Characters / SPY×FAMILY: Yor Forger

SPY×FAMILY Main Character Index
Forger Family & Associates (Loid Forger | Anya Forger | Yor Forger)
Eden Academy | Ostania

Yor Forger, née Briar

^{Click here to see her as a civilian}

Voiced by: Saori Hayami (JP), Natalie Van Sistine (EN) ^{Foreign VAs} Romina Marroquín Payró (LAT), Regina Tiscareño (LAT/young), Mireia López (SP), Adeline Chetail (FR), Daniela Molina (GER), Elisa Giorgio (ITA), Fu Qihui (TW Mandarin), Maira Paris (BR)
Played by: Mirei Sasaki and Fuka Yuduki (JP musical)

"May I have the honor of taking your life?"

A 27-year-old woman whose parents died when she was only a child, leaving it to her to raise her younger brother, Yuri, alone. Nowadays she works in the capital of Ostania's city hall.

Or at least that's what she tells people. In truth, Yor is an infamous Professional Killer known as <Thorn Princess>.

One day, as Yor was overly fixated on the idea her cover might be blown after a coworker ribs her about not being married or even having a boyfriend, Yor encountered the widowed Loid Forger with his single daughter Anya at the tailor shop where she regularly visits. After their initial exchange and understanding each other’s problems in life, Yor asked Loid to pretend to be her boyfriend for her upcoming social event; but Loid’s verbal slip up at the event promoted their relationship straight up into a married couple instead. As Loid’s public proclamation has been done, the two of them decided to just go with the marriage, since Loid agreed Anya needs a complete and healthy Nuclear Family in order to be accepted into The Eden Academy.

While an excellent assassin and Professional Killer, Yor is socially awkward at the best of times, easily duped by people she trusts, and comes across as bizarre to the people around her while she's undercover. Over time, Yor finds that her cover starts to become much deeper than she anticipated.

