Did the Spy x Family mangaka hate the series?

The line comes from the official fanbook EYES ONLY (Shueisha, May 2, 2022), in a three-way talk between Endo and fellow artists Kazue Kato and Amu, colleagues who had assisted on each other's work. Kato praised Endo for finally drawing a conventionally handsome lead, and Amu noted he had previously avoided, or deliberately distorted, characters who could have been popular. Endo answered, in Japanese: 'So that's why I have zero emotional attachment to the characters. It's the result of giving up on a lot of things (laughs).' The laugh is in the original. The subject is character design: he did not gravitate to cool men or cute little-girl leads, and his editor had told him such leads matter for popularity. It is a remark about his taste versus the designs this series needed. A sourcing note: the fanbook reaches the open web through Japanese reports quoting page 186, corroborated across multiple carriers; the Japanese sentence is the quote of record.

Watch what headlines did to it. One English report was titled 'Spy x Family Mangaka Says He Doesn't Like Anya and Other Characters.' The quote says no attachment; the headline upgrades it to doesn't like, and names Anya, whom the quote does not single out. Another framed the same material under 'completely detached,' with the laugh and the design context dropped, compromise recast as coercion. In Japan the fanbook sparked a minor flare-up, with many readers noting that the surrounding context changes the line's meaning. In every source opened for this page, Endo never uses a hate or dislike verb about the series or its characters. That absence is itself a finding.

For the fifth anniversary in March 2024, Endo wrote: 'I started the series casually, thinking that as long as I could enjoy drawing it, that would be enough. I never dreamed that so many people would also come to enjoy it... It has been a very fulfilling five-year run, both enjoyable and fleeting, as well as painful and long.' Bittersweet is fair, in his own sentence. Hate is not in it. He has also said Loid carries a lot of self-projection, including his tiredness, that scenes from the anime get him a little emotional, and that writing the arc about Loid's past left him an emotional wreck. One more word needs care: 'rehabilitation' is widely attached to the series in retellings, but in the published talks the rehabilitation framing attaches most directly to his pre-series drawing practice during his slump, not cleanly to the series itself. This page does not print it as a series quote.