I had such high hopes for Wonder Egg Priority. I praised its first few episodes like it would be the best anime of the year. If only I could go back in time and prepare myself for a massive disappointment.

Before someone tells me, "You didn't understand the symbolism and metaphors." I understood it, but I don't think it's as deep as people say. The symbolism is either so blatant you barely need to do any thinking or so vague that it becomes pretentious. It's like watching a movie while the director is breathing down your neck, telling you what every symbol, line of dialogue, and gesture means.

In my eyes, the most underwhelming art is the kind that tells you exactly how to interpret it; though writers can break this rule successfully, it must be purposeful. Wonder Egg didn't ignore subtlety for a reason, and it did it because it's simpler to spell everything out. The viewer can feel instant gratification for understanding a symbol, which inspires us to dig deeply into the vague and nonsensical parts—leading to theory crafting to excuse the show's writing flaws. With only thirteen episodes, one being a recap and the thirteenth airing months later, the series bit off far more than it could chew. If we ignore everything except Wonder Egg's movie-like technical qualities, it is a masterpiece. Scratch off the paint, and underneath, all you'll find is hack writing exploiting people with mental illnesses and trauma.

Spoilers incoming, but you'll thank me later because you won't have to sit through the show to discover its idiotic twists. I'll try to explain the show to those of you whose brains died trying to understand what was supposed to be the hamfisted twist near the end. Trigger warnings include suicide, self-harm, pedophilia, child abuse, and sexual assault.

Entering Wonder Egg, I had no expectations. They hardly advertised it, and the plot summary was mysterious. "The story of four girls who find eggs." It sounded intriguing. From the start, it introduced our main character, a 14-year-old girl with two different colored eyes. She was cleverly named Ohto Ai. While aimlessly wandering through her town, Ai finds an egg with numbers stamped on it. What could it possibly be? When Ai falls asleep, she enters a dream world that resembles her middle school. Things immediately become dire as an invisible man yells at her to break the egg—once she cracks the shell, it expands and breaks to reveal a girl was inside.

Angry CGI gnomes wielding knives chase after the two girls. These creatures are named "seeno evils" because they symbolize any bystander who allowed bullying or harassment; this is the kind of on-the-nose symbolism the show is known for, rather than designing a creature that conveys the idea. The writer just named it the thing because it's easier. The seeno evils wear demonic masks, wielding knives, and leave a blood-red paint trail, like generic horror game monsters. Monsters can physically harm Ai within the dream world—those wounds won't go away when she wakes up, similar to the horror classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. The dream world has a final boss called a "Wonder Killer" representing the person who tormented the 'egg girl' in the real world—they are an oversimplification of cruel adults: abusers, pedophiles, stalkers, and other creeps. There's no nuance to them, don't expect complex villains. Ai assists the girl by clobbering the monstrosities with a large colorful sword resembling a Kingdom Hearts weapon. The girl who Ai rescues has a name, but you won't remember it because, as every egg girl, she is present for half an episode at most and given the bare minimum characterization.

This is Wonder Egg's plot structure; in most episodes, Ai, or one of her three friends who later get introduced, enters a dream world to save an egg girl from their tormenter. Every egg girl is 14-years-old and a suicide victim. The heroines, Ai, Neiru, Rika, and Momoe, defend the egg girls to resurrect a friend who committed suicide. Every girl they protect brings them closer to achieving their goal. Each girl's dreamscapes are the location where their friend, or family, passed away. The victims are represented by a statue, frozen in place moments before their death. The girls buy the eggs from two mannequin men who call themselves Accas; they explain various aspects of the dream world to create an internal logic; that way, it doesn't feel like an asspull when a character jumps 30 feet in the air. The Accas are the author's mouthpiece because he cannot trust us to think on our own. Their gender essentialist philosophy makes them unreliable allies, and that's welcomed character depth. However, their ideologies are never criticized within the story. Instead, they are reified. One of their gender essentialist quotes goes as follows: "Boys' and girls' suicides mean different things. Men are goal-oriented, women are emotion-oriented. Women are impulsive and easily influenced by others' voices." This is blatantly untrue, and suggesting otherwise is stupid and harmful.