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A-D

• Accidental Hero: Downplayed. When terrorists are trying to assassinate a foreign minister to start a war, Yor ends up helping to capture and foil them while searching for Anya, initially mistaking them for child kidnappers and rapists. Once she learns what the criminals are, it ceases to be accidental.
• Achievements in Ignorance: In Mission 65, Yor is the first member of the Forger family to achieve one of her husband's and daughter's primary objectives, that is to get close to a member of the Desmond family, which Yor does when she befriends Melinda Desmond, Damian's mother and Donovan's wife. The irony being this was purely by accident on Yor's part and she is the only member of the Forger family who wasn't actively trying to do this, due to being Locked Out of the Loop in regards to Operation Strix.
• Acquired Poison Immunity: As a contract killer, she's developed a high tolerance for poisons. She accidentally drinks a whole cup of blowfish poison; just 10 grams of blowfish poison will kill the average person. With Yor, not only does it not kill her, but the powerful neurotoxin manages to serve as a pain killer from being Shot in the Ass by an earlier assailant. She doesn't, however, have this level of tolerance for alcohol.
• Action Mom: She becomes Anya's adoptive mother early in the series while secretly working as a professional assassin. She can also cut through hordes of thugs, guards, and even pumpkins easily. Her establishing moment as an assassin has her clear out a room of almost a dozen men, all without even a scratch. Even drunk, her fighting skills are good enough that she could kill her spy husband Loid; she only stops when her heel breaks and she sleeps off the drink.
• Aerith and Bob: Westalis and Ostania are filled with broadly European, mostly British, names, with the exception of Yor, which is Asian. Given her surname is 'Briar' and she mentions coming from eastern Ostania, it's likely her parents were immigrants from an Asian-esque country in the setting, corroborated by the fact Yor's brother, Yuri, also has an Asian name (though, it should be noted Yuri is a feminine name in Japan and a masculine one in Russia).
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: While Yor's thought processes can be odd and chaotic at the best of times, they get much more unstable and prone to illogical meandering when she is drunk. In Mission 80 it takes her fully sobering up to finally realize that not having any major gripes with Loid is actually a good thing, even if it makes their relationship a bit unusual.
• Alliterative Family: Yor and her brother, Yuri.
• Almost Kiss: She nearly kissed Loid in front of Yuri to prove that they are a married couple. However, she chickened out and slapped her brother (although it was actually meant for Loid) out of embarrassment.
• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: How she appears to her colleagues in her day job due to her eccentricities; she's actually just shy. As things progress and she becomes more open with expressing certain things, said colleagues also note the change.
• Amusing Injuries:
  • She suffers a bullet to the butt in Extra Mission 2, and although she treats the wound, she doesn't (or doesn't get a chance to) do anything about the pain for the entirety of the chapter. As a result she constantly has an anguished look on her face that causes Loid to come to the wrong conclusion.
  • At the end of Mission 52, after being forced to use her bare hands to stab a super tough assassin multiple times to kill him, Yor (covered in the man's blood) cries that she jammed one of her fingers.
  • In Chapter 68 she ends up spraining both her wrists after sending a giant assassin flying as he was boasting about his steel girdle body armor.
• An Arm and a Leg: A few jobs offscreen had her literally rip people's bodies apart and throw the pieces around.
• And Call Him "George": Because of her monstrous strength, she once hugged her little brother so hard that she broke his ribs by accident. It's for this reason she trains to be gentler when handling Anya.
• Anime Hair: Downplayed, but not even the author can adequately explain how Yor preps her seemingly simple hairstyle.◊
• Anti-Hero: She became an assassin to protect her younger brother and provide for him when they became orphans - and later on, continues working as this to protect innocent civilians from evil and vile people. However, she genuinely has strong morals, always makes sure that she only kills absolutely evil and vile people, and is also a genuinely kind, sweet and selfless young woman with strong maternal and big sister instincts, a Friend to All Children and would Never Hurt an Innocent.
• Armor-Piercing Question: After a tutoring session, she asks Loid, "Is that actually what Anya wants, or you?" Loid can't tell Yor that his mission requires Anya to do well in school, but he's forced to stop and consider Anya's needs.
• Attractiveness Isolation: Implied. Many characters have commented on how attractive Yor is. Both Swan and Yor's co-workers have stated that Yor could have gotten any man she wanted with her good looks. Fiona even begrudgingly admits that in terms of physical appearances, Yor has no flaws. However, Yor lacks the social skills and confidence to capitalize on her beauty. As a result, her good looks only serve to isolate Yor from her jealous colleagues at her civilian job. It's strongly implied Loid was one of the first people to compliment her on how pretty she is, as Yor was genuinely surprised that someone had a "favorable impression of her physical appearance".
• Badass Adorable: Yor is depicted as a cuddly womanchild and a total sweetheart who just happens to be a walking slaughterhouse.
• Bare-Handed Blade Block: Does a more realistic version of this against a sword master assassin that was about to kill her. Realistic in the sense that while she does directly grab the sword to block it, and then proceeds to snap the blade with that same hand through sheer strength, she still cuts herself badly in the process of doing so (her being Made of Iron ensured that she didn't suffer even worse).
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Enforced. It's revealed in Chapter 49 that if Yor ever receives an injury that can't be hidden or "explained away" (i.e. a lost limb or a massive scar that couldn't be hidden by clothing), the Garden will take Yor away from the Forger family as a means to keep her assassin life a secret. As a result, Yor takes great care of her injuries to avoid scarring. Ironically, this ends up becoming a Drama-Preserving Handicap throughout the Great Cruise Adventure Arc, as Yor finds herself subconsciously holding back in a fight out of fear that she could receive such an injury that would result in her having to be taken away from the family she has come to love.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Yor was so moved from Loid standing up for her in Camilia's party and complimenting her fighting skills, that she asked him to marry her to maintain both of their covers. Yor's feelings for Loid continuously grow due to how well he has treated her.
• Becoming the Mask: Yor might have married Twilight/Loid for her cover, but it quickly becomes clear she's settled into her new role as a mother and wife. She instantly bonds with Anya as her daughter and wants to keep the girl happy and safe. She also takes quick notice of how kind and considerate Loid is of her, making her actually quite happy to be "married" to him (and indeed believing he may be the only man she's ever known who could accept her as she is), and she repeatedly displays signs of jealousy or unease toward threats to their relationship.
  • Mission 24 has her shocked at how happy she is at Anya and Loid enjoying her cooking when she originally joined the Forger family as cover.
  • Mission 35 has her deeply unsettled by the possibility that Loid is in love with Fiona/Nightfall and wants to replace her. By the end of the chapter Yor is shocked that she considers the Forger family as a place she doesn't want to leave.
  • Played for Drama during the Cruise Arc: Yor contemplates leaving the Garden after the mission and when she is fighting the other assassins, she ends up subconsciously holding back in fear of getting an injury that would force her to leave Loid (the Garden having explained that for the sake of secrecy they will send her away from the Forgers if she takes an injury that can't be explained away or hidden).
• Beneath Suspicion: Loid's early attempt to bug Yor following his realization her brother was a member of the State Security Service backfires and indirectly leads to Yor 'proving' that there's nothing off about her. During the time she's bugged, she never once gets involved with her job as a hitwoman, meaning Loid is never made aware of Shopkeeper or Garden's presence in her life. Following a great display of loyalty towards her fake family, Loid destroys the bug, which lends some credence to why Loid is somewhat blind to his wife's odd behavior; all he ever was made aware of was the fact that Yor did indeed work at City Hall all day. Of course, the humor in this comes from the fact Yor herself wasn't aware she was creating an airtight alibi.
• Beyond the Impossible: It's implied at several points that Yor's incredible physical resilience is not Charles Atlas Superpower but legit Super-Toughness, unknown in this setting even to assassins of similar caliber to herself. The only person of similar durability to herself is her own brother. For example, see this exchange during the Grand Cruise Arc when Yor is struck with a taser-baton:
  Yor: Hey! That hurt!
  Taser-Assassin: It's supposed to kill you!
• Beware the Nice Ones: Yor is a very sweet and loving woman, but mess with her family, especially her adoptive daughter, and you'll see why the Thorn Princess is one of the deadliest assassins in the country.
• Big Damn Heroes: Should Anya ever be in danger, Yor will always be there just in time to save her. The first instance was Anya being kidnapped right outside of a supermarket. Then later on Yor saves her from Keith and his goon when they're trying to silence Anya.
• Big Sister Instinct: She initially became a contract killer to earn the money she needed to look after her little brother, and to ensure he had a carefree life.
• Blatant Lies:
  • How she can take down a stampeding cow by targeting its pressure points: She took a Yoga class! Even Loid doesn't question it.
  • The reason she gives to Yuri for why she never told him about her getting married? She just forgot. And when he questions how she could have forgotten for a full year, she tells him she forgot she had forgotten to tell him. Both of these are such whoppers that Twilight drops a plate after hearing each of them, but thankfully Yuri is so obsessed with his sister he accepts her words at face value.
• Blood-Splattered Warrior: Given her preferred method of assassination, she often ends up with plenty of blood from her victims after the job is done. During the Great Cruise Adventure Arc, as she massacres the army of assassins in the anime some stains fall on her face giving her a war-paint look, making her look even more badass. In the manga she was practically bathed in blood.
• Book Dumb: She can't even solve a simple maths problem. It's justified due to having to divert time from her education to work as an assassin to provide for her brother, barely graduating from High-School with enough basic literacy, typing and organization skills to be hired as a secretary.
• Boxing Battler: Downplayed given her preference for needles, stiletto heels, and kicking, but when Yor uses her hands for anything other than stabbing, she's shown to adopt a lot of stances and techniques from Swarmer style boxing overwhelming opponents with speedy, up-close punches.
• Brainless Beauty: Downplayed; Yor is attractive and merely outlandish rather than stupid. She's hypercompetent at certain tasks, but she lacks common sense and is noted by her brother to be gullible, showcased when she seemingly suspects nothing of Twilight's flimsy lies of being chased by his 'mental hospital patients'. Even Twilight thinks to himself that he can't tell if she's the smartest or the dumbest girl he's ever met. Other panels also show her head overheating in the face of more refined activities as if her brain can't quite make sense of their appeal or how to interpret them properly.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: The Gentle Girl to Loid's Brooding Boy. She's a very kind and polite woman who's more open with her emotions compared to her cool but less expressive fake husband who tends to keep his emotions under a veil.
• Bully Hunter: In spite of needing to maintain a façade of civilian normality, Yor does not tolerate the innocent being victimized in her presence.
  • She leaps into action the second a sweet old lady's purse was snatched by a thug, in spite of it breaking her "ordinary housewife" cover.
  • Nothing enrages her more than assassins who are willing to kill children for money, as an army of elite murderers paid to kill baby Gram Gretcher learned the hard way.
• Bumbling Dad: She could be considered a rare gender inversion of the trope as a Bumbling Mom, as she is terrible at household chores. Her cooking is usually pots full of ominously smoking and burned messes, her sewing up Anya's torn stuffed penguin makes it "even deader", and even her attempt to iron one of Loid's shirts gets it burned.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Despite Yor's lack of social skills and Cloudcuckoolander thought processes, she is still an incredibly capable assassin who's been trained for the job since childhood. Her physical skills are an outright Charles Atlas Superpower, and her physical prowess borders on Super-Strength. She does detailed research and analysis of her targets to make utterly sure she sticks to her Never Hurt an Innocent code. She is also extremely good at organizing and cleaning up crime scenes, unpacking most of her things when moving into Loid's apartment in moments, and managing to consistently leave no real evidence linking her to her assassin work despite her own brother and several of their acquaintances being part of the Ostanian Secret Police and her now husband being Westalis's top spy, all trained in Spotting the Thread.
• Butt-Monkey: When it comes to trying to balance being an assassin with her cover as a married woman, Yor's failures are frequently played for laughs, including Anya saying that she can't cook well most of the time.
• Can't Hold Her Liquor: She gets drunk way too easily, much to Loid's horror when she downs a whole bottle of booze. Whether she has low tolerance, or she's just prone to knocking back large amounts of alcohol in one go, she still gets sozzled extremely quickly. Considering the extra bit about how she can drink an entire cup of blowfish poison without issue, it plays into how oddly quirky she is.
• Cassandra Truth: Her drunken displays of jealousy towards Fiona momentarily makes Loid realize that Yor might have developed genuine feelings for him. He very quickly shrugs this off when she high kicks him in the chin in embarrassment, "confirming" to him that it was all some convoluted reverse Honey Trap.
• Character Catchphrase: "May I have the honor of taking your life?" It's said as a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner to her targets whenever Yor's acting in her capacity as the Thorn Princess.
• Characterization Marches On: Slightly downplayed. Yor has a fascination with blades and weapons, but this behavior has appeared rarely with long stretches between instances, namely Mission 3 when she's closely observing fine silverware and becoming flustered looking at a painting of a guillotine, and Mission 65 when visiting a shopping mall, where she's convinced that it's a place of "traps and temptations" after misunderstanding an eyeliner as a hidden weapon for the eyes. It's implied that her growing desire to be more normal is what's been keeping this behavior under the surface in later chapters.
• Character Development: Her insecurities lessen more and more as the series progresses, as shown in Chapter 86 when she says she wishes for Loid to rely on her more and in Chapter 91 when she confidently stands up for Millie when the latter is being insulted and patronized by the Lady Patriots.
• Character Tics: Doubling as a nonverbal Pre-Asskicking One-Liner, she'll often crack her fingers when agitated and ready to lay the smackdown.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Yor has trained as an assassin since her youth, and it has made her a One-Woman Army. It gets to the point that, given many of her feats aren't being exaggerated for the sake of a joke (such as several fights during the Cruise arc, where any failure on Yor's part would mean the death of a child and thus necessitates a brief but serious tonal shift away from humor), Yor outright has at least low-level Super-Strength.
  • Extra Mission 1 has her high kick a man so hard he gets stuck in the ceiling, while Anya was holding onto him.
  • Extra Mission 2 has her take a bullet to the buttocks with no adverse medical outcome, though it does leave her in considerable pain for a few days. In the same chapter, she also drinks a martini laced with fugu fish blood with no ill effect; in fact, it actually dulled the pain of the aforementioned gunshot wound.
  • Mission 19 has Yor leap to the ceiling of an event hall with a single jump, and later kick a terrorist about to hurt Anya so hard that he hits the walls three times before one last impact with the ground, all in heels no less.
  • Mission 22 has her kick a moving car off-course without suffering any injuries.
  • Mission 24 has her cut through both the vegetable and the cutting board beneath it when trying to cook, doing so multiple times before she even notices the damage.
  • Mission 34 has her hit a tennis ball so hard the wires on the racket slice it up like confetti. Her second shot, after reminding herself that she needs to hold back a little, sends the ball flying so fast it goes in a perfectly straight line at the speed of sound, and outright destroys her opponent's racket when they try to hit the ball back.
  • Mission 35 has Yor, in a moment of drunken embarrassment, reflexively kick Loid across the room.
  • Mission 42 has her ripping a proportion of Franky's Mech-Suit off his back and hurling it in front of a cat to stop it from running into traffic.
  • Mission 47 has her throw a dagger through a wooden cabin door and into the head of the assassin on the other side, pinning his body to the wall. She follows it up by flinging a button into another assassin's neck with force and precision enough that he is sent reeling unconscious into a chair.
  • Mission 51 has a attacking assassin block a jab from Yor's fingers with his knife. It works, but the knife proceeds to shatter into pieces.
