Tag: Anya

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 25 – “First Contact” (SEASON FINALE)

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Spy x Family is, first and foremost, a slice of life series. Its focus is on comedy and on character interactions. Anything more serious is a secondary concern, at the end of the day. But! The fact that it does have a plot at all still puts it in a rather different space narratively than, say, something like Do It Yourself!! or BOCCHI THE ROCK!, to provide two examples from this very season. Things eventually circle back around to that narrative core. That’s where episodes like “First Contact” come from; they are quiet, slow, and subtle affairs, but they’re not boring. Indeed, the entire second half of this episode is ridiculously tense. Moreso than any scene since the bit with the bomb dogs back in the earlier parts of this cour. Through it all, Spy x Family makes things look effortless, not unlike Loid himself.

Speaking of Loid, he’s mostly the main character in this episode, which we get a demonstration of right off the bat in a scene where he’s snooping around Eden Academy’s school grounds just prior to a staff-and-parents meetup and creates a mental map of them in his head (complete with a cool wireframe effect.) But the first half actually focuses on Anya, who we should take note of as well.

It feels safe to say that Anya, with her bottomless well of silly reaction faces, general adorability, and strong design, is Spy x Family‘s most popular character by a decent margin. There’s also her charming dynamic with Damian, whose ongoing inner struggles to win the approval of his father have remained one of this cour’s more compelling subplots. It’s brought to the forefront here, and Anya, perhaps surprisingly, helps with that, scheming as she does to help her father by “meeting the evil boss” (recall that this’d be Damian’s father Donovan, Loid’s target). This launches a miniature web of half-misunderstandings and concealments, a spin on the classic “stupid people keeping obvious secrets from each other” school of comedic setups.

To wit; Anya’s great ploy to give Damian the confidence to confront his father directly is to proudly proclaim that she trusts her papa, which she demonstrates by saying she even shows him her “bad tests” and such. Anya’s conversational through-line here is shaky enough that she even confuses herself, ending this little pep talk with a flat “what we were talking about, again?” I have to admit, it got a genuine out-loud laugh out of me.

Loid’s plan, meanwhile, is to engineer a situation where he can talk to Donovan directly, using Anya punching Damian dead in his face way back in episode six as a pretext. It’s just one part of a fairly complicated scheme where Loid plants a fake sheep keychain, banks on Damian’s better nature to pick it up and hang onto it, “happens” to stumble over to Damian and his friends while “looking” for it, takes it back, and then attempts to build a rapport with Donovan by apologizing to him for Anya’s behavior. (Damian is only even meeting up with his father because he called his older brother Demetrius to ask him about it. And Loid only knows that because Anya read Damian’s mind and then happened to blab about it while he overheard. Quite a web being weaved here.) Loid is on the ball throughout, and while it’s no great feat to pull the wool over a group of kids’ eyes, Donovan himself is a very different story.

In general, Donovan Desmond (Takaya Hashi) is a grimly charismatic character, around whom the show actively warps. The background music shifts into an upright, militaristic march (and later, lead-heavy piano work). The man himself has eyes as big as headlights and is surrounded by a clutch of black-suited bodyguards, and the show’s art noticeably sharpens slightly in his presence. Every cue is crystal clear; Donovan Desmond is not a man to be fucked with.

Yet, fuck with him is exactly what Loid Forger does. In particular, I love the visual that pops up when Loid slides into the conversation, knowingly interrupting Damian’s rare meeting with his father. A literal idea web pops up, a giving us a very visual peek into Loid’s mind as he actively calculates the best way to get a foothold—any kind of foothold—with Donovan.

He does succeed, but the entire conversation is tense as hell. Again, probably the tensest moment in the series in nearly an entire cour. It’s cut by only a tiny bit of levity when Damian, in the midst of Loid’s prodding, confesses that he’d like to be friends with Anya. Cute!

