Loid's fatherhood and his friendship with Jeeves
I was going to just reply to this amazing post from lpham2525, but my answer became long and out of topic, so I brought it here ;w;
The original post I read was about how Loid needs a dad friend he can show his fears and struggles as a parent to Anya, the same way Yor currently has Melinda. Which makes a lot of sense; Loid is trying to portray a biological father in this fake family, while Yor is playing the stepmother, so she is socially allowed to show her insecurities, while Loid feels like he shouldn't do it at all or his bluff will fly out the window.
Well, there's this one plotline that got a bit forgotten with time, and I really really hope it comes back: Loid becoming friends with Jeeves (and the other 2 butlers, but let's focus on Damian's butler here). He got close to them to gather information, but by the end of the day he looked at them and saw his childhood friends in them; he felt a true connection. As far as we know, they mostly talked about the children and how to raise them. Jeeves showed a completely opposite point of view to Loid's, and Loid seemed to be open to listen to him, maybe even ready to learn a bit, and here's the beauty of it: they're not the biological parents to any of these kids (as far as we know), but they ARE the real fathers. They are the ones raising them, caring for them, and the ones who actually know them. These are the perfect friends for Loid.
In the end, the entire situation is really difficult for Loid because, other than the reasons already listed in the original post, he has to parent a child who was already raised a big part of the way by someone else. He, as a first-time dad, missed all the formative years of learning how his kid works and how he needs to act in front of each of her new personality traits to keep things under control. He doesn't really know his child, and ok, some people adopt older kids and go through it anyway, but (some people might not love reading what's next, but trust me, you should keep reading) here's the key difference from their case to his: Loid had to learn all this without having a pinch of love for this kid and no real interest in the slightest in becoming a father. Sure, by now things may have changed, but this is how the situation started. I'd actually argue that not even Anya really thinks of him as her father, and changing their dynamic is a HUGE challenge.
...And that's where it gets so cute about his friendship with Jeeves. He raised Damian basically from scratch, and despite him having this facade of a vain, spoiled child, he actually is quite a good person, with great values, and is quite caring to others for a wealthy high society 6-year-old. He's not perfect, but again, HE'S 6. He clearly is on the best track; Jeeves did one hell of an awesome job raising him and knows him like nobody else. And Loid is aware of this. Jeeves has been able to achieve everything Loid needs to do with Anya, and he's not the biological father either.
Loid knows he's working for the mission first, but still he IS trying not to harm Anya in the process as much as he can, but he tends to think about her more like an annoying little sister than as his child. He gets on her level and interacts with her as if she were an equal; a couple of times he has even snapped out of it and remembered he's dealing with a toddler
so from time to time he loses sight of "do what's best for her" and pushes her in harmful ways like a big brother would, and that's exactly where Jeeves makes him question himself. He reminds him that it is very important to get things right with them NOW; everything done wrong now will haunt them for life.
Unlike Yor, who, even while raising her brother, always took up the role of a mother, Loid doesn't have that instinct because for many years he didn't allow himself to feel love. The love for your children is supposed to be the biggest love there is; that's how they become your full priority. You learn to speak their unspoken language to understand their intentions behind every action, and you learn to instinctively make sacrifices for their well-being. He's getting there, but we're still in the process.
If you think about it, at the very start of the story, Loid had more fatherly moments with Anya than later on, because he was a stranger fully pretending to love this random child he had no feelings for. All empty gestures. As the story moved on, we haven't seen him that often holding her in his arms or caressing her, for example, and I think that's because he stopped pretending that much as he actually started developing feelings for her (why fake love when you actually feel love?), but that love doesn't look like a stereotypical father-daughter relationship; it looks more like a sibling relationship for now, because he's still fighting to not love her, but he's slowly losing that battle too (if he learns about Anya's past, I bet that will break him).
After meeting Jeeves, Loid started to finally have a better grip on Anya and how she works. Being with him made him notice her with human eyes for the first time in a while, not agent eyes. He ended that episode knowing Anya was very liked by others and that she can handle social interactions. He finally understood how her relationship with Damian worked and figured they weren't enemies, as he thought for dozens of chapters, but rather it was a friendship with a fighting dynamic, as they are children who don't know how to show affection otherwise.
Next time we saw Loid and Anya, for the first time, he played a convincing biological father with his child in front of the stranger in the house (Yor). He fully read Anya and told Yor to not buy her bs like an actual father would. But Yor insisted, and he doubted and stepped back a little because he THINKS he knows her but doesn't KNOW he does yet. Fatherhood improved ages with just one day with Jeeves; I really hope we get more of it ;w;
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