Wonder Egg Priority

Whether or not the show feels worth finishing is up to you, I felt mixed about it earlier than most others and was left with the overwhelming mixed feeling of the anime feeling lacking in an actual deep understanding of the serious topics it swan dived into, a habit of having the subtlety of a house on fire while being vague as fuck and a head stuck firmly up its own ass that dropped plot points and introduced more convoluted ones only for it to come to a head when it went full Freud. That said, I've seen people that still think that it's anime of the year material so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

As for Rika being a Ryouko expy, I never once had that impression

While the latter episodes do disappoint, especially when it comes to the lore, I still feel WEP is worth experiencing. Gonna leave it at that to avoid spoilers.

Edited by fillerdude on Apr 13th 2021 at 10:01:24 AM

I agree with Mami here on all points. It's fine as spectacle, but it has no idea what it's talking about, while at the same time being both completely unsubtle and about as clear as a muddy creek. At this point I intend to watch the final episode mostly for a sense of closure and possibly something to shake my head in bemused awe at.

And no, I don't think Rika's an expy. She looks and acts nothing like Ryuko.

Thanks for the answers. In the meantime I managed to see the other episodes up to the end... and yes, I don't know either what they were trying to say by introducing all that technobabble stuff, parallel universes, and people being either conceived or artificially created in a lab. I did enjoy a lot the series in the beginning, but maybe I had to be more wary when Ai suddenly decided to go back to school with seemingly no reason, and we still didn't manage to see her actually going to school... or did we? It was all so confusing.

I don't know if I'm staying for the true final episode because I don't see how they're going to untangle themselves out of this mess. Reminds me of another thing I didn't really like, the movie Us, interesting until it became too full of itself and trying to explain everything in a rational/sci-fi way, which made it much more dumb and ridiculous if anything.

Speaking of surreal shows, can you recommend me Flip Flappers? I heard good things about that one too.

Flip Flappers was a good time. The details of the plot have faded from my mind, leaving only the surreal imagery. But it didn't fall apart or anything.

My thinking with Wonder-Egg is post-Recap episode it feels like they tried to condense content for what was meant to be a full second cour into just 4 or 5 episodes. I still really like the series, but it definitely gives the vibes that it was written as a 26 episode series but then somewhere along the line got cut in half.

Kind of like Angel Beats.

Flip Flappers is pretty good, yeah. It does a similar thing (very similar, actually, right up to the morally questionable adults running the show - and, uh, one of those adults' fixations on an old love interest... and a genki red-headed girl involved in weird science shenanigans to be younger than she looks... There are a lot of parallels, is my point.

I'll also say that Flip Flappers does better LGBT analysis/representation than Wonder Egg, too, in that it doesn't just yank a poor trans kid into the spotlight to recount his victimhood.

Flip Flappers was good. More surreal, less edgy. Actually has a coherent through-line

My thinking with Wonder-Egg is post-Recap episode it feels like they tried to condense content for what was meant to be a full second cour into just 4 or 5 episodes. I still really like the series, but it definitely gives the vibes that it was written as a 26 episode series but then somewhere along the line got cut in half.

Eh, I've seen that happen a few times, and it doesn't look like this. We're not seeing over-stuffed episodes, and the dropped plotlines seem to be intentional^note With the latest episode it's clear that they intend for the trauma involving the statue girls to go unresolved. What we have here is much more in line with a turbulent writing process that never had the time to rewrite everything once the plot got finalized

Yeah having the trans boy be the only egg kid to have his past trauma/rape depicted on screen was... a choice.

I would say Flip Flappers was considerably better than WEP at being a surreal magical girl show. No need for fancy technobabble.

Agreed with this. It’s not a problem of lacking runtime— it’s a fundamental problem with the writing. Not sure why, but the post-recap stuff lacked the polish, which is frustrating because some elements are well done when taken in isolation.

Edited by fillerdude on Apr 15th 2021 at 4:35:25 AM

@Moth: There was that one egg girl who offered herself up to being groped, also on Momo's watch. Really, I worry that people will look at the rough edges around all of the episodes that focus around gender identites and think "oh, so LGBT is the problem" and not "oh, maybe an old Japanese man shouldn't write stories that center on what it's like to be a queer teenage girl in modern society".

Everything involving Momoe ended up pretty iffy. Like, the basic idea of centering pretty much all the gender/sex stuff around a cishet girl who just really wants to be gender-conforming is... certainly a choice they made. And then her trauma involves the story's lone lesbian, which will never get resolved because the statue girl backstories got scrapped

That was gross, but it was technically offscreen and not in the real world.

"Straight girl can't stop running in troubles with lesbians and gay men" is a bad look for sure.

It's no wonder so many people prefer to read Momoe as trans, even if the show is wishy-washy at best about it, because her whole plotline feels less stupid that way.

Like, Momoe declaring herself a woman by ripping off her shirt and showing off her boobs when there's a trans boy five feet away is actively offensive if she's cis, but if you read her as trans and assume she's showing off her trans pride bra the scene is downgraded to merely "really stupid".

Can I add "Narm" to the show's page about the cliffhanger of Rika being turned into stone by the stalker monster? It feels like it was an attempt to be dramatic which fell flat because 1. it came out of nowhere and is not linked with the monster's themes and general appearance 2. it gets resolved pretty fast 3. there's no real tension because we know that the girls are basically immortal when in the dream worlds (unless they're being stabbed in the eyes or heart, or so they say) so there was no doubt she was going to be safe.

I ever wonder why fans always treating this show like a slice-of-life but unaware of the show's disturbing contents. It's not like they're luring them to watch the show, I just don't seem to understand their posts moreso than Madoka, School Days, Hirugashi, and other simular shows.

I haven't seen anyone say that.

Me neither, I've seen a lot of comparisons especially to Madoka when recommending this show. Trying to trick people into watching a show with a lot of triggering elements under false pretenses would be kind of shitty though

Edited by Mami on Apr 28th 2021 at 10:36:43 AM

Some facebook pages (like Ani Trendz) and posts hardly mentions the actual content saved for few comments, especially hits hard in some LL community since the 3 V As were casted there as M Cs.

>Facebook

Ah that explains it

It's just another form of trolling, people were already doing it with shows like School-Live! and Narutaru/Shadow Star.

It's not like they intentionally lure people to watch like the other shows, it's like a whole new approach of harmless posts (showing off Ai and Rika's happy moments, LGB Ts, as such).

I kinda get it but I don't really understand why some people are doing this even in some well-known pages and articles, moreso than other similar shows. I was really curious however I'm traumatized by its settings despite I'm fine watching some thriller movies and other shows.

Edited by rouward on May 2nd 2021 at 7:58:23 PM

Well that's strange then, so basically these people want it to be a slice-of-life show as it was implied to be and not the drama/scifi/fantasy it actually is? There's fanarts and fanfictions for that. I thought that, since there is now more attention about potentially triggering elements, people would go out of their way to point out that the show includes death, bullying, harassment, suicides etc. instead of pretending it is just some harmless "cute girls doing cute things" type of stuff. That's why I thought it was some type of trolling at first.

It's finally June! The countdown to the special episode starts!

Edited by thuse on Jun 1st 2021 at 7:36:38 PM

Last episode airs today.

Can't wait!! It's been a season already after all... Man, I wonder how this will end...