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mdhwrites · 7 months

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Jumbled Thoughts: Romantic Rivals With Spy x Family

"What do you mean you love him!? You may be best girl, the tsundere and the one who spends 90% of your screentime with him but I'm in love... With..." "You want to go get a drink as a consolation prize?" "Yes please." And then I'm going to poison her drink so he can be all mine!

A lot of good, long term romance works have what can easily be identified as the romantic rival, regardless of how actually effective those rivals are. A character essentially designed to be an obstacle between the main couple and true love. There's a lot of forms this can take and luckily, anime has given us two great examples recently with Spy x Family's Yuri and Nightfall... But first let's get a few things out of the way.

Despite my bit at the beginning, a romantic rival actually doesn't need to be a direct competitor. Quintessential Quintuplets' romantic rival is the 5 girls' father and it'd be real creepy if he was actually trying to bang him.

"SIS!"

We'll... We'll get to that. No, instead the point of a romantic rival is simply to be someone who has to lose if the main couple ends up getting together. Their happiness and desires are essentially impossible if the main couple's happiness is achieved. That's why they're a rival since there can only be one winner. The most direct way to do this is with someone else who loves one of the two MCs but it can take on a lot of forms.

Secondly: For them to be a rival, they do actually need and investment in the potential of the two MCs being together. The best rivals are likely going to relish in destroying what might have been just as much as they'll enjoy either capturing the one they love or dooming them to misery. For their role to function though, they can't be unaware of what they're doing. Otherwise, they fall more into cruel twists of fate or comedic interventions depending on the severity of the moment and the tone it's portrayed with. Like Joe from Big Time Rush moving for her work isn't because her agent is a romantic rival, whoever they are doesn't care about the romance going on, it's just business. One that tragically breaks up the head of the band and her.

We did get one hell of a song out of it though. (Yes, I loved this show as a teenager and still think their music slaps incredibly hard. Also, I'm linking this video because it portrays more what happened but I do think the 2020 acoustic version done during lockdown is better.)

youtube

Another thing necessary for the character to be a rival though is that they are inherently a bad option. While one could call all the girls in your typical harem romance rivals to each other, it's better to call them contestants. They all have a real, viable case for taking that spot of best girl/boy, both in the hearts of our MC and of the audience. You are supposed to be okay with any of them getting with the main character. They are simply a competing ensemble.

A romantic rival is a villain. Even when not explicitly portrayed as one, you're supposed to want them to lose. They VERY rarely are real people besides maybe a sob story but that's not really the point of them. Romantic rivals are meant to elevate something into soap opera levels of drama, not for a nuanced discussion of love. A way to heighten the stakes and force the cutesy, potentially eternal lovey dovey elements of a work into what will be an even more satisfying conclusion.

Or for some EXTREMELY funny jokes. Speaking of, let's get into Spy x Family.

Nightfall versus Yor.

Yuri versus Loid.

Or, er... Well, see, why these two are so useful is that we actually have an incredible romantic rival and one that mostly entirely falls flat on his face in the role and is arguably the worst element of the show to me. As such, let's start with him: Yuri. Yor's baby brother.

He is a member of the secret police, the best at what he does despite such a young age and has a sister complex. Like... 80% of his character is sister complex. 19% more of that is screaming about his sister and then 1% of him makes you remember "RIGHT! This guy actually claims to be a functional human being!" Yuri's inability to actually function as a person is one of his biggest flaws because that single minded obsession makes it hard for him to really have more than a handful of jokes, all of which just increasingly become more stale (at least for me) as the show went on. That's a real shame too because as a rival to Loid, he's actually about as good as you could ask for.

See, while I have problems with Yuri, his failure in this role actually has a lot more to do with Loid than himself. A rival is meant to push the couple out of their comfort zone, potentially make them fuck up and do something that will upset the other, or challenge some aspect of a person's love for their partner. Loid... Doesn't have any of these traits. His whole gimmick is being the man with a thousand faces. To have so many layers, you'll have cried an ocean by the time you get to the core of this onion. That also means he has no comfort zone to push him out of, only fuck ups because of himself and...

