Spy x Family has an incredibly unique and original premise where a guy who has spent his entire life as a spy has to be part of a family.
*pause*
Wait, didn't Jackie Chan do that in 2010? (Onscreen: The Spy Next Door)
People say that “Spy x Family has a good premise,” and…I agree but I also think there’s more to it than that. Because it’s not really possible to have a good premise…depending on how you use the word premise. That’s the thing about these pesky writing terms like “premise,” “character development” and “pacing.” Nobody’s looking these terms up in the dictionary before they use them, and even if they did, we’d all still have slightly differing concepts of them in our heads. As a result of this I think a lot of discussion about storytelling and critique gets bogged down in arguments about the language we use to discuss rather than the actual subject. So rather than debate with you about what a “premise” is…let me try to explain what I mean by “premise” in this particular instance, because that’s what I’m making a point about.
What I’m talking about is the basic concept behind a story, essentially the idea from which it was spawned. For example, the premise of Spy cross Family is that a spy must form an eccentric family to complete his mission. This isn’t necessarily the first idea the writer had about a story, but it is the one that they keep going back to as the core concept that they’re trying to execute on. And I think sometimes that initial idea is overvalued.
One of the best things that you can learn as a burgeoning writer or artist of any kind is that ideas are cheap. The simple fact of the matter is that humans have been on the planet making art for far too long for anyone to possibly have an original idea. As writer Matthew Cheney puts it in his essay on writer’s block, “The last person to be original was Gilgamesh.” Think of something completely fresh and original, and chances are, it’s either so experimental and out there that it won’t connect with audiences, or it’s been done before.
Which is why it doesn’t really make sense to use the word “trope” as a critique in and of itself. The mere presence of a trope in a story isn’t automatically a flaw. All a trope is a storytelling convention, a nugget of narrative that the audience can reasonably be expected to recognize or to have seen before. Stories are made of tropes. Dialogue is a trope. So are villains. If you tried to write a completely original story without using any tropes…you would fail.
But if ideas are cheap and original ideas are practically impossible, then how are there things that feel fresh and original, like Spy times Family? Well that depends. Sometimes something will feel fresh and original just because it’s been awhile since you’ve seen something like it, even if lots of things exactly like it exist elsewhere. Something can also feel extremely fresh if it’s being released in spaces or circumstances that don't normally see anything like it. (Onscreen: Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness) But the real trick for making ideas feel fresh and original is how you combine them with other ideas.
In other words…it’s about the execution, baby.
So let’s have a look at how Spy xxx Family executes its premise in episodes 1 and 2.
Before it can begin digging into the meat of its larger narrative, Spy tic tac toe Family needs to do three things:
- Establish character.
This doesn’t just mean giving us a sense that they are well-rounded, fully formed people and giving us access to their inner lives, but also making us care about their motivations and goals and empathize with their situations. It’s also important we have enough of an understanding of their personalities to follow the internal logic driving their actions, as this is a story built around characters not having all of the necessary context to deal with the situations they keep being plunged into. Loid and Yor are both unaware of each other’s true identities and of their daughter’s telepathic capabilities, Anya knows both of their true identities, but as a young child, is operating on a limited understanding of the world.
So basically we need to know them well enough to understand why they’re behaving the way they are at the drop of a hat, otherwise the fun and games of the convoluted setup would be mired in explanation, probably from, like, a narrator, who would be brought in to tell us things that would be more exciting and interesting if they were shown, but whose terse explanations would allow the narrative to move at a decent clip and get away with things that might have otherwise been confusing or under-justified.
…Okay so yeah they do bring in a narrator.
Not a fun, purposeful narrator, either.
This isn’t Kaguya-Sama: Love is War, where the narrator is baked into the experience as a part of the fun and a key to making it all work. No, this narrator is very boring, but he does the necessary dirty work efficiently. It’s frustrating, because you can tell: they ALMOST squeak by without a narrator. ALMOST. To the point where he almost never talks. But even though there is a narrator, MOST of the interesting information is conveyed through dialogue between actual characters and the actions of our protagonists. So luckily, it’s not a “tell, don't show” fest.
- Arrange convoluted circumstances.
