Tanner picked Spy x Family. I want to be clear about that because I feel like this is important context – I didn’t come in knowing what this show was gonna do to me, I just knew it looked funny and family-friendly and we needed something we could sit down and watch together without me having to explain a bunch of stuff. And the first few episodes delivered exactly that, like it’s genuinely hilarious and the animation is great and Anya’s faces are iconic, she’s basically a sentient meme with pigtails and I love her, and I figured okay this is just a good time.
And then somewhere around the middle of season one I was laughing a little less.
What the Show Is Actually About
Okay so if you somehow haven’t seen this one yet – and you should, I’m gonna be pretty light on spoilers here but just watch it – the setup is this: Loid Forger is a spy who needs to build a fake family as cover for a mission. He adopts a little girl named Anya, he enters a fake marriage with a woman named Yor. None of them know each other’s secrets. Anya is secretly a telepath, Yor is secretly an assassin, and Loid is running the whole thing as a tactical operation because that’s the only way his brain knows how to function.
The central comedy of Loid as a character is that he approaches fatherhood like a mission briefing. He has checklists. He runs probability calculations on which parenting decisions will produce the optimal outcome for his cover. There’s a bit where he’s internally evaluating the statistical likelihood of different after-school snacks affecting Anya’s exam performance and it’s genuinely funny because it’s so absurd, like who thinks like this, this man is broken in a very specific and entertaining way.
But here’s the thing. That bit – Loid treating fatherhood like a logistical puzzle he needs to solve – hit me in a spot the show probably didn’t intend to hit me in.
The Part That Actually Got Me
I spent two years and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars fighting in court just to get 50/50 time with Tanner. And I know that number sounds insane and I’m not exaggerating it, that’s what it actually cost when you factor in everything, and what I came out the other side with was the thing that Loid Forger literally manufactures from nothing because his job told him to. Equal time with my own kid. The default that should have just existed from the start.
So sitting there watching this guy treat fatherhood like a mission objective, treating it like something he’s enduring and managing and optimizing rather than something he fought for or wanted – I mean, it’s not that it made me angry, not at all, that’s not the right word for it, it’s more like… it just kept reminding me that some people really do have the luxury of taking it for granted. And I used to be one of those people before everything happened, so I’m not judging Loid, I’m not saying he’s a bad guy or whatever, the show isn’t saying that either. It’s saying something more interesting than that.
Because what the show is actually about – and this is where it stops being just a funny anime and starts being something else – is Loid discovering that he didn’t build a fake family. He built a real one and then lied to himself about what it was.
Every “tactical parenting decision” Loid makes just works as actual parenting. Because it turns out showing up is showing up. It doesn’t matter if you wrote it on a checklist or if you calculated the optimal response or if you’re doing it because your handler told you the mission required it. You show up consistently and you’re there and you pay attention and the kid feels it. The kid always feels it.
Anya Knows Everything
And here’s the layer that makes the show genuinely kind of devastating if you let it be, okay, bear with me here. Anya is a telepath. She can read minds. She knows Loid is a spy. She knows Yor is an assassin. She knows none of the family stuff is technically “real” in the way normal families are real.
And she is completely, absolutely, all-in on it anyway.
She chose this. She chose to treat it as real. She chose to call him Papa and work her hardest on the stuff that matters to him and be the kid who tries, because she’s a little girl who just wants a family and she will take it however it comes. And the show plays this as comedy because she’s running around trying to execute her dad’s mission without him knowing and it IS funny, but underneath it there’s this orphaned kid who sees the most clearly of anyone in the show and uses that clarity to commit harder, not less.
I dunno, I mean that wrecked me a little and I don’t fully know how to explain why except that there’s something about a kid who knows the situation isn’t perfect and decides to love it anyway that hits different when you’ve watched your own kid navigate stuff that kids shouldn’t have to navigate, you know what I’m trying to say.
Loid Forger Is Every Dad Pretending He Knows What He’s Doing
I need to talk about Loid specifically because this character hit me harder than I expected. Here’s a guy who is objectively one of the most competent people alive — master spy, genius-level intellect, capable of anything the mission requires — and the one thing that consistently breaks his brain is being a dad.
He doesn’t know how to handle Anya’s emotions. He doesn’t know what to say at parent-teacher conferences. He overthinks every interaction with his fake wife because he’s terrified of getting it wrong. And he keeps doing it anyway because the mission depends on it. Except at some point — and the show is brilliant about making this transition subtle — the mission stops being the reason. He keeps doing it because he actually cares about this weird little family he accidentally built.