  • Mission 52 is perhaps the biggest series of examples yet, with Yor facing off against a ton of assassins in a row. She first protects where her client is taking shelter by knocking a large metal container over the hatch door with a single kick, then proceeds to go all out in what becomes a massacre against her opponents, most of whom she kills with single stabs to their brains (often straight through their skulls). When one hits her with enough poison gas to kill a bear she emerges unscathed, she barely flinches when hit with a electric baton from one assassin and then sucker punched by a huge assassin (who she proceeds to kill with rapid fire jabs of her bare hands that leave him such a bloody mess that one could be forgiven for thinking he'd been hit with machine gun fire). The only notable injury she takes in the whole exchange is jamming one of her fingers.
  • In Mission 59, while running off to the hospital carrying Becky, she sees a car approaching too quickly to avoid it, so she throws Becky into the air, gets hit straight on by the car, rolls along the ground, and gets herself into a crouch to catch Becky, again without any injuries (aside from a brief nosebleed). Later on, she knocks the bell off a "Test Your Strength" Game, sending it rolling, after swinging the hammer one-handed.
  • According to Eyes Only, she's unable to measure her grip strength because the instrument breaks.
  • Mission 65 has Yor making various volleyball throws that leave a crater in the floor and smash a hole in the roof of the sports hall. One of the volleyballs ends up leaving the mesosphere (though this part may have been Rule of Funny rather than literal).
  • Mission 75 has her rushing to reunite with Anya. She mentions passing Melinda's car on the way over, meaning she ran so fast as to completely overtake a potentially speeding vehicle.
  • As a child she apparently fought and killed a wild boar with her bare hands and minimal injuries to herself.
• Child Soldier: Although she was neither a formal member of a military nor paramilitary organization, the bits and pieces that have been shown about her past imply that she was recruited into and trained by the The Garden when she was a child and has been conducting assassinations since her early teens. She likewise has noted that the Shopkeeper considers her work to be much like that of a soldier in the military.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Demonstrated when the family sees a thief snatch an old woman's purse, Yor immediately jumps to stop the man. Overall, while Anya also wants to be a hero, and Loid is warming up to it, Yor has a habit of dropping everything to perform a random good deed if the opportunity arises. It's the reason she becomes friends with Melinda Desmond.
• Cleanup Crew: Her skills as an assassin include cleaning up after herself. Interestingly this also gives Yor her only real useful housewife skill of being extremely good at keeping their home clean.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Subverted when it comes to Fiona. She glowers at a tennis ball, and clenches it when thinking about Loid and Fiona going to a tennis match, briefly thinking of killing her. However, she does immediately realize how harmful these thoughts are and tries to (quite literally) shake them off. She later confronts Loid about his relationship with Fiona, clearly upset with the idea that he might enter a relationship with her and replace Yor. That said, it's clear that, though unhappy, she would have stepped down willingly for Loid's sake. Completely Averted when it comes to Becky, who she doesn't even register as a rival on account of her young age.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • Yor has a decidedly skewed view of the world. She often considers killing someone as a potential option in normal social interactions. She has a strange fixation with blades, getting lost in her own world admiring things like a painting of a guillotine in a museum, or a sharp piece of silverware at a fancy restaurant. She thinks fondly on the time she accidentally broke two of her brother's ribs when he was little. She doesn't understand why her coworker would want to put a booger in their creep boss's coffee as a little revenge, asking if boogers make coffee taste better or something. She doesn't even bat an eye at Loid beating up the criminals he claims are his "patients" as "concussive therapy". Eventually we get a flashback showing she was like this even as a kid, coming home to Yuri while covered in blood until she learned she shouldn't leave evidence of her kills on her person anymore.
  • Her train of thought quickly veers off into its own tangents as well. Such as when she's against Anya getting a dog because she thinks it'll maul Anya to death... or if it's a small one, the dog might get a dagger somehow and try to cut Anya's throat. Or when she thinks that Loid will report her to the Secret Police if she's a weak tennis player. Or when she tries to help Anya with her math homework:
    Um... The denominator is 5, so it's one of 5 parts. Um...to make this simpler, I'll just think of this as a dismembered body: 4 limbs and 1 torso. Wait, but what about the head then? Huh...let's see, 5...5...doesn't a 5 look a lot like an S?
  • During an original segment in the anime, Yor believes Anya to have left her PE clothes behind after accidentally sleeping in. She immediately assumes that the act of simply forgetting PE clothes would lead to Anya being immediately expelled from Eden Academy.^note Complete with an Imagine Spot of Anya sporting a pompadour and riding off in a tricycle to pursue a life of crime. Thus, she goes to great lengths to try and deliver Anya her PE clothes without getting caught. Hilarity Ensues.
• Color Motif: Red, appropriate for an assassin. Her eyes are red, and she gravitates towards red clothing in her civilian attire. Downplayed with her mostly-black assassin attire, although the inside of her skirt is still red.
• Cool Big Sis: After witnessing her Charles Atlas Superpowers and engaging in a series of comical mutual misunderstandings with Yor, Becky is deeply impressed with her, calling her "the perfect woman... as open-hearted as the sky above and as mighty as the earth below," before asking her to train her.
• Combat Parkour: She can leap across tall buildings with no issue to chase down targets.
• Combat Pragmatist: Downplayed in that, much like Twilight, Yor goes to considerable lengths to avoid collateral damage, the harming of children, etc. However, in regards to her opponents she doesn't have any particular rules she follows in fighting beyond that if they are trying to kill her or someone she is protecting then there is nothing wrong with killing them back. She does admittedly tend to kill quickly when it comes to her targets, noting that even the worse people still deserve to be treated as people and given quick deaths if possible (specifically stating that despite how bloody her assassinations appear, she stabs them in such a way that they are "at peace" in "moments"), but all that can go out the window if fighting someone on her level who is able to avoid her usual quick kills. Against two separate assassins who try to verbally introduce themselves, Yor takes them out before they can do anything else, with one even getting Killed Mid-Sentence. One assassin calls her heartless after watching her cleave through dozens of attackers, killing every single one of them, and Yor responds matter-of-factly that she had no reason not to kill them, that if you point your blade at her then you can't complain if one is pointed back at you and the same goes for herself in not taking it personally that the assassins are trying to kill her. Course Yor very much does have a heart, proceeding to ask if the remaining assassin who is not currently attacking her would be willing to leave peacefully (he isn't).
• Combat Stilettos: Yor wears high heels even during her missions as an assassin, with them doing nothing to deter her terrifying skills as a fighter or her speed when running. In fact, they instead complement her image as a graceful fighter. Yor herself justifies their use by noting (in a manga page detailing various outfits she wears) that her high heels can serve well as emergency weapons. At one point, she even uses them to catch a sword strike from the one assassin on the S.S. Lorelei who has the strength and skill to directly take her on, and actually holds him at bay by parrying his sword repeatedly via multiple kicks, basically sword fighting with her high heel. That the heels come out undamaged (compared to her civilian heels that have at least once snapped simply from the strain of her superhuman exertions) suggests her "work" heels are made of tougher than normal materials.
• The Comically Serious: English version only; the mature contralto of Natalie Van Sistine's take on Yor makes her come across as more dignified compared to her original Japanese voice. Initially it's a little creepy due to her inability to read and enact normal social cues, but as she expresses herself more it quickly tends to turn humorous.
• Compressed Hair: A more impressive example than most, given that she doesn't wear hats, just a hairband. Not even the mangaka himself can explain how she does it◊. Downplayed when the author later clarified in Eyes Only that he was joking and that Yor's hair is not such a mystery, that she just gathers her hair in back and lets the sides dangle down.
• Consummate Professional: While she's something of a goof while off the clock, Yor is brutally efficient and straight to the point while acting as the Thorn Princess, taking the quickest route to her target and dismantling entire armed retinues frighteningly quickly. She feels neither joy nor remorse for her actions and is quick to clean up any incriminating evidence before strolling out the door. But this mask of hers begins to crumble the more time she spends with Loid and Anya. Her thoughts stray to them even in the midst of a heated fight with other elite assassins, distracting her and causing her to make mistakes that she'd have never made otherwise.
• Contralto of Strength: Natalie Van Sistine gives her a suitably low voice befitting of a master assassin in the English dub. Her voice tends to rise an octave during humorous moments and/or when Yor's emotionally vulnerable, especially when drunk, but still slips back into the lower voice whenever she's serious.
• Contrived Coincidence: She meets Loid at the tailor's due to accidentally tearing her only good dress during an assassination job she was carrying out the previous night, and the former was also there following Franky's suggestion to get Anya new clothes. Admittedly their meeting only develops beyond that due to Anya pushing them together after a misunderstanding threatens to end the relationship before it can start. This all also happens to occur just as both Yor and Loid were in need of a fake romantic partner.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: As Loid points out in Chapter 14/Episode 9, Yor never needed to get married to avoid suspicion from the Secret Police as her brother, Yuri, is an SSS agent. In the event Yor were to be accused of being a spy, the charges against her would likely be immediately dropped once the familial connection is discovered, and, knowing Yuri, the accusers would likely be the ones to "disappear" afterwards. However, since Yor herself is unaware of her brother's true profession, and the fact that she is guilty of being a dangerous assassin for a secret organization, Yor still believes that she has to uphold her fake marriage to stay under the radar. It does help that Yor genuinely loves being a part of the Forger family.
• Creepy Good: Due to her growing up working as an assassin, Yor sometimes is shown having creepy thoughts in her mind, but she's actually a genuinely morally upstanding person who always reminds herself to Never Hurt an Innocent.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • Part of the humor of Yor's character is that while she is one of the deadliest people alive, she has practically no other skills, so any time she tries to do something domestic it turns into an Epic Fail. The only reason she is so good at cleaning is because it is also part of her job.
  • Somewhat downplayed since Yor typically can take on people with guns using martial arts and piercing needles just fine, but her fighting style puts her in something of a stalemate against snipers, since her reaction speeds allow her to effortlessly dodge high-impact bullets but her focus on melee means she has little answer to a fortified sniper with proper support firing on her from a vantage point too far for her to safely reach.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Yor is usually presented as a naive and ditzy woman with inept basic domestic skills. She's also an extremely deadly assassin with immense physical strength who can kill several different fellow assassins in a single night.
• Crush Blush: Yor will occasionally blush or be flustered around Loid as her feelings for him slowly become more genuine, especially whenever he praises her or is too close to her.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: When Fiona challenges her to a tennis match, Yor wins by hitting the ball at supersonic speed and splintering Fiona's racket.
• Cuteness Proximity: She absolutely finds Anya adorable. The two waste several minutes admiring Anya's new school uniform while the tailor keeps trying to get them to leave. She also really likes holding Anya's hand.
• Dark Is Not Evil: She's an assassin, wears dark colored clothes and can be absolutely terrifying when she's in work mode, but she's firmly on the side of good only killing absolutely vile people and making sure to Never Hurt an Innocent.
• A Day in the Limelight: The Cruise Ship Arc focuses a lot more on her and her job as an assassin, having Loid and Anya appear from time to time just to show them enjoying the cruise until they get a bit more time in the spotlight after it's discovered that Snoops rigged bombs all over the ship.
• Death Glare: She gives a lot of these whenever Anya's in danger, scaring perpetrators shitless.
• Devious Daggers: Her weapons of choice as an assassin is a set of two daggers, reflecting the dirty and secretive nature of her job. Said daggers are fashioned like long spindle-needles, fitting with her theme as the Thorn Princess, since Princess Briar Rose of the "Sleeping Beauty" fairytale was put to sleep by a cursed spindle-needle.
• Didn't Think This Through: She decides to teach Anya martial arts so she can defend herself when alone. So what's the first thing Anya does? Punch Damian, the kid Loid's mission entails getting close to as a backup plan (though she doesn't know this), for being a jerk on her first day. Yor doesn't let herself live the fact down.
• Ditzy Genius: It can be pretty hard at times to tell if Yor is a mastermind or a dimwit. Though not as much as Loid, she's absolutely skilled and generally seems to be intelligent but... What about the lies she believes? Her strange thought process? Her lack of common sense and social skills?
• Does Not Know Her Own Strength:
  • She has a tendency to break or hurt things by accident due to her immense strength; she broke Yuri's ribs by hugging him too hard when he was little (she once hugged Anya too hard, too, but luckily without any injury), and sometimes goes overboard in her fights.
  [Thinking while holding Anya's hand] Aww...Her hands are so cute and tiny. It takes me back to when I used to hold my little brother's hand. He was delicate like this too. That one time I hugged too hard, I accidentally broke two of his ribs, though.
  (Cue Anya reacting in horror as she reads Yor's mind.)
  • After Nightfall challenges her to a game of tennis, Yor hits the ball so hard that the strings of her racket slice through the ball, reducing it to cubes. Then when she manages to hold back a little to avoid this, the ball flies faster than sound in an unerringly straight line.
  • She kicks a man thinking he was kidnapping Anya. By sheer accident she kicked with enough force to crash him into the ceiling.
    "Oh dear...I may have overdone it this time. He's not dead, right?!"
  • At the end of the Cruise Arc, having spent a lot of time fighting at full strength, Yor outright forgets entirely about holding back when she pushes Anya on a surfboard, sending her rocketing across a wave like a speed boat and needing to be rescued by Loid.
  • Trying to win a "Test Your Strength" Game prize for Becky, Yor breaks the bell off, even using just one arm and trying to hold back.
  • While playing volleyball with the Lady Patriots Society, her hits are strong enough to leave craters in the opposing team's court, and send the ball crashing through the roof and into outer space!
  • In a slightly orthogonal example, Yor, who is constantly worried about doing something unusual and outing herself as an assassin, ends up extensively demonstrating her superhuman strength while helping her coworkers at City Hall get set up for a celebration of injured veterans because it turns out Yor just has a completely skewed idea of what "normal" human strength even looks like.
• The Dreaded: Zigzagged. In Extra Mission 2 Thorn Princess is treated as a well-known and feared name in the Ostanian underworld, with one terrorist outright calling her a monster as he tries to kill her with his last breaths, and another being scared straight by the sight of what she can do (at least until he thinks his companions in Hell are giving him an opportunity for revenge). However, outside this chapter Yor is not treated as being recognized by any of the criminals we see interact with her on her missions (admittedly in the main instance where this happened most of her opponents were implied to be foreigners). Her organization Garden, however, is certainly both The Dreaded and Shrouded in Myth judging by what Franky has to say about them.
• Drunken Master: Being three sheets to the wind does nothing to decrease her lethality - it just makes her less likely to hold back.
• Dual Wielding: She often wields a pair of needle-like daggers officially called "stilletos" to kill her targets. She may carry several extras as replacements.
• Dub Personality Change: A curious subversion happens in the Latin American Spanish dub: Rather than using a deep voice like the one from the original Japanese, or even like the English dub, which the Spanish dub was dubbed from, Yor speaks with a higher, cheerful, teen-like voice, except when doing her job as a assassin. Despite this, it doesn't change her personality too much, since her tone makes her sound like something is very off with her.
• Dull Eyes of Unhappiness: Her eyes lose their luster when acting as the Thorn Princess, becoming dull and lifeless to emphasize Yor flipping from her civilian persona to her Consummate Professional role as a Professional Killer. At the start of the story (Mission 2 specifically) her civilian identity has these as well, as Yor is currently living alone after Yuri moved out. This becomes less and less prevalent the more time she spends with Anya and Loid, emphasizing how Yor is Becoming the Mask.
• Dumb Muscle: She's a spacey Cloudcuckoolander who tends to keep her cover more through accident than design. She's also a supremely gifted killing machine who utterly eclipses even elite intelligence agents like Twilight and Nightfall in strength and speed.