Don’t feel bad for Damain about his meeting with his dad being interrupted, either. After Loid departs, both his and Anya’s earlier encouragement actually inspire Damian to tell his dad about what he’s been up to. In response, all he really gets is a “well done,” but for a boy who clearly almost never sees his father, that much is enough, a rare genuine moment of human connection brought out by advice from two people who are part of a family that is, in a lot of ways, much more real and genuine than Damian’s. Maybe he will find his own way to true connection—with his father, or with someone else—in due time. I hope so, the poor kid deserves better.

On that note, Spy x Family‘s wildly successful first season ends. I’d make some kind of grand denouement here, but the year-end list is only a few days away from starting up, so I’m sure you can wait until then. I will just say this much for now; through Spy x Family’s ups and downs, I’ve never stopped caring about the Forger family and their friends, and I am excited to see what else is in store for them in the future.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 24 – “The Role of a Mother & Wife”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Today, on Spy x Family, Loid and Yor have what is quite possibly the first honest conversation in their entire relationship. Does it work, as either a story beat or a piece of earned character development? Eh, yes and no.

This is, if you were curious, still about Fiona. Yor’s hung up on the idea that Loid might have someone else in his life, and might be eager to get rid of her, since she is, in her own mind, not a great parent. (Exactly why she thinks this is only explained in broad terms, given that she calls herself a “musclehead” and similar.) Loid knows trouble might be brewing because of some gossiping old women outside his apartment complex (a recurring fixture in this series, really). His solution? A bar date. Which, itself, does not go as planned.

Yor actually tries to talk herself into being okay with the idea of Loid leaving her for Fiona. The fact that this isn’t actually what’s happening is more or less irrelevant. She gets so into her own head that she tries to break up with Loid first. When she can’t actually make herself say it, she drinks enough that she starts sloshing and slurring her words. (Somewhere in here, Loid tries to 10,000 IQ his way out of the situation and gets kicked in the chin for his trouble. Not a good idea, man!) Trying to break up doesn’t work, of course. Because whether she realizes it or not, she’s genuinely in love with the man and loves her current life as his wife.

They eventually patch things up, in a moment that is genuinely pretty sincere. During their conversation, Loid ends up drawing an analogy between how safe he felt as a boy when his mother would sing him to sleep, and how safe Anya feels with Yor. It’s sweet, and it’s a nice reminder that these two idiots do, in fact, love each other, even if they’re still not really cognizant of it yet, necessarily. This is all extremely hetero, mind you, but straight people deserve good romances too. I’d say this episode is one. Its first half is, at any rate.

Yes, this is another episode with two distinct, largely unrelated halves. The B-plot here is about Anya, who, to be fair, hasn’t had a spotlight episode in a few weeks at this point. While I wouldn’t blame anyone for being a touch tired of The Anya Show, this is one of the better such segments. Mostly because rather than revolving around Anya’s ongoing quest to gain eight Stella stars, it instead centers on her relationship with Becky, a hitherto largely undeveloped character who gets a bit more depth and development here than she’s previously had.

The premise is simple, if silly. Becky wants to take Anya shopping, so she—the heir to a fashion fortune, remember—rents out an entire department store. What initially threatens to be a little dry soon turns out to be mostly an excuse to draw both Anya and Becky wearing ridiculous outfits. Those that Becky tries on largely remain within the realm of traditional cuteness. Anya’s, meanwhile, are so goofy that they quickly go from “cute” to “avant garde.” (Her outfits are also soundtracked by a pleasantly breezy pop song. A nice touch.)

More importantly; it’s genuinely sweet to see Anya getting along so well with Becky, given that she’s Anya’s only real friend. Anya eventually buys Becky and herself a pair of matching sheep keychains. A flashback from Becky’s butler provides some important context here—Becky struggled with making friends when she was younger, being prone to haughtiness and with an inability to hold her tongue. Anya, as perhaps the first friend her own age that Becky actually respects as an equal, is a very important person to her, whether or not she’d ever say so.

