By focusing on the secondary characters, Endo makes war hurt.
Spy x Family Chapter 99. Written and illustrated by Tatsuya Endo. English translation by Casey Loe, lettering by Rina Mapa. Spy x Family is distributed by Viz and can be read at viz.com.
As is typical for me, I break the guidelines I set up for myself, namely to stop persisting with only negative reactions to fiction I don’t enjoy, and to stop lifting up excellent work by only tearing down bad work.
All of that is to say: Chapter 99 of Spy x Family is really good.
It’s unfortunate that I wasn’t able to do a live reaction during my typical Sunday morning livestream.
However, it may have been for the best that I did not go live, as I’m not sure I would have been able to put into words on the spot the emotional reaction I was having while reading the chapter.
My emotional reaction to Chapter 99 was in part due to the chapter’s troubling nature and its subject matter as regards war and protesting for peace. That subject matter is all the more troubling during these times because war persists today, including but not limited to Israel’s inhumane decimation of Palestine after Hamas’s inhuman terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, and Russia’s ongoing illegal war against Ukraine.
And my emotional reaction was also due to it hitting too close to home. It is difficult for me to read Henderson: he’s trying to persist as an educator while biting his tongue about the foolhardiness of the war that is killing and damaging his friends, loved ones, and students. It hits me hard emotionally because I continue to see fellow academics who bite their tongues, who cannot even say the phrases “Israeli victims of Hamas’s attack” and “Palestinian victims of Israel’s attacks” (as if my own silence on these topics is not similarly worthy of condemnation).
And it hits me hard emotionally also because of my persistent frustration with academic groups that sat in silence from 2015 to 2021 about the then prevalent (and still hurting us) drumbeat of the Republican Party’s fascism and its White House incompetence that led to Charlottesville, COVID, and January 6. And even after 2021 when that orange fascist was thrown out by our votes, still the fascism of the Republican Party has done significant harm to public education, and we have so much work still ahead of us to fix it. The Republicans are enforcing bigoted, anti-gay, anti-trans, xenophobic, and just plain racist and sexist policies, thanks to the books they are banning, thanks to these laws that are putting teachers and students back into the closet and overall silencing points of view or just straight-up erasing history and teaching lies to students in order to pretend racism was not and is not still a thing–while academic organizations and institutions, for fear of offending Republicans, are willing to host transphobes and Nazis while banning anti-war protesters, Jewish students, and Muslim students. That’s a lot going through my mind when reading Henderson buckling to familial and governmental pressure–and I’m not sure how well I could have put any of this into words talking into a microphone live last weekend.
But there I go being political about our real-world problems, instead of just sticking to the text of Spy x Family–as it grapples with its politics of war, education, propaganda, censorship, police violence, and manufactured consent.
Oh, and Tatsuya Endo made sure to add a ton of soap opera theatrics to make the politics go down smooth. We’ll talk in a moment about Henderson finally realizing he loves Martha and how we get that chapter’s cliffhanger.
The chapter continues to accomplish what I wanted out of Spy x Family for Henderson’s origin story but, as I have complained repeatedly, didn’t get for another teacher, that being Aizawa’s pointless backstory arc in My Hero Academia: Vigilantes.
As I have before, I did not imagine this was Henderson’s backstory, but nothing here contradicts what we already know, Endo so far has written most characters well enough that it makes sense how the Henderson we know now is the result of these past events we are getting in flashback. In other words, this story entertains more than annoys while also giving new bits of information about Henderson that I did not expect, which only has me more excited to know more about his past and the people he has known. I mean, seriously, I didn’t see it coming that Henderson had already been married–let’s meet his wife! Please, I’m begging Endo, don’t just add that marriage for the sake of drama for Martha’s sake, and don’t just make it a plot point that develops a man off of the work writing a woman–please, show us Henderon’s wife, let’s see how her story went, let’s see her story, maybe tie that into something else going on in the overall plot to this story, even if it seems contrived or too coincidental to have it all connect up.
And even as I ding Endo out of fear for something that hasn’t happened yet and is only conjecture, that Henderson’s wife will be just a plot device for Henderson’s own development, I have said nothing here about what this chapter does to progress Martha’s characterization. I don’t know how much of this is because I don’t think Endo does as much to progress Martha’s story beyond what we have seen before, and how much of this is I, a man, refusing to exit my bubble and focus on what this woman is going through.
I’m not sure what to say about what Martha goes through in this chapter. It seems like the biggest moments of progression for her will be in Chapter 100, after that cliffhanger of her recovery from her injuries. The next steps that lead from Martha, a young woman who is committed to her nation, to Martha, an older woman and caretaker to Becky, will include recovery from injury, likely career-ending injuries where she will not be performing ballet again, and discovering Henderson is married. That all will hurt.