E-M

• Endearingly Dorky: Yor, despite her job, is a very endearing, sweet, and kind woman who's also spacey and naive, particularly regarding her lack of social skills resulting in awkwardness. All of this is precisely why Loid starts Becoming the Mask in terms of loving her, as the honesty and earnestness of her feelings warm his heart to her and her alone among all the women he's been with, since every other woman in his life was as fake as himself.
• Epiphany Comeback: In Mission 53, Yor being led to question her reason for being an assassin leaves her open to her current opponent's attack, which sends her crashing into a wall, unable to get up, with her opponent readying a killing blow and her mind drifting into a Near-Death Experience as she reflects that she doesn't need the job to support Yuri any more, and this would be a good place to stop. Then a comment from the other enemy assassins about taking care of her current charges has her trying to remember why she was protecting them, and she finally recalls why she became, and remains, an assassin - to protect Yuri, or anyone else, from needless tragedies and ensure they have carefree lives, something which has only become more true with gaining a new family in the Forgers. Her purpose now clear in her mind, she snaps her opponent's sword with one hand, gets back up, and sends him flying with a punch, ready to return to the fight.
• Establishing Character Moment: Mission 2 first introduces her personality while at her office job, a polite if spacey woman with little social grace, misinterpreting her coworkers' discussions and mostly keeping to herself. You also learn that she's single, in her late twenties, and is singled out among her circle for not having a partner. She later has a pleasant phone call with her brother Yuri, hinting at her maternal nature, only for her to follow up with another call with her employer for another job. It's then you see her singlehandedly wipe out a room of armed men and a corrupt diplomat, showcasing her other nature as a Professional Killer.
• Everyone Has Standards: As an assassin, her profession is one of murky (at best) legality, but all the same Yor despises conventional criminals such as thieves, robbers, traffickers, etc. and will readily take them down on sight regardless of if it is part of a mission or not (not that she would kill a simple thief of course, but she will seek to have them arrested). While she readily admits money was a major motivation for her to feed and take care of Yuri, she nonetheless also has a low view of professional assassins who only care about money and will take on any job and kill anyone provided they are paid enough, outright asking such an assassin to not compare himself to her.
• Experienced Protagonist: She's already a renowned professional assassin at the start of the story, as well as having experience as a parental figure because of her taking care of her brother.
• Exotic Weapon Supremacy: In spite of regularly facing hordes armed with guns, Yor exclusively uses her oversized spindle-needles, supplemented with steel-shattering kicks, and always wins against foes armed with more advanced weaponry. It's only when confronting assassins also specializing in medieval arms and martial arts, such as the Katana-wielding Master Swordsman aboard the Princess Lorelei, that Yor is ever challenged in open combat.
• Fairytale Motifs: Her daggers resemble giant spindle-needles, her assassin outfit has several rose motifs, her code name is Thorn Princess and her surname is Briar. This all points to her being themed after Little Briar Rose, aka one of the alternate titles of Sleeping Beauty, with her weapons of choice alluding to the cursed spindle-needle that plunged the titular princess into her eternal slumber. In a darkly comical way, this makes sense - her job is to make people "sleep."
• False Reassurance: In her first job shown in the story, Yor says she's terribly sorry for interrupting anything her target was doing after kicking his guards through the door of his hotel room. She then politely asks if she could have the "honor" of killing him. The next panel shows her washing her hands after she finished stabbing every man in the room to death.
• Fatal Flaw: Insecurity. Yor doesn't think she's good at anything apart from killing and cleaning, constantly worrying that she's not a good wife and mother. There are times when it's used against her: when Fiona tries undermining Yor in Mission 29, what eventually works is playing on her worries about being a good wife, and when Yor's led to question why she's an assassin mid-fight during the Cruise Arc, it leaves her open to her opponent.
• Feminine Women Can Cook: An aversion; by her own admission, she can keep the house clean, but doesn't know how to do any other housework, like cooking or mending clothes. Murdoch uses her inability to cook to attack her, and she's left self-conscious about it for a while afterwards, even requesting cooking lessons from Camilla in a later chapter - who Yor often perceives as a more "typical woman". It doesn't help that Anya keeps innocently pointing out she can't cook.
• Femme Fatale: Subverted and deconstructed. Yor certainly has most of the trademarks - being a highly attractive woman, having long dark hair, her Iconic Outfit being a flattering black dress that shows off her curvaceous figure, classy enough to meet Eden College's standards for parents, the love interest to a super spy, and happens to be a dangerous world-class assassin. In fact, she's so dangerous that she never needed to use her womanly wiles to complete a mission, as her physical prowess was more than enough to get the job done. As a result, she became a Socially Awkward Hero whose dedication to providing for her younger brother through her assassin jobs has left her romantically lacking, to the point where she actually has a Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality. Ironically, it's her husband who is the charming one who has seduced and discarded numerous women for the sake of his missions. Loid once points out that his missions tend to require more complexity than an assassination job. In contrast, Yor's missions are far more simple as they only require her to track someone down and eliminate them, with the occasional protection job (This is because Garden handles most of the complexity assassinations require, such as selecting the target and analyzing their capabilities and defenses).
• Flanderization: At the beginning her cooking was just described as not very good, especially compared to Loid's, while in later chapters many of her cooking attempts are shown to be awful enough to knock out anyone who tries it (other than her brother Yuri, though he still throws up eating it). However, she's consistently able to make simple stuff like heated drinks that taste normal. As the story goes on this gets downplayed, as while her food is still generally deadly she's gradually improving on those skills to make more palatable meals, to the point she's at least reached One Note Chef level in regards to properly making a meal her and Yuri's parents used to make.
• Flower Motifs: As the assassin "Thorn Princess" she wears a black dress with a rose choker and a rose pattern on the inside of her skirt. She also wears a golden headband with a rose and two spikes on each side. It is subtler for her civilian clothes, but there's still the odd rose motif such as the shape of her buttons.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Played with. Yor considers herself to be the foolish sibling to Yuri's responsible, stating that Yuri was a much more capable child than her and that he taught her more things than she taught him. In reality, she's the responsible one, as she's a good mother to Anya despite her shortcomings, works hard at her civil service job and is very thorough in regards to her assassin hits.
• Formal Characters Use Keigo: Yor constantly uses polite speech, whether to children like "Miss" Anya, people she's about to kill, or even in her own private thoughts.
• Friendless Background: She already had poor social skills because of her background, which was compounded by her coworkers, Camilla especially, being rather cruel about her shortcomings and lack of a romantic partner. Her one true connection at the beginning of the series is her brother, and even he encourages her to start branching out and finding love.
• Friend to All Children: Due to spending most of her life doubling as the primary mother-figure to her brother Yuri, Yor has developed an exceptionally strong maternal kindness and love towards children. She emotionally-bonds quicker with Anya than Loid did, and in the defense of Olka Gretcher's infant son Gram, she fought with a fury that a literal army of assassins was no match for, with her tenderness embracing the boy farewell when the battle was won just as loving as that of his mother's. Yor's valiant efforts thereafter protecting Becky earned the respect and admiration of the Blackbell Enterprise Princess, inspiring her to grow up to be just like her in spite of having a Precocious Crush on her husband Loid.
• Genki Girl: An adult example. When she isn't killing warranted targets, she is rather hyperactive and childlike.
• Gentle Giant: Her height is on par with the average Japanese man (her heels make her even taller), yet she is sweet and kind to a fault.
• Gentle Touch vs. Firm Hand: The Gentle Touch to Loid's Firm Hand, as she's more permissive with Anya.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: When she's in a particularly deadly mood her eyes are sometimes depicted glowing white or red and lacking both irises and pupils to stress just how seriously she is taking something and how dangerous she has become in that moment. Presumably not literally happening, and may even simply be a symbol of how frightening she has become to the person looking at her.
• Good Is Not Soft: As sweet as she is to most people, being an assassin means she can be brutally violent if need be. Most of her opponents are killed swiftly and efficiently, their bodies left bloodied and their faces fixed in shock.
• Good Stepmother: She believes Anya is Loid's child from his first marriage, not knowing that Anya is actually adopted. Regardless of this, Yor already loves Anya as her own daughter and wants to be the best mother she can be to the girl. The anime adaptation's second opening pays special attention to the fact that Yor is the parent more present in Anya's life.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: At the end of the Inusan Crisis arc, she muses to herself that she managed to beat the crap out of terrorists and none of her family knows about it, unaware that Loid had just spent the past few hours dismantling the plans of said terrorists, and Anya managed to prevent Loid's death and a war between Westalis and Ostania, again because of her investigating said terrorists.
• Hard-Drinking Party Girl: She loves her alcohol. She can toss back an entire glass of wine in one go, then reach for a refill. She tends to get intoxicated rather quickly (with the side effect of driving her Cloud Cuckoolander tendencies through the roof), but whether this is because she's got a low alcohol tolerance or just because she tends to drink a lot is anyone's guess; every time she's got drunk so far, she's been knocking back large amounts of alcohol in a single go.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Due to her real job, Yor is cut off from civilian life, and thus considers herself different. In Mission 2 she starts to think she doesn't deserve normal happiness when at the party her coworkers are holding before Loid turns up. Throughout the series, Yor is depressed by what she sees as her inadequacies as a mother due to her secret life.
• Heroic Second Wind: Yor is in real danger of being killed in Mission 53 near the end of her battle with the assassins in the Cruise story arc, due to a combination of fatigue, accumulated injuries, and a nasty concussion leaving her vulnerable. Her thoughts become more disjointed, her body goes completely limp, and she wonders if the life she's leading is even worth it now, now that her brother Yuri doesn't need to rely on her anymore. She manages to find her resolve when she remembers that she started her work as the Thorn Princess to make a world where the people she loves don't suffer pointless tragedies, and to protect their carefree lives - something as important to her in the present day as it was to her then as she now has Loid and Anya to love as well. She proceeds to grab her opponent's sword and begin the fight again.
• Hidden Buxom: Yor is quite well-endowed, but this is usually only obvious when she's wearing her assassin outfits as most of her normal clothing tends to downplay her chest.
• High-Pressure Emotion:
  • Yor has several instances of these whenever Loid makes her blush, to the point she has her own meter. If the meter maxes out then there is a risk of Yor reacting violently.
  • In Mission 94, the Forgers visit a ski resort and have to stay the night in a lodge due to a blizzard. The mere thought of sleeping in the same bedroom with Loid makes Yor rush outside to cool off. Never mind the fact it's a very cold night in the middle of a blizzard.
• Hitman with a Heart: Yor flips the stereotype of this trope (that is, a hardboiled killer with a sympathetic side): she's a caring, considerate, rather shy woman who happens to be a Professional Killer. She has to resist her reflexive response to solve problems with murder by reminding herself she doesn't kill innocents.
