Fridge / SPY×FAMILY

Unmarked Spoilers below! Read at your own discretion.

Fridge Brilliance

• There's a subtle bit of Animal Motifs in the series with Anya's chimera doll- a creature made up of three different creatures, combining into one. Just like the Forger family.
• The family name itself, Forger, is one. Forgers are people that produce fraudulent copies or imitations, and the family itself is forged - although, it becomes less and less so as time goes on.
  • To forge can mean "to fake", but it can also mean "to create, to make stronger". Both meanings are relevant here; the family at first comes together for false reasons on everyone's part, but they are genuinely making a true family as time goes on. They are literally forging from their forgery something real.
• Anya's intelligence and grades:
  • Anya is portrayed as being a slow learner and pretty poor at academics compared to her classmates, despite being generally pretty bright, and capable of reading and writing. This can be explained easily if one remembers the conversation when Twilight adopted her. When Twilight thinks of how he was looking for a child of six, Anya pipes up that she's six, which seems to confuse Twilight as he thought she was maybe four or five based on height and appearance. In all likelihood, Anya is one or even two years behind the rest of her peers at school. She only managed to impress him with a Crossword Puzzle when she read his mind. If anything, her managing to keep up with the harsher lessons despite being younger than her classmates is very impressive.
  • Furthermore, as seen with the math lessons and quiz, Anya's academic problems is also due to the curriculum at Eden Academy being more advanced than your typical school. Given how she came about with the wrong answer to the fraction question and her actually getting some points on the math quiz (even if part of it is thanks to Bondman), Anya's math skills can be easily comparable to that of a normal first-grader (one that is learning addition and subtraction). Meanwhile, Eden Academy's classes involve word problems that can confuse her and material that most kids usually don't start learning until later grades (i.e. fractions, division, the Pythagorean Theorem).
  • When Yuri tries to tutor Anya, he ends up leaving in a fit of rage due to Anya being unable to learn anything. When Loid returns, he finds out they were studying a course that isn't even on the midterms, meaning Anya isn't even taking it. She has no way of understanding any of it even ignoring her inadequate studying skills.
    • To top it all off, they were studying foreign languages, a topic even adults struggle with. Of course Anya wouldn't understand the grammar lesson that's being taught in another language. She's just 6, if not younger.
• Both Anya and Twilight have lied (or most likely lied in Anya's case) about their ages but for opposite reasons. Anya lied about her age because she wanted a family while Twilight lied about his age because he lost his family and wanted revenge.
• When Twilight’s in a hurry to complete a mission because he must go to the party with Yor, he recruits Franky for help in spite of him being a knowledge broker who claims his fighting skills are "literal trash". Considering they first met on the battlefield with Franky being an army deserter, Twilight simply knows what he can do and trusts him. This is also supported by Franky being able to sneak behind Nightfall, a skilled agent in her own right, in Mission 60 when she enters his safehouse.
• Twilight has explicitly dated women for assignments before; the relationship he had with the woman immediately before Operation Strix was serious enough she was bugging him about marriage and he outright confirms this in Chapters 14 and 35. This adds extra depth for when he praises Yor for (apparently) prostituting herself to support her family—he has, in all likelihood, had sex for his missions before, so to him, Yor doing sex work for money to support her family is not that much different from him using seduction and his body for missions.
• Why is that Twilight used a cover identity of a psychiatrist instead of a identity that could allow him to more easily fit into Eden's Academy's social circle, such as a wealthy socialite in the business world? Apart from WISE being underfunded, such an identity would be incredibly difficult to create in Ostania, which is a hostile country. Even if Loid managed to forge the graduation documents which stated that he attended Eden Academy, there would be no one who could confirm him as a member of any school generation. And while he could steal the identity of a member of a previous generation, he'd still have to get a wife and child for the mission, and having such an elaborate facade would be too impractical to maintain. Plus having a more obscure identity would allow him much more malleability with manipulating his background.