The heroines struggle with personal turmoil, such as forbidden love, grief, regret, self-loathing, and more. Throughout their interactions with the egg girls and conquering trauma, they confront their problems. While a shallow, one-dimensional archetype, each dream's Wonder Killer is animated beautifully and brought to life with the best fights in TV anime. The production is on par with Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer. Though the egg girls are suicide victims, there isn't enough time to shape them into real people, so Wonder Egg uses a tactic to make us care for them. Designing a cute character design. There's no need to write a deep character when you can make her cute then say, "She committed suicide," or "She was abused." It has the same effect as putting an adorable puppy in a depressing situation—you'd be a monster if you didn't feel sympathy for it. If you want to scare the audience straight, then it works purely on the basis of the shock factor, like a stunningly animated Public Service Announcement. But you have to admit, PSAs aren't very well written.

In all seriousness, throwing in sensitive topics such as mental illness, suicide, and sexual assault haphazardly is dangerous and writers must handle them with respect and care. Wonder Egg treats them with the sensitivity of a sledgehammer. It doesn't feel deserved when the director throws in shots of a girl's dead body, with her head smashed into a splatter of blood on the pavement. It's overly indulgent. One of the worst scenes showed a one-off character getting raped on screen. The writer plays with fire, not caring who he burns in the process. It's no surprise that Wonder Egg's loudest critics are the ones who've experienced the trauma that it brazenly uses to startle the audience. Gratuitous violence and high-quality art does not make a story deeper. Trying to excuse the meticulous attention to detail put into drawing a dead girl's foot only leads to pretentious navel-gazing.

Wonder Egg has mastered the art of emotional manipulation in this way. Of course, I am not saying you cannot make depressing stories featuring cute girls. Look at Madoka Magica, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and Princess Tutu. They deal with suicide, sexual assault, death, and other heavy topics. Not to mention, the show copied Madoka's spirit gems which the girls use to summon adorable Pokemon-like guardians. Wonder Egg's issue is that it doesn't have enough time to make its extraneous characters more than two-dimensional victims, and its understanding of mental illness is shallow. If you take away the cute character designs, odds are people would have a much harder time sympathizing with them. Each egg girl describes their reason for suicide; some bold-facedly says, "I was repeatedly assaulted."

The script is so awkwardly alien it feels like you're watching a PSA or an afterschool special for teenagers, rather than believable people with trauma. Perhaps they grew weary of writing suicide victims who resemble real people, reflecting problems with society and the economy, because most of the egg girls state they committed suicide for ridiculous reasons. Such as, 'I want to be with my dead pop idol," "The ghosts told me to," and "I did it because my cult leader said so." Although it could happen in real life, they far surpass the point of relatability. I'd almost laugh if it weren't so exploitative of people who cope with mental illness and suicidal thoughts. It's astonishing how quickly the show desensitizes you to suicide; it becomes so inconsequential that Ai straight-up asks an egg girl why she killed herself, no preamble. The girl said she saw ghosts—so Ai thought it was appropriate to reference The Sixth Sense. The whole thing gets played off as a joke. Suicide. Joke. What is the correlation? Do you see how this is a total nightmare? It appeals to the same kind of people who disingenuously say they like "Dark humor" when they only want to offend people in reality.

On the other side, the main characters have plenty more time for development.

Perhaps the most fleshed-out character of the four was Rika. Her story is one of redemption. Despite being young, she was a junior idol who dealt with fans regularly. Her biggest fan was Cheimi, a girl who spent all her money on seeing Rika and giving her gifts. Eventually, Rika discovered the girl was shoplifting to afford gifts, so she made an irrational decision to stop her. She insulted the girl by saying she could never be friends with a fan and would be "Embarrassed to be seen with a fatty." Cheimi developed an eating disorder and died after starving herself to death. She said the cruel things seemed to reveal what Rika thought; they weren't just made-up insults to make Chiemi leave. We saw her, and she was a big girl, then she starved herself because Rika body-shamed her. There are plenty of good ways to prevent a fan from visiting an idol. Insulting them isn't one. But Rika understands the weight of her actions. Driving Chiemi to suicide leaves Rika regretful and self-loathing; she reflects on these emotions as she cuts herself with a razor beside a mirror. Do you get it? She is self-reflecting, next to a mirror. The MIRROR is a SYMBOL for her self-reflection. Seemingly to mock us, Rika's weapon is a giant box cutter. She cuts herself with a box cutter, a weapon she uses against herself to fight her trauma. Do you get it? Shall I explain it to you again?