• Hyper-Awareness: Being an expert assassin means she's got a very acute sense for danger. During the exam at Eden Academy, she can tell the family's being watched, but not by who or where. She can pick up on very subtle actions too, like being able to tell for example if Loid is glancing at her from across the room of a store. Notably, to her it felt as if Loid had been "staring" at her ever since she entered the store, implying she can feel how focused his mind was on her despite the fact that physically he had barely glanced at her. Perhaps ironic given she otherwise has No Social Skills, but being able to notice people who focus intently on her is a good protective skill for an assassin both to know if a surprise attack is happening or if someone is intending to attack. Those who are able to conceal themselves from her awareness are likewise recognized immediately as very capable people.
• I Am Not Pretty: Because of all the mixed messages she gets from her coworkers, Yor has a low view of her looks. It then takes her for a complete loop when Loid compliments her appearance. Later on she feels she's not pretty compared to Fiona. In the same scene Yor admits to being worried Loid didn't mean it any of the times he called her pretty.
• I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me: In their first meeting, Yor was surprised when Loid complemented her appearance and even asked him if he has a favorable impression on her just to be sure.
• I Have Brothers: Yor claims that she learned self-defense from her brother. Of course, she's lying; she became a child hitman to support her little brother, who is seven years younger than her.
• I Just Want to Be Normal:
  • Yor's initial character arc explores this trope and its tension with Be Yourself. At first, Yor doesn't seek out being 'normal' (that is, meeting someone and settling down) because it's her ambition, but because she wants to avoid drawing suspicion to herself, and because Yuri wants to know she'll be alright, and that she'll be happy. She soon gets attached to living with Loid and Anya, but the entrance interview for Eden hits her self-confidence about what a mother's supposed to be like, leaving her feeling she wants to be more of a 'normal' mother for Anya. However, Anya assures her she admires her and wants to be like her, giving Yor the confidence that even if she's not a 'normal' mother, she can still do everything she can for her. Later on, Yuri's first meeting with the Forgers leaves Yor insecure about how she's doing as a wife, but Loid tells her that while trying to live up to an ideal is admirable, having to perform all the time is exhausting, and you can end up losing sight of who you really are, so he wants her to be herself.
  • A point made later on is that Yor has nothing to calibrate against when it comes to being 'normal', and is left wondering how other people learn to do it. She goes by what she sees people do, being unaware of their deeper insecurities and worries, and is terrified of standing out for any reason, no matter how small, in the belief that this will cause her to be reported to the Secret Police.
• Imaginary Love Triangle: Due to her lack of self-worth, Yor doubts that she is as good a match for Loid as his first wife (who doesn't exist) or Fiona (whom he sees as nothing more than a coworker). She doesn't realize she's the only woman Loid shows any genuine fondness for.
• Implausible Deniability: Yor's excuses and cover stories for her superhuman physical skills are almost invariably paper-thin. She's claimed her super-strength is because she once apprenticed under a blacksmith, that her superhuman balance and acrobatics are the result of growing up around a gymnast, and even her comparatively plausible excuse that she was luring assassination targets into hotels with the promise of "massages" made her sound like a prostitute.
• Improvised Weapon: Even without her signature stiletto-like daggers, Yor is more than capable of turning any object into a formidable weapon:
  • She ripped a button from a tuxedo and threw it with enough speed and force to silently knock an assassin across a busy ballroom unconscious without rousing suspicion.
  • The Code: White movie is where her versatility truly gets to shine:
    • On top of General Snidel's Zeppelin, a soldier attempts to throw a hand grenade at Yor from his pill-box. She throws her coat back to catch it in mid flight, letting the snowstorm's winds carry her itand the grenade back to the soldier, causing him to scurry away in terror as his missile explodes, starting the fire that eventually crashes the Zeppelin.
    • She then takes out a line of firing soldiers by hurling a fire extinguisher towards them like a bowling ball and knocking them over like nine-pins (complete with a comedic "strike out" stock sound effect)
    • Finally, Yor destroys a steel cyborg with an inexhaustible Gatling Gun for his right-arm, by painting a rose-patterened "fuse" across his otherwise indestructible body into the exposed ammo chassis of his torso with a red lipstick on her left hand as she distracted him with a combat knife in her right; after her knife shatters, she calmly lights said lipstick-fuse from a safe distance, causing the invincible bio-mechanical horror to explode like a keg of black-powder.
• Insane Troll Logic: Going hand-in-hand with her being a Cloudcuckoolander, she has a tendency to come to some truly baffling conclusions. Among other instances, Anya disappearing on her while they were looking for a family dog led Yor to believe that one of the dogs ate her.
• Insecure Love Interest: She views herself as an incompetent wife who doesn't deserve a good man like Loid. Mission 35 has Yor worried that Loid is in love with Fiona because Yor feels her only good point is her strength. When Fiona lies to her by telling her Loid has been badmouthing her behind her back, Yor has nothing to say in her defense. Regardless of Yor's insecurities, Loid does appreciate Yor as part of the family and his affection for her is more genuine than any of the other women he seduced in previous missions.
• In Vino Veritas: Yor loses all her physical restraint when drunk, making her a complete pain to deal with. Loid admits she could have killed him in Mission 6 when she drunkenly tried to protect Anya, while in Mission 13 she threw a fork so hard that the gust created cut Yuri's cheek and twice accidentally slapped Yuri so hard that she caused massive bleeding from his wounds. She also loses almost all her emotional self-control, going from being too nervous about raising the topic of Fiona with Loid in Mission 35 to furiously accusing him of carrying on an affair with her at the top of her lungs after downing both her and Loid's drinks in search of Liquid Courage.
• Irony:
  • Yor is terrified of the thought of her new family discovering her double life and goes to great lengths to try to keep them separate. She's especially worried when Loid and Anya come along on the same cruise ship as she's expected to face a Carnival of Killers onboard while assigned to bodyguard work. But Loid is more than capable of fending for himself as the greatest spy of Westalis and Anya helps both of them from behind the scenes.
  • She became an assassin-for-hire to provide for Yuri and ensure that he's able to lead a life free of worry and pain. Unbeknownst to her, he enlisted in the SSS and became a brutal secret policeman in hopes of doing the same for her. Both Briar siblings are blissfully unaware of the other's actions and assume they're a part of civil services when their work is anything but civil. Additionally, she eagerly accepted a Marriage of Convenience to avoid getting arrested by the SSS for being single, yet if she knew about Yuri being an SSS officer, just mentioning her familial relationship to him would drop all charges of suspicion and he likely would've ordered the arrest of whoever cast suspicion on her in the first place.
  • She's the only member of the Forgers Locked Out of the Loop concerning Operation Strix's objective to get closer to Donovan Desmond, with one of the approaches being to get close to one of his family members. She ends up befriending Melinda Desmond when the latter takes an interest in her after Yor saves her, meaning Yor achieved what her husband and daughter have been struggling to do without actively trying and being completely unaware of said goal.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: A Downplayed example as Yor doesn't really grasp that she's actually in love with Loid yet, but when she begins to suspect that Loid might actually be in love with his coworker Fiona (aka. Agent Nightfall), she thinks the right thing to do would be to bow out gracefully and let them be happy together.
• Kick Chick: She uses her legs a lot in combat, and is strong enough to force a person's head into the ceiling and leave it there, or punt a moving car right off the road. Her first reaction to a falling tray of food (courtesy of Camilla) was to nonchalantly catch the whole thing on her heel, rather than try and catch it with her hands. She even engages in a short sword fight with her legs, parrying her foe's sword with her stiletto-heeled foot.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: She always goes to her assassination missions wearing a halter-style Little Black Dress with a rose choker and rose pattern on the inside of her skirt.
• Killer Bear Hug: Played for Laughs. She has a memory of once hugging her brother so hard that two of his ribs broke, which horrifies Anya who was reading her thoughts.
• Killing Intent: As a trained assassin, she's able to perceive bloodlust from a single person in a room filled with people, even when it's being hidden. She can also exude high enough levels for normal people to feel it, notably highlighted with a Death Glare. She's instantly on her guard when she encounters a foe who doesn't immediately trigger this honed danger sense of hers.
• Knuckle Cracking: Of the one-handed variety, and rather than by forming a fist she cracks them with precise movements of her fingers. Yor doesn't seem to do this to intimidate people (though when they notice, as Franky once did, they can be intimidated regardless), rather she simply seems to do it by reflex when her mood shifts to preparing her body to commit an act of violence. Two notable examples are when Swan provoked Anya to tears, and another when Twilight and Franky in disguise threaten to go after her brother and Loid.
• Lady of War: Whatever her deficiencies outside her work, she entirely fits into this trope when she's on the clock as an assassin - she's as graceful and elegant as she is lethal, carving her way through her enemies with precise, deadly, and acrobatic kicks, pressure points, and stiletto stabs.
• Laugh of Love: Yor is usually seen giggling at Loid whenever she notices him getting worked up and mistakes it for his excitement, especially when it comes to his role as a father to Anya.
• Le Parkour: While she has been shown to be more-than physically capable of it in the manga (as in when she leaps from the ground to the rafters of a ceiling with ease), it's only in the anime-original segment of Episode 19 that we've seen her actually using parkour; specifically to quickly get to Eden.
• Leave No Witnesses: Unlike Loid, Yor doesn't conceal her identity through disguises, misdirection, or concealment. She simply kills every hostile adversary that's seen her face. Luckily, the odd survivor that runs into her civilian identity just tries to kill her right there until he gives up instead of providing others the knowledge to attack her at home. She is capable of stealth, but she's never been shown using it when on assignment unless the job implicitly or explicitly requires it - such as when she has to defend the remnants of a mob family on a cruise full of assassins out for the family's bounty and Yor needs to deal with opponents in the middle of a crowd.
• Leg Focus: Her being both a Kick Chick and a Ms. Fanservice, especially how she shows hints of being an Innocent Fanservice Girl due to her believing I Am Not Pretty, means she is a common target for Male Gaze relating to her long, shapely legs with quite the thighs. Loid even feels compelled to comment on them after a particularly skilled display of her flexibility and balance.
• Leitmotif: When she's on her real job, "Thorn Princess", an eerie, dissonant track that underscores the dissonance between Yor's elegant beauty and her deadly precision as an assassin.
• Lethal Chef: It's been stated mostly by Anya that Yor's a very bad cook. This is only a side note when first mentioned, but gets flanderized to be one of her defining traits afterward; though it is later stated she is slowly improving.
  • Chapter 24 reveals her food knocks out everyone who eats it besides Yuri, and even then he vomits with every bite and has a Near-Death Experience where he hallucinates a vision of their mother. On one occasion young Yuri was able to ignore his cold symptoms because of the strange effects Yor's food was having on his body. She reveals her bad cooking is due to her focusing on the nutrition before taste due to her parents dying young, and with Yuri doing his best to eat her cooking regardless, she never saw any reason to improve. That being said, the fact she never thought it strange that Yuri vomited with each bite of her food says quite a bit about Yor.
  • Bond sees a timeline where he literally dies from eating Yor's homemade dog food, and spends the whole chapter trying to avert this by bringing Loid home early to cook instead.
• Lifesaving Misfortune: Her role in the Cruise Ship arc hits a major snag when Anya manages to win tickets for herself and Loid on the same cruise ship she was assigned by Garden for a protection job, meaning she has to hide her true identity from them. Fortunately, both come in handy later when Anya manages to secretly return one of Yor's lost daggers to bring her back into the fight and inadvertantly takes out a few more assassins in the process, and it turns out Snoops planted bombs all over the ship, so Loid disguises himself as a shiphand and uses his knowledge to disarm the bombs and accidentally dispatches the last two assassins after throwing the final bomb overboard.
• Lightning Bruiser: Again, she can dodge a speeding car trying to ram her and then kick it off the road. She's superhumanly strong and fast even by the standards of a manga filled with extremely competent people.
