Fun with Spy Family

What happens when you combine anime melodrama with hyper competent characters and 60s spy thriller plot arcs? You get an enormously entertaining show with massive potential.

I’ve really loved watching Spy X Family with my wife. We’ve related to the emotional roller coaster each of the characters experience, and had a lot of good laughs. The first season weaved through phenomenal adventures of a ‘family’ putting their daughter through an elite private school, and growing closer than they expected.

Spy family is about three exceptional individuals, a spy, an assassin, and a mind-reader, who come together as the Forger family. 

Code name, Twilight is a spy who takes on the alias of Loid Forger when he is assigned a mission to prevent a major conflict in the middle of a brimming war between the two countries, Westalis and Ostania. His daughter, Anya, is a recruit from a local orphanage, and succeeds in grabbing his attention because she uses her mind reading capabilities to her advantage.

Loid also recruits a woman, Yor, to pose as wife and mother to Anya. Yor is secretly an assassin for hire just trying to make ends meet, since she grew up as an orphan. Anya is a former orphan, who just wants to keep her family together. She, in fact, loves her fake parents all the more because she is completely and totally informed of their secret identities as assassin and spy

So all three individuals in the spy family have different ways of responding to their bizarre situation. The truth is they are lovable; their internal dialogue is incredibly relatable. Lloyd is goal oriented to the nth degree but he can't stop himself from seeing the needs of his fake daughter, Anya, or how impressed he his by fake wife. 

Yor wants desperately to keep her family together, and is terrified that when they find out she's an assassin, it will destroy them.

Anya is probably the least imposter although the fact that she keeps her mind reading to herself is quite a bombshell.

Interesting thing about imposter syndrome is it leads to all sorts of negative feelings on the basis of cognitive distortion. Usually people who are hard-working and well deserving of their accomplishments have this nagging idea that one day they could lose everything when people realize that it was nothing more than an act all along.

No one in the family is quite so plagued by the sense that she could lose everything as Yor. She is constantly aware of how her work as an assassin or her shortcomings could end her relationship with Loid. Despite her superhuman assassin skills, she always terrified she won’t measure up in the eyes of her family. Her self-doubt is so relatable and endearing.

There’s time to binge the first season before season two comes out in October 2023, followed by a full length film the following December. I can’t wait!