This week’s Spy x Family is, on the whole, a low-key and relatively character-driven affair. Very different than the tennis-fueled adrenaline rush of the last couple episodes, but solid nonetheless.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 20 – “Investigate the General Hospital”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

This week, Spy x Family wisely returns to what is probably its greatest stylistic asset; the fact that Anya, for the many ways in which she is not like an actual child, is, at her core, written with an authentic kiddishness that lets her carry whole scenes—or in this case, an entire episode—by herself. For being, what, five years old? She’s a hell of an actress.

Our A-plot here is pretty simple. Anya is assigned a job-shadowing project at school; she has to follow one of her parents to work and ask them a few questions as they go about their day. Initially, she asks Yor, but after an admittedly quite amusing sequence of Yor vividly imagining what “taking Anya to her job” would actually entail, she decides to ask her pa instead.

Thus begins a miniature odyssey of Anya going to the hospital that Loid practices as a therapist at. (I think this is the first confirmation we’ve gotten that he actually does go in at least occasionally to keep up appearances for his real work.) In general, this entire plot reminds me of the aquarium episode that closed out the first cour, except here, the monkey wrench is not an enemy spy organization but rather Anya herself. Predictably, she gets into all sorts of trouble at the hospital, from taking notes on what Loid is thinking rather than saying, to sneaking into a secret passage that WISE has installed in the hospital for Loid’s benefit, to stressing her papa out by dumping a bunch of toys into a therapy sandbox in an expression of pure, utter chaos.

The point is this; while Spy x Family still hasn’t really regained any sense of urgency, this plot is proof that it can at least be genuinely fun and charming. This is to say nothing of the report that Anya eventually gives when she’s back in class; a pretty acrid piece of genuine cringe comedy in an anime that doesn’t really go there that often. The mixup is nice, even if it’s not a direction I’d want SpyFam to take for very long.

The B-plot is similarly simple. Anya watches an episode of SpyWars, the in-universe cartoon she’s obsessed with, featuring a cryptogram. She becomes obsessed, and has Yor help her copy the puzzle onto paper several times. Thus begins a dead-simple bit where Anya runs up to various people—her mailman, the women who live down the hall from the Forgers, Becky, Damian, even Frankie—and exclaims “top secret!” before handing them one of the cryptograms and running away. It’s absolutely adorable, and it put a huge smile on my face. (Spare a thought for Frankie, who once again somehow manages to twist this into being convinced that Some Random Woman is in love with him.)

All in all, a resoundingly fun episode for a show that seems to finally be finding its swing again. Let’s hope that continues as we head into the final stretch of the season.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY – Episode 15

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

“Boof!”

I feel like I’ve been a bit unduly mean to Spy x Family since it came back. Not in a major or intentional way, but more just out of reflex. I made clear last week that I think Spy x Family’s most recent storyline has been hitting kind of an odd note. I more or less stand by that, but part of me feels that I just haven’t been giving the series the attention it deserves. Which is unfair, because while I’m maybe not as keen on Spy x Family as some are, it is still one of the year’s better action anime and one of its better comedy anime. That’s a solid showing twice over, and it deserves credit for that.

Either way, the whole terrorist bomb dog plot comes to its conclusion here with some amount of fanfare, but much to my own joy, this episode dials back in on the comedy that made Spy x Family so endearing in the first place. In the process, it rediscovers its inner warmth. I don’t think it’d be at all a stretch to say that this episode is the best since the show came back from its hiatus.

Let’s start with the basics. If you were worried about the cliffhanger from last week; don’t be. Loid does not shoot the dog, and in fact, he goes out of his way to make sure the dog who attacked him is fine, even managing to somehow get its bomb harness off and tossed into a nearby river, where it explodes harmlessly.

Yor also gets a brief bit of shine here. It’s perhaps not as much as I’d like, but a scene where she spin-kicks the terrorist Keith through a windshield and sends him careening into a lamppost is a pretty solid showing.

But of course, the main focus is about the dog. Not just any dog, the dog who is basically already Anya’s. With the crisis averted, Sylvia, Loid’s handler, tries to confiscate the psychic woofer while incognito as the state police.

And if you can forgive your blogger here for a moment; she looks damn good while doing it.