• Like Parent, Like Spouse: Mission 35 shows that Yor reminds Loid of his late mother, particularly the safety and security her presence gave, the same way Anya feels safe around Yor. Indeed, she even knows the same lullaby his mother used to sing—albeit, she doesn't know all the words.
• Limited Wardrobe: Her only piece of formal wear at the beginning is the same black dress she wears performing assassinations. Then after marrying Loid, she quickly decides to visit the tailor for more options to better fit into various situations, averting this.
• Liquid Courage: Anytime she has to do something embarrassing, such as kiss Loid or express her deep feelings, she usually downs a bottle of booze to do so. It never quite works out the way she intends.
• Literal-Minded: She will usually answer a question literally and not understand metaphors. Best example being Becky wondering how she was able to "pierce Loid's heart."
  Yor: Oh, I would never do that. Loid could get hurt, and there are better ways to get the job done.
  Becky: Huh?
  Yor: Hm?
  Becky: Uh...
• Living a Double Life: City hall worker by day, contract killer by night
• Locked Out of the Loop: She's ironically the only member of the Forger family who's unaware of the fact that Yuri is an SSS agent.
• Logical Weakness: A few are shown in succession during the cruise arc:
  • The first person Yor ever has any real trouble dealing with is an entrenched sniper who has ground support keeping Yor from running off to deal with the person firing on her. She's a Close-Range Combatant in a setting where the tech level makes guns common weapons. Normally this isn't a problem for her because she's just that fast and that resilient, allowing her to dodge gun fire, but she's still mostly restricted to taking out people near her.
  • That same sniper shows off another issue Yor has; she's an enthusiast of piercing weapons like needles, high heels, and, if need be, her middle fingers, but she can only carry so many needles on her, and shoes aren't the most ideal throwing weapons. Yor ends up in real trouble when she wastes one of her primary weapons to try to take the sniper out (admittedly only missing his neck by a hair when she throws the dagger at him), because she's surrendering one of the few weapons she has and can't easily grab more weapons to throw, putting her in a tight spot she ultimately needs her handler to bail her out of. Long-distance foes might not be able to hit her given her reaction speeds, but she ultimately has few tools to deal with them and using those tools puts her at a disadvantage afterwards.
  • Yor has one weakness when it comes to melee combat. Namely if all other things are equal or near equal, she will have trouble winning against an opponent whose reach is notably longer than her own. Against the master swordsman whose strength and speed approach her own, she is able to hold him off with kicks and agility, but can't effectively strike back due to losing her needles and the extra reach they afforded her, enabling his sword to keep her deadly strikes from hitting him as she can't get past his guard. Once she gets back one of her needles, that one change means she manages to kill him via Single-Stroke Battle.
  • Yor is actually fairly capable at espionage and maintaining a cover, even if she doesn't think that of herself, and can incapacitate people in the middle of a crowded room with no one the wiser. However, she needs to maintain such a cover to blend in properly and not arouse suspicion as to her assassin job - she can only continue being Anya's mother and Loid's wife so long as they are unaware of her double life. This means that she has to play a bit more defensively than she did before she got married, which somewhat hampers her performance when she can't simply take hits without caring about the consequences - a grievous wound to the body would raise too many questions, enforcing Beauty Is Never Tarnished.
• Luminescent Blush: Happens frequently with Yor when she's either embarrassed or being nervously shy around Loid.
• Made of Iron: Going hand-in-hand with Yor's superhuman strength is superhuman durability. While it's noted that other deadly assassins might be able to kill her, Yor has breezed through things that would send any normal human to the hospital at best.
  • She's regularly seen performing kicks and jumps that would almost certainly cripple any normal person, including leaping from a roof to the street.
  • She shrugs off a bullet after getting Shot in the Ass, though the injury did need treatment and still leaves her in considerable pain for a couple days.
  • She drinks a poisonous cocktail of blowfish poison with no adverse effects whatsoever. Blowfish contains a deadly neurotoxin; just a few milliliters is enough to kill the average person, and Yor drank an entire cup of the stuff. In fact, not only does she not die, it worked as a good pain reliever.
  • She gets hit dead on by a car and, while she is sent flying/rolling, she smoothly gets back on her feet unscathed and catches Becky, who she had thrown up into the air before the car hit to protect her. And all she has to show for this is a small nosebleed.
  • On analyzing the hooked chain a opposing assassin is using to fight her with (and who thought he could kill her and the people watching the fight with a single attack), she thinks to herself that the weapon isn't capable of killing her.
  • During her battle with over a dozen skilled assassins, she takes multiple strong attacks directly and endures most of them with nothing more than being annoyed that they "hurt."
    Assassin: Shouldn't it do more than just "hurt"?!
• Magic Skirt: No matter what form of acrobatics she performs, whether on the job or otherwise, Yor's modesty is protected whenever possible (if it's not, she wears Modesty Shorts beneath). Particularly noticeable in the anime at Camilla's party, where despite performing a near-perfect I-split with her legs, the hem of her dress folds and stays perfectly in place.
• Major Injury Underreaction: In the anime adaptation of Extra Mission 2, rather than the expected blood-curdling screech of agony expected from being shot in the backside with a M1911 pistol by a surviving Red Circus terrorist, all Yor lets out instead is an adorable little "ouch" as if she has just stepped barefoot onto a stray piece of Lego.
• Makeup Is Evil: Her character plays around with this trope, as while Yor herself is not evil, when acting in her role as an assassin who engages in a morally grey job out of Well-Intentioned Extremist ideals, she wears much more obvious lipstick, compared to her usually subdued Unkempt Beauty as a civilian.
• Mama Bear:
  • Despite only being married to Loid for cover and raising Anya for the same reason, Yor quickly grows maternally attached to Anya. Yor is absolutely ferocious if it even looks like someone will endanger Anya. And since she's the deadliest assassin in the world, threatening her daughter will make an already dangerous woman even more dangerous.
    • Yor almost strikes Swan after he makes several disparaging remarks to her and Anya, but the last straw is when Swan makes Anya cry. Yor cracks her knuckles, narrows her gaze, and lowers her voice down to a whisper, indicating that she's entering Thorn Princess mode and is going to kill Swan. The only reason she doesn't is Loid moves first and breaks the tension by punching a table.
    • She goes ballistic when a group of street punks try to snatch Anya off the street corner, proceeding to knock one upside the head and shattering a pumpkin with one strike from her bare hands to terrify the others into retreating. It didn't help that the kidnappers mistook Yor for a maid instead of Anya's mom, which just riled her up even further.
      I am that girl's mother! Do you hear me!? If you don't want to end up like that vegetable, I suggest you leave right now!
    • On two other occasions when she thought someone was kidnapping Anya, each of the supposed kidnappers got a powerhouse kick into oblivion.
      Hands off, creep! (crescent kicks the "kidnapper" into the roof) DON'T TOUCH MY DAUGHTER!!
  • Protectiveness of Anya aside, Yor's valor extends to defending all innocent children; not even an army of elite murderers, literally numbering in the dozens, were able to withstand her maternal fury protecting the life of her client's baby son Gram, and her similarly valiant aiding of Becky, Anya's Only Friend, earned the little princess' undying respect.
• Master of the Mixed Message: Towards Loid. Since Yor is a Cloudcuckoolander who is both insecure and not entirely honest with herself when it comes to her growing attraction towards her husband, Loid has a hard time determining how she feels about him. There are times where he is unsure if Yor only sees him as a platonic partner, has romantic feelings for him, or secretly hates him. It doesn't help that Yor has a Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality and tends to react violently when she gets too embarrassed.
• Master Poisoner: She has poison needles that she uses in her assassinations. Anya freaks out a little when she realizes they're stored in a random box in their apartment and toxic enough to kill an elephant.
• Maternally Challenged: Downplayed; Yor definitely has the right attitude to be a mother, but her skillset doesn't match up. Her cooking is a health hazard, she shreds what she tries to sew, and she's known to hug too hard. Although Yuri got the brunt of her lack of motherly finesse, Yor is steadily learning how to raise and care for Anya properly.
• Meaningful Name: "Yor(u)" can mean "night" in Japanese. Her maiden name "Briar" is a word referring to any number of thorny shrubs, alluding to her codename. Coincidentally, Briar also fits in with her job as an assassin, given the name of the organization she's a button woman for is called 'Garden.'
• Men Can't Keep House: Gender-inverted. While she's good at cleaning as covering up her actions is part of her job, she's atrocious at all other forms of domestic work. Her cooking (with few exceptions) causes violent vomiting at best and knocks them unconscious at worst.
• Mistaken for Prostitute: When Yor's co-worker Camilla gets jealous of her in chapter 2, she tries to embarrass her by telling Loid her previous work involved getting called out by men to give them "massages" (i.e., sex services), although Yor actually meant "acupuncture" massages. Regardless, the truth is that's actually Yor's cover story for her assassinations, and a Deadly Euphemism at that. Loid's reaction to what Camilla said about Yor, however, is empathy, based on his own experiences as a spy, believing that Yor had done whatever it took to support her brother.
• Mistaken for Servant: After Anya is accepted into Eden, a group of thugs assume she's a rich girl and dismiss her adoptive mother Yor as a hired servant (because they don't think any parent who could send their child to Eden would do the shopping).
• Mook Horror Show: The anime version of Extra Mission 2 depicts Yor delivering one of these to the Red Circus sect she slaughters. While in the manga we only see the aftermath, here it opens to a scene of darkness lit up by occasional gun shots and filled with the sounds of stabbing and cutting into flesh. By the time the viewer can see properly, Yor is calmly reporting via phone that "the customers have been served", while behind her lie scores of recently dead bodies with blood pooling all around them.
• More Deadly Than the Male: Loid is no slouch in combat (hell, he's one of the top spies in the world), but Yor is the physically stronger of the two by a notable amount. However, while Yor specializes in melee combat, Loid possesses a broader skillset.
• Ms. Fanservice: Downplayed, but her more form-fitting outfits reveal that she's fairly well-endowed, indeed the bustiest of any of the recurring female characters, and show off her long, shapely legs quite a bit. Several promotional illustrations also have her in very flattering outfits and poses, some with a lot of emphasis on her breasts. The second opening for the anime even includes her posing in her assassination outfit in a way that would make a pinup model proud.
• Multi-Melee Master: The Code White film shows that Yor merely prefers the use of her custom-forged spindle-needle stilettos; and when deprived of them is more than capable of wielding any melee-weaponry, such as S.O.G military combat-knives and Fire-Axes, with just as much skill and ferocity as her signature blades.
• Mundane Utility: Due to her skills as a hitman and clean up artist, she is very skilled in keeping the house clean and can pack and unpack at incredible speed.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Played for Laughs. Terrorist cell has to be dealt with? Kill everyone. Need to steal documents of illegal dealings? Kill everyone guarding them. Don't want her party guests to spill the fact that she lied about bringing a boyfriend to the party? "Maybe I should kill all the (adult) guests?" Someone needs to drop out of a waiting list so Anya can get into a school? Better kill a child's parent to force them to drop out. Another woman may be threatening your place as wife in the family? Kill her. Trying to fit in (while drunk) with the other office workers who complain about their significant others' quirks and talk about "killing" them over it? Decide to kill Loid for making her breakfast omelet not taste sweet enough, even though she doesn't mind the taste. The subversion is that Yor is not an evil character and would Never Hurt an Innocent, but given her profession as an assassin, it's still the first place her brain goes in every situation. It tends to scare the hell out of Anya.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: Yor has an overall slim and feminine figure, though she's undeniably well-built and athletic. Her strength, however, is inhuman.