In the seventh episode, Rika's character arc peaks. She confronts her feelings of self-loathing on her birthday while searching for a father she never met. The problem with this episode wasn't just the unsubtle symbolism. It is how Rika's self-harm gets treated. Clearly, she self-harms to cope with things—and it bothered me how the episode framed Rika stopping self-harming as positive growth. It's a good thing she stops, even if she relapses, but that's typically not how it is in real life. I'll admit I went through a period in my life that I self-harmed to cope with a difficult circumstance. And I'd be lying if I said it goes away entirely—even after years of treatment. Framing it as a step in her character development ladder is dismissive rather than a long and challenging process. It shows a lack of understanding on the part of the writer.

Perhaps the most questionable part of Rika's character arc was how a few times it is implied that Rika had sex with adults, but why? The probable answer is that the story restricted itself to a mere eleven episodes. Why would they include such a harmful topic like pedophilia concerning a central character, then not address it at all? One could argue the dream world allows Rika to conquer her inner demons, ala the Person franchise, which is true, but not enough to justify an unnecessary and painful aspect.

Within the dreams, the girls are stronger, but their injuries stay when they wake up. Rika got a giant cut on her arm in the seventh episode, but it disappeared when she woke up. The internal logic seems to fall apart whenever it's convenient. They attempted to make rules in the first few episodes: Kill the monster, save the girl, then once the bell rings, it ends. That's not longer important. The heroines use anything as a super-powered weapon, not just their designated swords or guns. Though I was frustrated with Rika's mental illness's poor handling, her mother's relationship was perhaps the most empathetic part of the show. The end of her episode had a poignant message; love your parents, if they're worth it.

I want to praise the show for Momoe Sawaki, one of the few respectful portrayals of a transgender character in anime. She confronts true-to-life problems transgender people face integrating into society as her true gender. Her friend fell in love with her, but Momoe "Got scared and pushed her away" because she was uncomfortable. Note, it wasn't anyone's fault. Inevitably, this led the girl to suicide; This is one of Momoe's most significant obstacles. Her egg girls are all lesbians in the dream world, or they mistake her for a man, except for one. I wouldn't say I like how the show portrays its only lesbian interactions as predatory. Still, it could be worse. They're attracted to her because she appears handsome and dresses masculinely, despite being feminine on the inside. The Wonder Killers that Momoe fights are typically pedophiles; her fights are symbolic for her claiming her true gender and rejecting the patriarchy. Her dream worlds were perhaps the most straight-forward.

There was a time I didn't like her, though. In the bowling alley, Momoe jokingly said, if you don't let us bowl, "We might kill ourselves without it." I dislike people who joke about killing themselves to get what they want—even though they exist among highly privileged people. Chances are this won't bother most people, but it is a major annoyance for me; whoever wrote this joke should've considered talking to real people with mental illness. It's another unfortunate reminder that Wonder Egg doesn't understand the people that it's story is about—rather it has the understanding of a parent's obtuse understanding of their depressed child. Momoe is wholly unlike Neiru, the most complicated of the four heroines.

Neiru Aonuma is a quiet and reserved super-genius who owns a company. She was created in a lab, has no parents, and no friends except a comatose girl. Her circumstances are so unbelievable I found her the hardest one to relate to; she seemed to belong in a Sci-Fi show. Her sister stabbed her, then jumped off a bridge. The reason why she is fighting in the egg world is to forget her sister. It's not until episode nine that she becomes outwardly unlikeable. She invites her friends to her home (part of her company's building), introduces them to her comatose friend, then says she'll unplug her life support right now. Of course, her friends are distraught. They don't want to watch someone die. In response, Neiru says, "I didn't… ask you to take a field trip here." No, she did ask them to come; she just wasn't honest about why. The writer rushed the whole thing. It introduced new concepts and far-fetched ideas; they showed that the Accas could record the dreams, Neiru's Plati society's existence, and its ambiguous connection to the Accas. As it rushed through content, it became apparent there would only be one season. If you don't understand what's happening by the eighth episode, don't worry; the recap explains all of the symbolism for you.

