With the return of SPY×FAMILY for its third season, I figured today I’d talk about this sweet and tender found-family series centred on an orphaned spy known as Agent Twilight—aka Lloyd (voiced by Alex Organ)—a ruthless assassin codenamed “Thorn Princess”/Yor (voiced by Natalie Van Sistine), and their adopted daughter, an orphan who was experimented on and granted telepathic powers: Anya (voiced by Megan Shipman). Together, they build a chaotic, loving life during a fictionalized Cold War.
I started watching the series because I needed something lighthearted after finishing Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid—an amazing show, but that’s a topic for another time.
The series is available on Amazon Prime and Netflix in some regions, or on Crunchyroll in others. The movie was released both dubbed and subbed through Sony Pictures Entertainment under its Crunchyroll label.
I was lucky enough to catch a screening of SPY×FAMILY CODE: White dubbed in theaters. Now that I think about it, most of the movies I’ve seen in theaters since COVID have been anime — which honestly says a lot about the sorry state of big-name Hollywood releases lately.
The animation, a co-production between Wit Studio and CloverWorks, is gorgeous. I love how the world feels solid—rooted in clear inspiration from Germanic architecture and city design. It could’ve been so easy to make everything flat and sterile, but instead, it feels lived in—real, textured, and full of quiet life.
The plot is simple on paper—a fake family that somehow feels more real than most families in fiction. Outside anime or web series, the best found-family stories that come to mind are Chuck (NBC), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Good Omens, the original animated Lilo & Stitch, and Firefly—which, let’s be honest, was basically a better live-action Cowboy Bebop than the crap Netflix gave us.
What makes SPY×FAMILY so great is how two broken people: Lloyd, a drifter constantly switching identities to avoid reliving his trauma, and Yor, a woman who only saw herself as a killer, find belonging through a telepathic orphan who never lets on that she can read minds.
A lot of fans resonate with that. So many people never really had that feeling of belonging, and I think that’s why they’re drawn to stories like this. You don’t have to be perfect—you just have to be good enough, even with all your dysfunction.
It’s wild how many shows try to do “found family” and fail miserably. Fans hype up series like Steven Universe or Fairy Tail, but somehow they never land the emotional truth of it. Hell, even RWBY’s later volumes fell flat [despite my love for Salem and Ozpin’s twisted relationship]. That same studio nailed it back in 2010 with Red vs. Blue’s Recollection Arc, which nailed “found family through broken fools.”
Later RWBY volumes preached unity as an ideal—“We’re in this no matter what.” But Red vs. Blue actually showed it: broken people, clinging to each other because no one else would.
That’s why SPY×FAMILY feels like an oasis in a desert of phony “found family” stories. It’s genuine, messy, and heartfelt. It’ll be a shame when it ends and we’re left with more formulaic junk—more Naruto: Shippudens, Fairy Tails, and Sword Art Onlines.
Honestly, it’s depressing when a fan parody nails the concept better. SAO Abridged did “found family” far better than the original, especially in Episode 10 when Yui says:
“All of that changed when I found you two… the most broken, sociopathic players I had ever laid eyes on. Less people than a loose collection of character defects.
But somehow, together… you were happy. Everything I knew about human relationships told me that one would eventually kill the other. And yet, no matter how often you fought, your bond only seemed to grow stronger.
I decided that my information must be flawed in some way, and that I needed to amend it firsthand. I wanted to know what love is… I wanted you to show me.”
Where was I? Oh, right—talking about how SPY×FAMILY somehow became the perfect found-family anime.
To close out, here’s a great cover of SPY×FAMILY’s first opening song, “Mixed Nuts.”
Alright, that’s enough sentimentality for one day. Time to go see Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc. I don’t bark for Makima like Denji…Wait—what?! Power, the blood-crazed fiend, is in this movie?! WHERE DID I PUT MY WALLET?!!?