Wonder Egg Priority’s first episode is one of the most intimate experiences I have seen in anime and one that impressed me since the first time watching it — I think I have seen it four times by now. It is yet another one of those anime that has a name that can be seen as cute but is actually a psychological horror that, despite being very abstract in some of its ideas, still has very real themes. I like how there is a clear distinction between what happens in the “real” world and the dream world — at least in the beginning, since as time goes on more science fiction and fantastical elements are introduced in the “real” world, which goes well with the show’s structure of slowly blending dream and reality.

Most of the time the fantastical elements are kept in the dream world and this means that these characters are real people out there, that these traumas exist in our world. It focuses a lot in details such as beginning with a very personal event that isolates the characters instead of going for action or prologues that are desperately trying to catch your attention; or in aspects such as the very realistic, nearly rotoscopic character animation, all coming together to create the necessary atmosphere for the show to tell the intimate story it wants to tell. However, when Wonder Egg wants to do action, it does action, better than most shows out there.

It is no secret that the production schedule for Wonder Egg was a mess, needing the last episode to be released separately from the rest of the show, and this episode was even marketed as being one hour long, only to prove itself to be one recap episode and one episode of new content, this being the origin of many of the anime’s criticisms. After all, it was pure ill intention of whoever on CloverWorks decided to spread an information that was literally false. Now, considering all of this, the fact that Wonder Egg’s production values manage to be as high as they are throughout the show is even more impressive.

From the character animation, the order of events going back and forth in time during most of the episodes and the very limited cast of characters, it is clear that Wonder Egg’s priorities are different. I’d even say some of the worst moments of the anime is when it is trying too hard to be anime. Take for example the title drop in episode six, It is a bit forced and is there only so a title drop can exist. The characters always say their one-liners when finishing a fight, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. For a moment I even thought that the screaming of a catchphrase being used to solve issues was a simplification of the issues and thematically inconsistent with the rest of the show, but looking back on it now, it doesn’t bother me as much, since the priority was never the mechanics of the fights, but the literalization of metaphors. I’m also not going to pretend as if I have seen any of his other works, but the writer for this show is a Japanese TV writer, not an anime writer, which might justify some of the different sensibilities it has.

The show’s premise is quite simple and visceral. Ooto Ai is a 14 years old girl whose only friend killed herself, making Ai isolate herself and become even more introverted than she already was. One day, an entity that takes the form of an insect convinces her to buy an egg, saying that if she breaks this egg during her dreams and helps save other people, she might get her friend back. All of this honestly sounds like an RPGMaker horror game above everything else and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was inspired by or initially designed to be one.

As time goes on, Ai meets other girls that are also buying eggs under the same premise of saving someone they knew that killed themselves — in case it is not clear yet, traumas are the central theme of this story. The structure of breaking the events into more manageable chunks by isolating them through the eggs makes it fairly easy to insert other themes and comment on them briefly, calling attention to the fact these issues exist while also keeping the character’s original goals. Obviously, these girls are also affected positively and negatively by everything they witness and this makes them bond together more strongly.

Despite all the rubbing of themes in your face, the show can definitely be subtle when it wants too. Some things are only left in the subtext for a while, for example in episode three where we meet Rika, we get some dialogue that we believe might relate to her trauma, the show then reveals to us that she used to self-mutilate, and it stops right there. We don’t have to see it happening or having a flashback or direct monologue about her past like any other show with less sensitive writing would do. Whoever made this decision knew there would be enough time later to flesh out her situation in a more natural way. A fictional character does not need to be completely transparent since their first appearance. If you do it correctly, the audience will be engaged enough to keep going, there is no need to halt the whole story to explore a single person before getting the gears turning again.

Rika is a character that some people might find annoying. She is so nonchalant that she barely seems to be affected by her situation and the stories she encounters in her egg-breaking endeavors, frequently teasing the other girls and making some comments you wouldn’t really make in a conversation between friends and also talks ill of the person she is trying to save. I was immediately drawn to her character because it is all clearly a facade. Rika is in fact by far the most self-conscious among the four main characters and the one who better understands their dynamics, and everytime someone says anything that gets close to who she really is instead of who she is pretending to be, her reaction is to lash out and then flee. In episode seven she says that now she is the serious Rika, meaning that she either intentionally created this facade or at the very least realized that she had built it.