That’s my entire experience of fatherhood. Nobody gives you a manual. Nobody tells you what to do when your kid is crying at 2am and nothing works. Nobody explains how to navigate co-parenting with someone you’re in a custody battle with. You just figure it out as you go and hope you’re not screwing it up too badly. Loid Forger is the most realistic portrayal of new fatherhood I’ve ever seen in fiction, and he’s a fictional spy in a comedy anime. That’s how weird life is.
The Found Family Thing Is Real
Spy x Family is technically about three strangers using each other for their own purposes. Loid needs a family for a mission. Yor needs a husband to avoid suspicion. Anya needs parents so she doesn’t go back to the lab. None of them chose each other out of love.
But the show spends its entire runtime showing you that the circumstances of how a family forms don’t determine how real it becomes. By the second season Loid is making decisions that actively compromise his mission because he can’t bring himself to hurt Anya. Yor is risking her life to protect people she was supposed to be pretending to care about. Even Anya, who knows everyone’s secrets and could theoretically blow up the whole arrangement, chooses to protect the family because she wants it to be real.
I think about this in the context of blended families, step-parents, adopted kids, and especially custody situations where the family structure isn’t what anyone planned. The shape of your family doesn’t determine its value. How you show up for each other does. Spy x Family never lectures about this. It just shows it through characters you can’t help caring about. That’s better than any after-school special ever made about what family means.
Why You Should Watch This With Your Kid (If You Have One)
I came back to anime after a long time away – I basically took a decade off and am in the middle of catching up on everything I missed – and what I keep finding is that the shows that hit the hardest as an adult hit hard in a way they couldn’t have when I was younger. Not because they’re better shows necessarily, but because I have more life to bring to them.
Spy x Family is funny and it’s got great action sequences and Yor’s combat stuff is legitimately insane in the best way, and if you just want to watch something entertaining with good animation and a lot of laughs then it absolutely delivers all of that. But if you’re watching it as a dad, especially if you’ve been through anything hard in the process of trying to be a dad, there are moments in this show that are gonna land in a different place than you expected.
Watch it with your kid if you can. There’s something kind of perfect about watching a show about a fake family becoming a real one with the person you built your actual life around. Tanner thinks Anya is hilarious, which she is, and I get to sit there thinking about all of this at the same time, and that’s kind of the best version of watching anime there is.
Spy x Family is two seasons in with a movie, all of it’s worth watching, go do it. If you’re starting tonight, watch it on Crunchyroll and don’t overthink it.
The Comedy That Sneaks Up on You
Spy x Family is genuinely one of the funniest anime I’ve watched and I think the comedy is part of why the emotional moments land so hard. You spend most of your time laughing at Anya’s face, at Loid’s inability to understand children, at Yor’s casual relationship with extreme violence, and at Bond just being a dog who can see the future.
Then without warning the show drops a moment that’s completely sincere. Loid watching Anya sleep and realizing he doesn’t want to give this up. Yor deciding she’d rather die than let someone hurt this family she barely knows. Anya knowing everyone’s secrets and choosing to protect them all because this fragile fake family is the first real thing she’s ever had.
The comedy makes you lower your guard. The sincerity walks right through the gap. It’s brilliant writing and I genuinely think more shows should study how Spy x Family manages tone shifts because it makes every emotional beat hit twice as hard.
Tanner would love this show if he were a little older. The spy stuff would hook him, Anya would make him laugh, and Bond the dog would become his favorite character immediately. I’m saving it for when he’s around eight or nine. Something to watch together on the couch during my custody weeks. Another thing to share.
The Verdict
Watch Spy x Family. Watch it with your partner. Watch it with your kids if they’re old enough. Watch it alone on a Tuesday night when you need something that makes you laugh and then quietly devastates you two minutes later. It’s the best show about family that doesn’t even have a real family in it, and somehow that’s the point.
I keep coming back to one specific thing about this show. Loid Forger is the most dangerous person in any room he walks into, and the thing that scares him most is a six-year-old girl’s feelings. He can overthrow governments but he can’t figure out what to say when Anya is sad. He can assassinate targets with surgical precision but he freezes up when she asks why other kids have normal families.
That contrast isn’t just funny. It’s true. Being competent at your job, being good at the hard things in life, being someone who can handle pressure — none of that prepares you for the raw vulnerability of raising a child. Tanner has brought me to my knees emotionally more times than any business failure or legal setback ever has. And Spy x Family captures exactly that feeling through a character who could literally save the world but can’t figure out how to pack a school lunch. Parenting is the great equalizer. This show gets it.
If you end up wanting more of the Forger family after finishing the season, the Spy x Family manga volumes are an easy pickup, and the Spy x Family Blu-ray makes sense if this is one of those shows you know you’ll rewatch.