Anya Forger is the reason Spy x Family works. Her adoptive father is a spy pretending to be a psychiatrist. Her adoptive mother is an assassin pretending to be a city hall clerk. Neither knows the truth about the other. Anya, who can read minds, knows everything, and she's delighted. To her, having a spy and an assassin for parents is the most exciting thing that's ever happened.
She's also a small child with a hard past, who badly wants a family and has finally found one. That mix of comedy and quiet sadness is why she's become one of the most popular anime characters of the 2020s, and the face of countless memes. This profile covers who she is, how her telepathy works, her life at Eden Academy, her story so far and the people around her. For the full cast, see the Spy x Family character guide.
Who is Anya Forger?
When the series begins, Anya is living in an orphanage in Berlint, the capital of Ostania. She's been passed between foster homes and sent back several times. Then Loid Forger, the Westalian spy codenamed Twilight, comes looking for a child to adopt. He needs a daughter to enrol at Eden Academy, the elite school where the son of his target studies. Anya reads his mind, realises he's a spy, and decides she wants to be his daughter.
She passes his test by reading the answers from his thoughts, and goes home with him. Soon after, she reads the mind of Yor Briar, a woman Loid meets by chance, and discovers that Yor is an assassin. Anya happily helps to bring them together, and the Forger family is formed.
- The adopted daughter of Loid and Yor Forger, and the only one who knows both their secrets.
- A telepath, created as Test Subject 007 by a secret research project.
- A pupil at Eden Academy, which is the key to her father's mission.
- The owner of Bond, a dog who can see the future.
- The glue that holds the Forger family together.
Design
Anya is small, with pink hair, large green eyes and two cone-shaped hair clips that look a bit like antennae, a playful nod to her mind-reading. Her extremely expressive face, especially her smug grin, has made her one of the most recognisable characters in recent anime.
Personality
Anya is curious, energetic, mischievous and very easily excited. Her catchphrase, "waku waku", expresses excitement about spy adventures. She loves peanuts and cartoons about spies, and she's thrilled by anything that resembles a secret mission.
She's also not very good at school. She struggles with reading and maths and finds Eden's strict rules exhausting. Her answers to problems are usually creative and almost always wrong. A lot of the comedy comes from Anya's misunderstandings of what she reads in people's minds: she knows what adults are thinking, but she's often too young to understand it.
Underneath, she's lonely and frightened. She remembers the lab and the orphanages. She knows that if she isn't useful, she could be sent back. So she works hard to help Loid's mission, even when she doesn't understand it, and to keep the family together. It gives a lot of her silliness an edge of real anxiety.
What she wants
Anya wants a family. That's it. She wants Loid and Yor to stay with her, and she's willing to do almost anything, including helping her father's spy mission, making friends with a boy she doesn't like and studying for tests, to make sure it happens. She also likes the idea of the world staying at peace, because she has heard in Loid's thoughts how much depends on it.
Telepathy and how it works
Anya's power is telepathy. She can read the surface thoughts of people near her, hearing them almost like speech. It's a passive ability. She doesn't have to try, and she often can't stop.
| Aspect | How it works |
|---|---|
| Range | She has to be fairly close to someone to hear their thoughts. At a distance, she loses them. |
| Crowds | Large groups overwhelm her with noise, which can make her ill or frightened. |
| Animals | She can read animals' minds too, which is how she sees Bond's visions of the future. |
| Strong emotions | Intense or violent thoughts hit her hard. Some of the minds she reads frighten her badly. |
| Limits | As far as the story has shown, she hears what people are thinking in the moment. She doesn't plant thoughts or control minds. |
The power is also a burden. It means she hears every unkind thought, and she's sometimes upset by what people think. It's part of why she's so desperate to belong somewhere safe.
Anya and Bond
Bond, the family's big white dog, was also an experimental subject, trained by a project that gave him the ability to see the future. Anya can see his visions by reading his mind, so the two of them become a team, quietly heading off disasters before anyone else notices. Bond is named after the hero of Anya's favourite spy cartoon.
Anya at Eden Academy
Eden Academy is an elite school for the children of Ostania's upper class, and getting Anya in is the first stage of Loid's mission. Students earn gold Stella stars for good deeds or achievements and red Tonitrus bolts for bad behaviour. Eight Stellas make a student an Imperial Scholar, whose families are invited to events Donovan Desmond, Loid's target, attends.
Anya gets off to a poor start. On her first day she punches Damian Desmond, the target's son, after he insults her, and earns a Tonitrus Bolt. Loid's backup plan is to have her befriend Damian, which is complicated by the fact that she can't stand him. She does earn a Stella later, for rescuing a boy from drowning, but her progress toward eight is very slow.
At school, Anya also makes a best friend: Becky Blackbell, a wealthy, romantic girl who decides on the first day that Anya is hers. Their friendship is a bright spot in the series.
Anya's story so far
The anime adapts the manga closely. These sections follow the main arcs in order.
