Spy x Family vol. 10

The back half of this volume is more or less what you’d expect from this series.  There’s a one-off where Loid’s spymaster boss has to foil an attack on a VIP while imparting a lesson about the subjective nature of truth to one of her subordinates.  Anya also gets to spend some time with the Headmaster of Eden Academy as he tries to find out what’s going on in her head, only to realize there’s not much there.  Yor goes on a shopping trip to get some cakes while trying to be as normal as possible.  Naturally, this leads her into a group of moms who recruit her as a ringer for their volleyball match, with one mother having a role that’s more critical to the main plot than you’d expect.  All of this is executed as slickly and with the same sharp comic timing that “Spy x Family” has effortlessly shown off for the past ten volumes.

However, it’s the first three chapters that are likely going to stick in readers’ minds, and not because they’re what I’d call “good.”  These chapters effectively detail the earliest days of Twilight’s backstory and show us how he went from being a kid who played war with his friends to being recruited by Westalis’ Military Intelligence for his skill at lying.  It’s not that what happens to him doesn’t make sense, but the seriousness with which it’s depicted feels REALLY out of place in a series that’s built out of the silliest parts of “Bond” (BORF!) movies – let alone what comes after here.

Is mangaka Tatsuya Endo feeling fenced in by the world he’s created?  Or is he trying to broaden its scope to allow for the possibility of telling more serious stories.  I feel for the man if the former is the case, but the part of Loid’s origin depicted here doesn’t make a really good case for adding more drama to this series.  If Endo really wants to tell a straightforwardly dramatic story about the awfulness of war, he’d be better off doing it in a series that doesn’t feature a dog who can see the future.