The second half of Spy X Family is a lot of fun! The second cour focuses more on the slice of life aspect of the characters rather than the action. I get why that's a turn off for some - however I think the show really benefits from it. Seeing characters like Yor and her brother get fleshed out a little more was nice. Fiona is a really entertaining addition to the cast and though her time in the show was brief - her set of episodes were some of the best across the whole season.

If I had to list out some actual gripes, I do wish we saw Yor a little more. Like her character development in this half is nice, I really like her arc where she (tries) to learn how to cook. But she comes off as less of a "cool badass" like she did in the first cour and more of just "wife who happens to be really strong for some reason". Like if you only watched this second half of the first season (for whatever reason) I think you would only see her talk about her job as an assasain and not actually do any of it. Also something that sort of annoyed me is that there's this pretty good episode where Anya sends a code for people to meet at a certain spot. It's a pretty entertaining episode and ends on a bit of a cliffhanger which I was excited to see what happens next, but then it just. Goes nowhere? Like the next episode starts a new arc and I thought I had missed an episode.

Also want to talk about the music real fast. The OP/EDs are some of my favorite of the fall 2022 season. I almost never skip them. The actual OST for the anime is also really well done, as I've become familiar with this world over the past several months, a lot of it's background music has become stuck in my head.

I should mention that I didn't watch this weekly, I watched a few episodes at a time every couple of weeks. That sort of helped with the pacing a bit in my opinion. There are a lot of episodes that don't "contribute to the story directly" or whatever. Doesn't bother me but if you're one of those types that gets annoyed by that, I think it's worth mentioning. Something I've seen a few slice of life anime do is adapt 1 or 2 stories per episode. Spy X Family does this quite a bit in it's second cour, where for the first half of the episode it'll be about tense drama between Loid and Yor, and then the second half is just Anya and Becky shopping. I think they pull it off pretty well, but it can be a little jarring at times. But I think this show is best watched in batches of 2 or 3 episodes, really makes the filler feel less filler. I don't know if I prefer this half to the first half or not, but I intend on doing a rewatch of the whole thing to find out! If you haven't watched Spy X Family yet, do yourself a favor and give it a watch! It's a lot of fun.