Anya, in a shrewd moment of using her psychic powers directly for her own benefit, throws a bit of a temper tantrum and threatens to stop going to school. Which is enough to get both Loid and Sylvia to change their tunes. There’s a touching scene in here where Sylvia remarks that Anya is a good kid, and offhandedly mentions that she had a daughter her age. The past tense isn’t remarked upon directly, but combined with her cold-blooded treatment of the terrorists in last week’s episode, this certainly implies some pretty heavy shit in Sylvia’s past. (Not that this is surprising, given her line of work.)

The rest of the episode, though, is concerned with the far more lighthearted but very important work of naming the dog, who Anya has up until this point just been calling “Mr. Dog.” (Inu-san.) Anya even assumes that the simple act of having a named dog might help her befriend Damien at school. Though, in her defense, Damien’s reaction when he asks for her dog’s name and she can’t give it to him is pretty amusing. This episode is actually a veritable harvest of Anya faces in general, which is great news for anyone who’s been missing those.

We have “Imitation Yor.”

“Thonkeng.”

“The Antihero”

“Edvard Munch’s ‘Scream'”, and many, many more!

She does settle on one eventually; late in the episode the Forgers take Anya and her new pet to a dog park. There, her dog retrieves a pair of gloves surreptitiously swiped from Anya by a different dog. Anya is reminded of an episode of Bondman, and this big pile of fur and love is given the most natural name possible; his name is Bond. Forger Bond.

He likes his martinis shaken, not furred.

And with that, the episode ends later that night, with a shot of the two having fallen asleep together. Yor remarks that Anya looks like a “little angel in [their] midst.” She is absolutely correct.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch – SPY X FAMILY Episode 14

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

War, and what people do while waging it, are terrible and depressing. This is known. Armed conflict remains a serious issue throughout the world, perhaps even moreso now than it was just a few months ago back during Spy x Family‘s first cour. Again; terrible, depressing.

The same isn’t true for Spy x Family itself. Even as we get into the meat of a pretty damn serious arc with this second episode of its second cour. Throughout this arc parts, of the story get pretty grim, but Spy x Family still cuts its most serious moments with ones that are more lighthearted. This prevents what is easily the most uncomfortably real arc of the entire anime so far from being outright suffocating, but, nonetheless, it does kind of hit a weird note, doesn’t it?

What actually happens here is pretty simple; the episode is split between a cat and mouse game between Loid’s agency and the terrorists (And eventually, just their leader, the mononymic Keith.) and, separately, Anya and the clairvoyant dog from last week trying to stop a bomb from going off.

That second part is ostensibly the “lighthearted” half of this week’s episode, but even this involves the dog having a grim vision of the near future where Loid dies in an explosion, which, obviously, Anya is desperate to avert. It says quite a bit that this is still the comparatively sillier part of the episode. Mostly due to Anya’s goofy reactions when things don’t go her way.

Loid’s half of the episode is much darker and is almost entirely devoid of humor. Perhaps the most indicative scene being one where his handler, Cynthia, interrogates Keith’s terrorist ring. Things get pretty intense!

And while that conversation is, I’m sure, written from a place of good intention, it does illustrate something of a problem with this episode.

At the end of the day, it’s excellently made, and it certainly deserves to exist in an abstract sense, but cutting so close to the gritty realities of war is dangerous for Spy x Family, which tends to work better when it’s in modes that are a little less reflective of things that actually go on in the world. (Deadly-serious dodgeball games, for example.)

More concretely, it’s a little annoying how yet again Yor is reduced to a bit player in a show she is supposed to be one of the protagonists of. It’s understandable that things here play into Loid’s specialties a little more, given the whole espionage angle of this arc, and I’m not asking Yor to start shanking people in front of her daughter, but surely, she could’ve been given a little more to do? Perhaps next week, it’s hard to say. All in all, this is a well-made but somewhat disappointing episode for me personally. If you feel differently, I’d be happy to hear why in the comments.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 12 – Penguin Park

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Today, in its cour finale, Spy x Family circles back on its core strengths, those things that make it good in the first place. To wit; the series is an action comedy. There’s a lot of both in ” “. What more do you need?

