(CR) Spy X Family

[Frontier]

Originally Posted by serenade_beta

Is this anime original? Yeaaah, it's anime original.
It's entertaining to me how sometimes it is so obvious when something is anime original.

...Like when they drag a farce on for half an episode
Not just this anime. Like Takagi-san and Nagatoro-san's dream sequence. Well, one spent an entire episode, not half. Man, don't know what they are thinking. Put all of your effort in animating this manga, advertising like hell, and hmm... Let's not animate the manga after all!

I dunno, I feel like most anime-onlies would probably not realize it's anime original anymore than they did the anime original content in episode 3. At the very least it's just expanding on a sequence that was actually in the manga (which I think was true for Nagatoro I believe).

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

Anya isn't so petty and spoiled that she would have stopped cooperating for the sake of the mission just because Loid wouldn't have given her an entire castle to play in with several attendants playing along.

I don't think it's a matter of being petty and spoiled so much as just being a little girl getting a chance to have fun and her dad being forced to go along with it .

[ryllharu]

Originally Posted by Frontier

I don't think it's a matter of being petty and spoiled so much as just being a little girl getting a chance to have fun and her dad being forced to go along with it .

At least what we've seen so far, Anya is deeply manipulative because her telepathy gives her the chance to be. It's just that her end goal is usually her own personal entertainment with the opportunity that landed in her vicinity (getting a spy and an assassin as her surrogate parents).

Her earlier trauma going back and forth to the orphanage gave her these skills and the need to manipulate others to maintain her secret and not look creepy. It's present, but the backstory for that behavior was efficiently set up.

The fact that Loid and Yor are both inwardly good people who mean well despite what they do and how they came together, means Anya's manipulative nature has low consequences thus far...aside from a very large bill to WISE.

edit: She wants to keep her new family together, but otherwise, she wants to enjoy what she's never had before.

[zztop]

Spy X Family's mangaka talks a bit about the world setting :
https://ayakuweb.com/?p=496

[serenade_beta]

Originally Posted by Frontier

I dunno, I feel like most anime-onlies would probably not realize it's anime original anymore than they did the anime original content in episode 3. At the very least it's just expanding on a sequence that was actually in the manga (which I think was true for Nagatoro I believe).

I only watch the anime, but when they started to move HQ for the sake of Anya's... whatever and repeated the sequence and Yoru remains drunk the entire time, my eyebrow started to raise.
Putting aside the tricking HQ thing being just off, when an anime that usually doesn't repeat its jokes suddenly starts doing it, those are red flags

[ryllharu]

Yor did drink like two full bottles of wine before Franky even proposed renting the castle, much less the rest of what ended up happening.

That part is faithful.

[Frontier]

Originally Posted by serenade_beta

I only watch the anime, but when they started to move HQ for the sake of Anya's... whatever and repeated the sequence and Yoru remains drunk the entire time, my eyebrow started to raise.
Putting aside the tricking HQ thing being just off, when an anime that usually doesn't repeat its jokes suddenly starts doing it, those are red flags

I think it was more of a theme or plot than a repeated gag, but that's just me .

[bakato]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

This is so wrong on so many levels.

Anya isn't so petty and spoiled that she would have stopped cooperating for the sake of the mission just because Loid wouldn't have given her an entire castle to play in with several attendants playing along.

Moreover at no point it was stated that the mission requires Anya to be an exceptional student. All that it was necessary was for her to be a student in that school.

The rest is about Loid, not Anya. Loid needs to get close to Donovan Desmon, and while Anya becoming friend of his son would help, nobody said that it is necessary.
Because it was clearly stated that Loid would need to approach Donovan during social gatherings and his presence there can be justified just by being one of the parents of the children attending the prestigious school.

I don't see any evidence that suggests that Anya's role isn't pretty much done, all she needs to do is avoiding getting expelled or causing unnecessary trouble, which shouldn't be that hard. Loid is assuming that Anya is a very smart child, the reality is that she can read people's mind, but it doesn't matter, the fact remains that she can't possibly perform badly given her ability.

...I didn't say cooperative. I said motivate.

And exceptional school will have exceptional standards. This is the same school that bribes its students to get stuck in sewage to weed out examinees. If she get gets 30 points on all her exams, she won't be a student for very long.

This telepathic, 4 year-old child attracts little else but trouble. Her ability got her returned to an orphanage after being adopted FOUR times. If anything her telepathy is a liability.

Originally Posted by ryllharu

At least what we've seen so far, Anya is deeply manipulative because her telepathy gives her the chance to be. It's just that her end goal is usually her own personal entertainment with the opportunity that landed in her vicinity (getting a spy and an assassin as her surrogate parents).

Her earlier trauma going back and forth to the orphanage gave her these skills and the need to manipulate others to maintain her secret and not look creepy. It's present, but the backstory for that behavior was efficiently set up.

The fact that Loid and Yor are both inwardly good people who mean well despite what they do and how they came together, means Anya's manipulative nature has low consequences thus far...aside from a very large bill to WISE.

edit: She wants to keep her new family together, but otherwise, she wants to enjoy what she's never had before.

