“ink stained mind”

Like in shounen we get kids being given insane amounts of responsibility at such a young age, and the adults around them don't care or feel responsible for them.

But in spy x family we see the main motivator of one of the main cast is protecting children from living the nightmare childhood that he lived.

And the kids, Anya and her classmates, they feel so real, it's so well written. It feels like childhood experiences of messing around with friends and the process of making friends when you were a kid.

I'm not a kid anymore, but there are some moments in this anime that sort of feel like they're forming a core memory. It reminds me of my childhood.

This makes the message of war is bad, and children are it's worst victims so powerful. We see the two types of experiences these kids and mostly Anya have, like normal childhood kids stuff at school, then stuff like the bus hijacking and all the other situations Anya gets into cuz of her mind reading skills.

And the mind reading itself was a result of experiments done in an effort to gain an advantage over the enemy. Anya herself is already a victim of the war, and yet living with Twilight gives her a chance for a normal childhood.

Twilight doesn't know about it, but he tries his best to protect her from his work. So he's not like adults in normal shounens, he's actually trying his best to give Anya a good childhood even though he says it's "all for the mission".

He does pressure her to study, but he doesn't want to traumatize her so he gives her breaks.

It's not like the usual shounen message of work until you get it or you're not my student thing.

And the romance is sort of barely there but also it's building up. I thought it would be like unspoken, as is usual in a lot of action animes, but it's more like it has to be spoken at one point cuz these characters are dumbasses.