  • There's another reason for using a psychiatrist, rather than any other type of doctor, as the cover. The reason being, psychiatrists are not expected to perform surgeries, and in 1960 to 1970s, the available drugs for that speciality is relatively small in number—antipsychotics, tranquilizers, and the earliest of antidepressants, the latter of which has so much side effects that it'd only be applied on patients in the Sleepy Depressive stage or have attempted suicide. This means Twilight's specialty is one he can act like he's a competent doctor without actually going to the medical school for it.
  • The simplest reason honestly is Loid's job also means he's absurdly good at reading people. He even notes as much himself. So it's an easy job to upkeep, and it keeps his skills sharp.
• In the anime, we don't see the ending Kigeki until the third episode. We hear snippets of it in the first episode, but it doesn't all come together until later. This is because the song is about forging a family and creating a home - neither of which is complete until Loid, Anya and Yor are all together.
• When Anya first meets Becky at the entrance ceremony, Loid is amazed at seeing her and realizes she's the child of the Blackbell Group, who are a military manufacturer, and we know from later chapters that her family has their hands in things like tanks and planes. If you look closely, the small hair accessory Becky wears in her bangs looks like a lit bomb.
• An eagle-eyed viewer might note that Damian's interest in Anya actually began before she coldcocked him in the jaw. When Anya is initially staring at Damian during the entrance ceremony, he notices, and immediately assumes that she must have a crush on him. Then when the children are touring the school, Damian is surrounded by other students who are vying for his attention, knowing who his father is. But when Damian sees Anya staring at him, he immediately turns to talk to her. This all before Anya even says a word to him!
• In the anime-original segment of Episode 19, Yor jumps to conclusions that because Anya forgot her gym clothes, she'd be expelled from Eden and pursue a life of crime. Ridiculous and contrived as the thought is, Yor actually has some cause to believe that last part: Anya previously threatened Loid and Handler-in-disguise that if they didn't let her keep Bond, she'd stop going to school and turn bad. Given that Yor's Super Gullible and tends to take things at face value, Anya becoming a delinquent in such a scenario isn't that much of a stretch (in her mind, at least).
• While Anya's tendency to refer to herself in the third person can be taken as a simple quirk, it could also be much more important to a mind reader, especially one so young. Her referring to herself could be used as a technique to keep her own individual identity, amidst all the noise of other people's thoughts. Aka, literally reminding herself that she is Anya. She's not Becky, she's not Damian, she's "Anya".
  • There's potentially another reason for this as shown in a manga extra. Anya was the one who carved her name into the wooden nameplate for her bedroom door. However, the first time she did this she spelled it as "ANIA", before Loid informs her that her name is spelled "ANYA", presumably just assuming she misspelled it as she sometimes does. However, Anya appears surprised to realize this would be her spelling, and afterwards Anya is shown laying in her bed, pondering the name. Since Anya was shunted from place to place a few times, its possible that her name changed at some point, possibly even in the lab she originated from. Which could make it a self reminder that she's Anya *now*.
• Loid's codename is Twilight, the time right before nightfall. When Anya gets her first star, she (briefly) goes by Starlight, which is most visible after nightfall.
• Of the various kids' minds at Eden, Becky is the one who's the least likely to have thought bubbles, outside of unusual/extreme situations. Being the type to always speak her mind rather than keep things to herself, she rarely has anything for Anya to read, thought-wise.
• In Mission 10, Loid ends up being too hard on Anya concerning her studies to the point where she locks herself away in her room. When Yor steps in to advise him, he ends up feeling guilty about pushing her and resolves to be more accommodating in the future. Come Mission 62, it's shown Twilight's own father was strict with him concerning his studies to the point of berating and being physical with him, which caused his parents to fight often while child Twilight hid in his room. Coupled with Yor reminding him of his mother, Loid's guilt about being too pushy with Anya's studies takes another meaning in him recognizing subconsciously he was acting like his father in that moment and him resolving to do better than him.
