Spy X Family, a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Tatsuya Endo has found itself in the weirdest and quite frankly illogical controversy I have ever seen. And the young Anya is at the center of it all!

Spy X Family follows a spy named Twilight, who has to “build a family” to execute a mission, not realizing that the girl he adopts as a daughter and the woman he agrees to be in a marriage with are a mind reader and an assassin! The anime is considered a massive hit with the anime community, out-rating even the likes of Attack on Titan. So what’s the issue? It appears folks on Twitter and Tiktok have a bone to pick with the father-daughter relationship shown in the anime. Yep, Spy x Family, is one of the rare anime that showcases a healthy parent-child relationship, and somehow, the internet found a way to corrupt it.

Truth be told, I think this anime has shown that Twitter and Tiktok folks have fostered an unhealthy outlook on a normal relationship, and now they’ve projected that outlook on Anya and Twilight. It’s weird, very weird even for the anime community. Then there’s the whole Blackwashing thing, which honestly my opinion has already been expressed in a different blog.

Anyways, the bigger concern for me is this weird sexualisation of a young girl and her adopted father and the fringe in the anime community is accusing the show. I have watched the episodes, all of them and have failed to see anything weird going on between them. In fact, as I’ve said before, this is basically the healthiest father-daughter relationship you could possibly imagine. Twilight is an attentive and patient father to Anya, even if he is only using her for his goal. I think what has happened is that Twitter’s echo space has produced a group of people who may have had a bad experience with their own fathers, or are fatherless and have no experience of what a caring and loving father is meant to look like, and thus have instead projected their own weird outlook on them.

The anime is good, watch it! It’s a good mixture of character drama, humor, action, and romance.