Anya > Kanade:

The latest episode of 'Spy x Family' prompted me to exercise yet another edit to '100 Waifus.'  I wanted to include Anya in my fictional character hall of fame, as one of the most adorably expressive and goodhearted kids in the history of fiction.  Anya is definitely a child, easily influenced, overreacting to everything and having powerful mood swings from moment to moment.  But she's perfect just the way she is, I wouldn't have her any other way.  Her pink hair and green eyes are a lovely combo (the same as Sakura Haruno's from Naruto).  And those demon horn hair accessories are uniquely simple yet striking.  Anime has had a lot of girl character designs, and yet I've never seen accessories like Anya's before.  And yet once I've seen them they seem obvious and natural, like, how could we have not used this before?

To top off her cuteness she's also a telepathic orphan who just wants to be loved.  That's a lot of characterization in a very small body.  To top it off, Anya is a unique name to my hall of fame, replacing a repeat name, which is always a good thing.

Kanade from Angel Beats has a lot of problems.  For one, her name overlaps with Kanade from Pretty Cure, who I prefer.  So if one Kanade has to go it's not going to be Cure Rhythm.  The next problem is she's so emotionless and mindless that for most of the series the audience assumes she's not even human, but some kind of automata doll with a program to enforce heaven's rules.  Then to top it off she's another annoying heart transplant recipient, one of the most overused tropes in anime.  Going by anime half of all girls are hosts of other people's hearts.  There's a genuine good plot reason for her to be a heart transplant recipient, but I'm just tired of the subject ever coming up even when it has a good excuse.  Organ transplants are dumb -- people should not be treated as interchangeable parts, it dehumanizes them and leads to cannibalism and genocide.  People are not collections of useful 'things' which can be separated from the soul, the ego, that commands them and put to use in various other fields.  That's sick.  That's monstrous.  It's worse than slavery.  I don't care if it saves lives.  Cannibalism saves lives too, but it's still wrong.  Sometimes people need to die for the sake of principles, and one principle is that the human body belongs expressly and only to its own soul, no one else.

Furthermore organ transplants don't even work.  They go against nature and anything that goes against nature inevitably fails.  Most transplant recipients die soon after anyways, after great expense and pain trying to make the unworkable work.  The more we rely on this failed medical procedure the less we invest in genuinely effective alternatives like wholly artificial hearts or hearts bred from people's own stem cells or other sensible solutions that aren't so grisly and awful.

I've yearned for a decent replacement to show up for Kanade so I could get rid of this annoying heart transplantee for a long time.  Now, in Anya, I've found the perfect upgrade.  'Spy x Family' is a great anime that shows its worth every new episode.  By the time both this season and its second season airs I could see it ranking in the top 20, much less top 200 as it does now.  It deserves more than one character mention in my hall of fame.  Both Loid and Anya are amazing.