Rika’s arc here is not about learning to appreciate her mother, breaking up completely from her or finally meeting her father, because neither of these would be consistent with the themes and pacing previously established. It is about trying to come to terms with herself and making a decision that will harm her less in the future. The anime does not present us with clear alternatives that will immediately and definitively solve the issue, that would be too artificial. Wonder Egg might be realistic in certain aspects of its worldbuilding and completely fantastical in others, but the themes are always kept well-grounded. At no point does the show seem interested in something as formulaic as “do X to solve Y”, what it wants to do is remind us of how complex the world and our emotions are.

Of course I’m only talking about a single character here, I’m not mentioning everything she goes through and she is not even the protagonist despite being the character that affected me the most, but for the sake of not turning this into a summary of her character, let’s move on to something else.

I don’t remember seeing anyone complaining about the structure of jumping back and forth in time as I watched the show and honestly it is very effective, but I can also see how it would be confusing for some people. After all this still follows the monster-of-the-week trope to some extent, but since the priority was never with the mechanics of the fights but instead with however many themes and real issues we can get out of them, then the structure helps prevent it from getting too repetitive. I wouldn’t want every episode to follow the straight path of characters interacting, getting into a dream, meeting the trauma and the monster, defeating the monster and then taking a step towards self-betterment in exactly that order and pacing everytime.

This is important, by the way: taking a step towards self-betterment, not solving the issue as a whole. These girls killed themselves, they lost to trauma, but can still get some level of comfort through their interactions with the main characters. They are not in a situation where they can go back in what they did, so it is great that the anime does not put finality in everything, that would diminish too much of the situation and increase the focus on simply the monster being defeated. Even though the exploration of these issues is sometimes not as complex, the fact that Wonder Egg even comments on them is already something. Most anime can’t treat stuff like sexuality as anything else more than either comedy or something extremely degenerated, while Wonder Egg manages to comment — although briefly — on the discovery of sexuality of teenage characters without being uncomfortable about it. The story recognizes that these things exist and some of the issues that might sprawl out from it while also not needing an all-out speech about any of them.

I have a decent experience with amateur writers online and more than once have I stumbled about them saying stuff like that they only add enough minorities — primarily LGBT+ characters — “enough to please that audience”, only to them not understand why their “representation” is being criticized as superficial, stereotypical or problematic. Gladly Wonder Egg is self conscious enough about these and other things. Creative writing is always, on some level, about the human condition, and there is more than one human condition. It would be downright implausible to comment on these themes without recognizing the existence of “the other” at least once, or without having the notion that different people deal differently and to varying levels of success with their issues, while also not judging these characters as weak or anything similar in the process.

One of the things that bothered me for a while was the inevitable plot twist that was clearly going to show up at some point. When at the end of episode 8 two characters accidentally spy on Acca and Ura-Acca having a conversation that begins to unravel said plot twist, I got a bit anxious thinking the show was going downhill. Well, a lot of people clearly think that the show did go downhill, but, honestly, I found the ending at least adequate. No, I will not pretend that details such as Neiru’s true identity have remotely close to the same level of development or impact that other previously established details have, but I also don’t think that anything that happens in the end completely breaks the show — more on this soon.

Thankfully, the way the anime deals with this plot twist is by immediately having the characters question Acca and Ura-Acca, receiving a simple answer for it, and then the scene diverges to show the girls’ excitement with Momoe’s date. This is a fairly simple writing technique called “shining a light” on something to indicate where the audience should focus their attention and by extension what is the priority of the scene. Despite introducing the plotline about a pseudo-conspiracy, Wonder Egg is not trying to comment on anything such as authoritarian government or censorship, so introducing this while immediately turning our attention to something else means that the characters are above the plot in priority. Perhaps the true Wonder Egg was the friends we made along the way — again, I’m not going to pretend as if everything that happens from this onward is as great as what happened before, but I also clearly did not get nearly as frustrated as most people seem to have with the direction the show takes.

At the ending of the same episode, the anime goes back and gives you another conspiracy even bigger than the last one before you even understand the implications of the first one. This is where I think a lot of the criticisms people were making began, because I will admit that most of the time it does seem like we are getting the introduction of the main villain to be defeated. If the promise that this is the conflict we are building to really interest you, then I perfectly understand the dissatisfaction with the ending. I would argue that the show always gave us some reasons that this was not the point, but again, it is not perfect and I might just be wishful thinking. Liking where the anime goes does not mean I have to find every single step of the way there to be absolutely perfect or anything.