Well actually, this is the one way I think Yuri does screw up as a potential rival to Loid. He makes big declarations about whether or not Yor and Loid's love is real but his love isn't real either. He doesn't actually know his sister. He doesn't engage with her genuinely, just like Loid doesn't. He has this nostalgic, permanent image that would take literally seeing his sister kill a loyal citizen to the country in order to even crack. That's not actually more genuine than Loid using her like he does. The only difference is that one will never ask Yor of anything and want to stay by her side while the other will only stay until the job is done. It'd be much more effective, in this role, for Yuri to genuinely know his sister and be able to call things out because of the genuine care versus Loid's artificial care.

Otherwise, what Yuri really does is be a reminder of the world these characters exist in. Someone who genuinely can NEVER find out the secret between the main couple, that they're not married nor actually in love, or else Loid is a dead man and Operation Strix is over. That's because Loid is an enemy of the state so while Yuri would lock him up for the wrong reasons, he is still one of the few people who could actually cause trouble if only he knew the truth. Too bad Yuri has been a spy for like an entire decade less than Loid and so Loid can run circles around him also making this tension somewhat tenuous at best.

He is only a threat in essentially the same way anyone is. In that he cannot know the secret. That is the exact opposite of Nightfall, Yor's rival.

Nightfall is a fellow spy from Loid's agency. She actually was a pupil of Loid's and mistook being told you can't have emotions on a mission to mean she must deaden all emotions. She is also a super spy on a similar level to Loid, making her the idea working partner for him.

But that lack of emotions is also why she can never be Loid's romantic partner. Yor is a bundle of energy and a precious cinnamon roll who wears her heart on her sleeve and couldn't help but be earnest even if she tried not to be. She is exactly the sort of warm, open person that Loid needs to ever make him consider retirement. To peel back the layers so that he can one day be himself instead of one of the many faces that he has. She will only ever love Loid... Not Loid's job or codename: Twilight.

Immediately we have the reason why these two contrast and why you will never root for Nightfall. Nightfall loves Twilight. Loves the image and ideal of Loid as this unstoppable super spy who she could essentially conquer the world with. Who she could help alleviate the woes of before they both get back to work. She'd be devoted but to all the wrong needs of Twilight. We even know she has the skills with which to do it, something Yor very clearly lacks as putting her in the kitchen is a surefire way to attempt mass genocide.

Not to say Yor is incapable of challenging Nightfall in a more practical way like how Loid entirely destroys Yuri. Yor is still superhuman in her physical capabilities which is why despite how clumsy and dumb she can be, she's still a very capable assassin. It's just that being an assassin is essentially all she's good at, besides empathy that is. Yor's care runs deep, just like how deep the tennis ball she sent into God only knows where is or the ball she played with Anya with when she did her own signature shot. Since Nightfall can't convince Loid to drop Yor due to her wifely duties, she does only have this and one other tactic to use against Yor and here she fails ENTIRELY.

The other one she's a lot better at. See, in her eyes, Yor is a bad wife. Yuri thinks the same about Loid but as a bad husband. Unfortunately for our cinnamon roll, she does not have Loid's confidence or the homely skills to back that up and so questions about her capabilities, especially with a smooth motherfucker like Twilight, shake her to her core. Luckily, she has the empathy and care that helps with Anya and makes her not just a good wife but what is even more important here: A good mom.

Here is where we get Yuri's last failing. See, a good romantic rival should be like any good villain. They oppose not only the couple but the whole premise and theme of the show. Yuri and Nightfall both do actually attack the themes to some extent by asking for stagnation and pulling the two back to their past where they will be trapped in the violence they have known all their lives. This is attacking the Spy part of the title. Only one of them actually says anything about the Family part of it though.

The most disappointing moment of the entire series for me was when Yuri finally interacted with Anya, Loid and Yor's adopted daughter, and hated her. Now, admittedly, his goal of arresting and killing Loid would pretty much certainly mean Anya's death too since she was adopted by Loid. Best case scenario for Anya if Yuri wins is going back to the orphanage but... That's the same case for if the operation that brought these three together fails in anyway. He adds nothing new with this that the base premise of this being a sham family doesn't already add.

