It’s hard to go wrong with an Anya-centric storyline. As wonderful as it’s been to get Loid’s difficult past and to see Yor steal the spotlight, Anya remains one of SPY x FAMILY‘s most endearing characters, as well as the one it’s easiest to get an entertaining plot out of. She’s the ultimate wild card, a little kid who thinks and acts like one, but who is also privy to adult thoughts, which she filters through her own particular worldview. We know what Loid and Yor are likely to do in any given situation. With Anya, there’s very little certainty.
That unpredictability forms the backbone of the main story in volume eleven. Anya is already feeling like maybe her role in the family is at risk now that Yor is befriending Damian’s mother, putting less urgency on her managing to get in Damian’s good graces. (In her own mind, at least.) That means that she feels like she has to step up her game, all unknowing that she’s already well on her way to capturing the prickly little boy’s heart, assuming she doesn’t have it already and he just can’t quite bring himself to admit it. (By volume twelve, this is looking more and more likely as he goes full Domyoji, Endo’s stated inspiration for the character.) She seems to be stuck in her usual pattern of Just Not Getting It when disaster strikes: two of the school buses the first graders are on heading to a field trip are hijacked by a terrorist group, including the one Anya and Damian’s class is on.
While most of Anya’s schemes go hilariously sideways, now is her time to shine. Armed with knowledge gleaned from her favorite cartoon and her dad’s mind, Anya is ready to rise to the occasion, ably supported by Becky, Damian, and Bill Watkins, the giant boy from the dodgeball storyline. The result is a heady mix of drama and absurdity, with just enough pathos to balance things out, which could be said to be SPY x FAMILY‘s proprietary blend of story elements. It also shows how clever these kids are: sure, the favored distraction tactic may be loudly proclaiming to the hijackers that they need to pee, but while one kid is doing that, Becky’s slipping a candy tin with a note taped to her student ID out the window to alert the authorities. When everyone is panicking, Bill is calmly telling everyone what to do, and of course Anya is reading the bad guys’ minds to figure out what’s really going on. Anya is the most proactive of the kids because of this skill, but that just makes Damian standing up to help her even more impressive, because he doesn’t know what they’re thinking and is just committed to getting them all out of the situation because Anya is going all out. It shows how well Anya, Damian, and Becky play off of each other, as well as the way that the kids keep the adults confused, and later, impressed.
Meanwhile, Becky’s note allows the adult world to figure out what’s going on, mobilizing the Blackbell Corporation, the police, WISE, and the State Security Service. The Family Portrait novel showed how Yuri could, as a character, rise above his creepy siscon roots, and this storyline does him a lot of favors on that front. As an SSS agent, he’s well-placed to help save the day, and even when he’s sidelined (read: tied to a column) to keep him from running off half-cocked, he’s thinking about Anya and how to save her. Yes, he’s mostly thinking about this in terms of how sad her death would make Yor, but ultimately, he does want to save two buses full of kids because it’s the right thing to do, and a piece of him does care about his niece, though you’d never know it from his housekeeping competition with Loid in an earlier chapter. All of the groups – SSS, Blackbell, police, WISE, and children – have to come together to save the day, and that’s not something we’ve really seen in this series before. Loid and Yor are more or less sidelined this time, but that seems to be on purpose; after all, if they’re present with their superhuman powers, there’s no way for anyone else to do anything.
The end of this storyline, which does wrap up in volume eleven, goes back to SPY x FAMILY‘s emotional sector, with the kids all immediately dissolving into tears the minute their families show up. This is particularly important with Damian; we’ve known for most of the series that his family seems to see him as “less than” and there’s a sense that he doesn’t expect either parent to come to get him. His mother does, but there’s something off about the entire situation based on Anya’s reading of her mind. Damian’s home life is clearly even more fraught than we knew, and that’s alarming even to Anya, who has a well-developed sense of what it means to be a kid at the mercy of adults whose motives aren’t always clear. It returns us to the theme that has popped up intermittently across the series, of the need for children to have adults they can trust and rely on, because it’s really looking like Damian doesn’t have that in a way that may be just as damaging to him as Anya’s early life was to her.
We see this expanded upon in the first chapter of volume twelve, which handles the aftermath. While Anya enjoys some newfound popularity for her role in the escapade, Damian is struggling with some very difficult emotions. As Becky astutely points out, one of those issues is fear of Anya being taken away from him, but he’s also still working through his relationship with his mother. She’s clearly very conflicted about her relationship with her younger son, and as a first grader, Damian is struggling to understand that. He may be brash, but he’s still a little boy who wants to be loved by his mother, and the mixed messages she sends him may be part of what attracts him to Anya, who is always as straightforward as possible, even when she thinks she isn’t.
The idea of hiding one’s true self is integral to any spy story, and volume twelve expands on that with a short chapter about Sylvia Sherwood (AKA Handler) and the start of a longer spy-based storyline. Sylvia’s chapter is very bittersweet, as it confirms what we may have suspected all along: that her daughter is no longer with her. While we still don’t know if the child is dead or simply with her father somewhere else in the living world, I feel it skews more towards her husband and child being deceased. Sylvia’s messy apartment, which she just can’t be bothered to clean, seems to be a sign of depression, and while she can’t help herself from doing things like adopting Aaron, the German shepherd from the initial Bond storyline, she also appears to be living solely for her work. Like Twilight, she may have been drawn to this career when something awful happened to her during the war, which helps to explain her investment in Operation Strix not just as a spymaster, but also as a person.
The major storyline of volume twelve is refocused on that when a mole steals sensitive documents and is on his way to turn them over to the SSS. Since the SSS knows that WISE is fully aware of the situation, things quickly escalate into a full-on spy battle, bringing the series back to its roots. This is the most intense the spy plot has been, because now Twilight has things to lose – namely, his life as Loid Forger and the people who come with it. But those people are also complicating things in a different way, because Twilight is going to have to go directly up against Yuri. Yuri may not be a great character, but this arc highlights why he’s an important one: he’s the single most difficult issue for Twilight to overcome, because if Yuri dies (and if Twilight kills him), there will be an effect on Yor. Even without knowing that she’s an assassin, Loid’s wife losing her brother could change Operation Strix in myriad ways, which makes Twilight’s work much more complicated. Endo, as always, does a remarkable job handling this, and the volume ends on a vicious cliffhanger.
While the other, shorter stories in these volumes are also good, even if they bring the unwelcome return of Fiona, she’s kept mostly in check, the hijacking and spy stories are the strongest. They use the series’ thematic elements well, including with the head hijacker and Yuri, and they broaden the story’s world by showing all of its most powerful elements working together, or at least at the same time. Add in some new Anya faces and the only thing missing here is more Bond. These are good entrie, showing that Tatsuya Endō‘s still got it even twelve volumes in.
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