But I don’t know how Martha’s story speaks to me, partially because the Henderson stuff kept reminding me of my experiences working in education, whereas Martha’s story speaks to the life of a veteran, and I am not a veteran. We saw how Henderson realized this war was a fool’s errand because he saw the damage it was doing to Martha, but that is Henderson speaking on behalf of Martha–I want to see her interiority about living after war. Chapter 99 touches only lightly on what she is feeling, but what she writes is powerful, and Casey Loe does excellent work translating it into English. But it is powerful because I don’t yet know what she means: when Martha writes that her hands are too “filthy” to hold with those of Henderson and his students, what did Martha do or see that leads her to think she is excluded? Will there be some revelation, or is this a general feeling she has? I don’t know because I’m looking at this from Henderson’s point of view, not only because most of this chapter is from his perspective and we haven’t gotten Martha’s more focused viewpoint but also, as I said, I’m a teacher, Henderson is a teacher, Martha is a veteran, and I am not.
Let me awkwardly shift gears to talk about the visuals.
The motion lines of shock and stress when Henderson learns about Martha’s potential battlefield death is as effective as similar use during Twilight and Yor’s fights, a detail I wish had transferred better to the Spy x Family anime.
I’m not convinced with the character designs for the younger Henderson and Martha. Some of that owes to just Endo’s style: there are bound to be similarities across shapes of faces, eyes, and mouths. Yet there are details that amuse me or surprise me: I should have expected that Henderson’s father would look exactly like him, I did not realize how much of younger Henderson’s design owes to the design for the young Hohenheim in Fullmetal Alchemist. More moving is how defeated Martha looks when writing her letter: I don’t think I’ve seen Endo draw those kinds of eyes and mouth yet for any character, and the expression shows a kind of pain that is so different than when we saw Anya crying during her entrance interview–that is an excellent contrast that shows the different types of pain each character is feeling.
Even the paneling when Martha writes to Henderson is really good, as the page parallels the action well, the top panel being Martha facing our left when writing to Henderson, the bottom panel being Henderson facing our right when reading her letter, both of them crying, the middle panels being Henderson reading. All of that paneling communicates easily the practice of reading, a usually silent activity of limited motion, but the parallel paneling and the shifting of panels imitates motion, while not letting any of that motion get in the way of the main moment of action, that being Henderson’s tears falling onto the page.
I should also compliment Rina Mapa’s lettering: I appreciated how more rounded and slanted was the lettering on Martha’s letters, even looking similar to some of her spoken dialogue, compared to how stiff and upright the lettering is on Henderson’s letters, until Henderson has his break down writing to Martha at which point the lettering more and more resembles that of Martha’s, a good visual representation of how more desperate Henderson is getting.
And while I did say that the designs for younger Henderson and Martha don’t impress me, I was floored by how well Endo designed young Desmond.
Before I get to Desmond’s character design, I want to talk about the role his younger self has in this arc and the overall manga. I have not talked yet about that unexpected but welcome plot detail: to circle back to my complaints about why Aizawa’s origin story in Vigilantes did not work, here we are rewarded with a story that not only explains how Henderson and Martha go to these points in their lives, how Henderson developed his philosophy, and how Henderson’s cognitive dissonance between supporting elegance while propping up a fascistic governmental institution, but also gives us insight how Desmond developed his own philosophy. To lapse into my flaw of tearing down one work to build up another, this is not the slow burn of who Ivo’s assistant actually is in My Adventures with Superman that is expected and doesn’t really do anything new with a certain important character in the Superman mythos; rather, this is giving a few brief moments of Desmond that do not overstay their welcome and, with just a few scenes, clarify so much about how this child turned into that adult and the bigger problem facing Twilight’s mission and Damian’s daddy problems. I worry my positive reaction to how surprising Desmond’s appearance was is obscuring what may not work here: maybe it’s fanservice, maybe it clashes with presuppositions and headcanon readers already had. But for now, the shock is enough to give me more pleasure than annoyance, so Desmond’s arrival works.
Now to actually get to Desmond’s design: this is the rare case where a younger version of a character works for me. The younger selves of Twilight, Yor, and Yuri pretty much just look like miniature versions of their present-day selves; Henderson and Martha look too much like other characters for me to appreciate how they are de-aged from their more wrinkly older selves. Maybe it’s the fact that adult Desmond has a mustache so I am more surprised how different his child version looks, or maybe Endo hit on something simple but compelling that the eyes for Desmond have not changed, which makes him instantly recognizable as the same person even though all other markers–the mustache, the haircut, the attire, the height, the age–are gone and replaced by the features of a typical boy. Whatever it is, Desmond’s child design is about the only child design of an adult character in Spy x Family that works for me, boiling down the detail to just the eyes and not complicating it with any additions or subtractions.