Meanwhile, Nightfall knows from go about the operation and her opposition to Yor is specifically so that she can take the place of Loid's wife for the operation. This introduces two new elements that very, VERY few other characters can so directly. The first is that if Nightfall wins, it dooms Anya. Her desire to keep Loid as Twilight, rather than as himself, means that the warmth that Yor and Anya are forcing out of him will likely shrivel back up and die so that when the operation fails, Anya will go back to an orphanage and the family will end.

You also might have noticed that I said WHEN the operation fails, not if. While we haven't gotten it in the anime directly, we know a lot of Loid's methods for getting Anya to succeed fail and Anya at least likes Loid enough to try. Yor has made monumentally better strides in getting Anya to listen, be better and try harder than Loid ever has because, well... Anya is six. She doesn't need a cold, calculating spy, she needs parents and Yor's earnest and honesty makes her a great parent who is constantly trying to do the best for her child. From the brief glimpses we get of what Nightfall would try to employ as a parent, we have good reason to assume she'd fail just as hard as Loid has and so either Anya would run away, happy to be away from a family that no longer has Yor's warmth and has a slowly deadening Loid, or she'd be sent away once the stress and pain of that environment crushed her.

It is a unique threat that quite only someone from Loid's agency can present and it's a much more interesting reason to hate Nightfall and want to see her fail than Yuri just hating Anya regardless because he sees her as an extension of the sister stealer. It makes her a genuine villain that the regular populace can't replicate. It also allows her more dynamism as she'll do whatever she has to to gain the place of Loid's wife, even act kind to Anya, until finally she no longer needs to. She's a spy after all and this is her mission.

There's one other element here though I want to give a shout out for that is actually easy to overlook for romantic rivals: I want Yor, Twilight and Nightfall to be in a polycule. For Loid and Nightfall to finally have a real conversation and fix the lesson that has poisoned Nightfall so thoroughly. For Yor's kindness to help Nightfall see herself as a real person and not a slave to her image of Twilight. Hell, I even do want to see Nightfall be able to help shore up Yor's skill weaknesses and give Loid someone who can 100% understand his worldview, even as they both fight against keeping up those barriers. Nightfall is mostly a joke, mostly played for comedy but her genuine care for Loid, and how much it devastates her to fail, makes her into a more complex, sympathetic villain who you don't want to see be splattered on the pavement.

I... Well, I won't say Yuri is such a bad character that I want him literally dead but if he got shipped over to this world's version of America for the rest of his life, I would not miss his presence. He is a creep, a man child and quite frankly the best ending for him is probably to literally never be able to see his sister again so as to grow up as a person. Even that implies I even care enough to want to see him grow though as two seasons in, I don't really care. He has ONE truly great sequence that shows his potential and even it shows his critical flaw as a romantic rival: It has literally nothing to do with Loid or Yor. He is only an interesting character outside of the context of those two.

And for a narrative role who's whole job is to complicate and add excitement to the context of the main couple, that makes him a complete failure. So for as great as yuri is in most contexts, make sure you don't write the character Yuri if you're trying to make a good romantic rival. Not unless you wish for night to fall on your story and leave it in the dark.

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It's kind of fun how much romance anime I've watched in the like past six months. It's still only three series, Kaguya, Quintessential Quintuplets, and Spy x Family (the last of which is SO many genres) but it did help me have some actual examples when I finally sat down and wrote this. Also, I'm currently poking at theoretically going back to my roots and writing a harem story, though also keeping it PG-13 like my current stylings so honestly, have any anime recommendations for me?

Also, this is probably another Jumbled Thoughts post that goes too much into the example, even if highlighting how Nightfall is a good contrast to Yor is so important to understanding what a good romantic rival looks like.

I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!

I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past. I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead. If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.

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#spy x family #loid forger #yor briar #yuri briar #nightfall #jumbled thoughts #Romantic rivals

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