Spy X Family – 2 [Secure a Wife]

Right away I want to apologize for the lateness of this, Easter Weekend played havoc with my schedule. Excuses out of the way though, welcome to my 2nd show of the season, Spy X Family! This week continues the adventures of Anya and Loid as the search for the perfect wife to round out their dysfunctional little family. So without further ado, lets dive into it!

Before we get into all the good stuff Spy X Family gave us this week, and there’s a lot, I want to mention my only real negatives with the episode: Production. The show doesn’t look bad by any stretch of the imagination. There are much blander, much less animated series airing right now. However this is a step down from the first episode in my opinion. Part of that has to do with with darkness in Loid’s harbor scene. I harp on this a lot with Now and Then, Here and There as well. You have to light these things properly! The other issue though is that a lot of the models this episode felt… off? Not massively so, I want to be very clear when I say these are not huge problems. It’s just in places like the party scene Yor and Loid’s overall designs felt a tad stiff.

Speaking of, we met Yor this week! Yay! She’s a bity ditzyer than I remember, and I’ve already seen that rub some the wrong way. They are a bit miffed that this hyper competent assassin could be so… air headed at times. And in a way I understand that. However, much like with Loid, I don’t think Spy X Family could work without both of them being a bit ignorant of what a “Normal” life is. Neither of them really know what it means to be normal. They can both fake it well enough, as per their jobs. But when it comes to figuring out if someone else is bullshitting them or not? Well lets just say that Yor has no reason to know whats normal or not for a psychiatrist. Also this is based on 1950’s Germany, so not like medicine wasn’t weird back then either.

All of this is to say that I actually really like their relationship. From a comedic perspective this complete lack of normalcy opens the door for a lot of hijinks. With Anya, the mind reading child, somehow acting as the “normal” straight-man in all of this. Meanwhile from a romantic perspective, neither of them are trying to hide all that much either. Their real jobs of course, yeah. But they were both very upfront about what they wanted from this relationship. Yor openly said she needed a cover as a single women who is almost 30 while Loid outright said he needs a “wife” for Anya to get into school. This is no sitcom, surface deep deception that will lead to a misunderstanding. It’s very intentional yet at the same time very straightforward in what they want. And I mean what they really want.

What do I mean by that? Well this is where I get to what I believe is the heart of Spy X Family: The family. Ok I’m playing to many games here. I think that this “fake” family that Loid and Yor have found is, deep down, what they truly want. Loid has dedicated his life to keeping his country safe and making sure everyone can have a normal life. Meanwhile Yor is extremely disconnected from everyone else excluding her brother, and doesn’t really know what its like to have a family. So this “fake” family will quickly become something they both want to hold onto. They won’t want the mission to end, they will come to view the family as their actual secret from their job, rather than the other way around. And to me, that’s kind of the wholesome heart of Spy X Family.

Finally I want to talk about Anya and where Spy X Family goes from here. I’ll say it outright, Anya is cute. Now for those who read my Eighty Six coverage, you may be asking “Lenlo, why don’t you hate the uwu voice loli again”. Well the answer is simple my friend: Anya looks, sounds and most importantly acts like a 5 year old. She isn’t acting like something she’s not, Anya isn’t waxing philosophical about the horrors of war. She’s an airhead with shitty acting who only gets by because of mind-reading and parents who have no idea how children are supposed to act. There’s no longtime planning going on in her head. Just how she can get peanuts and a silenced pistol. And it’s cute. Plus, and this might be my most contentious statement, I just think Atsumi Tanezaki is a better VA than Misaki Kuno. Sue me.

As for where we go from here? Well that’s easy. The school! This is the obvious next step for the series and should provide a lot of Anya content for those who like her, like me! Whether it be getting through classes, interacting with fellow students, Loid and Yor attending school functions, it doesn’t matter. From what I remember of the manga, there’s some funny stuff here. My one concern is whether or not Spy X Family can keep it from getting stale. You see I didn’t make it much farther past this when I read the manga, mostly because it came out every 2 weeks and I just forgot. So its entirely possible that the whole setup becomes very samey.

So yeah all in all, a good episode. There were a number of b-plots/jokes throughout that I really enjoyed. Like Yor’s coworkers mentioning the copied files before we cut to Frankie having broken in and done just that. Or Loid mentioning a lot of female agents being rounded up soon after those same co-workers mentioned a lot of single, older women being arrested and setting off Yor’s whole fiasco. There are a lot of small details woven throughout the plot for those who care to seek them out and I think that’s pretty cool! So yeah, good episode, looking forward to more.