Tag: Yor x Loid

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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 16 – “Yor’s Kitchen; The Informant’s Great Romance Plan”

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

I don’t like the term “mid.”

Not because things can’t be mediocre—they certainly can—but because I feel like it gets slapped down on the table as an all-purpose “I didn’t really like this and don’t feel like really explaining why” card. When most people say “mid” they can mean anything from “decent but not my thing” to “outright terrible.” Rarely will they bother to explain which they mean or why.

But, you know, I say all this, but sometimes the only adjective you can pull for something truly is “mid.” There were some good parts and some bad parts and the whole thing is kind of just not that great overall. It’s not terrible, certainly, but maybe it’s a sign of bad things to come. Or just an unusually weak spot in an otherwise fine show.

Thus, we have episode sixteen of Spy x Family, the first Yor-centric episode in quite a while and also, unfortunately, easily the least essential since the series came back from hiatus.

The episode’s basic plot is pretty simple, revolving around Yor secretly learning how to cook from her coworker Camille (remember her? She was first relevant way back in episode 2). What the episode wants to be about is the simple joy of home cooking, the knowledge that you’re preparing something for someone close to you and, in a very real way, putting your heart and soul into it.

This is all well and good, and when the episode hits its primary climax at about the 15 minute mark, it does hit well enough to feel roughly worth it. Yor ends up cooking a stew (topped with a fried egg!) of some kind for Anya and Loid, and it’s genuinely pretty cute.

But the problem is getting there. Between the start of the episode and this little story’s conclusion is a parade of iterations on what might be the most overdone joke in the entire shonen format; the classic “oh no, someone is bad at cooking and their food looks like unidentifiable purple gunk” gag.

“Twists” on the trope in this case include Yuri, Yor’s obnoxious younger brother, who of course co-stars in this episode, actually loving Yor’s terrible food because he grew up with it, and….well honestly that’s kind of it. There’s some other stuff where Yor has difficulty properly preparing ingredients because her assassin instincts kick in and she ends up essentially butchering them. It’s marginally more unique, but not really any funnier. A lot of this really just seems far too basic for something like Spy x Family, which has previously demonstrated both much stronger characterization than this and much stronger comedic chops. Why waste time on this?

Yor does, at least, get the jump on Loid in one important way here, in terms of character development. She is the first one to realize that her “fake” family now matters to her more than what it was originally a cover for, and her coming to terms with that is an easygoing kind of heartwarming that perhaps more of this episode should’ve aimed for.

So, we end up with a very weak series of gags leading up to an emotional beat that is nice but doesn’t entirely feel earned. Is that “worth” it? It’s hard to say.

But don’t worry, this is a double episode, because Yor isn’t allowed to be the protagonist of an entire 22-minute stretch of Spy x Family. That would be silly.

No, instead, the latter half of this episode is about Frankie.

Yeah.

Uncle Scruffy here spends his half of the episode trying to enlist Loid’s help in hooking up with a cigar shop employee with the mildly amusing name Monica McBride. Presumably her mother is named Molly McBride and she has two sisters named Matilda McBride and Mary McBride.

Loid’s help mostly consists of telling Frankie to be himself—he tries making a way-too-thorough conversational chart too, but, perhaps wisely, Frankie thinks using that would be weird. There are some decent gags here, like when the two are having a full-on shouting argument and a stage direction pops up onscreen to inform us that they’re actually whispering.

Also, Loid uses his disguise skills to turn into a spitting image of Monica herself. I have to say, holding this against the show is astoundingly unfair of me, but when I’m already a little cold on an episode, hitting me with the dysphoria pangs does not improve my assessment.

On the other hand, it proves that Loid Forger could have tgirl swag if he wanted to.

Naturally, Monica turns Frankie down. (Sidenote here; it would’ve been very funny for the joke instead to be that she likes little awkward fuzzballs, a sort of hairy version of an Android 18 / Krillin situation. But that would’ve put a win in Frankie’s column, which I suppose is unacceptable for some reason.) Loid then closes out the episode by making one of his little speeches about how “people like them” can’t afford to be emotionally attached to others. Sure, dude. Keep telling yourself that.

And that’s where we end for the week! Again, I don’t hate this episode or anything, but a lot of this is just not all that interesting. The more emotional moments are the highlights, but there aren’t really enough of them to bring it above mediocre. Thus, again we must turn to that dreaded descriptor; mid. This is a mid episode. If you put a gun to my head and made me score it out of ten, I’d give it an even 5.

But, hey, next week is an Anya episode, and it’s been a while since we’ve had any episodes taking place entirely at her school. Hopefully that will be fun.

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 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 13 – Project Apple

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

If it seems like Spy x Family never really left, that’s because for all intents and purposes, it basically didn’t. In practice, this episode marks the start of a second season, but on paper, what the series is doing here is a once-rare but increasingly-common split cour. Two batches of episodes considered to be part of the same “season” even though they air months apart. Confusing! But if it lets the animators rest their weary bones even a little, we should probably be accommodating.

In any case, from a plot and style point of view it definitely doesn’t feel like things have changed. Spy x Family’s second cour opens with dual plots about adopting a cute dog for Anya and preventing not-Willy Brandt from being assassinated by bomb dogs. Naturally, these two things collide into each other when Anya gets lost at a pet adoption event.

Yes.

It’s easy to forget, since the series leans pretty heavily on the “comedy” end of the “action comedy” spectrum, but there is some genuinely harrowing stuff that happens in Spy x Family. The terrorist plot is played pretty straight throughout this episode. Keith, the terrorists’ leader, is a no-nonsense right-wing extremist, and when Anya stumbles into his group’s hideout, he’s the only one who’s completely unhesitant in trying to kill her.

But Anya is nothing if not lucky (and, you know, telepathic). One of the other assets being kept by the terrorists is a living mountain of fur in dog form.

He doesn’t have a name yet, but he doesn’t need one to make a strong first impression here. He has precognitive abilities, and makes his debut in this episode by yanking a child away from a sign that was about to fall, immediately establishing him as a “good guy” dog. (Although, really, with how Spy x Family generally is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the other dogs introduced in this episode eventually turn face also. We shall see.)

Here, our canine friend heroically slinkies Anya down some stairs.

We also learn of the sinister Project Apple, from whence all these telepathic dogs (and apparently a fair amount of other weird science-enhanced animals) come from. It’s not a stretch to assume that this might have some link to Anya’s own powers.

Regardless, the episode ends mid-showdown, with Yor rescuing her daughter from the terrorists, and things setting up excitingly for next week. It’s good to have the series back, foot foot planted firmly on the gas, dead-set on sparking a sense of adventure in your heart once again. And really, for now, that’s all it needs to do.

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 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.