Spy×Family

Episode 7

I'm not sure that Twilight has ever been in this situation before: his undercover spy life has become consumed by the cover story he's operating under. That it's something he's only now really coming to understand would indicate as much; while we don't know much about his prior missions, this one seems like much more of a long game, and part of that is that he has to really inhabit his role as Loid Forger, psychiatrist, husband, and father. It's that last one that keeps getting to him; Yor may be a little odd, but he's certainly interacted with adult women before, even in romantic situations. But his interactions with Anya feels more unusual, to the point where some of his assumptions or the conclusions that he jumps to seem to indicate that he's rarely, if ever, spent time with children since he no longer was one himself. He appears to truly believe that the kids in Anya's class are basically just tiny adults, and is he ever getting a lesson in the unpredictability of children. While his thought that Becky is actually a counter-agent sabotaging his (Anya's) mission is funny, his assumption that Damien will just graciously forgive Anya for her transgressions against his person is laughable in a totally different way. We don't know Damien well yet, but it seems pretty obvious that's not Mr. Live and Let Live.

He is a great parody of the tsundere shoujo romance hero, though. Watching this poor kid trying to work through his strange new feelings is quite something, with the old “there's something wrong with my heart” gag coming out to play alongside him screaming the exact opposite thing that he actually feels. That takes some of the sting out of poor Anya's emotional breakdown, which is yet another very good demonstration of how her psychic powers affect her. We've seen her have a panic attack in a crowd because there was just too much overwhelming information flooding her mind, and now her tears show us how hurtful it is to hear what other people know better than to say out loud. Tellingly, she doesn't pick up on Damien's thoughts (possibly because he's too freaked out to be thinking in words), but his friends' cruel comments threaten to sink her self-confidence as she struggles to do the one thing she knows she has to. She's only about five years old; she doesn't have a nuanced grasp of why it's so important to Loid that she befriend Damien. She just knows that it'll be bad if she doesn't, as if it's the monster lurking under the bed – she doesn't know what it'll do to her, but she knows it's there and that it's scary.

That makes Becky a very needed character. She hasn't done much so far (aside from annoy Loid), but Anya desperately needs someone in her corner at school, and Becky definitely is. You might think that Loid infiltrating Eden College would help, but that brings us back to that whole dad thing that he's having trouble with; he's so fixated on the end goal of the mission that he's not thinking about what needs to happen to get there, namely that he needs to be the father who can help Anya succeed. Arguably that's the most important part of his job, because without Anya, he's not getting close to Donovan Desmond. But it's also vital to both Loid and Anya as people; neither of them have had the kind of life that helps them be emotionally healthy, and I'd say that Loid needs Anya as much as she needs him. Yor then becomes the glue that helps to hold them together, as we see when she gently tells Loid that maybe there's a better way to kindly guide Anya in the right direction. She's grounding him as he's been feeling increasingly unmoored and out of his depth from the moment he became Anya's dad. Yor having raised her younger brother makes her uniquely qualified to help point Loid where he needs to go…even if her way of visualizing fractions is terrifying.

And speaking of Yuri, he's just gotten the shock of his life. Meeting the in-laws is a tricky proposition even when you aren't all hiding secret professions. I think Loid's going to need more than just his disguise skills to get through his new brother-in-law's visit next week.

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Spy×Family is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.