Well, I don’t know about any of us, but Loid “Twilight” Forger really seems like he could use a few vacation days.

The opening minutes of this episode establish that, on top of the ongoing Operation Strix, Twilight has been picking up extra missions by the armful. (He blames a staff squeeze, and I see no reason to question his expertise.) He’s been getting home late often enough that the apartment complex’s local hens have started to notice, and some of the women in question even wonder aloud if he’s cheating on Yor. (He would never, and I’m vaguely offended at the notion.)

Determined to keep up the appearance of the Forgers being a normal family, Loid insists on taking them out for a weekend trip, suggesting the local aquarium. This proves to be a problem for two reasons. One; some of those local gossipy housewives are also at the aquarium. Two; Twilight’s agency happens to foist another mission on him as he enters the building, to retrieve a film roll smuggled into the country via penguin.

Things unfold as you might expect; Loid has to go undercover as a penguin handler in order to get close to That Specific Penguin, and in the process completely shows up the lead aquarist. He fights an enemy agent, who also wants to get his hands on that bird’s precious info. Said agent “kidnaps” Anya—by which I here mean that Anya clings to his shirt and shouts “I’m being kidnapped!”—and the predictable result is him getting his shit kicked in by Yor. Loid wins a giant penguin plushie for Anya.

It’s a good, solid, fun end to the series’ first half. A rounding-out as it closes the first cour. There’s also a pretty excellent post-script where Anya inducts her new “secret agent”—that is, the penguin plushie—to her spy agency. AKA, her apartment.

Spy x Family will apparently return with a 13-episode second cour in the fall season. Until we rendezvous once again; be seeing you, anime fans.

You are #006!

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 11 – Stella

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Last week’s dodgeball plan out the window, Anya Forger needs to find a new way to earn Stella stars if Operation Strix has any chance of succeeding in the long term. In this week’s episode of Spy x Family, she finds a way, although not intentionally, and not without a fair bit of harrowing suspense beforehand.

The episode opens simply, with Loid again struggling with Anya as the latter’s grades continue to sink, although with a more understanding approach than we’ve previously seen. (Also, at one point Loid mentally refers to Anya as his daughter with no further clarifiers, which I think is sweet.) Even from the point of view of a mundane parent, Anya’s scores would be a problem; we see at least three F’s, and there may be several more, so clearly, he’s got to do something. Anya’s academic woes aren’t solved in this episode. Even as she has a fun internal monologue about how she can totally just read other peoples’ minds to cheat, and makes an attempt to sound like Loid while she does so, it’s clear that things need to change for Anya to have any hope of getting a Stella.

All of this vexes Twilight. And indeed, Anya’s ESP means that since she can read his mind, his worries become hers in a very real and immediate sense; a literalization of the idea that children tend to inherit their parents’ anxieties.

He does hit upon one possible solution though, a father-daughter “ooting” to a local hospital. There, he hopes that perhaps Anya acquiring a taste for volunteer work might eventually lead to her getting a Stella for being an exceptional community member. If not any time soon, at least eventually.

Loid gets far more than he bargained for. Initially, this is played for comedy. Anya, being a girl of recall, only five or so, is terrible at helping out around the hospital, first breaking a vase and then shirking her task to reorganize the hospital library by reading their comics section. (Presumably, something they keep around to entertain young patients, which Anya definitely falls in that bracket.)

Just when this gets bad enough that the Forgers are practically kicked out, though, something much more serious occurs. A young boy named Ken, attending a physical therapy session in the hospital’s pool room, idles around near the adults’ pool. Not paying much attention (do kids ever?) he falls in, and almost immediately “Stella” takes a turn for the significantly darker.

Ken cannot swim, and being unable to even thrash or make noise, he simply sinks to the bottom of the pool like a rock. The direction of the episode takes a sharp detour into the visually harrowing here, with the underwater shots especially composed like something out of a tragic drama. The boy is saved only by his own thoughts; mental pleas for help that happen to be picked up by our resident psychic.

