As I sit here once again looking forward toward a new anime season (October is coming up faster than you think, friends), I find that more than anything about to show up on my streaming services in the coming weeks, I’d rather look backwards. Several weeks ago the long-awaited (and troubled) finale to the Winter 2021 season anime Wonder Egg Priority was released, and while I was looking forward to finally being able to watch the remainder of that story, my weak, indulgent nature exposed me to some of the internet blowback it was getting. On the whole it hasn’t been particularly complimentary to the work. I gave myself the luxury of a few days away to allow the furor to calm before I watched the episode myself.
I should really say “episodes,” because I’m perpetually behind and I heard about the delay of the finale before I’d gotten around to watching the 12th episode. I figured that it would be helpful to have a bit of a lead-in rather than attempting to go in cold after months of waiting. Whether that was a better choice or not I can’t say; at the very least it kept me from having to wait and hope for weeks on end without knowing the outcome. Needless to say, after watching the episode(s) I ended up on an emotional journey that I didn’t entirely expect.
This essay has ended up being pretty long, which ought to at least speak to the regard in which I hold Wonder Egg Priority, at least in that it introduces many very interesting ideas throughout its run. Because of that I’ve broken it up into sections, with a bit of a “tl;dr” at the end in case folks are hungry for a “thumbs up/thumbs down” take. That said, even simplified I think my thoughts can best be described as “complicated” in this case, so I hope readers will do me the service of traveling along this thought journey with me. You can jump to each section by clicking the links below:
- A Lucky Road Map
- A Recap
- Frill
- Sawaki-Sensei
- Koito and the Impermanence of Friendship
- Motherhood
- As it is, or As it Should Be
- Epilogue
While I’d thought about breaking this up into several posts, I think it breaks up the continuity of my thoughts too much. That said, if you need to leave and come back, I hope the links help you do so.
It likely goes without saying, but this essay contains major spoilers for Wonder Egg Priority, as well as varying degrees of spoilers for the following:
- Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight
- Ex Machina
- A Song of Ice and Fire
- The novel Lolita
- The season 3 episode of Seinfeld entitled “The Dog.”
- The finale of Revolutionary Girl Utena
- Stars Align
- Mononoke
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Finally, I would like to note that, throughout this essay, I reference both real and fictional instances of sexual assault and grooming, including ones that I’ve personally experienced. While I understand if those things are too much for some folks to want to read, I hope that others might be willing to come along with me on this personal journey and understand how my experiences help me deeply relate to certain aspects of this series. With that said, I think it’s time to set forth.
A Lucky Road Map
I suspect from how I’ve phrased this introduction, some of you might expect me to come out of the gate with my fists swinging, ready to dunk mercilessly on an anime series that clearly didn’t live up to the expectations of so many. I’d agree that there are some non-flattering things I’d be inclined to say about the show if I wanted to toss some quick reactions around and be done with it. But several weeks ago I managed to find myself standing within an interesting confluence of ideas. I’m not one to seriously believe in concepts like “fate,” because I don’t think the things that happen from day-to-day are anything but chaos that we may mildly influence from time-to-time. Yet, I can’t deny that the links and articles that somehow showed up for me to read at that time ended up providing a lot more nuance to my thought processes and perspective than I might have had access to otherwise.
I’m also an avowed lover of very flawed and sometimes problematic stories. Whereas series like The Perfect Insider and The Lost Village briefly became the targets of some merciless critical dunking in the prime of their existences, I found a lot of things to like (and love!) about both. I tend not to want to completely dismiss a piece of media if it’s not what I expect it to be; part of me feels that allowing one’s self to be let down that way is more the fault of the viewer rather than the piece of media itself. If something gets into my good graces at all, it has a lot of work to do in order for me to subsequently write it off completely. With that said, I’d like to start of talking about Wonder Egg Priority by talking about something else entirely.
Recently, while I was scrolling through Twitter for the millionth time (as you do), I came upon a link to a recently-published Vox article focused on the story of Isabel Fall, a trans woman who published a short story called “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” back in January 2020. I vaguely remember this happening, because the internet furor surrounding it was already burning by the time it became a blip on my Twitter timeline. The title of the story co-ops a hurtful, transphobic meme which is meant to ridicule the idea of gender expression – the “joke” (and I say that sarcastically) being that if people can identify as any gender they please, then [the speaker] can just identify as an attack helicopter, because that, by their flawed, troll-ish line of thinking, is just as valid. There is a lot to unpack here, and as a cis woman all I can really say is that it seems like a particularly shitty way to denigrate a population of people who are just looking for acceptance in society. Which is I suppose what makes its use as the title of a sci-fi story by a trans author so attention-getting, by design.
