The Spring 2022 anime season’s biggest hit is already obvious. Spy x Family wowed fans in its first episode with its unique characters and wacky premise: that a family of spies accidentally build a family to their own ends, each without the others knowing, is poised to follow through on all the comedic possibilities therein.
If all the Anya-posting across anime fandom the past week was any indication, Spy x Family is full of loveable characters. And while we have yet to meet all of them in the anime streaming on Crunchyroll, the ongoing manga by Tatsuya Endo published in English by Viz Media offers us a fuller understanding of what each member of the Forger family’s secret identity really is.
Agent Twilight is a Westalian operative and master of disguise working for the nations intelligence agency, WISE. He’s at the spearhead of the nation’s information war with the neighboring nation Ostania. On his latest mission, codenamed Operation Strix, Twilight must learn about Estonia’s National Unity Party President Donovan Desmond. To do so, he has just a week to build the Forger family and get his child enrolled in a prestigious school that Desmond’s son attends.
Twilight catches something of a break in meeting Anya, a pink-haired girl at an orphanage who’s display of intellect catches his attention. It turns out, though, that Anya isn’t knowledgeable, she was just able to read Twilight’s mind. Anya’s backstory involves being a test subject who, under mysterious circumstances, develops telepathy. She ran away from the adults who experimented on her, however, and named herself Anya in order to have a normal childhood.
A child was somehow the easy part for Twilight. After Anya passes the school’s entrance exam, Twilight’s tasked with a more daunting challenge — getting married. To complete their totally normal family, Twilight has to find someone who would be willing to marry quickly, like, say, another operative. That’s when he meets Yor “Thorn Princess” Briar, an assassin who agrees to Twilight’s proposal for a fake marriage. Yor, who works undercover in the city hall, doesn’t know about Twilight’s mission and believes Anya is his child from a past relationship.
And then there’s Bond, the family dog who even has his own backstory. A Great Pyrenees and all-around good boy, Bond was also the subject of experiments that left him with the ability of foresight. That comes in handy with Anya’s telepathy, since she can see into the future by reading his thoughts.
Spy x Family is only just beginning, so we can look forward to much more shenanigans in the Forger family’s future together.