  • Mission 62 also gives additional subtext to why Loid wouldn't replace Yor with Fiona; he doesn't want to ever put Anya in a situation where she feels unsafe or uncomfortable with her guardians after experiencing such discord himself, further supported by him being aware of what kind of parent Fiona would have been.
• Twilight's plan to get Anya the Stars she needs for his mission seems to entirely just be for her to earn them the proper way, rather than figure out which of her teachers are the easiest to bribe or blackmail and get them to just give them to her, or sneak into the school and adjust her test scores so they're the highest in the class. But being an Imperial Scholar at Eden is a high prestige status, and the school is full of kids with rich and powerful parents. For Eden to keep its reputation, its teachers must be incorruptible, which is further supported by a conversation between some teachers about the headmaster not being a person who can be bought.
• Yor's codename plus her maiden name creates a subtle reference to Sleeping Beauty in her; except she is the one putting others to sleep. A common name given to Sleeping Beauty in tales? Outside of Briar Rose, there is Aurora, which means Dawn. This provides her another contrast and complement to Twilight.
• The animals getting into a fight in episode 19 (something that happens only in the animé) adds more than just comedy, it also explains one reason why the stampede during the interview day occured.
• One piece of promotional art (that begins manga Mission 1 and anime Episode 3) depicts the Living a Double Life sides of Loid and Yor as they're happily sitting as a family with Anya, while there are corpses and spy equipment all over the floor by the adults. Anya is the only one who's directly looking at the stuff on the floor while Loid and Yor are blissfully unaware, which represents her mind-reading abilities and her knowledge of what's really going on.
• Unlike the assassins on the cruise ship who have ominous black thought bubbles when their thoughts are read by Anya, Billy Squire has the usual radiant oval thought bubbles instead. The black bubbles are likely Killing Intent, and Billy's motive isn't to kill the children, but to hold them hostage for ransom — even the Explosive Leash he strapped onto Anya was a dud. In fact, he doesn't even have it in him to kill the children.
• Anya being Book Dumb and punching Damian during orientation day was actually the best thing to happen both to Twilight and WISE with regards to Operation Strix. When the get together for the parents of Imperial Scholars is going on, Twilight skulks within Eden College in disguise waiting for the right tome to intercept Donovan Desmond as Loid Forger. When a junior agent asks Handler why they sent Twilight alone with no back up, she answers that Twilight is the best field agent they have to navigate such a hostile environment, especially since due to the VIPs' in attendance, which includes politicians, high ranking military officers, CEOS', and celebrities security is extremely tight. Handler also mentions that previous attempts to infiltrate the meeting have ended in failure with WISE agents being captured, which resulted in worsening tensions between Westalis and Ostania, a reduction of intelligence gathering by Westalis since Ostania steps up its counterintelligence operations to root out enemy spies, and security within the school has been gradually beefed up to the point that not only is it practically impossible to sneak in or out undetected, but using a fake identity has a high percentage of being discovered. Thus Anya not being an Imperial Scholar by the deadline is what ultimately allows Twilight to more or less gauge Donovan's personality and better figure out a way to infiltrate his inner circle.
• Twilight shooting off the bomb attached to the dog attacking him in Mission 22 so he can throw it away is easily seen as a sign of his kindness, and it certainly is this. However, there is also a pragmatic aspect. Namely, killing the dog in such close quarters would not have saved Twilight from Keith remotely activating the bomb. The priority in the situation was to get the bomb away from him and into a place where it could detonate more safely (the river behind him).
• In Mission 91, we learn from Melinda that while a previous prime minister started The War Just Before, Donovan took over partway through and thus bears some responsibility for the rest of it. Unlike certain individuals who have extremist views yet were naive to the harsh realities of battle (ie, Keith and the collage students), Donovan's experience managing the country during the war likely created, or at least solidified, his current viewpoint... and this may even be the reason that he might be preparing for another war.
