SPY x FAMILY has a really fun way of making sure “The Big Guy” (Yor) doesn’t solve everything in 5 seconds.
A lot of other stories tend to keep The Big Guy from fixing everything by just writing them out entirely, but it’s honestly kinda trite.
“Oh no, Superman ran into the nth person with Kryptonite! Can the Justice League still save the day?”
“Oh no, Storm got knocked out by a sneak attack. Guess the X-Men can’t count of her really strong weather powers today.”
“Oh no, Goku’s out of town and he can’t reach us yet! Will the others survive long enough for him to make it back?”
But Yor tends not to get written out of the plot that deliberately. She just has zero context for anything that’s going on.
She thinks that she’s living with a kindly widower and his adorable (totally not adopted a week ago) daughter, and that’s basically it for the Forgers. Loid and Anya keep her 100% in the dark, so they never fill her in on the situation because Loid assumes that she’s just a civilian and Anya just really needs this family to stick together.
Loid and Anya have to worry about terrorists and enemy spies and everything while Yor’s just going about her day and feeling peachy keen.
But the second she realizes that someone’s trying to hurt her loved ones:
This is the woman who kicked a man through a metal ceiling. This is the woman who kicked another man so hard that he ricocheted off the walls of an alleyway like a pinball. This is the woman who can kick a car off the road without even trying.
(Side tangent, but I’m only just now realizing how much kicking Yor does. Kicks for days.)
The narrative tension doesn’t come from Yor being in a coma or being far away, it’s that Loid and Anya can’t tell her what’s happening because of their own secrets, so Yor only gets to step in when the situation is already out of their control. And when she does, she puts the fear of god into whoever they’re facing.
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