Spy x Family is a beautiful anime isn’t it? It is a series about a spy in a mission for peace and he needs to get a (fake) family, all of which have their special quirk which they try to hide from the others, all the while trying to have a stable façade. It presents us with an episodic series which showcases us the difficulties and the beauty of having a family. Now, if I say this is a beautiful anime then why the low score? Well, the answer is easy, the series fails at developing these ideas in an interesting way or in a comedic one. At the end I will talk about what I thought was beautiful in the anime.

Anya is definitely the biggest selling point of the series, you don’t even need to watch this anime to know her, my little sister knows her name and I don’t even know how since she doesn’t watch this series. She is the biggest case for Spy x Family’s virality on social media due to her quirks like her faces. I have to give credit to her since she at least actually behaves like a child, I have seen many anime in which child just behave like the most saintly thing on the planet and if you have seen a little kid you know that isn’t true. Anya can read minds which she can use to take advantage of it in order to get some stuff she wants. Anya is the one that gives us an outlook of what everyone is thinking due to her powers and it is contrasted in that, since she is a child, she cannot grasp everything completely about the adult world or even in simple things like not knowing how to read a clock. Funny thing, a lot of the sources of her good points are actually sources of her bad points. Like I said at the beginning, her quirks are the main source of her popularity, but in no way are these funny, her faces are so overused that even if you found them funny it should be getting pretty old even before halfway the second cour, because they are sometimes the punchline of a joke or the entire joke in itself. The Anya centered episodes where there is no one else aside from her school friends are very boring to watch because Anya is the whole joke and the problem with that is that she isn’t funny, her faces are like dumb meme templates that stop being funny the same day you watched them.

Loid is proficient at everything he does except in one thing, which is the central theme of the series, he isn’t knowledgeable about how to be a parent because it is basically impossible to teach oneself how to be one unless you are one, he has to learn how to take care of Anya step by step. The situation of his mission is pretty much out of his hands since it comes from his child and his wife to stay on their script instead of him individually handling everything. The bad part with Loid isn’t the part with his family, but rather when he is alone. Remember that I said that he is good at everything? Well, exactly that, not only the series fail to make his spy persona interesting since he is basically flawless in this aspect so we know he will always be fine even in missions and fights, but also it fails to do it comically. Just a little example in this part, in episode 6, Loid goes undercover to Anya’s school to change the answers of her test to make her pass the exam, but in his way he finds another spy (whose name I had to check) called Daybreak, then this goes about him just watching Daybreak being stupid while saying he is a better spy than Twilight which I suppose was supposed to be funny but it came out as lame and silly, it was really hurtful to see, because the boke and tsukkomi type of jokes barely work when half of the time they aren’t even interacting directly. He is still my favourite member of the cast, however, since he is the one with the best moments.

I remember I had problems at the start with the fact that he couldn’t catch up of Yor’s real identity despite even witnessing her super strength multiple times, but I came to realize that I was being dumb there and it makes perfect sense that he can’t discover it, after all, if I wasn’t told in episode 2, I wouldn’t be able to tell it either because Yor never does something related to her assassin job. And this leads us to another of the main characters, Yor. Ever since the start, Yor has been the character I have had the more issues with, she is quickly reduced to one big joke that isn’t funny, she is the weakest character of the main cast due to being like a third wheel in a bicycle, but not only she is a third wheel, she is a deflated wheel. You see, I had some hopes with Yor after episode 2 of the series, which I honestly think was one of the best ones, as you can get the gist of her character there: she is an assassin that hides herself and that she is dumb/veeeery naïve, but I think I underestimated how dumb she can be. You see she seems ret*rded, no joke, and I think I should have noticed this by episode 2 where Yor, you know, the assassin, saw as if it wasn’t a problem to kick your patients and throw them grenades. But then, in episode 2, you see another side of her, a very strong and serious side of her when she is in her assassin job, which doesn’t align with anything else you see of her. This is to have 2 things, the badassery of a strong girl and the dumbness and naïvetés of an innocent girl, which, if you didn’t catch it, is to appeal as many people as possible to like her despite being a failure as a character due to her portrayal.

As I hope you can see, there are many questions about Yor that aren’t answered at all. There is no answer as to why she is an assassin at all, we know that she needed money to take care of his brother, but in no way this suddenly justifies her being an assassin when she could take any number of civilian jobs instead. You also have her being super strong beyond any human, which is used as one of her main gags, and guys, this wasn’t funny in a series like One Punch Man, it is even less here, we aren’t even given a reason as to why she is very strong, it is related to her being an assassin or did she become an assassin because she is strong? We don’t know because Yor’s job as an assassin is never shown. She is not interesting, the episode where she learns how to cook, while I see it as a nice attempt for her to be a better wife, it is told like an unfunny joke “haha, she cook so bad”, but I think she has potential to grow like actually developing normal levels of human intelligence, like there is this part in episode 8 of the second cour where Anya asks her about her job, and Yor in all of her wisdom comes to the great question of whether she should tell Anya about her job, which she uses as a cover for people not to suspect about her assassin job or about her job as an assassin which she is trying to hide, and I think I lost some braincells there, because it seems this is just too hard to think for her despite the answer being quite obvious. Things like this is what makes me feel disappointed, not only her side as Yor the housewife is uninteresting, her side as Yor the assassin is superfluous.

Later in the season you get this new character, she is called Fiona and she is also a spy and one of Loid’s coworkers. When we get to see her, we immediately are shown that she is madly in love with Loid, because this is exactly what Spy x Family needed, a new love interest that’s also going to go nowhere, because of course, Yor isn’t developed so we now need a new girl to not get anything from her either. She wants to replace Yor as a wife since she thinks she would be much better than her, and I wouldn’t disagree since she isn’t making me lose braincells with her actions and she knows what is at stake, but she acts as emotionless as she can, so somehow Yor has more of a personality. This leads us to what she accomplishes: absolutely nothing. Her own character doesn't get to be funny because she is too exaggerated and at the same time not, because she always shows herself as stoic and her mind is the one that exaggerates things, making it painful to digest, and she shares the biggest problem I have with Loid, which is she is basically perfect at what she does, which made the tennis matches boring to watch because for their opponents to not even be equals they had to make like a hundred traps, so the tennis tournament where she was with Loid were tensionless and we got nothing from it.

The animation is fine, WIT episodes look better than Cloverworks episodes to no one’s surprise, and you can even see which studio is the one that is handling it without getting to the credits, you can notice it even by just looking at the background most of the time. The visuals of the opening are on fire, they are great but the song is not, it is like something is lacking on there, meanwhile the ending is the better one as in the previous cour.

Don’t think I didn’t like moments in Spy x Family, as I said at the beginning, this is a beautiful anime with some wholesome moments that I will surely remember as much as it fails in other important aspects. Moments like Loid being happy and lifting Anya after she passed her entrance in the school, when Anya gives Bond a name which was cute to watch, when Loid tells to Yor about his mother… but my favourite moment in Spy x Family is at the end of episode 9 of the first cour, where it showcases a pretty nice conversation between Loid and Yor talking about how many people fake their way of being putting themselves in a role and that he thinks Yor should continue being herself, Loid feeling guilty for doubting about Yor before and throwing the mic he put on her, it was a moment that actually put a smile in my face and that I will surely not forget because of how nice it felt.

Thank you for reading.