Of course, at the time the story was published, almost no personal details of the author were known, and as the broader internet caught wind of the situation it became easy for those on the periphery (including many who never even read the actual story in the first place) to interpret the use of this inflammatory title in bad faith. The backlash nearly drove the author to suicide; the aftermath has also taken away her feeling of safety in openly living her authentic life. The accusations thrown about – including those stating that an “actual trans person” or an “actual woman” could never have written such a thing – stole from Isabel Fall her ability to feel comfortable in her own existence.
Over the past year I’ve heard many stories about people being “cancelled” on the internet for spurious reasons and it’s lead me to reflect on a lot of my own feelings and the ease at which I come to be angry about situations about which I don’t actually have many details. The ways in which social media and especially Twitter is constructed in order to craft engagement at any cost, to wring emotion out of people in any manner possible in order to siphon out advertising revenue, is terrifying. Glob help anyone who ends up on the wrong end of Twitter’s furor. It’s not that some people don’t deserve to be called out for bad behavior; it’s more that the situations in which it’s justified are sometimes difficult to tell apart from the ones in which it’s not, and it’s so incredibly easy to get drawn up into an emotional situation without knowing all the facts.
One of the concepts I pulled away from the story has a lot to do with the different ways in which we interpret texts and media. Emily VanDerWerff’s article on Vox lead me to Eve Kosofsky Sedwick’s ideas on reparative readings as a form of academic criticism. It postulates that an alternative to critical or “paranoid” readings of texts which focus on their wrong, misrepresentative or problematic aspects, are “reparative” readings which focus more on a text’s ability to be nourishing or healing to a marginalized reader or group, even if imperfect. While this originally grew out of Sedwick’s framework for approaching queer readings of media and I don’t want to overstep by claiming that my own experiences are necessarily equivalent, I hope no one will be offended by my co-opting of the concept as I feel it relates very closely to my experiences navigating Wonder Egg Priority.
The idea feels very much in line with how I approach media as a viewer with some intersectional identities and related marginalizations – I’m a woman, a survivor of sexual assault, a person with mental illnesses, neurodivergent, and someone with a very misunderstood sexual orientation that I’m only just beginning to understand myself – and those are all lenses through which I experience stories, whether consciously or otherwise. Media frequently leaves me unsatisfied with its inability to accurately capture and portray my identities and experiences, whether that’s a by-product of the writer’s or director’s ignorance and prejudice, or simply a reflection of the maddening ways in which accepted tropes are sometimes the twisted echoes of society’s past and present hatred toward certain populations. No matter the cause, the after-effect is that I’m often faced with the conflicting feelings of enjoying or even loving fiction that also hurts me, and it’s on me and me alone to navigate those feelings and choose what I can ignore for the sake of the “greater good” – the aspects of the piece of media that I find compelling and relevant, or even revelatory as they relate to my life. It’s not that I or anyone else should be forced to ignore shittiness in media just as a matter of course, but one of the things that frustrates me the most about paying attention to how media is perceived is when folks tell me “well you just have to accept that, it’s part of that character/the source culture/that genre.” Like, it’s not my fault you can’t imagine a better and more equitable world within fiction, friend. It’s more that, in order to engage with media, it’s often an individual struggle to forgive certain trespasses if there’s the essence of something fruitful to be found within the miasma. Anime Feminist does a good job summing this up with their “My Fave is Problematic” series of personal essays. No matter how much social progress is made and how well that gets reflected in our media, I feel like there will always be missteps and I’ve tried, in my own way, to come to terms with that for myself.
