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Anime fans are excitedly looking forward to season three of Spy x Family, but we have some bad news for you. Don’t worry, it's still coming in October 2025. However, if you’re looking for more of the adorable slice-of-life comedy we’ve seen in the first two seasons, you might be in for a rude awakening. Judging by the Spy x Family manga, season three and beyond is going to bring us some of the most harrowing depictions of war we’ve seen in a Shonen manga. 

The impact of war – how it changes people who live through it for better and for worse – has always been a theme brewing in the background of Spy x Family, but the focus is usually on how the characters try to preserve - not break - the delicate peace between Westalis and Ostania. It is the stated mission of both WISE and Garden, though they go about it in very different ways and for different nations. However, everyone in Spy x Family has been impacted, in some way, by the horrors of war.

Unless it deviates from the manga, season three of the Spy x Family anime is going to open with an arc that shows Twilight’s childhood in Westalis, where war systematically takes every important person in his life away. His father, mother, and every friend he grew up with died either as combatants or civilian casualties in the war. The manga doesn’t pull any punches in how it approaches the subject. Spy x Family is a comedy about how the effects of war linger in people’s hearts and minds long after the fighting stops. Which makes it the M*A*S*H of anime, I think.

That comparison might sound odd, but hear me out. There is a famous scene in M*A*S*H where Hawkeye opines on the phrase "war is hell" and delivers one of the most impassioned messages about how devastating war is - in between scenes in what is, explicitly, a comedy show. "There are no innocent bystanders in Hell," he says. "But war is chock full of them." I can't think of a better description for Spy x Family's approach to storytelling. War is not something to be glorified - it is something to be avoided at all costs.

The thing is, the upcoming arc in season three of Spy x Family isn’t even the most blatant example of the manga hammering home its message. The most recently completed story in the manga, dubbed the Love and War Arc that ran from Chapters 97 to 102, is another flashback that shows Henry, Anya’s extremely elegant teacher, and Martha, Becky’s ever-present servant, in the closest thing to a true romance the series has given us. And it starts beautifully. Tea in the garden as students, the tension of their differing approaches to life spawning genuine affection between them. Their love is unrequited but so clear throughout the story that you can't help but root for them. Then the outbreak of war comes and shatters that illusion – Martha joins an all-woman unit and heads to the front lines while Henry’s position as a teacher keeps him from being drafted.

Predictably, Martha’s unit is bombed and suddenly we’re in the beach scene of Saving Private Ryan. Dismembered limbs are scattered around. Soldiers panic and flee, only to be shot by their commanding officers in a cruel and futile attempt to maintain order. All the gruesome parts of every war film distilled into a few black and white pages. Martha barely escapes with heavy injuries; she is stuck behind enemy lines and forced to slowly and covertly make her way home. Her reward for her bravery and suffering? Henry, believing her dead, has married a rich noble to secure his family’s fortunes, robbing her of the possibility of anything resembling a happy ending.

These chapters, as torturous as they are to read, are among the best in Spy x Family’s run so far. The page layouts and art are stellar and I loved watching mangaka Tatsuya Endo embrace the darker themes hiding beneath the surface of his work. There is so much emotion and expression in everyone’s faces I found myself near tears as the story concluded, mourning the love that could have been and the fictional lives lost. The juxtaposition of the wholesome, light-hearted comedy and the harrowing images of war make the story pop off the page in a way few manga can.

This doesn’t seem to be a permanent shift in Spy x Family’s tone – the following chapter is about a suspiciously intelligent seal and Anya's intense desire to find it (so she doesn't have to do homework) – so fans can still look forward to plenty of Anya’s playful antics as she undertakes her own quest for world peace. Just expect that slice-of-life wholesomeness to drop now and then as Endo gives us all emotional whiplash with an arc about the true consequences of war. 

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