Tag: Yor

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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.

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 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.

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 9 – Show Off How in Love You Are

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 Spy x Family, which I didn’t have the time to cover here, saw us introduced to Yuri Briar (Kenshou Ono), Yor’s weird overprotective brother. He didn’t really trust Loid, and very much still doesn’t at the start of this episode. All the absurd jealousy eventually boiled down to the bizarre cliffhanger last week ended on; Yuri’s demand that, well, if they’re really married, why don’t they just kiss in front of him?

I have to confess; I don’t really like Yuri. (Yuri Briar, I mean. I will never say a bad word about yuri the genre.) He’s easily my least favorite member of Spy x Family‘s recurring cast. Mostly, I just don’t really find the old “siscon in denial” trope particularly funny. To SpyFam’s credit, this is at least an earnest go at making the archetype work. I’m just not sure it really deserves that much gusto. This is without mentioning his day job as a member of Ostenia’s secret police, probably the closest the series’ politics ever get to being genuinely uncomfortable.

It is decently funny at least to see Loid not hesitate at all in his going in for the smooch, only for Yuri himself to freak out like a man being NTR’d and electrocuted at the same time. The whole convolution here eventually devolves into Yor sending him flying with a smack to the cheek for his troubles. Yuri himself ends the scene by developing some kind of bizarre tsundere complex for Loid. What’s that Kaguya-sama quote again? “Siblings tend to have similar tastes”?

In the fallout from all this, Yor becomes convinced (again) that she is a bad wife. She has a pretty sad inner monologue the following morning, only even slightly tampered by a cut to show Anya’s reaction to overhearing said monologue.

This is also roughly the face I make when someone enters a Discord channel and starts unpromptedly ranting about how sad they are.

Loid, who figured out Yuri’s affiliation with the Not-Stasi last week, also becomes suspicious of Yor as the result of all this, culminating with her planting a tracker on her as she goes to work and even, eventually, disguising himself and his assistant Franky as secret policemen in an attempt to absolutely eliminate all doubt from his mind that Yor might also be associated with the state. Honestly, it’s pretty despicable!

Sidenote; why does Disguised Franky on the left there look like an e-boy?

And the only thing that actually breaks his suspicion is Yor’s strong reaction to Franky’s (feigned, but still very much unwanted) advances, with the rebuke that she’s married. (Notably, Loid isn’t at all suspicious that a random secretary is able to effortlessly take Franky down, further evidence that his own sense of normalcy is off, or at least takes a hit where Yor’s involved.)

Guilty, he goes to meet up with Yor (out of disguise, of course) on both of their way’s home from work. There, he manages to stealthily take the tracker off of her collar, and, crushing it, throws it away. When the two return home—with cake, for their “first anniversary”—Anya notes that they seem to be getting along well, putting a cute end to an otherwise strained episode.

More importantly, we’re made aware of a key fact here, from a Doylistic point of view. At some point, the day may come where Twilight has to choose between his devotion to his mission and his devotion with his “pretend” family. Before this point, if that had happened, it isn’t unfair to the man to say that he would probably have picked the former. From here on, the answer is a lot less clear. Loid’s actions are impossible to defend, but they make perfect sense within the confines of the show’s narrative and genre, as well as the paranoia that comes from his occupation in the first place. (And which informed the fiction that Spy x Family is a pastiche of. It’s not The Prisoner or anything, but some of that palpable “trust no one” vibe is still present, and not just because Franky literally says that verbatim.) It is through these lenses that the episode manages to still work, despite the noticeable downshift in tone. At episode’s end, Loid has the revelation that perhaps his family being “fake” isn’t really that important, and the series once again draws parallels between the lives of spies and those of ordinary people, a recurring theme by this point.

In general, then, this is one of Spy x Family‘s least funny episodes, but it makes up for that with more complicated emotional shades. Loid can be hard to root for at times, never moreso than here, but certainly no one could accuse him of being a simple character.

Until next time, agents.

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.