• The day before Ostania shells Luwen in Mission 62, the Westalis radio news contains an item that reads "the Ostanian foreign minister said they're reconsidering the East-West pact." "Reconsidering" is the diplomat-speak for "invalidating," so Ostania did forewarn military action... it's just the local people usually have no clue what these words mean.
• It's fitting that Anya's favorite stuffed animal is a penguin. Penguins have black and white feathers that look like they're wearing tuxedos, just like James Bond, the world's most famous fictional spy.
• While Anya's surprising proficiency at Classical Language may or may not be tied to her still murky past, her youth is another factor: it's well-known that young children pick up languages much more quickly, and Anya is implied to be younger than her "official" age.

Fridge Horror

• Anya's telepathy was an accidental result of the experiments the scientists performed. If she's considered an accident and had a designation of 007, it means there are more psionic experiments around which may have more effective capabilities than her. Imagine if the Ostanian scientists drafted a similar experiment into the SSS as a discreet Living Lie Detector, which would make it far easier for them to rat out spies like Twilight...
• Anya was returned by multiple foster families over the span of a single year, implied that it was due to her abilities, hence her natural defenses regarding letting them be known. However, Whenever Anya uses her powers impulsively, it's almost invariably for altruistic reasons, such as finding a robber or cheering someone up. The knife twist here is that Anya was returned to the orphanage over her use of her powers when, in all likelihood, she was using them to be kind or helpful.
• While Anya's vision of finding Twilight's corpse after an explosion during the Doggy Crisis arc is horrifying enough in itself, with Mission 62 we discover Twilight himself went through this when he was young, finding his mother dead in an air raid, and snapped so hard as a result. If not for Anya and Bond's efforts, history would have repeated itself, with Anya following in her papa's footsteps and finding his body, the cycle of war continuing into the next generation. Considering how Anya loves her father, it is no exaggeration to assume that she will take his death poorly.
• In Mission 62, when Twilight was old enough to pass for eighteen, he joined the Westalis Army to avenge his hometown, parents, and best friends. To get closure for everything he lost, he made it a point to kill as many Ostanian soldiers as possible, and admits to racking up a massive kill count, represented by him siting atop a mound of corpses in one panel. When Twilight was out on patrol one day he encounters Frankie who had just deserted from the Ostanian Army. Twilight says that he should kill him right there and then simply because they're enemies, despite the fact that Frankie is unarmed and tearfully begging for his life. Twilight doesn't kill Frankie because he made Twilight chuckle when Frankie said he didn't want to die "without first being with a woman". Although their interaction is meant to be a comedic change of pace, there's still a heavy implication that Twilight has murdered unarmed Ostanian prisoners before, thus making him a war criminal.
• Anya only narrowly escapes finding a parent dead in the rubble because of Bond's precognition. If she hadn't, it would restart the cycle once again, and grown-up but broken Anya might go into a similarly dangerous position such as Loid or Yor. She already shows great aptitude for manipulation; with training she could become The Chessmaster, a dangerous spy par excellence, or a Knowledge Broker like Franky (or even worse, Snoops). She would be extremely valuable as an asset and have a target on her back from whichever country she's not working for.
• Garden's existence. Franky warns Twilight that just one of their assassins can eliminate an entire platoon by themselves, and seeing what Yor is capable of, that is not an exaggeration at all. The bigger thing to consider is that while Yor may be their best, that still means there are multiple other assassins of her caliber around. If a single assassin can wipe an entire platoon, you'd wonder what an entire group of them can accomplish.
• In Short Mission 3, Anya and Bond were able to make up from Bond tearing up Agent Penguinman, and Anya hating him for it. Imagine if similar events had occurred in the Bad Future where Loid dies to the bomb. Anya would have reacted even worse, having what remains of her father being damaged before her. With Loid not being there to fix the plush and encourage her to accept Bond's apology, Anya and Bond would have taken longer to reconcile, if at all.