In a visible panic of her own, Anya rushes off to the pool with a flimsy excuse to help. Thankfully, Loid gives chase, because even though her bravery is admirable and her desire to help equally so, Anya can’t swim either, and it’s only the fact that Loid hurries after Anya into the pool room that saves both her and Ken. A mission well done, if ever there was one.

Her role in Ken’s rescue is enough to earn Anya the titular Stella, her very first. She gets something vaguely akin to a henshin or other kind of visual power-up sequence as it’s put on her uniform, and it puts a sweet cap on what is otherwise a rather harrowing story. Perhaps more important than the Stella is the other thing Anya has earned: some self-confidence. For the first time, she considers that her powers might be able to actually help people. (And, of course, that this might make people like her. Something she’s also still not entirely accustomed to.)

The remainder of the episode focuses on the aftereffects of all this. Anya briefly gets a bit of a big head, in fact.

But unfortunately her hopes that having earned a Stella in a genuinely heroic fashion might endear her to her classmates are quickly dashed. Some nameless girls in class are straight-up mean about it, and even suggest she might’ve faked it somehow. Only for Damian (!) to, roundaboutly at least, stick up for her by telling the gossips that if they think Eden is such a cut-rate school that they’d hand out a Stella by accident, they should transfer. (He leaves out the part where the main reason he cares about Anya’s Stella being authentic is that it hurts his pride that she got one before him. And it would hurt even more if it weren’t genuinely earned.)

Anya’s little friend Becky also suggests, running on pure spoiled-little-princess logic, that since Anya did something good she should ask for a reward. Eventually, she hits on the idea of a dog (because, you see, Damian has a dog. And if Damian has a dog and Anya also has a dog they’ll have something to talk about. And that will lead to world peace. The mind of a first-grader is incredible. The mind of a telepathic first-grader, all the more so). Anya’s able to talk Loid and Yor into it fairly easily—though not without them respectively wondering about a dog’s utility as a house guard and threat level respectively—and the episode ends there, with the promise of Dog Shenanigans next week for the last episode of the first cour.

Except, there’s a little bit more. Somewhere in a mad laboratory-turned-hellish dog pound, a group of canines who’ve had something done to them—it’s not clear what—waste away in tiny, dirty cages. A pair of villains, obvious by their poor treatment of the animals, talk about their client, who they speculate will use the animals as “bomb dogs.” What the broader implications of any of this may be are presently unclear, but the camera focuses on one dog in particular as the episode fades out, and I do suspect we’ll be seeing him again soon.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 10 – The Great Dodgeball Plan

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

This week on Spy x Family: dodgeball.

Yeah, dodgeball. You know. That horrible game played in elementary and middle school classes the world over where you chuck specially made pain orbs at each other. It will not surprise you, I hope, to learn that yours truly, who grew up to become a professional anime critic, does not have the fondest memories of the sport in any of its many variations. But, hey, kids getting socked in the face with dodgeballs is kinda funny. Thus, this episode, which is seriously like a solid 75% kids getting socked in the face with dodgeballs.

Also this.

The core conflict that makes these particular 22 minutes go are dead simple; someone in Anya’s class starts a rumor that getting MVP in a gym class game can get you a stella star. Anya wants a star, so she’s going to do her best at dodgeball. Damian wants a star too, because it might get daddy to notice him (that’s called building a sympathetic motive, friends). The obvious thing for Spy x Family to do here might be to have Damian and Anya on opposite teams. But instead, they’re on the same team, and the real threat is this fellow.

Yes, Bill Watkins. Age 6. Built like a brick wall and whose father is, as we briefly see in a flashback, apparently M. Bison from Street Fighter. Bill Banner here is an absolute volleyball monster. He’s the Scott Steiner of first grade volleyball, and no one else in class is even playing in the same league. (Obviously! This is Spy x Family, not Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.)

Both Anya and Damian have been training though, in very different ways. Yor tries to teach her daughter some—ahem—killer techniques. With enough enthusiasm that she almost blows her cover.