N-Z

• Never Hurt an Innocent: Has to actively remind herself of this when an everyday problem comes up she thinks she could solve by killing someone. Mission 29 also reveals Yor carefully goes through intelligence on her targets, and all are unrepentant criminals actively hurting her country and its people.
• Nice Girl: If you're not her target, she's a very pleasant and friendly, if somewhat spacey woman. Even her motivation for being a hitwoman comes from wanting to support her younger brother. Her thoughts sometimes go to dark and disturbing places, but she always remembers the people she kills are anything but innocent and her kindness is genuine, fitting the nice image others see. Even if you are her target, she's polite enough to ask for the honour of taking your life.
• Nice Mean And In Between: Of the three adult Forger family members, she's the Nice to Yuri's Mean and Loid's In-Between. Yor is very polite, friendly and caring to almost everyone, particularly when compared to her aloof husband and bratty brother, and tends to bring out the best in both of them as a result.
• Nightmare Face: Although she's normally the picture of ladylike elegance in battle, Yor's face, just like her husband Loid's, can become a mask of monstrous anger when she needs to inspire mortal fear in her enemies.
  • When faced with a German-Shepard ordered to attack Anya, she glares at it with bloodshot-eyes and jagged teeth more wolf-like than human, sending the poor dog running for its life and scaring Anya into tears of terror.
  • When trying to stop a cat from running into traffic, she darkens her face with so much Killing Intent that it scared him long enough for her to get hold of him.
    • The same face of dark anger is enough to freeze Barnaby the Sickle, a veteran assassin, stone-solid with terror, allowing Yor to knock him unconscious with multiple Pressure Point strikes across his body.
  • When one of Harpoon's hired goons tries to blast Olga and her infant son Gram hiding within a shelter with grenades, Yor kicks the brute and his explosives into the ocean before they can detonate. Then she turns to the remaining murderers with a Death Glare of pure, unadulterated hatred, issues a bestial snarl of primal rage (complete with visible steam hissed through her gnashed, serrated teeth teeth) challenging, outright daring those who value money over their lives to keep pressing the attack.
• Nightmare Fetishist: She seems to have a disturbing fascination with blades, usually exhibited by a lustful, blushing gaze. She gets utterly enthralled with a museum painting of a guillotine, then later admires a fancy knife while the family is out for lunch at a posh restaurant, stroking it with a finger and blushing.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Reading Yor's mind often scares the life out of Anya, as her thoughts frequently default to dead bodies and harming and killing people, which she takes entirely for granted, only clamping down on it when she drifts into Murder Is the Best Solution. Her Nightmare Face also terrifies Anya to no end.
• No Guy Wants an Amazon: Amusingly double-inverted. While men's reactions to Yor's superhuman physical abilities can be hit and miss (although Loid seems weirdly fascinated by them), women, including Becky, Melinda, and even her coworkers in the office, almost universally find Yor's incredible strength very charming, and revealing it actually turns out to be the most reliable way for her to make friends with them.
• Noiseless Walker: Fitting for an assassin, Yor can appear in places without people noticing. The first time she and Loid meet, he was not aware of her walking past him until she spoke up (and he has Hyper-Awareness). Especially notable since she's usually wearing high heels as part of her assassin get-up, a kind of shoe not exactly known for allowing quiet movements.
• No Social Skills: Due to her social awkwardness and her line of work, Yor keeps a distance to other people, making her come across as somewhat aloof. Since single women at her age raise suspicions, she asks Loid to act as her boyfriend, and shortly after asks him to marry her (to protect her cover). One of the obvious signs that she has no real life experience outside of work is that she just takes Loid's word for whatever Blatant Lies he comes up with.
• Not in Front of the Kid:
  • Assassin or not, you'd be lucky to be alive if you ever cross this woman if Anya is within her sight, as a group of kidnappers learn first-hand. Yor gets pissed when she sees them trying to kidnap Anya, and proceeds to sock one in the face with her shopping bag, then split a pumpkin another's about to throw at her with her bare hand, warning them they'll end up like the pumpkin if they stick around. They wisely run after the fact.
  • Played for Laughs in Code: White, when she bursts through the door that Dimitri and Luca locked to prevent her daughter from escaping and was told that the duo were "bad guys who tried to hurt her." Yor quietly tells Anya and Bond to "please close your eyes." The little girl and dog shield their faces in panic as we hear multiple loud thumps and cries of pain, followed by Yor cheerfully telling them ''"Anya, Bond. You can open your eyes now! The bad guys... well... they kind of fell over..."'' all the while standing over their comedically bruised and battered unconscious bodies.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: During the Cruise Arc she admits to herself that loyalty to her country is no longer (and perhaps never was) her reason for working for Garden, her true motivation being to protect the lives and happiness of people she loves, to eliminate people who threaten that no matter who they may be.
• Oblivious to Love:
  • She brushes off Yuri's blatant Big Sister Attraction as exaggerated sibling affection.
  • Much like Loid, Yor is seemingly in-denial that she is slowly Becoming the Mask in regards to her feelings for him. While she is initially paranoid over the idea of Nightfall supplanting her as the wife of the family in Chapter 35, she also drunkenly freaks out at the notion of Loid legitimately confessing his love to her.
• Offstage Villainy: Well, not exactly villainy but, unlike Loid, whose peacekeeping missions as a spy can range from firefights to simple recon which are occasionally given focus, Yor is an assassin and continues to act as one even after becoming part of the Forger family. Her much deadlier and more morally dubious jobs are sometimes alluded to, but never fully depicted, and her most prominent action beats as the dreaded "Thorn Princess" so far involve a bodyguard gig and an intense battle against other assassins.
• Old Maid: Yor is 27, and hasn't had any previous relationships. After overhearing her friends discussing how she's yet to find a boyfriend in her age, she is concerned with the difficulty of being single in this fictional equivalent of The '60s' East Germany, as it could easily cast suspicion on her and lead to getting outed as an assassin. Her and Twilight's goals thus perfectly align.
• One Last Job: Chapter 44 ends with Yor thinking that this mission will be her last job as an assassin. However, after her Epiphany Comeback, Yor decides to remain as an assassin for the time being.
• One Note Chef: Once she wishes to start learning how to cook better, she learns how to make something other people enjoy (not just Yuri), a stew her mother made.
• One-Woman Army: She habitually takes on multiple mooks during her missions, and unlike Twilight, she can do this as a frontal assault. This trait is best shown in the Cruise Arc where it's Yor vs an army of assassins. Despite most of the assassins being high level, Yor easily dispatches the majority, with the main struggles coming from protecting her client and making sure none of the innocent passengers get harmed or catch on to there being dozens of assassins aboard the ship. Even if her handler was there to back her up, her kill count still reaches the dozens by the end of the arc.
• Out of Focus: Downplayed. In the manga's early chapters, while Yor is treated as a main character, she gets noticeably less focus compared to Loid and Anya, largely due to her having no direct connection to the central plotline of Operation STRIX, and there is also relatively little screentime of her as an assassin. This is eventually remedied with a full arc focusing on her, depicting her taking on One Last Job as an assassin and focusing on her dual life as an assassin and mother. After that, Yor inadvertently gets dragged into the Strix plotline by befriending Melinda Desmond.
  • Yor's lack of screentime early on in the series seems to have been noticed by the anime's production team, as quite a bit of the anime's new extra content focuses on her to balance things out - namely, the beginning of episode 3, the first act of the dodgeball episode, the second cour's opening, and the last part of episode 19. Some of the differently-adapted material, such as Extra Mission 2 where she's Shot in the Ass and the focus of the chapter, is also spread out to be much later than it originally was (becoming the first episode of Season 2), in order to further help out.
• Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality: Unlike her husband, who has seduced numerous women for his missions, Yor has no experience when it comes to romance, and thus is a blushing mess when they happen.
  • Chapter 13 reveals Yor hasn't had her First Kiss yet, only having kissed her brother on the cheek. Just the act of attempting to kiss Loid required Liquid Courage, but she ultimately couldn't go through with it thanks to Yuri's attempted intervention; her knee-jerk embarrassed reaction is to slap Yuri, which narrowly misses Loid.
  • Chapter 35 details how Yor seems to also have a fear of romantic emotional intimacy, as she has to get herself drunk before she can manage to tell Loid just how insecure she is over Fiona Frost's relationship with him. This then leads into her sexual fear when Loid (recognizing the clear hints that Yor is developing romantic feelings for him) thinks he can both reassure her and make their marriage real at the same time, triggering her embarrassed kick that Loid takes for a complete rejection simply due to how strong the kick was (though he realizes the truth may be more complicated when he analyzes how Yor acts afterward).
  • In Chapter 94, after the Forgers get stranded on a ski resort due to a blizzard, they manage to get a room in a nearby inn with two beds in it. When they go to see their accommodation, Loid says that Yor and Anya can each take a bed, and he'll sleep on the couch. Just the thought of simply sleeping in the same room as Loid flusters Yor so much that she runs outside to cool off (note that there's a blizzard currently happening). When she finally comes in, everyone in the inn, including the other guests and owners, is shocked that she didn't freeze.
• Parental Abandonment: Her parents died when she was young, leaving her alone to raise her brother.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Mission 29 reveals that Yor does extensive research into her targets and only goes after those who are unrepentant criminals seeking to hurt her country and people. It's a good thing she does because what she subjects her targets to is horrifyingly bloody.
• Pressure Point: Yor is able to knock out a rampaging cow using pressure points in chapter 4.
• Professional Killer: Her job at city hall is for appearances; she's really a dreaded hitwoman known as the Thorn Princess who is sent to kill members of criminal organizations and traitors to Ostania (including government officials). She initially got into that line of work to earn the money she needed to raise her little brother, and more fundamentally, to make sure he had a carefree life.
• Promotion to Parent: She had to raise her younger brother Yuri on her own after their parents died. It actually helps a lot when she becomes a mother for real, being a competent guardian for Anya and giving Loid parenting advice based on her own experiences with looking after her brother.
• Properly Paranoid: A downplayed example, but Yor isn't completely wrong when she's afraid of being replaced as a wife, which is exactly what Fiona is aiming for in the first place. Fortunately, Loid himself has no plan on replacing Yor, knowing that Fiona isn't suitable to be a mother figure anyway.
• Psycho Knife Nut: Downplayed, as while Yor prefers to use knives for her job as an assassin and can have some bizarre thoughts (including how her main solution to a problem is murder), she's still a sweet and loving woman who cares not just for her family, but everyone she meets who isn't an enemy or a target.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Inverted and Played for Laughs in Mission 65. Yor was invited by Melinda Desmond to play volleyball with the Lady Patriots Society against their unbeatable rivals. However, despite Yor's vastly superior athletic abilities, her team still ends up losing because Yor didn't fully understand the rules of the game. That said, the Lady Patriots Society were content with the loss as they still had fun and Yor's feats of superhuman strength left the other team so terrified that they were at the point of almost bursting into tears.
• Rage Breaking Point: As a rule, Yor executes her targets and slays anyone who gets in the way with a disquieting lack of emotion, no matter how fierce the battle or formidable the foe, befitting her status as an experienced Consummate Professional. The only way to rouse Yor's genuine anger and personal hatred, however, is the sight of a child being emotionally or physically harmed in front of her, such as her daughter Anya being driven to tears by Housemaster Swan's bullying, or one of Halpoon's thugs attempting to blast baby Gram and his mother to bits with grenades.
• Raven Hair, Ivory Skin: Black hair, pale skin, and noted to be very pretty by her co-workers, who say that she could be a head-turner if she put more effort into her appearance. It's also implied that Loid genuinely finds her to be pretty when they first meet.
• Razor-Sharp Hand: In a pinch she has the strength, durability and speed to use her hands as effective stabbing weapons, first demonstrating this early in the series when she pierces apart a pumpkin a thug was attempting to throw at her with a single precise strike. In Mission 52, she shows just how deadly and messy this technique can be, taking out an assassin twice her size by rapid-fire jabbing him with her hands after she was disarmed, shredding his entire torso open and drenching the area in his blood as his fresh corpse collapses in a bloody mess. That said, using her hands like this does risk injury, as afterwards she cries a bit in pain at having jammed a finger.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Subverted. She certainly has the makings of it - red eyes, black dress and hair, and kills people for a living. She also has a preference for clothing that is either red or black in color, as it makes it easier to hide blood stains on them. But she's actually a very sweet and loving woman who only kills to support her family and protect people. It helps that she has a policy of never killing an innocent.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: While she's a sweet and unassuming young woman on the surface, she's also a professional killer. The anime emphasizes her cold, crimson eyes whenever she shifts into Thorn Princess, even for mundane things like her daughter's school interview.
• Red Is Violent: She has an association with violence due to her assassin profession and superhuman feats of strength, all complemented by her deep red eyes.
• Reused Character Design: Yor's overall character design bears a heavy resemblance to the young stalker girl from Endo's I SPY one-shot whose MC inspired Loid' overall character, but her Signature Headgear of thorn-shaped earrings come from Ashe of Rengoku No Ashe whom inspired Anya.
• Rule of Funny: Her most extreme uses of Super-Strength (such as literally throwing a ball into space) are implied to be this as far as the story is concerned, either exaggerated for the viewer or some other form of hyperbole. Unlike the more "mundane" superhuman things she does, these acts are never commented on by other characters as having actually happened. This also explains why Yor, while still Made of Iron, is not nearly as durable as she would be if she actually could do the most extreme things she's been shown doing.
• Running Gag:
  • Every so often, Yor will misinterpret something in a violent, and unrelated, context. When Loid asked her how she "planned to pass (Eden College's exams)", her first thought was about how people pass as in manners of death, and later when Loid is speaking to Anya about how to name Bond, she misinterprets his word of plosives as explosives (manga) / consonants as causes of death (anime).
  • And in the Japanese version, Yor has a tendency to incredulously shout "Ga-n!!" ("Clang!") whenever she is shocked or disappointed.
• Sarcasm-Blind: In Mission 43, one of her coworkers snipes at her being in a good mood as her being happy "because she's finally become somewhat normal". Yor takes this as a compliment because she takes it to mean she's doing a good job maintaining her cover.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: A Running Gag in the Anime's Japanese language version is Yor incredulously shouting "Ga-n!!", which literally means "Clang!" or an onomatopoeia of "Shock!", whenever she is well, shocked. This is a trait she shares with her daughter Anya.
• Scare the Dog: She can make a Nightmare Face so angry and terrifying she frightens attack dogs away, along with accidentally terrifying Anya. Animals in general are intimidated by her due to sensing how deadly she is, a bear at a zoo backing away in fear at the sight of her grimacing (Yor being in a foul mood over an injury), and a whole herd of beasts retreating after she knocks out their leader. Even Bond, while liking Yor overall, fully believes (in part due to Anya) that Yor will kill him if he ever makes her mad enough, leading him to be very careful with her.