This is a story about a bunch of disparate characters coming together to work towards similar goals and also growing to love one another, while also hiding essential truths from each other. That’s fairly convoluted. It’s nothing like Kaguya-Sama, where the circumstances that call for hiding things from each other and engaging in thrice-weekly, hyper comedic gamesmanship are right there in the character writing, so they establish the absolute basics and then just jump right into it. This is a feel good rom com, yes, but it’s also a spy thriller, and none of the principal characters have ever met before. If we want weekly hyper comedic gamesmanship, then some careful setup needs to occur.
And 3. Set up the theme.
For a work to be thematically coherent, no part of it can take breaks from adding to that central theme. Sure, different parts of a longer work can explore new themes that haven’t come up before, but by the end, it all has to come together into a coalescent message.
In my book, there are two extremely important points in a story where the thematic work needs to be especially present, barring special cases. The most important point is the very end. That is the narrative’s last word, and what the audience is going to ponder as they walk away from it. However, the second most important point is the very beginning, because that’s going to prime audience expectations of how to interpret the work. For example, the core theme of Kaguya-sama is right there in the setup of episode 1, with two characters who could easily be in a happy relationship instead letting the massive egos that they use to conceal their fear and the addictive back and forth game of romantic parry and riposte get in the way, a theme which will be in the driver’s seat going forward.
*muffled voice*
What’s that?
*muffled voice*
Stop talking about Kaguya? Ahahaha. You’re gonna have to kill me.
So it’s pretty essential that Spy multiplied by Family starts setting up its thematic ideas as soon as it possibly can.
Additionally, while it’s doing those three things, it has to be funny, entertaining, and at least somewhat tonally consistent so that the audience doesn’t check out before they even get to the part that all of this premise setup is leading towards. That’s a tall order. Which is why I think Spy unknown variable Family’s execution is so masterful.
We’re gonna go through it as if we’re writing it, you and I. I should specify that I don’t actually have any insider information about how this idea was crystallized and written. This is just an exercise for the purpose of analysis and making a point. Let’s start with episode 1.
The first problem is character density. We’ve got three main characters and enough time to fully establish one of them, maybe two if we’re smart about it. That won’t do. So let’s take our adorably ditzy and terrifyingly sexy MILF and get her outta here! We’ll get her up and running in episode 2. Episode 1, it’s just our leading man and his telepathic daughter…who he doesn’t have yet. That’s slightly more manageable.
Okay, Twilight’s mission is going to be the foundation of our overarching plot, the reason the story exists, so we need a rock solid reason that he needs to form a spy family. The obvious solution is to have them be his cover story, but we need something that he can’t abandon when the going gets rough. He needs to be locked in. So how about this? There’s only one avenue to his target: through a hoity toity private school for children. To get close, he not only needs a child that can attend a school, but a child talented enough to get in. That would also mean it's less of a coincidence that he happens to end up with a telepath, since he’s actively looking for someone uniquely gifted. Sweet.
Okay, theme. Some of our thematic focuses are the political and social troubles in our two fictional nations. There is no way in hell we are establishing anything beyond the basic political situation in this short time frame, so we’ll coast by on the fact that it’s clearly a Cold War analogue and stay focused on social ills. In fact, we can use those social ills to get Loid and Anya in the same house quickly: the orphanage is shitty as fuck, overflowing with unwanted children. Children being unwanted in any circumstance that isn’t your typical fifties era, happy, male-female marriage where the woman’s in the kitchen and the man pays the bills is going to come up again, very shortly, so hitting the audience with a flood of unwanted children hiding right behind the country’s idyllic facades is good thematic setup.
Same with Anya’s backstory, which we have an excuse to delve into through Loid reforging her documents to suit his mission. Obviously we wouldn’t want to reveal everything right at the start, even if there was time for that. We can get a lot of mileage out of leaving that a mystery. So the audience gets nothing more than the essentials for understanding Anya’s clingy behavior and empathizing with her: She’s never really had a family or a home, and she’s desperate for stability.
