Episode 30 – Spy×Family Season 2

Despite being one of the central three characters in the story, Yor hasn’t gotten much time to shine. That may be because “____ by day, assassin by night” is a far more common plot trope than either Loid or Anya’s stories, but it could also simply be because her husband and daughter are scene stealers – even in this first episode of Yor’s arc, Anya and Loid get the flashier sequences. (And Loid’s concern about asking for time off is one of the more spot-on moments in this series.) But just because Yor is a quieter character than the other two doesn’t mean that she won’t get her time to shine, and we can already see that being carefully constructed here in the fact that the woman she’s guarding has learned to place family over anything in the worst possible way.

That only puts her one or two steps ahead of Yor. She became Thorn Princess because she cared about her only remaining family, Yuri, and now that he’s (physically) grown up, she’s beginning to rethink her options. When she was raising Yuri, Yor didn’t have many options for keeping him clothed, housed, and fed; she needed a well-paying job before she was old enough to hold one down, and the political and social turmoil led her to find a shady career. But now she has a steady job in a civic field and a husband who makes a good living. Is it worth the risk of death to maintain her assassin persona?

Yor’s already thinking about this before she meets Olka, AKA Shaty. The job lends itself to that sort of reflection – Shaty lost her husband and older child due to the violence inherent in their line of work. Now she’s fleeing the country to try to preserve her life and her baby’s, and Yor can’t help but see at least a little of her potential future in Shaty’s predicament. Even without knowing that Loid is Twilight, Yor’s own identity as Thorn Princess could one day mean that she’ll be killed, leaving her husband and daughter behind. She sees the emotional toll that’s taken on Shaty, as well as the physical one: she had to change not only her name but her entire appearance (possibly surgically?) to ensure that her son would survive. It’s easy to see that Yor is thinking about being put in the same position someday, with her death endangering Loid and Anya even as it takes her away from them. It’s not a comfortable thought, although it is one that she never had the luxury of thinking about before.

In some ways, it puts her much more on Anya’s level. As the sole person who knows everything that’s going on, Anya has been worried about losing her new family almost from the start, even if she filters that through her limited (but awful) life experience. We’ve seen Anya worry about being returned to the orphanage, even though it’s usually played off as something on the silly side, so now to see Yor starting to think through the potential consequences of her lifestyle gives us a chance to see how much the Forger family means to her. Loid is the only one who truly doesn’t grasp how important this once-sham family is in his life, which makes it a very good thing that he’s got Sylvia for a boss. She and the other WISE employees try to pass off Loid’s shipboard vacation as a crackdown on overtime, but we can see that what Sylvia wants is for him to have a vacation with his daughter. From things she’s said before, we know that she’s fully aware of how important family is.

This episode does a good job of setting up the arc to come while maintaining the series’ trademark blend of serious and silly. Anya announcing that the ship’s going to sink (a very five-year-old assertion to make in my experience) juxtaposes well with the danger of someone leaving bugs all over the vessel to trap Shaty, and Loid may end up getting the vacation he’s preparing for rather than the one Sylvia intended. Either way, this is going to be Yor’s time to shine, so stick around, and not just wonder why “Shaty” is such a popular name.

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