) This relies heavily on understanding the tragedies in Lyu’s past, and it is genuinely moving; Omori admits to tearing up while writing it, and I can tell, because the same thing happened to me reading it, especially “Girl in Twilight.” This volume also has my all-time favorite cover for any Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? book, and nilitsu’s art is very pretty throughout.
If Lyu is your girl, you’re probably already planning to read this, and it certainly solidifies her as one of the best characters in the franchise. But even if you’re not in the series for her, this book adds to her character in ways that stand to enhance the story as a whole, and I think it’s also one of Omori’s best-written novels to date. This does more than just fill in a gap in the main storyline – it shows Lyu and Astrea as we haven’t seen them before. That alone is worth the price of admission.
