I was a Teenage Spy Girl — Spy Kyoushitsu

After the horrors of the Great War, the nations of the world resolved to from now on fight through espionage instead, with each nation creating entire schools for them. In the Din Republic, seven failed almost dropouts from these schools have been assembled to be trained under the world’s greatest spy — and wworst teacher — to become a team capable of completing Impossible Missions.

The team certainly looks good, even though I got the feeling I’ve seen some of them before in some Key visual novel. This first episode was very much the setup for the rest of the series, following Lily, the girl in the middle. She’s the optimistic, air headed type and the one to get the group settled as they get used to their new situation. Things come to a head the next morning, as it turns out their teacher Klaus is one of those geniuses who thinks everybody can understand him if he tells them that to pick a look you need to use your lock picking tools the correct way. It sinks in for Lily and the others that their’s is indeed an impossible mission, but Lily refuses to give up. It’s in the second half of the episode that she shows off both her resourcefulness and her cynicism as she attempts to blackmail their teacher into returning them to their schools, only to inadvertently give Klaus an idea on how to train them properly…

As a piece of entertainment this was fun. I hope the focus stays on the training and our various spy girls attempting to defeat their teacher and we don’t get too much into the actual spy missions though, our that it loses its light hearted tone. Animation wise this is also one of the better shows so far this season, with crowd scenes in which we had actual movement! But. I’m always a bit worried when an anime series has a Taisho-era inspired setting, as that seems to be pretty much the time period of choice for people nostalgic for Imperial Japan before WWII spoiled things. Combine that with the pseudorealist but strangely apolitical idea that war has grown too terrible but nations still need to fight each other, but now through espionage and alarm bells start ringing.

With this setup, it’s naive to think that this will ever offer “a robust look at humanity”, as the Anime Feminist review hoped for. That’s not what this show is interested in. Lily’s backstory confirmed that. Her motivation to become a spy because a spy saved her as the only survivor of a horrible tragedy is again, an apolitical motivation. It’s idealistic but with no ideology behind it. In real life, you had people like the Cambridge Five who become spies out of solid communist convictions and regardless of what you think of it, that makes sense. But Lily doesn’t even become a spy out of patriotism, but from some generic belief that by doing so she can prevent further tragedies, without much regard for whom she will serve or which cause she’s spying for. This is a rightwing anime, a series that presents its status quo as right and just, that accept that nations will always be in conflict, with no intent to examine this worldview other than perhaps some cliched clash between idealism and realism.

Which doesn’t stop it from being a fun little spy action series, but I don’t expect anything more from it.