This is one of the cases where I find it hard to fault the show too much, since Wonder Egg is already trying to do a dozen more things than most of the copy-pasted seasonal shows ever do, so I will always give it the benefit of the doubt.

However, in retrospect, we are watching a history about two guys that stopped being human and created a magical egg that is capable of summoning teenagers in the dreams of other teenagers that might or might not be from different parallel universes and that somehow saving these girls enough times is going to bring back another dead teenager from another timeline to ours, so I’m not even sure why we expected the show to have answers for all its science-fiction and fantastical elements to begin with.

Wait, maybe by introducing the creation of a girl that was artificially created to be perfect, with all her characteristics controlled exactly how adults want them to be, they actually created something that not only does not exist in the human world but also negatively affects girls that are not created artificially because they are, you know, human beings? Perhaps the idealized and romanticized view of the perfect kid that some people have is a social issue that generates dissociation in the people who are not capable of meeting that standard. Perhaps the show is trying to say something when everything goes wrong when two scientists begin to play with not only life, but also with a figure such as this, that also puts the literally artificial girl in opposition to the actual real girls as a looming presence that cannot be directly defeated. Wait, you’re telling me writers think before they write?

Occasionally, I have seen some people criticizing the anime as being “yet another story about bullying”, and this is where I want to directly address a criticism. First, because bullying is one of the themes that the story deals with, not the only one. Second, because if you think that everyone knows that bullying is bad, or how bad it is, then I don’t believe we are living on the same planet.

I do understand what this criticism is trying to say, it is when you see a story telling you that absolute control over a society is bad and your reaction is “I wouldn’t know it if you hadn’t told me!”, or something similar. What is being criticized here is that this is a common theme and seeing it too often can get overused and outdated, but we also have to remind ourselves that the fact we got sensitized to certain issues through exposure to them in works of media does not mean that everyone has gone through that. There is no such thing as excess of calling attention to a real world issue in an industry — in a story? Sure, it can get repetitive and not go anywhere, if the author seems incapable of turning it into anything and just keeps going around and around and ending in the same spot, but not in an industry. Even if I can get bored of seeing a theme or scene that I have already seen be executed similarly or even better in the past, I will still take the time to remind myself that some people haven’t. Since this anime is about traumas and essentially a call to compassion, then if I had left it primarily dissatisfied with the repetition of a theme, then at that point I would look back and feel like I lost the point — the empathy it is trying to evoke.

We don’t want to face issues all the time, it is a perfectly common reaction to shy your eyes away from something scary or sad, but fiction is always a good place to bring attention to these things, and Wonder Egg is here to remind us that these people exist, that adolescence is a confusing and troubling moment of our lives, that there are victims and aggressors, and that not all of them are helped or punished for what they did. When in the ending Ai goes back to where she began, I interpret that as the show telling us that what happened here can’t simply be forgotten. The damage is done and the connections they formed along the way are going to follow these girls even as they move forward in life. There is no simple and definitive answer such as “we dealt with none of our problems and all the issues still exist” or one of “we dealt with all of our problems and every single issue has been resolved”, because as I said previously, that would simply be implausible. The message of Wonder Egg may be bittersweet, but it is still optimistic.

Having said all of this, does this mean everyone is wrong for not liking the ending? Of course not. Just to make something clear, I didn’t even register the last scene as being a bait for a sequel until someone pointed it out to me, which proves my perception of fiction is not perfect, no one’s is. There are other issues I didn’t comment on, for example such as the lack of Momoe in the last episode — I don’t think the show needs to explain to us why she was angry at the other girls before but later was singing at the karaoke with Rika and Ai, that is very clearly just a case of her reacting to a traumatizing event and lashing out, like human beings tend to do —, but I still felt like there was no reason to exclude her. If you ask me why what happened to Neiru happened to her, I would have no answer to give you. Still. I seem to be one of the people that were the most satisfied with the conclusion. It was a decent ending to a great show, not nearly as impressive as the beginning, but also not nearly as horrible as to be close enough to ruin and devalue everything that came before it.

But then again, that is just my take on it.