I tend to hyperfixate on the little details in anime. It’s how my brain is wired. Take, for instance, SPY x FAMILY, a series with a lot of layers going on in its fake-family spy operation premise. Among these layers, is an overlooked aspect of the series I cannot stop thinking about: the fact that Anya is pretending to be six.
This is the funniest thing to me. It’s a detail that occupies my mind whenever I watch Anya make attempts at being a spy and helping Loid’s mission. That’s because Anya’s intelligence, or lack thereof, is a major source of humor in the series, and it all derives from her lying about her age so she could be adopted. Anya pretending to be six is the basis for literally everything fun and delightful about her character and I think about it constantly.
“I’m Six!”
When Loid comes looking for a child to adopt, he makes it clear he needs someone who can read and write, more specifically, he needs a 6-year-old to be able to get into Eden Academy. When he sees Anya he assumes she’s either four or five. Anya knows the specifications needed because of her telepathy so she claims she is six, stands on her toes to try and appear taller and does the crossword by reading Loid’s mind to prove she’s a smart cookie.
Anya does this in order to be adopted, her younger sense of logic concluding that this is what this mysterious man needs and to not question it. This lands Anya in the middle of a spy operation — which should be absolutely frightening, but because she’s just a little kid, the idea of this strange man “recruiting” her for a mission is exhilarating. Anya’s too young to understand that there is danger in this situation at first because she’s a kid with a big imagination who treats this as playing an episode of “Bondman.”
As such, to accomplish her super secret mission, Anya tries her darndest as a spy… though she’s not really an agent and is more of an asset to Loid’s mission.
All Loid expects Anya to do is go to school, but as a result of her lying about her age, Anya appears to lack the intelligence needed to succeed in Eden Academy. A 4-year-old shouldn’t be held to the standards of a 6-year-old, especially not a 6-year-old at a prestigious elite academy, but because she lied, she has to, which is comedy gold.
For Papa’s Mission
Though they’re just two years apart, four and six are very different ages — assuming Loid is right about Anya being around 4-years-old. For a 4 or 5-year-old, Anya is actually right on track in terms of intelligence and understanding — in fact, she’s perhaps even bright for her age. According to the Children's Health of Orange County organization, children around Anya’s age believe their thoughts can make things happen — if Anya believes Damien will befriend her for a photo of her dog, she thinks it will actually happen — they have a sliding scale of their awareness of themselves and others (Anya wants to watch cartoons and goof off all day but knows she has to study for Loid’s sake and for “world peace”), they are curious about the world (Anya is constantly asking questions) and they compare the rules and ideas of their parents (Anya understanding Loid’s mission while also taking Yor’s teachings to heart) and apply it to their social life (Anya making every encounter at school a mission).
Remember that Anya is pretending to be six, so she’s not where a 6-year-old typically is developmentally. According to MedicineNet, the traits she would need to avoid getting into so many tricky situations or prevent her plans from going awry start coming in at around age six. This is why Anya doesn’t understand the math she struggles so hard with, why she can’t read the clock to figure out how much time is left before the bomb goes off, why she has trouble pronouncing words, and, most importantly, why she can’t quite distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Simply put, Anya has an incredible power and is actually quite bright, but she is a bit too young to use her telepathy to efficiently solve problems or understand she is not really a spy herself. She’s also too young to keep up with the high standards school she is enrolled in.
And it all stems from her lie about her age.
This is why I am obsessed with this detail. It’s the source of 90 percent of Anya’s humor in SPY x FAMILY. She continuously gets poor grades and makes zero progress in tutoring because she’s too young for the material. Meanwhile, her plans to become friends with Damian are about as well-crafted as you would expect from a preschooler. She thinks just being good at school stuff will make her seem cool enough for Damien to want to befriend and believes that simply helping Damien with things like his art project will be an act of kindness so deep he will have to be her friend. Much of these plans go awry, especially because her immaturity leads her to clash with a kid as smug as Damien, though sometimes her innocent childishness makes her appear as elegant to Professor Henderson and kind in some ways to Damien — not that he’ll ever admit it.
Yet despite all her errors and Tonitrus Bolts, Anya is brimming with confidence that she is a great spy and is enacting all of her plans flawlessly. Heck, when she does succeed, it’s just as funny or endearing because she is using the tools of a child. She prevents the bomb plot by using ketchup to alert Loid about it, assuming she’s written a perfectly legible message when she actually hasn’t. Any victory goes right to her little 4-year-old ego, the smallest successes making her feel like a superstar. Honestly, even just coming up with a plan is enough to give her the confidence to form her iconic smug face.
One Little Lie
SPY x FAMILY is built on a sitcom-like setup, and part of that formula is the fact that Anya has a powerful ability to read minds… but it doesn’t always work out the way she wants because she’s too young to fully grasp everything. She also can’t ask for guidance because she fears that her telepathy might send her back to the orphanage. It would be an asset in an adult's hands, but it's in the hands of a little kid, which is both a brilliant comedic setup and wonderful exploration of the concept of telepathy in media.
Simply put, the concept of Anya lying about her age combined with her psychic abilities is great, only made funnier by the fact that it’s not given a lot of focus. It’s almost a throwaway line, a fact that I completely forgot about from reading the manga and was reminded about when the anime started airing. Anya’s no dummy, she's actually trying her best and is just swimming in a deep end she is not ready for. It’s what makes her so dang endearing. She shouldn’t be expected to be at the same level as her classmates — but I love that she’s gonna try.
Sean Aitchison is a writer and researcher from LA who watches too much anime and knows too much about Sonic the Hedgehog. Follow him on twitter @Sean8UrSon for his work and listen to his podcast, Sonic Podcast Adventure (@SonicPod)
Source: Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!
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