Since half the fun of this character concept is that she always knows exactly what’s going on through what the people around her are thinking, we also need a reason for her not run from Loid, who we want to write as closed off and intense to foil him off of Anya and later, Yor. There’s a very simple solution to that: she loves spy fiction. She’s a kid, she doesn’t grasp the severity of the situation, so she hears Loid’s thoughts and goes “that’s awesome.” This is also a really easy way to introduce conflict and genuine spy thriller tension when we’ll need it later.
Honestly, establishing Anya is the easy part, because she’s the plot of the episode. Getting her into shape for the mission and thus, understanding her, is the goal, so each step forward and step backward serves as a plot beat.
Loid, on the other hand…with Loid we’re going to have to get a bit trickier. How to make someone care about a seemingly emotionless, unstoppable badass in a suit…Hollywood action films have been trying to answer that question for decades. Some of them have it figured out, but I don’t think we can get away with smashing up Loid’s car and killing his dog, that’s not quite the tone we’re going for.
It’s easy enough to make Loid fun to watch. His callousness and apparent lack of concern with anything that isn’t his mission lets him stand out among quote unquote “normal” people--“Karen, let’s break up.”--But whenever that isn’t enough, all we have to do is poke fun at the straight man. Tale as old as time. (Onscreen: Cowboy Bebop) Tropes, ladies and gentlemen. Tropes.
Anya is practically a “poke fun at the straight man” machine, but we can turn that up to eleven by making Loid completely divorced from the entire concept of child-rearing and family life. So even when Anya is just being a normal kid, he has no idea how to deal with her. That’s funny and charming, buuuut it also risks coming off as cold and uncaring, which the audience will react very negatively towards, since Anya is such an adorable, helpless character. In fact, we already get some of that with how closed off and focused on the mission he is…
“It might not be too late to get a different child”
So rather than trying to mitigate that aspect of his character…why don’t we harness it? Turn it into a fakeout.
It seems like Loid is so callous and focused that he’d abandon Anya when his mission is in danger. And he even begins thinking that way…But then his body seems to move on its own, and he risks the mission to save her. That in and of itself is enough to make the audience feel a surge of affection for Loid, but let’s ride that wave while we can to establish some more about him. He realizes suddenly why he’s doing this: it’s the same reason he’s a spy. Like Anya, he too was once alone and helpless, back during World War 2. He’s doing this because he wants to make a better world where people don’t have to go through what he did, and Anya has reminded him of that. Not only does this get the audience invested in the mission objective, to prevent warfare, but also in Loid’s moral character. Sure he’s a little callous and closed off sometimes, but he’s fighting for a reason we can get behind, and the way this realization shakes him sparks hope that he could become less callous and closed off one day, perhaps with the help of a family.
Guys! Theme! We got some more theme in there!
However, that’s still not enough establishing work! Because as things are now, Loid wants to save Anya, but has no reason to hang onto her. We need an immutable reason for this spy family not to disband at the first sign of trouble.
Well, we already established that Anya is clingy because of the instability of her childhood. All we have to do is make Loid recognize that, and tug at his softer side. Boom. Now he has a good reason to both A) keep Anya around and B) want to protect her. Alright, with all that established, it’s now time to bring our third agent into the picture. How the hell are we gonna do that?
It seems like Loid has everything he needs for his mission, right? And if we want to keep up this theme of characters not having the full context of the situations they’re in, we wouldn’t want Loid’s wife to know he’s a spy. That wouldn’t be any fun at all.
So how do we bring her in?
I can’t think of any reasons to justify her inclusion rooted in character…so how about we go back to theme, and go from there? This is a society that idolizes the perfect nuclear family. We’ve already gotten at that through implication. So let’s really establish the homogeneity of this society, too. Everyone needs to fit into little boxes made of ticky tacky, and never leave. As such, outliers are rare and viewed as bizarre. So how about...we have the uptight private school that Loid needs to get Anya into require the presence of a mother? No, not just a mother. A wife.
That makes complete sense, coming from a conservative institution concerned with its reputation and possessing that fifties era mindset of “let’s sweep the hardship and discourse under the rug and smile for the camera”. We can also use this nuclear family centric society for the other half of the equation. In order to get Yor into a position where she wants to pose as Loid’s wife, all we need to do is give her a reason to not want to attract social attention. Keeping on genre and on theme, not to mention giving us more room for fun and games later, we should probably also have her involved in espionage, right?