Adoption and the interview
Loid adopts Anya and finds her a mother in Yor. Then the family faces the Eden Academy admissions interview, a gruelling test of whether they're a suitable family. A hostile interviewer upsets Anya, and Loid nearly loses his temper. Henry Henderson, a teacher on the panel, is impressed by them anyway, and after a nervous wait Anya is admitted.
School life
Early school arcs follow Anya's attempts to make friends with Damian, her friendship with Becky, the dodgeball match against Bill Watkins and her struggle with schoolwork. Loid's spy-level preparation for small school events is one of the series' most dependable jokes.
Bond joins the family
Anya sees a vision of the future through a dog's mind, and realises that a terrorist group plans to bomb a visiting foreign minister. She and the dog, later Bond, work together to stop it, mostly by steering Loid toward the plot without revealing what she knows. Bond joins the family at the end of the arc.
Code: White
In the 2023 film Spy x Family Code: White, the family's trip to a winter resort goes wrong when Anya accidentally swallows a chocolate holding secret microfilm. It's an original story, rather than an adaptation of the manga.
Later arcs
Later in the manga, Anya's school bus is hijacked by an armed group trying to take the children of the elite hostage. Anya uses her telepathy to help, without giving herself away, and the arc shows how frightening her power can be in a dangerous situation. The manga also begins to reveal more of her past, including flashbacks to the research facility where she was Test Subject 007, and of how she escaped. The full story of where she came from, and what the project wanted, is still a mystery.
The series is ongoing. This page doesn't track the most recent chapters.
Relationships
Loid Forger
Adoptive father · Spy
Loid adopted Anya for a mission, and he's come to love her. She reads his thoughts and knows he's a spy, and she loves him for that too. He worries constantly about her schooling and her safety. She worries about him being sent away.
Yor Forger
Adoptive mother · Assassin
Yor is gentle with Anya and fiercely protective. Anya adores her and is thrilled that she's an assassin. Yor's cooking is a running joke. Her love for her daughter is not.
Bond Forger
Family dog · Fellow test subject
Bond can see the future, and Anya can see his visions. They're partners in quietly saving the day, and both of them came from experiments that treated them as tools.
Damian Desmond
Classmate · Mission target
Damian is proud, rude and secretly in love with Anya. She's supposed to befriend him for Loid's mission. She mostly finds him annoying, although she does see the lonely boy underneath.
Becky Blackbell
Best friend
Becky decides Anya is her best friend on the first day, and sticks to it. She's spoiled and dramatic, and a loyal friend. She also has a crush on Loid.
Yuri Briar
Uncle · Secret police
Yuri is Yor's brother, a secret police officer who hunts spies. Anya knows exactly who he is, and finds him a bit strange. His devotion to his sister makes him a constant risk to the family.
Trivia
- Memes. Anya's smug face, nicknamed the "Anya heh" face, became one of the most widely shared anime reaction images of the 2020s.
- Peanuts. Her love of peanuts is a running gag, and she uses them as rewards and bribes.
- The hair clips. Her cone-shaped hair clips look like antennae, a visual hint at her telepathy.
- Voice cast. Atsumi Tanezaki voices her in Japanese and Megan Shipman in English. Our voice actors guide covers more anime voice casts.
- Another found family. Anya's household is often compared with the improvised family in Chainsaw Man, where Power, Denji and Aki end up living together. Chainsaw Man's Part 2 runs on Shonen Jump+, the same platform as Spy x Family.
Why Anya matters to the story
Anya is the heart of Spy x Family. She's the one who knows everyone's secrets and keeps them, the one who makes the fake family into a real one, and the one whose wants are clearest. Loid wants peace, Yor wants to belong, but Anya just wants them both to stay.
She's also a clever twist on a familiar character type: the cute, comic child. Our anime archetypes guide looks at others like her. What makes her different is that she knows more than anyone else in the room, and has to hide it. That makes her one of the most memorable young heroines in recent anime, and the centre of one of its warmest takes on the found family.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Anya Forger?
Anya is the adopted daughter of Loid Forger, a spy, and Yor Forger, an assassin, in Spy x Family. She's a telepath who can read people's minds, the result of a secret experiment. She knows both her parents' secrets and keeps them, because she wants the family to stay together.
How old is Anya Forger?
Anya says she's six, the age she needs to be to enrol at Eden Academy. The story implies she's younger, probably around four or five. Her real age, like much of her past, hasn't been confirmed.
Can Anya read everyone's mind?
Mostly, yes, within a certain range. She hears people's surface thoughts, can't easily switch it off, and finds crowds overwhelming. She can also read animals' minds, which is how she sees Bond's visions of the future.
Does anyone know Anya is a telepath?
No. Not Loid, not Yor and not anyone else in the main cast. Anya keeps it secret, partly because she remembers the lab she escaped and partly because she fears she'd be sent away if anyone found out.
Who voices Anya Forger?
Atsumi Tanezaki voices Anya in Japanese, and Megan Shipman voices her in the English dub.
Does Anya like Damian?
Not in the way he likes her, at least not yet. Anya mainly sees Damian as part of her father's mission, and as an annoying boy. Damian, meanwhile, has an obvious crush on her that he refuses to admit. Their relationship is one of the series' biggest running jokes.