What show have you been watching? It's been well established since the first episode that Anya is a child first before a telepath. She's reacted to every thought of significance she picked up with little regard as to how she might look. Whether it's standing on tip toes in response to Loid thinking she was too short for a 6 year-old, hiding under a sign when Loid offhand thinks about how inconvenient holding her hand was, or offering up her preferred foods in response to his thought about learning more about her. Hell, she nearly outed herself as telepathic when she argued against needing to study. Telepathy is just a conversation for her. This is 4 year-old child-level intelligence.

She has no such skills. Period. The orphanage owner thought she was creepy. She was returned after being adopted FOUR times.

I have to question the intelligence of anyone who calls her deeply manipulative.

[ryllharu]

Originally Posted by bakato

What show have you been watching? It's been well established since the first episode that Anya is a child first before a telepath. She's reacted to every thought of significance she picked up with little regard as to how she might look.

This is 4 year-old child-level intelligence.

She has no such skills. Period. The orphanage owner thought she was creepy. She was returned after being adopted FOUR times.

I have to question the intelligence of anyone who calls her deeply manipulative.

Thank you for confirming that, intellectually, you know what a young child is, but have never experienced one firsthand.

[serenade_beta]

Originally Posted by ryllharu

Yor did drink like two full bottles of wine before Franky even proposed renting the castle, much less the rest of what ended up happening.

That part is faithful.

Originally Posted by Frontier

I think it was more of a theme or plot than a repeated gag, but that's just me .

My alarms were already going off when they did the HQ joke twice.
But that was probably partially because abusing the HQ joke itself felt like a change in... I don't know, "feel" from the anime so far

[FlareKnight]

Originally Posted by Frontier

Honestly, even if it leaned more into a bit of absurdist comedy, it didn't really feel that tonally out of place to me for this series, and like with the other filler, it's building up the family bond/dynamic in a fun way and putting them in crazy situations. So it worked for me .

Plus, drunk Yor is worth the price of admission .

Yeah, I'm fine with it. This series hardly has the strongest tether to realism. One of the main characters is a telepath! Reality kind of went out the window at that point . Yor is downright supernatural with what she can do as well. This franchise exaggerates for the sake of entertainment and this whole fooling around while rescuing Anya thing is completely fair game for it.

I get wanting a 1:1 adaptation. But it's an adaptation. Things are going to be added, cut, and moved around to make the episodes work. Sticking to the script and ending this episode part way through where the next one will end up isn't necessarily going to make the better episode.

It had a bit of fun while continuing to build things up with the family. Seems fine by me.

Originally Posted by serenade_beta

My alarms were already going off when they did the HQ joke twice.
But that was probably partially because abusing the HQ joke itself felt like a change in... I don't know, "feel" from the anime so far

Not that it's unfair to feel that way. But funnily enough the things that raised alarms and red flags were in the source material. But honestly I think it also fits alright within the feel of the series. It's as ridiculous as the spy organization having such insane expectations of Twilight that in almost no time they expect him to find a kid capable of getting into a super elite school, find a wife, and have them set to clear any issues with getting into that school. And also clear extra missions they throw on his plate at the exact same time. Their demands of him are incredible and so are their expectations. So having HQ just go along with absolutely ridiculous requests from him in turn fits for me.

All they did was expand on bits that were already set up. A more over the top situation, but only to a certain degree.

[Jan-Poo]

Originally Posted by Frontier

I don't think it's a matter of being petty and spoiled so much as just being a little girl getting a chance to have fun and her dad being forced to go along with it .

Yeah, except "forced" isn't the proper word, or at least it needs to be contextualized. I'll elaborate more on my answer below:

Originally Posted by bakato

...I didn't say cooperative. I said motivate.

And exceptional school will have exceptional standards. This is the same school that bribes its students to get stuck in sewage to weed out examinees. If she get gets 30 points on all her exams, she won't be a student for very long.

I'm not arguing that Anya doesn't need any motivation at all, but I'm very strongly arguing that she's not the kind of child that needs that much to be motivated, not even remotely close.
Until this episode she didn't really get anything special, the mere fact of living together with a spy and an assassin, plus the occasional peanuts were more than enough to motivate her. And if the "carrot" wasn't enough the prospect of returning to the orphanage in case the mission fails is likewise a powerful "stick" that she certainly didn't forget.


At any rate to claim that for Loid to go that far for Anya was necessary for the mission completely misses the point of the whole latest episode.

There is a recurrent theme of Loid becoming less and less a cold calculating spy and more and more a hot-blooded person who acts on impulse whenever someone touches his "family".

In the case of Anya specifically he's been changed from a professional spy into a man who dotes so much on her daughter that he simply can't say no to her even when her requests are absolutely absurd. So it is from this perspective that he was "forced" to do what he did in the latest episode, not from the perspective of a spy who needs to do anything for the sake of the mission.

In fact while Loid explicitly or implicitly used the mission as an excuse to get all the funds and men to give Anya what she wanted, at no point in his thoughts he showed to believe that himself.