Chapter 99 and this entire arc have made me appreciate Spy x Family more. I had been growing tired of the tired jokes of supposed master spy Twilight being pretty bad at his job in pivotal moments long before he joined Anya and Yor as a family. I was not as thrilled with the arrival of the elderly Authen family next door to the Forgers. Meanwhile, this arc improved on each of those problems, as Henderson remains still absolutely devoted to the ideal of elegance that a war-happy humanity cannot arrive at while adding One Piece levels of tragedy as to why he is on such a fool’s errand. The addition of new characters does not feel forced, and on top of that, the story digs into what we already knew about these secondary characters while adding surprises, such as Henderson and Martha’s romantic interest in each other, the fact that Henderson was engaged to be married, and Desmond’s origin story.
I have said recently I don’t like trying to review milestone chapters, if just because of the pressure of giving fair consideration to the story on its own outside of the arbitrary number assigned to it as a way to connote larger significance. Seeing as I didn’t do a live reaction to Chapter 99 as I had intended, I should devote a live reaction to Chapter 100. But as I also said, Chapter 99 was hard to sit through, and I’m not sure I could handle the emotional impact of talking live about Chapter 100 given the emotional pain that will be added to Martha’s physical pain.
What helps make this story work where other ones would fail is that nothing is done to redeem Henderson. I don’t know whether I would say he failed at doing the right thing, but he definitely did a lot of bad things, or had motives that are as selfish as just about any person is capable of. His growing affection for Martha is not necessarily because he loved her (although that is all but confirmed he did): his affection is because she’s no longer at the school and she could die at the warfront. He didn’t oppose the war for the sake of his nation and people’s lives: his was his complicity in that war and his loss of Martha that motivation his war opposition. And that opposition falls apart when he realizes he may not be a moderating force in, or at least a good influence on, the ethics of his students.
And because the story is not trying to redeem Henderson, the story is all the more effective for it and makes Henderson ironically more sympathetic. He screwed up. What has been the rest of his life in post-war Ostania if not to make up for it? Unlike worse origin stories that needlessly retcon details or contradict what we already know, this story explains why Henderson is the kind of guy who says he upholds the rules of his school–but in his first arc punched out a colleague and got himself demoted, all for the sake of the honor of our likable protagonist Anya and her parents. What else could Henderson’s origin story be? He’s who has broken the rules, whether for good reasons or his own selfish (though honorable and understandable) motivations but at the same is still a part of the governmental power structures and ultimately will side with power every time (until Spy x Family inevitably gets to its climax at which point someone like Henderson will be on the side that helps Twilight, Yor, and Anya stop this war).
It has been awhile since I have read a story where the later-presented origin story stuck so close to the ongoing narrative and built itself up from rather than contradicted what the previous installments already told us about a character. For all the criticism I have towards Endo’s writing and visual art, but really only in terms of Twilight’s sometimes static progress and the “same face” problem almost any illustrator has, Chapter 99 shows what made Spy x Family initially so compelling. It’s both disappointing that it took this long to throw some focus onto Henderson, and also understandable that enough pieces had to be in place in this story before an entire arc could be devoted to secondary characters like Henderson and Martha.
As the manga reaches its 100th chapter, now we have to see where Martha’s story goes. As I indicated a moment ago, I’m not entirely thrilled about this prospect, not only because it’s going to hurt me as a reader seeing her recovering from her injuries but also because I worry her further development will be shallow, even worse by comparison to all that Henderson has been given. Martha has had fewer appearances in the manga and a smaller role in the overall story, so my hope is that this arc promotes her to a larger presence amidst the already sizable secondary cast, but I wonder whether it is too late for that.
Think about all that needs to be covered for the rest of Martha’s story. Did she have a spouse who also will be off-panel for most of this flashback story, or does that spouse have their own story that may be compelling and relevant to later developments in the manga? Did her fighting on the frontline lead to her placement in Becky’s family? Is this going to somehow tie into the Desmond family and Martha was put into Becky’s family to keep an eye on them on behalf of the Ostanian government? How did Martha’s relationship with Henderson change upon learning he was married? Perhaps having the 100th chapter focused on Martha’s character will make up for that lost time we didn’t have with her.
Let me wrap this up: my hopes and fears for Chapter 100 and how it handles Martha center around whether the story has enough of a personality built out of her to manage to do something intriguing with it all. I have been bothered how much of this arc has made Martha rather one-note as her focus has been on Henderson–but that is not fair of me, as it’s more like it’s three-note: nation, dance, and Henderson’s love. We saw how national pride has wrecked her body, so it’s going to hurt when that pride is likely what damaged her body thus that professional dance is now less likely as an option, and separated her from Henderson before she could have that marriage with him that both of them likely wanted.
So, how much is the next chapter going to hurt? And how much of that will I feel is solidly earned, and how much will I be worrying that this is defining her character around pretty much three details and not letting her come across as more complex?
And that’s not even getting into how my lived experience as a man and institutional patriarchy has me focused more on Henderson than on Martha. I’m up-and-down praising Henderson as God’s gift to narrative writing when, really, what is his characterization aside from descriptions such as old, “elegance,” a stickler for rules, and a “nice guy” but as is typical with the “nice guy” archetype is hypocritical and potentially toxic?
Derek S. McGrath 