Comparatively, Ai received less development despite being the primary character. Her friend Koito committed suicide due to bullying—a typical sad story told in many PSAs geared towards kids. Her classmates harassed Koito because her teacher Mr. Sawaki gave her 'special treatment.' Due to the show's prevalent theme of not trusting adults, it is glaringly obvious that Mr. Sawaki is a suspicious figure. He's dating Ai's mom to get closer to her; Ai saw him getting intimate with Koito, so she has been awkward around him, and now she suddenly likes him for unclear reasons. The thing that bothers me about Ai's relationship with Sawaki is that he blatantly grooms her—like the other young girls who are in love with male adults (And yes, this becomes a trend), it seems irrational. Ai is the quiet outsider, allowing the audience an avatar to connect with the fantastical setting. The truth is, we don't have enough details to enter her headspace, unlike the other girls. When Ai saw how Sawaki painted Koito, she associated it with their mutual love. Ai believed if Sawaki painted her, they would form a similar bond. Their problematic relationship gets promptly brushed past until the twelfth episode to make room for the other characters, lore dumps, and unnecessary exposition. In episode twelve, Ai confronted different versions of herself from other worlds and predictably fought Sawaki in the dream world. The writers introduced totally new concepts and ignored previously established logic. They aimed for a profound conclusion like Evangelion's final episode but it landed closer to Darling in The FranXX's clusterfuck of an ending.

By the eleventh episode, Wonder Egg jumped the shark. It added an entirely new villain, a schoolgirl with the head of a butterfly, and it replaced meandering dialogue with gory ultra-violence. Episode eleven shifts perspective to developing the two Accas. You know. Because they're important, right? Their backstory focuses on their lives as scientists; for no reason whatsoever, they created an artificial human girl. Somehow the show ripped off both the Matrix and Ghost in The Shell in one scene.

The girl looked like a hideous bleached raisin. Less than a minute later, it turned into a 14-year-old girl, designed to look and act painfully adorable. She names herself Frill. In a better show, they'd use this as an opportunity to critique the male writer/director for designing a dozen cute female characters with prepackaged traits to be readily marketable. But no, the two men raise Frill for a couple of years, then they neglect her. She develops a mental illness, murders one of the guy's wife, and consequently, they throw her in a basement for years. Acca physically beats the girl on screen, and it gets framed as though she deserved it. However, it was he who created then neglected her. The show implied she caused Acca's daughter to commit suicide, gratuitously shown on screen. With no logical evidence, the man grabs Frill and burns her to death. The anime added her for two reasons: To show how the Accas are bad guys (which we already knew), and for sadistic entertainment that's more befitting a series like Magical Girl Site.

I didn't even get to the part about Frill controlling the dream world all along. At the last minute, it is all revealed to be a simulation designed to torture young girls. What is the message here? Don't create artificial life and let two mansplainers raise it? Beyond faux-intellectual theory crafting, there's no value in this exercise in futility. To any audience members with mental illnesses, I strongly advise you to avoid this like the plague. If you want to feel shocked, disgusted, and insulted, this is a good choice.

Wonder Egg Priority was a passion project created by young aspiring artists from across the world. Frankly, their work paid off because this is one of the best animated TV anime I've ever seen. Due to the pandemic, the staff worked remotely, but the lack of management led to them working far past their deadlines with little to no pay—even causing staff members to need hospitalization. Ironically, Cloverworks is a horrible studio that exploited young artists to create an anime ABOUT cruel and untrustworthy adults. The final episode will get released in a few months because the studio tortured its staff, but no polished animation will make-up for this show's deeply ingrained flaws.