• Second Episode Introduction: She makes her first real appearance in Chapter 2, with Chapter 1 focused entirely on Loid and how he came to adopt Anya. This carries over to the anime, with Episode 1 adapting the main story of Chapter 1 and leaving Yor's introduction for Episode 2.
• Secret Sex Worker: Subverted. Before she became a civil servant working at city hall she routinely went to hotels to give people "massages", leading some in the present to spread rumors that she used to be a prostitute and may have kept it up. They're half-right; Yor is indeed Living a Double Life, but as a Professional Killer known as "Thorn Princess," with those "massages" having been excuses for places she went to undertake assassination orders.
• Sexy Backless Outfit: She wears a black dress like this during her missions. Also, her favorite casual outfit is a red boat neck sweater with a split back. Although not as fanservice-y as her dress, her sweater does leave a good portion of her back exposed.
• Shot in the Ass: In Chapter 15.5, Yor gets shot in the butt while performing an assassination job. Although she hides the injury from her family, Yor can't help but makes a face of discomfort and irritation due to the intense pain she is in. Hilariously, due to Yor's facial expressions, Loid ends up assuming Yor was upset at something he did and resolves to take her out on a date to make it up to her. Throughout the date, Yor refuses to sit for any reason because she knows it'll cause her more pain, with Loid chalking up her odd behavior as Yor still being mad at him. It reaches the point where she's hover-sitting at dinner. It isn't until a survivor of her assassination job makes an attempt to poison her, while being unaware that she has Acquired Poison Immunity, that she starts to feel better because the poison numbs the pain.
• Showgirl Skirt: The black dress she wears as Thorn Princess has the skirt cut much closer at the front for better mobility of her legs and, of course, fanservice.
• Shrinking Violet: In spite of her being a highly trained assassin, she is still insanely shy mostly due to her having to repeatedly shake off her Murder Is the Best Solution mindset.
• Signature Headgear: She has a number of different hairbands she wears during the series, as well as a pair of thorn-shaped earrings.
• Single-Stroke Battle:
  • She incapacitates an aggravated cow by quickly striking it in its various pressure points, all without being touched.
  • After Anya tosses Yor one of her needles, Yor uses it to strike down a sword-wielding assassin who challenged her to one.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: While trying to convince herself that their marriage is just a beneficial lie, Yor clearly adores Loid for being a kind, selfless man, especially when he doesn't judge her for her suspicious activity outside of her day job.
• Skilled, but Naive: Yor is a nigh-unstoppable monster in combat, but she's completely out of her element when it comes to social interactions and basic things like cooking. She also usually takes Loid's word at face value no matter what, making her come across as painfully naïve.
• Socially Awkward Hero:
  • She's extremely skilled as an assassin, having both a Charles Atlas Superpower and honed killer instinct that make her among the best assassins in her organization, but her dedication to providing for her younger brother Yuri has left her socially and especially romantically lacking. For the latter, she's never gotten close enough to a guy to even receive a first kiss, resulting in the very thought of kissing/being kissed heavily flustering her... so when her brother demands that she and Loid do so (to prove they are married), she outright downs some Liquid Courage before she can try to go through with it.
  • Her lack of knowledge about many normally common knowledge things also contributes to this. When she tries for the first time to go shopping at a normal grocery store, she can identify that fruits and vegetables are, well, fruits and vegetables, but beyond that has no idea what they are and so just buys a bit of everything in the hope she can make something good out of them. She's also utterly ignorant of dogs as pets, having only ever encountered guard and attack dogs.
• Spy's Suspicious Spouse: Parodied. She is the wife to the super spy Twilight, granted through a Marriage of Convenience, who has not informed her about his true nature or his mission. He is often worried about her discovering the truth. Yor, on the other hand, is constantly worried about him realizing that she is actually the assassin, Thorn Princess. Both are completely oblivious to the other's secrets. Even when they act suspicious to each other, usually both Loid and Yor would try not to look too deep into the other's affairs, and just assume that they are being paranoid for having to keep their own dark secret.
• Statuesque Stunner: She's tall (170cm / 5'7", which is taller than most Cold-War era men), physically fit, dark-haired and (as noted by a number of other characters) very attractive.
• Strong and Skilled: A nimble martial artist and capable of flinging a car several yards with a single kick.
• Stronger Than They Look: Despite being a thin young woman, she is incredibly strong, to the point of Super-Strength.
  • In her first appearance as the Thorn Princess she knocks two grown men across the floor with ease. In a drunken stupor fighting Loid, he mentions she could have killed him. She also kicked a man hard enough to get him stuck in the ceiling while Anya was still holding onto him. She was also quite strong when she was a kid, noting she accidentally broke two of her brother's ribs when she hugged him too hard.
  • When assigned as a bodyguard to a woman fleeing other assassins, the woman's attendant says Yor looks rather spindly for a bodyguard and wonders if she can truly protect them. He's quickly proven wrong when Yor throws a stiletto through a door hard enough to pin a man's head to a wall, knocks out another assassin by throwing a button at his head, and disables a third killer by crushing his hands and backhanding him unconscious.
• Strong Girl, Smart Guy: The Strong Girl to Loid/Twilight's Smart Guy. Yor can never hope to be sharp like her husband, but her physical strength and hand-to-hand combat skills are far superior, which is really saying something given Twilight is a good deal stronger than average person himself.
• Stylish Sunhats: She wears a fancy, wide-brimmed sunhat during the cruise ship arc.
• Super Gullible: She very easily gets fooled by the lies her husband tells her to hide his spy double life, even when those lies are ridiculous. Such as believing that the criminals chasing them are his patients and he's beating the crap out of them as part of their "therapy".
• Super-Reflexes: She's very quick in a fight, able to kick away thugs that are inches away from striking her. She can also catch a steaming hot tray of food dropped right in front of her with her foot.
• Super-Strength: It's not clear how much of it is simply already impressive feats being exaggerated for the sake of comedy, but Yor is still inhumanly strong.
  • She smashes a pumpkin with one jab, bare-handed, as a way to terrify some thugs into leaving Anya alone. While part of this was Mama Bear instincts kicking in, it was still done with intense focus and strength.
  • When teaching Anya how to throw, Yor throws a rubber ball hard enough to bounce it dozens of times across multiple fully-grown trees, including causing one of said trees to break and topple over from the impact.
  • She managed to knock someone out by flicking an ordinary coat button into her target's neck.
  • She knocked out a cow which was several times larger than she was by hitting a Pressure Point.
  • Yor gave her brother a slap that sent him flying across the room. She also once managed to kick a fully-grown adult man into the ceiling of a room while Anya was holding onto his leg.
  • To stop Mr Koppi, a cat that Franky is trying to catch from fleeing into traffic with his home-made exo-suit, Yor effortlessly rips the engine-backpack off said metal suit like its made of cardboard , then casually tosses the heavy chassis like a missile in front of the fleeing cat to halt its flight.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Defied in the Cruise Ship arc where she gets the upper hand on a couple of assassins because they thought up battle introductions for themselves, only to get instantly killed by a clearly-uninterested Yor.
• Tender Tears: In stark contrast to her lethality in combat, Yor is prone to adorable bouts of tearful moping when she feels that she has failed to be "normal" or is being an incompetent mother and wife. Fortunately, her husband and daughter don't fault her failures, but instead love her all the more for trying.
• Textile Work Is Feminine: Played for Laughs. Yor subverts the anime stereotype of kind and elegant ladies also being skilled at sewing and fixing dolls for children in Short Mission 5, wherein she tries to patch up the Agent Penguinman doll that Bond mauled and scratched-up in jealousy... Emphasis on tries, when the result ended up looking like one of her regular clean-up "operations."
  Yor: Oh dear, I somehow tore his head off...
  Anya: AAAAAAAH! Now he's even deader!!
• Tranquil Fury: While Yor can certainly get loud when the situation calls for it, acting as the Thorn Princess will usually see Yor channeling her anger in a focused yet intense form.
  • When an army of dozens of deadly assassins were paid to kill baby Gram Gretcher, Yor killed all of them without even raising her voice.
  • When Swan insults Anya at the meeting to get into an elite school, it eventually makes Anya cry from the stress and the abuse. Yor starts entering Thorn Princess mode, cracking her knuckles, narrowing her gaze, and speaking with a low growl. The only reason Yor didn't kill Swan right then and there is that Loid broke the tension by punching a table.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Yor started her job as an assassin as a young teen, which is when we see her first recorded instance of returning home covered in blood. Rather disconcertingly, she didn't seem all too fazed by what she had just done.
• Unkempt Beauty: Yor doesn't take too much care of her looks, but still is met with the envy of her female colleagues, who point out that she'd be really popular if she bothered to care about appearance. It's also what ends up catching Loid's eye as he's looking for someone to play the role of his wife.
• Unknown Rival:
  • After befriending Melinda Desmond and with Loid realizing he can use this new friendship as an alternative route to getting close to Donovan, Anya starts thinking she might become irrelevant and get sent back to the orphanage, so Anya decides she is now competing with her mother to see which of them will be the one to give Loid the in with Donovan he seeks. Yor of course is completely unaware of this.
  • To Fiona, for her position as Loid's 'wife.'
• Unskilled, but Strong: When it comes to any sport that isn't killing. Yor can hit a tennis ball so hard that either the racket cuts it to pieces, or the ball breaks her opponent's racket, but doesn't land in the court. When playing volleyball, she can strike the ball so hard that it makes a deep impact on the floor or flies into the stratosphere, but she still loses the match for her team because she handled the ball twice, shot the ball into the net or hit it out of bounds.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Twilight, a master at reading people for the most subtle of intents and secrets, can hardly spot Yor's insane combat skills and agility. Even outside of her husband, people rarely react to her wall running, wall jumping and performing all manner of moves and attacks no normal person could know.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Despite only knowing Loid for a few weeks and originally being part of a fake marriage for her cover, Yor is willing to confront the SSS officers (who are actually Twilight and Franky in disguise) to defend him as soon as they threaten that her husband and brother will be involved.
• Wall Jump: Her absurd Charles Atlas Superpower lets her kick off walls for Combat Parkour.
• Weapon-Based Characterization: According to the official fanbook Eyes Only, Yor's weapons being stiletto needles is both a reference to Yor's rose and fairy-tale motif (i.e. thorns and spindle needle from "Sleeping Beauty") and chosen by her for the sake of killing her targets relatively quickly and painlessly, as she believes even the worst people should still be treated as people. They allow her to target specific and deep vital points rather than relying on more prolonged methods of killing. When able, Yor seems to have a preference for stabbing her target directly through the brain and with her strength she has no problem penetrating the skull.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Yor's fundamental reason for becoming a Professional Killer is to make sure others can live carefree lives without needless tragedies, and she doesn't care if that means getting her hands bloody or constantly risking her life.
• What Did I Do Last Night?: Sufficient alcohol intake tends to cause Yor to only vaguely remember the events that follow and wake up wondering just what all actually happened. She may or may not remember more over time.
• What Is This Feeling?: Yor doesn't seem to realize how strongly she's bonded to Anya and Loid since meeting them.
  • She tries to frame her worries the Forger family will dissolve if Anya fails to get into Eden as simply worrying about her cover.
  • Mission 24 has her shocked at how happy she is at seeing her family happily eat her food, and Mission 35 has her amazed at how much she doesn't want to lose her place in the family.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Yor only excels in fields that are not murder when she can apply her inhuman strength and speed to the task. At one point, she beats the more rounded Nightfall in a tennis match by simply serving a bullet-speed ball aimed right at her face.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Downplayed as it hasn't been seen to interfere with her work yet, but she has a fear of bugs, not even wanting to see them in her brother's schoolbook. Notable considering gore to the point of being bathed in the blood of her foes doesn't even make her flinch, but the sight of insects, spiders, etc. unsettles her.
• Womanchild: Despite being 27, a lack of many social experiences growing up means she often shows the emotional maturity of a preteen.
• Women Prefer Strong Men: She looks back on Loid's supposed "concussive therapy" method very favorably, referring to it as "fantastic" and the way he punched and kicked as "amazing."
• World's Best Warrior: Yor has an easy claim to the distinction of being the best warrior in the cast. Against an army of skilled assassins, she won after going days without extended rest with some assistance from her handler, McMahon, all while admitting she had taken on the severe handicap of having to hold back in most fights following her marriage to Loid so she wouldn't accidentally end up showing any grievous wounds that would break her cover. She's dodged high-impact sniper fire, beat an unstoppable cyborg, disposed of dozens of bodyguards without breaking a sweat, and deleted an entire cell of the Red Circus with only a minor wound to her bottom - and that minor wound was a bullet. Even as a child, she's canonically fought wild bears and boars and won. Most of the drama that comes from sections revolving around Yor are the presence of valued targets she needs to protect or the effort of maintaining her masquerade, because if she ever got the go-ahead to stop holding back and didn't have to worry about collateral damage she'd be virtually unstoppable.
• World's Strongest Woman: Even trained agents are shocked by how physically strong she is. Her feats have included kicking a speeding car off course, kicking a man so hard he got stuck in the ceiling, and hitting a ball so hard with a tennis racket it sliced the ball into pieces. No other female character in the series has come even close to her in strength, while the only male with even the implication of comparable physical prowess is her boss Shopkeeper, who despite never being seen fighting has at least exhibited comparable speed with his gardening shears to nearly stab Yor, and even then Yor is still faster enough to dodge his strike.
• Worthy Opponent: The Master Swordsman among the Carnival of Killers hired to kill Olga Gretcher and her son Gram aboard the Princess Lorelei, seems to regard Yor as this. He offers her the chance to surrender instead of finishing her off when he has her prone and helpless, admiring her skill and absolute determination in protecting the mother and son; and when she conclusively refuses to yield by grabbing onto and breaking the tip off his sword, he formally challenges her to one final Single-Stroke Battle out of respect for her as a fellow warrior.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: In Mission 2, the awkwardness of showing up to Camilla's party without a date has her briefly tempted to kill all the guests to keep her brother from finding out she's single, but her choice of words makes it clear she would have spared the children.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Mission 35 has Yor worried that Loid wants to replace her because her only good quality is her strength. Loid counters her strength makes Anya feel safe and experience taking care of Yuri growing up makes her a great mother.