One day, without warning, an alien spaceship crashlands in the ordinary city of Yumemigaoka. While the crash doesn’t make any victims and the alien promptly apologizes for the incovenience, it also causes some… changes around the world. People’s personal wishes start coming true and the laws of physics and logic become a lot more fleeting: trains start to fly, dinosaurs casually walk the streets, some people get superpowers or transform into all sorts of things while others remain normal… From there, we follow the stories of various characters caught up in all this weirdness.
Yumemigaoka Wonderland is a manga by Masuda Eiji, started in 2020 in the Bessatsu Shonen Champion. Set in the same universe as his other works, the series (which is his first monthly publication) is this time written as a an anthology with some recurring characters but mostly self-contained stories. While Masuda’s trademark rapid-fire comedy is still present, some of the stories can have surprisingly dark or disturbing twists, creating mixes of tone as strange as the series’ world itself.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Unsurprisingly, some of the wishes come with unexpected side effects, such as the ability to fly being activated by farting (chapter 1), the ability to eat as much as one’s want leading to constant hunger (chapter 3), or the wish to erase your imperfect self leading to constantly erasing your own memory (chapter 8).
- Big Eater: Uzuki Ritsu’s wish was to be able to "eat anything she likes as much as she likes". Her wish came true in the most literal sense possible, as she became able to eat literally anything.
- The Cameo: The early chapters are littered with background cameos (and even some talking ones) from Masuda’s previous series, strongly establishing that this one takes place in the same universe. Once that’s established though, they become few and far between.
- Dating Catwoman: Played With. The superhero protagonist of chapter 4 and 5 thought he was in such a relationship with his archnemesis the Black Princess, and was even about to propose to her, but found out that she was already dating someone else.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The second half of chapter 3, where Ritsu starts to mindlessly indulge in her appetite, has obvious parallels with sexual liberation, with some shots and reactions from both characters that almost wouldn’t feel out of place in a hentai.
- Flying Seafood Special: The city has fish flying all around it as if it was a giant aquarium, which reinforces the feeling of being constantly in a dream, a place that’s not quite real.
- Identical Panel Gag: This is Masuda Eiji we’re talking about. While it’s not used as prominently as in Jitsu wa or Hachi, there are still some copy-pasted page compositions in the more wacky chapters, notably chapter 7 focused on the crane Tanya.
- Idiot Hair: Both Tanya (chapter 2 and 7) and Ritsu (chapter 3) sport a very prominent one, although their idiocy manifests in different ways − the former is clumsy and blatantly selfish while the latter is overly formal yet completely obsessed with food.
- Occult Detective: Claire and her beloved Professor investigate on wishes and their supernatural effects since the Crash, taking requests from strangers to elucidate mysteries in chapter 6 and 8. It is thus ironic that both of them are strongly implied to be some kind of ghosts.
- Phenotype Stereotype: Played With − Tanya, as a Russian crane, is naturally white as a bird and thus has the white hair and teal eyes typical of Russian manga characters as a human.
- Psychological Horror: Chapter 3 (focused on Uzuki Ritsu) has some elements of it, especially at the very end where Ritsu seems to genuinely restrain herself to not eat her new friend alive; but it’s most prominent in chapter 8, focused on an "invisible woman" where "Cuco" is trapped in a cycle of constantly erasing her own memory and it turns out she has already "met" with Claire several times, which the latter gleefully reveals to her; she’s also terrified to find out that she is, in fact, not invisible and people call her by her old name. It is so far the only chapter that’s almost devoid of comedy.
