Heavy spoilers for Steins;Gate, Steins;Gate 0, and Wonder Egg Priority. If you haven’t finished these series, read at your own risk.
“This is going to be the Madoka Magica of the 2020s.” “Madoka Magica crossed with Death Parade.” “The voiceacting reminded me of SSSS.Gridman.” “This anime feels like a magical girl show right?” “It reminds me a lot like Flip Flappers, but without the magical girl bits.” “Reminds me of Flip Flappers and that has me so hyped.” “Brings me more … upbeat Lain vibes, sort of similar to Ghost Hound too.” “Did I just watch a Makoto Shinkai film?” “Some shots that feel reminiscent to Monogatari.” “Strongly reminiscent of Suicide Parabellum.” “Opening scene reminds so strongly of an episode from Revolutionary Girl Utena.” “Makoto Shinkai + Silent Hill + Chunibyo Demo Ga Shitai + 22/7 + Love Live seiyuus.” “+ Liz and the Blue Bird!”
“I didn’t even ‘get’ any of that stuff that I’m supposed to … same thing happened with Evangelion.”
If you ask me, I think that fully encapsulates what happens when a show is just impossible to pin down.
But what are these viewers even talking about? If you haven’t heard of Wonder Egg Priority before, this hodgepodge of first impressions isn’t going to help pin down what genre this show is, let alone understand the plot of the first episode. So, let me attempt a synopsis.
Ahem.
A blue-haired girl with heterochromia named Ai walks around one night and buries a dead firefly, only for it to start talking and lead her to an underground tunnel. The next day, Ai wakes up with an egg in her bed, with no explanation other than a cryptic code imprinted on the egg’s shell.
Later in the day, she leaves her home only to get suddenly transported to a twisted mimicry of her school, where she got bullied so badly she’s stopped attending altogether. Hiding in the bathroom, she’s told by the same voice from before, now speaking through a piece of toilet paper, to crack the egg. From the egg emerges another girl Ai’s age who died in the real world. Together they run away from the monsters that populate the school and seek to kill the “egg girl”. While running, Ai also stumbles upon a statue of her real-life friend, who committed suicide for reasons unknown to even her.
The dead girl (the first one!) gets surrounded but is saved by Ai, who manages to turn her multicolor pen into an effing magical club, but immediately after the girl thanks Ai, she poofs into a cloud of smoke. The disembodied voice comes back, telling Ai that she can get her friend back if she continues to protect people the same way Ai protected that “egg girl”. Following the voice’s instructions, Ai returns to the underground tunnel, which leads to a cottage house, home of two mannequins named Acca and Ura-Acca that have been speaking to her this entire time, and where Ai meets a girl in a gray maid outfit, buying a bunch of eggs from a gachapon machine.
Did you get all of that? No?
A better question then: what heuristic, or means of problem-solving, did you rely upon to try to process this unfamiliar story?
The basic, instinctual, and reasonable solution is to compare the unknown with something you do already know — namely, the shows you are familiar with.
Maybe you caught elements of a typical magical girl formula: the parallel world, the enemies, the main character being granted powers to save someone, the mysterious person that introduces the main character to everything, and the promise of episodic fights like this. Combined with Wonder Egg Priority’s unfiltered focus on heavyhanded issues such as teen suicide, it’s not surprising that some people interpreted this show as a subversive take on the magical girl formula in the same vein as Madoka Magica and Flip Flappers.
With that premise established, the floodgates open wide for speculation. The eggs drew comparison to Madoka Magica’s egg-shaped Soul Gems, which grant their users’ magical powers, and the mannequins Acca and Ura-Acca to the magic-granting entity Kyoubey. At this point, the heuristic evolves beyond being merely a means of comprehension … into one of prediction. If this show follows the same formula as Madoka Magica, the mannequins are probably bad guys who are manipulating Ai for their own secretive purposes by giving her powers with serious consequences. Not a bad guess, but still just a guess.
Following a similar train of thought, some people saw stylistic similarities with other shows, regardless of the viewers’ knowledge about the show’s actual production. Shinkai, Ikuhara, Kon, Shinbo — all directors that were invoked as inspirations, if not outright spiritual predecessors of this show.
This is not to say that all such stylistic comparisons lacked evidence. For example, Yuji Furuya was responsible for Sound Effects on both this show and Flip Flappers, a common point of comparison. The director of this show, Shin Wakabayashi, was the basis of several connections, from the 22/7 web shorts he directed to Naoko Yamada and Yukiko Horiguchi, which both were likely a conscious influence on this show’s subtle character acting and the latter a collaborator with Wakabayashi as 22/7’s character designer. Be willing enough to jump from place to place, and you’ll find that this show’s animation producer, Shouta Umehara, also worked on Nisemonogatari Eps. 6 back when he was still at Dogakobo.
From that, you could argue some shots in this show “feel reminiscent to Monogatari”. But the reality is that some connections are simply going to be relatively defensible and some purely based on impression and wildly off-base — just look at the number of people believing Ai’s voice actress was some veteran of the industry (a common guess was Tomoyo Kurosawa — my favorite VA by the way), only to find out the actual voice actress was just 16 years old and had only one prior role.
Nonetheless, this inconsistency in claims never dissuaded predictions on Wonder Egg Priority’s story progression. Recognizing screenwriter Shinji Nojima’s name, many viewers anticipated this show to delve into topical societal issues such as bullying, child abuse, and homosexuality based on his work on live TV. One blog writer would dedicate an entire series of articles detailing the flower language they noticed, beginning immediately with the assumption that Yamada’s penchant for the symbolism was a clear influence on Wonder Egg Priority and therefore held important hints for how the story would play out.
Again, this wasn’t unfounded conjecture. A character later introduced would struggle with her gender identity through the rest of the series. Stories of bullying, suicide, and abuse continued to be the lynchpin for the fantastical nature of the show’s universe. And, unsurprisingly considering how much the blogger wrote, flower symbolism continued to appear almost everywhere, even as part of the Ai’s character design, with a sunflower featured prominently on the front of her bright yellow hoodie. Even so, the average viewer just doesn’t have the knowledge or analytical skill to make such intricate claims. More often, as we’ve seen, conjecture at best amounted to “X is like Y”.
Speaking for myself, it’s been ages since I’ve seen an anime that rode so far on fan speculation and episodic hype, fueled directly by the viewers’ struggle to find a footing within this strange, unusual show.
That isn’t inherently a bad thing. Speculation and intrigue are part of the fun. But when we make predictions of the entire show’s content based on connections made from just a singular episode, we can reach so many divergent conclusions from just the smallest of observations.
The thing is, it’s not possible for Wonder Egg Priority to be the next Madoka Flip Flapper Lain Monogatari Silent Hill. Someone has to be left with cold feet, their predictions unfulfilled, no matter how strong their belief. Yet, we can’t seem to escape the instinct to reach premature conclusions as a mode of engaging with and investing in the stories we love, despite that the risk of all of that expectant hope being dashed.
Can such expectations get in the way of our enjoyment of media by informing a story we want to be given, rather than the story actually being told? Or, to put it another way:
What happens when we believe we know exactly which of the thousands of chickens laid this egg? When it hatches, will we be rewarded with what we hoped for all along? Or is that necessarily rewarding at all?
… Hey, are you sure that’s the right chicken? Check the number on the tag! What does it say?
dya- -gesis 