Maybe not counterintelligence, though, that’d be a hard sell and would cause some problems down the line, with the two of them on opposite sides of the conflict. Something adjacent rather than opposite…snaps fingers An assassin. Nice.
So she’s equally competent as Loid and wants to use him as camouflage…mmmmm. That’s still a hard sell. It feels like one or the other would totally catch on…so why don’t we add a character trait to Yor?
…She’s a little dumb.
Yor Noise
Not only does this mean Loid will underestimate her, but also that we can poke fun at her for not catching onto the fact that Loid is obviously a spy. And we can play up the Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass dynamic of her seeming like a complete airhead and then fucking murdering a bunch of dudes. In fact, we can harness that dumbness even further, recontextualize it as her not fitting in among her peers. That serves our fifties-era social ills theme, but it’s also a really good way to establish empathy for this character.
In fact, that’s a strong core. Let’s have that be the central focus of episode 2. Yor doesn’t just need social camouflage, she’s also lonely, same as Loid, same as Anya. She’s an outlier in a society that isolates outliers and doesn’t think she can ever be normal or that she’ll ever be accepted. So if we set it up so that Loid and Anya are the first accepting people she’s encountered, BECAUSE Anya likes spy shows and BECAUSE Loid needs a fake wife, that gives her a strong emotional reason to stick with the spy family, too. And maybe even start to view it as more than just camouflage…THEME!
Speaking of theme, we’ve even got some space to bring in those political ills, too. Loid is looking for a wife, so he’s exploring his options among the local women, and that allows us to talk about spy witchhunts that have been going on, how you might be reported as suspicious just for not sticking to the social calendar. Very Red Scare. And also like the Red Scare, what’s terrifying is that some of these hunts are actually working! Loid’s colleagues are unavailable because they’ve been captured and killed! Even though the tone is generally low stakes and slice of life-y, that gives us a sense of genuine suspense we can bring in when necessary.
Alright. With all this character and theme work in place, we just need to arrange their meeting. Why don’t we do a variant on a meet cute? Two characters who are totally perfect for each other…but only because of how their respective espionage problems suit one another, bump into each other by complete coincidence. And rather than having immediate romantic chemistry, they’re super awkward, but only because they’re thinking about how they could use each other.
“You have a favorable impression of my physical appearance?”
One scene isn’t much of a plot, though, so obviously we’ll want to spend the rest of the space we have dramatizing Yor’s characterization. We can do that while also bringing in comedy with a classic comic scenario: two dates, one night. Loid needs to be in two places at once, and his lateness makes Yor think she’s been abandoned, and thus won't be accepted even by Loid and Anya…only for him to eventually arrive and subvert that expectation, making her feel like she’s found something truly special. Plus we get to comment on those social ills even more with Loid looking a party full of asshats in the face and yelling “respect sex workers!”
Fuck. Yes. It’s perfect. I’m a genius.
I mean, uh, the author. The author of the manga is a genius.
I could keep going, but I think I’ve illustrated my point. Spy kiss Family’s premise works because of how it’s executed, not because there’s something special about the premise itself. Of course, maybe you view all of that as the premise and you think that saying “Spy x Family has a good premise” is a completely succinct way to say it. I guess that’s fine.
But what I’m trying to impart with this video is that art is more than ideas. And there’s a danger in focusing on the ideas behind something. When it’s all about the new twist, the hot new thing, and how it appeals to what the audience already recognizes while also somehow being a completely new take, the actual execution exits the discussion fairly quickly. Even Spy ten Family is a good example of this. The basic elevator pitch of this manga feels purpose-built to catch an executive’s attention. But when we actually get into the story…the setup here is so convoluted it almost doesn’t work. Don’t get me wrong, this is a video about how IT DOES. But you can really see the author bending over backwards to accomplish this in the coincidences, tenuous links, and lack of critical thinking skills on the part of the characters required to carefully arrange the titular spy family.
So no matter who you are or what you think a “premise” is, let's talk less about the basic ideas behind Spy adults only Family and shows like it and more about what they actually DO.