• While Loid easily outmaneuvers Gerald Gorey's attempt to report him to the SSS, the way he does so raises some questions. Gerald comes up with that plot entirely on his own, with no prodding from Loid or Fiona to bait him into doing it. Additionally, they get Franky to tap into the hospital phone lines long before Gerald escalates to that point, meaning they knew he'd go that far or at the very least had a reasonable assumption that he would. All this to say—there's a chance Gerald has reported other coworkers of his to the SSS before. Coworkers who didn't have the foresight or connections that Loid used to escape his predicament, thus meaning they'd get visited (and likely arrested) by the real deal.
  • It's mentioned in Chapter 67.1 that Gerald achieved his position as chief medical director through careful networking. Who's to say some of that networking didn't include reporting any competition to get them out of the way?
• While Loid and Gerald resolve the spy issue, it's indicated that false reports to the SSS are the least of Gerald's misdeeds, which include such acts as illegally selling medical supplies to other hospitals, falsifying reimbursement requests, and improperly accepting political funds. He's a rather corrupt individual through and through, and in a position of high power... which means he's the exact kind of person who might get paid a visit from Thorn Princess sometime in the future.
• Unlike Bond, who was deemed to be a failed experiment and sold on the black market when the program that created him was shut down, Anya was a successful creation from the lab that gave her telepathy, who were fully aware of her powers. She wasn't lost or released, she escaped. So it stands to reason that, unless something happened to them offscreen that we don't know about yet, they'll still be out there somewhere. And they'll want her back. So if Anya ever becomes publicly visible (such as, oh say, being involved in a high-profile terrorist kidnapping incident), they're almost certain to come looking for her...
• During the cruise ship arc, Anya throws a tantrum because she wants a skeleton keychain, and Loid internally panics because he doesn't know what to do in that situation. His logic goes that not buying it for her will look suspicious, because parents normally buy things for their children, so people will think he is a spy and he will get arrested. While the situation is Played for Laughs, we have been shown that the SSS can and have arrested people based on extremely flimsy evidence or none whatsoever, including a woman mentioned by Yor's coworkers whose neighbors reported her as suspicious for being single while in her thirties—and it's safe to assume that horrible things probably happen to them in prison. Suddenly, Loid's fears of being arrested for not buying his daughter a keychain don't seem that silly after all.

Fridge Sadness

• Anya is always afraid that Loid will abandon her if he finds out she is a telepath. Before meeting him she was adopted and returned by four different families. Maybe those two things are connected.
• In Mission-62, a young Twilight gets into an argument with his father over the fact that he wants to enlist in the army, while his father wants him to go to university instead, and when Twilight says he needs to enlist because he must kill Ostanians, his father slaps him and angrily yells at him for parroting Westalis propaganda. On the morning of the day the war started Twilight's father left the house because there was some trouble near the border and needs to take a business trip to area and check it out, and tries to reassure his son by saying he'll take him to the fair when he gets back. When War breaks out, Twilight's father is never mentioned again, meaning that he was likely a soldier and was killed between the opening stages of the war, when Lewen, Twilight's hometown, was razed by an artillery bombardment, and when his mother died during an air raid.
• In Mission-95, the students at Eden College attend the end of the year celebration which includes a formal dance. The chapter focuses on the lower grades students, which includes Anya's first grade class. Aside from a few party games, the students mainly focus on making connections with schoolmates that would be beneficial to their families, and Damian himself, who dismissed the whole the celebration as inane, only decides to attend when Professor Henderson tells him that the party provides excellent opportunities for networking and making powerful alliances. Meaning that the children Ostania's elite are raised with the idea that it is their responsibility to form connections that would consolidate and expand their family's power and influence, and are not really allowed to make real friends and have a carefree childhood.
• Anya's answer that the person Damian loves most is his father sounds sweet, until you remember what kind of a father Donovan is. Then it just emphasizes the fact that the most important person in Damian's life is someone who doesn't, and perhaps can't, give him the love and approval he craves.

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