The “training” scenes are a particular highlight of this episode. Both the goofy shit that Yor puts Anya through and, later on, Damian training with The Boys are absolutely hysterical. In the former, Yor chucks a volleyball so hard that she casually prunes a tree by doing so.

In the latter, Damian and co. imagine themselves on what is very clearly Namek, while in real life they’re just messing around with a tire swing.

None of this actually helps when it comes time to face Bazooka Bill, who downs most of Anya and Damian’s team with comparative ease. (The only thing stopping the carnage from being worse is that they’re playing whistle dodgeball here, which is a slower, basically turn-based variant that, somehow, is even less fun than normal dodgeball.) There are plenty of “dramatic” (comedic) scenes of characters taking the bullet for one another here. Here, for instance, is Emile, one of Damian’s friends, leaping in front of him to block one of Bill’s shots with his face.

And here’s Damian doing some Naruto shit to defend Anya—yes, Anya. Remember, he’s a tsundere—from the same.

Anya’s “killer move” doesn’t do much either. She definitely throws the ball hard, but messes up at the last moment and ends up chucking it at the ground, and she’s promptly eliminated moments later.

None of this even ends up mattering, as Master Hendersson explains, there is no Stella star awarded for something as minor as winning a single game in gym class. Thus, the entire episode is a gigantic, lavishly animated anticlimax that progresses basically nothing. Even any development of Anya and Damian’s ‘relationship’ is pretty muted. They immediately have a fight after the match is over.

But such a stretching of legs suits Spy x Family just fine, especially after last week’s comparative seriousness. Next week marks the penultimate episode of the first cour, I imagine something a bit more dramatic will begin brewing then.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 7 – The Target’s Second Son

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Kids are funny. This is a fundamental truth of comedy, and it’s where Spy x Family gets a decent chunk of its comedic juice from. This episode, which mostly centers on Anya’s first real day at school, is pretty much just 22 solid minutes of “kids are funny.” There’s some other stuff in there, especially toward the end, but that’s what the focus is on.

Frankly, I’m pretty happy with that. Anya’s friend Becky and, we’ll say for now, rival Damian form a sort of secondary trio of lead characters. They take the spotlight when the rest of the Forgers are off-screen, and Anya’s friendship with Becky is already adorable, even this early on.

Anya’s goal throughout this episode, such as it is, is very simple. She just needs to make amends with Damian before the end of the day, before the bad blood from their fist-first first meeting has time to curdle. That makes perfect sense in theory but ask anyone who’s ever been a child; when you’re a kid, apologizing to other kids is hard. Especially if you actually did do something wrong. (Not that I or, I imagine, most of the audience, can really fault Anya for decking Damian, but it is technically against school rules.)

So, to make sure his daughter actually does apologize, Loid spends most of the episode “encouraging” Anya from the shadows. Mostly, this makes it seem like Anya is in a particularly bizarre grade-schooler take on The Prisoner. It’s admittedly pretty funny, although probably not great for her mental health.

Speaking of that; Anya’s outburst has had a few lasting effects. Everyone in her first period class avoids her now, because they think she’s some kind of delinquent. (Becky gets hit with this too but doesn’t seem to mind so much.)

And then there’s what’s become of Damian himself, which, well, he’s pretty obviously developing a crush on Anya. In fact, we see the exact moment his feelings bloom into one. How can you tell? Well, it’s pretty obvious, really.

Sorry son, you like the fiery ones.

He copes with this by fleeing from the cafeteria and shouting that his pride won’t allow this. Which is, admittedly, an accurate summary of how young boys deal with crushes.

Anya’s attempt at apologizing being roundly rejected, she slumps home understandably upset. Loid being not particularly great at helping her with her homework doesn’t improve things, and eventually she gets so frustrated that she storms off to her room, thus marking the first fight the Forger family has had over the course of the show. Loid reflects, musing that it’s the patience to tackle mundane missions like this that make him a true spy, and, along the way, perhaps stumbling into a deeper insight about himself. Yor, also, offers some genuinely good parenting advice.

