Something I’m finding a bit frustrating is how Twilight’s emotional stunting around love and sex is seen as something inherent to him and not something trained into him by WISE, and how many people seem to have blinders on when it comes to WISE’s stated goals and what they really stand for.
Twilight was a minor when he was scouted by WISE. They knew he was a minor; they were able to blackmail him because he was impersonating someone else and they knew that. They impressed upon him straight away that his work will preserve the tenuous peace between Ostania and Westalis, and his work directly impacts the continuation of that peace. They put that weight on him, straight away, as an impressionable young man, little more than a child.
Now fully grown, we can see how that pressure invades every part of Twilight’s psyche; every action, every choice he makes is given over-inflated importance because of the years and years and *years* of conditioning he has been given by WISE, Handler in particular, who as nice a person as she has seemed at times, relished in ripping Twilight’s psyche apart and building him into a tool for Westalis’s use.
This gets even darker when we look at Twilight’s relationships. I’d be comfortable speculating that Twilight has never had a relationship other than those he needed to have for a mission. In other words, relationships he was coerced into having by his employer. Coerced as in forced. Forced as in not his choice. I feel like I need to underline this point because I have seen takes blaming Twilight for tricking the women he had relationships with, as if these relationships were wholly his idea. He was told to find a wife and child at the beginning of Operation Strix with the usual ‘the world will blow up if you don’t succeed Twilight’ bs, so it’s way more likely he was told to forge relationships with women close to particular targets, and he was emotionally blackmailed with the ‘for the mission’ mantra that they bred into him as a weakness. In my opinion, WISE have acted very similar to traffickers when it comes to blithely commanding Twilight to share intimacy with women for their own benefit.
So what does that do to a person, when every instance of intimacy, of romance, of closeness with the opposite sex, has been for false reasons? What does it do to a person when every relationship you’ve ever had is not by your own choice, and on top of that you were told to ‘love’ this person and make it convincing otherwise oopsie, we might get into a war again, kids are going to be orphaned or die and it’s all your fault!
I don’t know whether it’s because Twilight is a man or what but most people can recognise that what Garden did to Yor is deeply unethical at best, and they only required her to kill; not torture, not lie to, not steal from, not have sex with, just kill her targets. Twilight is required to do all the above by WISE, and from the time he was a minor or close to a minor as well, but people don’t seem to recognise the deep harm he has suffered at the hands of WISE.
I have a theory that this is because we don’t see what Westalis is like currently and we only have Handler as a representative of Westalis, the majority of the audience take what she says at face value because they, like Twilight, trust her implicitly. I’d say this is a wildly incorrect reading simply because everyone reading this manga should understand the real-world parallels of Spy x Family enough to realise that WISE is the CIA. And like the CIA or really any covert operation operating in foreign territory, world peace is not a priority, the furthering of their own country’s interests is the priority.
The only reason why WISE and Ostania have their interests aligned *now* is because Westalis and Ostania both have governments that want peace. Operation Strix is basically a play at undermining a sovereign nation changing governments to one that doesn’t align with Westalis’s interests at this time, which is incredibly problematic even if the (stated) intention of preserving world peace is a good one. It’s completely in the realm of possibility that if Westalis’s government changes and their interests change, they can command Twilight and the other operatives to foment unrest and undermine the current Ostanian government, because that’s exactly what the CIA did in many parts of the world in the time period Spy X Family is set. We’re supposed to know this and distrust WISE accordingly. And when we distrust WISE we can see the cruel evil with which they have treated Twilight.
WISE took a boy who was deeply traumatised by the war, who had lost everything and used all the best parts of him to forge him into a weapon for their own interests. They straight up abused him, and we see the scars of that abuse *everywhere*; they deliberately made him into a person that cannot function normally, through emotional coercion and conditioning. That he has done horrible things for WISE and to other people in the name of WISE’s interests only binds him closer to them; he is not blameless of course but assigning full blame to him for his instances of deception especially is to absolve WISE of their blame, which I think is counter to Spy X Family’s broader point; that people wherever they come from are inherently good, but systems and governments are to be distrusted
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