The Spy x Family anime on Crunchyroll has been met with high praise from fans, and the manga, as usual, is even better as it demonstrates one of the Greek tenants of family love, Storge, which refers to familial love.
I used to be a believer in writers setting up estates to protect their life’s work. The past three years have forced a major reevaluation on my part. The absurd lengths of time that entertainment conglomerates have inflicted on copyright protection laws, as well as these self-same corporations having no interest in protecting the worlds a writer creates, (in truth they are now a source of vandalism), leave the creative professional with little choice. If you’re a writer try to be fiscally responsible, pass on a decent-sized trust to your dependents, and put your works into the Public Domain upon your death. Your son might be devoted to protecting your life’s work but your great-grandchildren will have cocaine and hookers to pay for.
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Look at what has happened to James Bond. Far from being the sixties cool master spy and ladies’ man, he’s now a hen-pecked husband who is probably sneaking smoke breaks in the carport and praying his wife doesn’t catch him.
It’s impossible for a spy-hero to have a normal family.
However, an exceptional family is a different story.
Spy X Family takes place in a world that is very much Cold War Cool Sixties. The nations of Westalis and Ostania had a very nasty war not too long ago and tensions are running high again.
Westalis’ best secret agent is code-named Twilight (as yet we don’t know what his real name is) and has been assigned the task of spying on Ostania’s National Unity Party leader, Donovan. The problem is that Donovan is such a recluse that the only way in that Twilight can find him is to enroll his child in the same private school as Donovan’s and hope to force the camel’s nose under the tent that way. His new cover identity is psychologist Loid Forger.
Problem: He doesn’t have a kid. Or a family. He is a sixties spy after all.
Solution: He’ll have to find a kid and a wife. He’s the best spy in the world, how hard can it be?
Test Subject 007, aka Anya, is a six-year-old (possibly younger) orphan who was raised at a secret facility where she was altered to become a telepath. After escaping she ended up at an orphanage where she was acquired by Twilight as part of his cover. Anya is addicted to a TV spy show called Spy Wars and super excited to be helping her new father’s secret mission. Whatever that is.
Yor Forger is the world’s greatest assassin or at least in the top 5. She’s code-named Thorn Princess. She needed a husband because she lives in a country with a very active secret police and just being single at 27 is too suspicious.
Mutual problems and solutions to those problems are how the Forger family came together. At this point in the story, the Forgers still consider themselves “a fake” family. Or at least Loid and Yor do, they haven’t even kissed yet. Anya for her part is determined to keep her family together. Bond likes that idea too.
Oh, sorry. Bond is the family dog. A demi-sapient, precognitive Pyrenees Mountain dog. He wears a black tie.
Anya and Bond know her parents’ secrets whereas Loid and Yor don’t know each others’ or Anya’s or come to that, the dog’s.
Okay, that’s the over-complicated Japanese setup.
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To the outer world, the Forgers are the perfect family. However, at a much deeper more secret level, they are still the perfect family. It’s the in-between layers they have trouble with.
What makes this show worth watching is the dynamic of a group of people who simply need to be family. What makes it special is watching this group of highly exceptional and highly defective people coming to love each other.
And they are defective. Loid is too dedicated to being a field officer to risk being human, he comes across as a Vulcan in the early episodes and tends to fall back on that in situations where he doesn’t have a ready answer. Yor has trouble instinctively grasping what is normal human behavior and lives in constant dread of screwing up common everyday interactions with people. Anya’s problem is that she is fundamentally lazy and has the easiest out on Earth when it comes to studying, she can just read the right answer in other people’s minds. Assuming of course they have the right answer.
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Another intriguing element is that all of the authority figures in this series are demanding but compassionate. All of them are based on sixties spy tropes. They know they are asking too much of their charges and are trying to keep them from breaking. It’s not immediately apparent with any of them but once the show develops their characters for a bit it becomes clear that they are trying to take care of their subordinates in a world that won’t let them be gentle to them.
This anime is violent but not excessively so by anime standards. It is very light-hearted. The artwork strongly suggests sixties-cold war era Germany without tying you down to any one location or period. Ostania’s architecture is kind of a European mix, there are suggestions of Prague and Budapest but nothing to really tie you down to those locations.
Overall plot is an extended narrative that is nowhere near finished yet. The Forgers have quite a ways to go before Loid and Yor can admit they can’t live without their makeshift family. Loid in particular. Their character development is the real story here. It’s certainly the reason I’ll be coming back.
The Dark Herald Recommends with Confidence (4/5)
Available on Crunchyroll for a subscription and Apple TV if you want a license. Blu-ray is available but it ain’t cheap.
What do you think of Spy x Family? Are you going to check it out? Leave a comment!
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