Spy X Family – Everything Is Important

Happy Christmas Eve everyone! Hope everyone has a good Christmas tomorrow and just has a good time with their family. Or if you are alone, I hope you still have a great day. The holidays are a busy time for everyone with work ramping up to hit the yearly or quarterly quotas, the customer service sectors of our economy busier and working more overtime than ever, and the tension of trying to find a good gift for the people that you love if you celebrate Christmas for that reason alone. With that sort of thought, I thought it would be good to celebrate this Holiday by looking at something family related. I don’t need an excuse for it, but the timing just works out.

So what is Spy X Family? I feel like you should know what it is instantly by looking at the title. It is that major crossroads between spy working and family. Loid Forge is a spy in Ostanian working for Westalis to break the peace. He just happens to need a family in order to find a way into becoming a major authority figure of the Ostanian Government by the way of Eden Academy. Loid finds a telepathic young girl named Anya to get into the school and then finds Yor, a person who is a person who works as a lower level government worker during the day and an assassin during the night time. I mean honestly, who hasn’t heard of this show by now?

What bothers me is how many people don’t seem to understand the show at all? I mean, it is still a very popular show and I am one of the people that really likes it. I love it as a manga as I keep up with it on purpose and the anime is a fair bit behind in quality because of the pacing can feel jarring to me, but it still feels like such a passion project for the two studios involved with its production. That problem being that it is interesting when people complain about filler or how they are waiting for the plot to kick in. Here is the thing about it, this is a generally a slice of life show that has action in it from spy cases which seem to happen. It is all Operation Stryx. 

Neither of those cases are filler or out of sync with what the show is trying to do. It all matters including Anya’s little stint at Eden Academy when trying to get closer to Damien through her very awkward antics. Plus, the Stella stars. Anya is a perfect little child who can read minds, but she doesn’t know how to act on what she hears in people’s minds at all. Anya is very cute, young, and awkward, so she doesn’t know how to act in a more positive way towards other people even with her mind reading. So none of these moments are wasted or “filler”, it is all serving towards getting Anya closer to completing her goal one awkward step at a time. 

While we are here about filler, there is a long standing tradition of what filler means. It is the original content in a show that is from a show following the manga. Whether that is throwing in filler arcs with anime about to catch up with the manga OR just original content put into the show itself. Almost nothing in Spy X Family is filler at all. There are very clear moments in the first cour, like the castle spy campaign or the added bits of fun before the dodge ball game that are filler. That’s about it, everything else has been following the manga pretty closely. Please, come up with a different word then filler because I am not letting go of what it is supposed to mean. 

So everything is built into the show to the point where they matter. It’s very smart in concept because of that fact. I get that the spy missions with action are more exciting because it feels more upfront and personal with its themes and not everyone is a slice of life fan, but both sides culminate in this thing called Spy X Family and it does jell together. I think that fact and it has a found family dynamic at its core is why it has gotten so big and attracted so much attention. You know, on top of it being quality goods. You can choose your favorite bits of Spy X Family, but it’s all Spy X Family regardless. Once again, have a great holiday everyone.