In the end I think that the fact that Loid was willing to go that far for Anya and specifically for Anya, not for the mission, to that over the top and absurd degree in contrast to what he would be supposed to really do as Spy with a very important mission, is exactly what it is intended to make the whole situation funny.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

I don't see any evidence that suggests that Anya's role isn't pretty much done

I doubt that's the case. Her first task will presumably be to befriend the son of the target. Telepathy could help with this a lot.

[Jan-Poo]

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

I doubt that's the case. Her first task will presumably be to befriend the son of the target. Telepathy could help with this a lot.

Well, like I mentioned before, that would certainly help, but the mission Loid was assigned never mentioned that and so it isn't strictly necessary.

I guess Anya might end up helping more for the mission, and there might be unforeseeable events that will require a more active role than anticipated from her, but the point I was making is that Loid as of now only needs her to avoid getting expelled or create some problems.

[bakato]

Originally Posted by ryllharu

Thank you for confirming that, intellectually, you know what a young child is, but have never experienced one firsthand.

I've witnessed yours.

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

I'm not arguing that Anya doesn't need any motivation at all, but I'm very strongly arguing that she's not the kind of child that needs that much to be motivated, not even remotely close.
Until this episode she didn't really get anything special, the mere fact of living together with a spy and an assassin, plus the occasional peanuts were more than enough to motivate her. And if the "carrot" wasn't enough the prospect of returning to the orphanage in case the mission fails is likewise a powerful "stick" that she certainly didn't forget.

At any rate to claim that for Loid to go that far for Anya was necessary for the mission completely misses the point of the whole latest episode.

There is a recurrent theme of Loid becoming less and less a cold calculating spy and more and more a hot-blooded person who acts on impulse whenever someone touches his "family".

In the case of Anya specifically he's been changed from a professional spy into a man who dotes so much on her daughter that he simply can't say no to her even when her requests are absolutely absurd. So it is from this perspective that he was "forced" to do what he did in the latest episode, not from the perspective of a spy who needs to do anything for the sake of the mission.

In fact while Loid explicitly or implicitly used the mission as an excuse to get all the funds and men to give Anya what she wanted, at no point in his thoughts he showed to believe that himself.

In the end I think that the fact that Loid was willing to go that far for Anya and specifically for Anya, not for the mission, to that over the top and absurd degree in contrast to what he would be supposed to really do as Spy with a very important mission, is exactly what it is intended to make the whole situation funny.

From the very beginning, Loid has professed to have no understanding of Anya and who could blame him? Few could claim to have any understanding of the capricious mind of a child, much less master it. Loid's used to dealing with predictable, reasonable adults so he's totally out of his element. There's no doubt he's is getting attached to her, his outburst during the interview made that clear enough. But when it comes to Anya's role in his ultimate mission, Loid is at a complete loss as to how to get her to do as he wants. So when it comes to rewarding her for her acceptance into Eden, it's not unreasonable to say he has no notion of restraint and goes all out.

What happened in this episode isn't quite as extreme when you take the chain of events into account. At first, it was just renting an expensive castle complete with air transportation. But Loid really didn't think this through, so when they actually got there and it was empty, Anya's big reward turning into the biggest disappointment threatened to crush her morale. Renting the castle again would've been expensive and wouldn't undo the damage this fiasco would've done to Anya, so calling in backup wasn't unreasonable.

So really, this excessive reward was necessary because of Loid's screw up.

[aldw]

WRT the manga's execution vs the anime's episode 5, I thought the simplicity of the manga version worked better in terms of keeping closer to realism vs the anime's more over the top execution, but I expect opinion to be split on that given the elements of gag humor vs realism the series tries to balance.

As for long term predictions, given the nature of the setting and the source material inspirations, it wouldn't surprise me if the final chain of events to bring Loid and Yor together isn't them simply finding out each other's true identities in light of conflicting mission orders, but rather facing a SPECTRE-style third party that neither one can defeat on their own and requires them to work in harmony to defeat. That I think works better in building on the spirit of the story.

[SeijiSensei]

Loid does some moonlighting as a fashion model.

[Frontier]

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

Loid does some moonlighting as a fashion model.

Best Dad of the season .

[Ghosty 404]

Even if I don't think he is very in to the idea, it does show off the facade that they are affluent. Who would book a castle for a party to celebrate his daughter's entry in to a prestigious school ? As well, Hiring how many people to be part of the event ? Any one watching is going to notice this. This guy is affluent and has the money to do this. Major in among the uppity mucky mucks

[videoman190]

YouTube

https://youtu.be/ONhiYiI8_zw

Sorry; dynamic content not loaded. Reload?

[Decel]

Originally Posted by Ghosty 404

Even if I don't think he is very in to the idea, it does show off the facade that they are affluent. Who would book a castle for a party to celebrate his daughter's entry in to a prestigious school ? As well, Hiring how many people to be part of the event ? Any one watching is going to notice this. This guy is affluent and has the money to do this. Major in among the uppity mucky mucks

Ohh good point. I didn't think of it from that angle.