Tag: smug Anya

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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.

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 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.