Albeit, perhaps anachronistically effective given that this is supposed to be, what, the 60s? The 80s? When the hell does Spy x Family take place anyway?

Loid attempts to make it up to Anya, but finds that she’s fallen asleep at her desk and was studying on her own, determined to make her papa proud. It’s a cute end to a cute episode.

Until next time.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 6 – The Friendship Scheme

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

“Heh.”

Today, Spy x Family moves into the second phase of its first major arc. Anya’s gotten into Eden Academy, and the first portion of Loid’s mission is complete. We meet his handler Sylvia Sherwood (Yuuko Kaida) for the first time properly here, as she rags on him for blowing a bunch of the agency’s money. (For more on that particular misadventure, you’ll have to see last week’s episode, which I didn’t cover here due to being ill.) The main thing to take away from Sylvia’s speech though is not budgetary concerns, but her explanation of how Eden’s merit and demerit system works.

You see, Loid’s target, Donovan Desmond, only attends certain functions with the families of certain, particularly prestigious students. The students who make up this inner circle are Eden’s Imperial Scholars (an admittedly curious name given that “The East” seems to run under some kind of Communist government, but whatever). One becomes an Imperial Scholar by earning eight Stella stars, awarded to Eden students who get particularly good grades or perform feats that somehow benefit the prestige of the school.

Conversely, there are Tonitrus Bolts, which are “awarded” instead as a disciplinary measure. Eight of those and little Johnny is expelled on the spot, no further questions asked, or opportunities presented. Keep all that in mind, it becomes relevant over the course of this episode.

We begin, though, with the relatively innocuous outing of Anya being measured for her uniform. The tailor promptly scares the hell out of her by casually mentioning to the attending Yor and Loid that kidnapping and ransoms of Eden students have been on the rise lately. Even so, this can’t dull Anya’s enthusiasm for her new uniform for long, and she spends a good few minutes of the episode showing it off. To her credit; it does look very cute on her, although black and gold is ostentatious even for rich kid school uniforms.

Anya actually does get kidnapped, though. Thankfully only very briefly, and she’s saved by Yor before anything can happen to her. (In a scene that is both really cool and genuinely moving. A recurring pattern in the Yor-focused bits of the series. There is something very satisfying about how righteously pissed off she gets when Anya’s kidnappers mistake her for a mere maid.)

Still, the experience rattles her a bit—understandably so—and after heaping praise on her “cool mama”, Anya basically asks her surrogate mother for self-defense lessons. Yor obliges.

The episode then skips ahead to the following day, where Anya properly enrolls in Eden and—as much as any young child does—partakes in the entrance ceremony. There, Loid carefully considers the facts of things; Anya could earn eight Stella stars and become an Imperial Scholar, or she could befriend Donovan Desmond’s young son Damian (Natsumi Fujiwara) and simply be invited over.

Unfortunately, Damian is a little shit, and Anya’s mind-reading makes her immediately privy to that fact. They don’t get on, despite Anya’s valiant (if wildly misguided) attempts to immediately get an invite to his house. Instead, Damian taunts her, calls her an “uggo”, and is generally unpleasant to both Anya and Anya’s actual fast-friend, Becky Blackbell (Emiri Katou). Anya tries to keep her cool, applying Yor’s advice to smile through tough situations. But her attempts come across as….well, just take a look at the header image. (This gag actually works even better in the anime than it did in the manga, that expression just being plastered on her face over the course of a good minute makes the scene hit that much harder.) Eventually, things escalate to the point where Anya can’t take it anymore, and she promptly slugs Damian right in the fucking face.

To the displeasure of her school housemaster, initially. But Anya is able to spin a convincing lie about how she only punched Damian directly in his smug face because he was insulting Becky. Which isn’t really remotely true, but our elegance-obsessed Mr. Herriman humansona here buys it.

You all see it, don’t lie to me.

She manages to get off with just one of the demerit bolts.

All in all, a very entertaining episode, but a rocky start to Anya’s school career. Only one way to find out where it goes from here, anime fans. Until next time.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.