Lastly, in another weird stroke of luck I happened upon a link to an academic article by Patrick Galbraith entitled “The Ethics of Imaginary Violence, Part 2: “Moexploitation” and Critique in Revue Starlight.” I’m sure many of you out there are rolling your eyes right now; as someone who was formerly steeped in this kind of reading (liberal arts degrees for the win!) I think it’s easy to accuse academic critique of both being impenetrable and missing the point of what it’s targeting. That said, while I love Revue Starlight and gleaned many different things from my viewings than the primary problems that article asserts, I think the framework by which is examines certain moé anime and Revue Starlight in particular has merit. To summarize its point as I’ve interpreted it, it considers Revue Starlight a miss in that it benefits from a cultural framework that does not interrogate its audience’s participation in a system that is harmful to marginalized people (in this case, the assumed straight male audience, and teenage girls respectively). It features girls being forced through the dramatic wringer, their violence and victimhood presented to an audience that does not have to experience the discomfort of seeing themselves and their roles represented in the brutality of the narrative. Additionally, the character who is actively causing the chaos (the giraffe) ends up essentially monologuing about how he’s just there to enjoy a show that no one has experienced before – he gets orgasmic over the novelty of the main characters’ quest to share the stage. In Galbraith’s interpretation, this gives the audience by extension a “free pass” to enjoy the violence of the narrative without being forced to question the framework (both internal to the narrative, and more broadly as it applies to the extremely commercialized and gendered genre of moé anime) in which it operates.
This is not to claim that members of anime viewership who are just there to have a good time are all secretly victimizers (although I’m sure by introducing this line of thinking at all it’s what I’m going to get accused of. Alas, fandom is not prone to reading or accepting nuance), but while my interpretations of Revue Starlight go in an entirely different direction and thus I disagree that it fails in some singular duty to remind adult men of their participation in patriarchy, Galbraith’s article helps to sum up a thought that I’ve had for a long time but had a very difficult time articulating. Media seems all too willing to dabble in complicated subject matter and claim it as “representation,” expecting gold stars and kudos without actually interrogating any of the deeper ideas that surround that subject matter (or leading the audience to interrogating them as a matter of engaging with the media). As I often like to joke, satirizing something is not simply presenting that thing on a plate with a heavy accompaniment of irony, and expecting the audience to eat it up willingly by doing all the legwork on behalf of the creators. I believe the most successful kind of commentary is that in which those commenting are brave enough to have some point-of-view, and that their point-of-view is discernable (even if the audience ultimately doesn’t derive their own value from it). They don’t have to be blatant about their position (in fact, one of the more successful of these creators when it comes to anime is Kunihiko Ikuhara, and he’s anything but straightforward), but they ought to be courageous enough to express it in some form.
With that said, that’s the kind of “light” reading I’ve been up to lately. I imagine that my feelings about Wonder Egg Priority would be mostly the same whether I’d been distracting myself with other articles and essays or not, but that said I find it kind of lucky in a way that my extracurricular enrichment has helped me hone in on some of my very complicated feelings about this very complicated show.
A Recap
I imagine if you’ve found yourself here without already following my blog, you’ve probably been watching or recently-completed Wonder Egg Priority and been searching for answers. Honestly, the only “answers” I can give are those that I’ve been tossing around in my heart since I finished the series, polished stones that might only have beauty to me. But if you haven’t watched the series (or watched it in its entirety) and you still feel like reading a multiple thousands of words blog post about it, below is my summary of its story so that you can have some baseline knowledge from which to start.
The primary protagonist is Ai Ohto, a shut-in who stopped going to middle school due to a combination of being bullied for her heterochromia and the suicide death of Koito, the one girl who reached-out to try to become Ai’s friend. We also learn later on that another complicating factor to her situation is that Ai had or has a crush on Sawaki-sensei, the school’s art teacher, but suspects that his apparent closeness with Koito may have been a factor in Koito’s death. Sawaki-sensei has also started to show up at Ai’s home, where she lives with her mother, ostensibly to help convince Ai to return to school. Ai’s mother eventually lets on that she would like to start dating Sawaki-sensei.
Aside from these more “mundane” concerns, one night Ai is approached by a talking firefly and beckoned toward a mysterious underground arcade. Contained inside the arcade’s strange gachapon machine are “wonder eggs,” mysterious objects which, when broken inside a dream world, reveal girls who, as we later learn, all died by suicide. Using abilities only available inside these dream worlds, Ai attacks monsters that represent the sources of these girls’ trauma. In doing so, she hopes that she might eventually be able to bring Koito back from the dead.
Upon her subsequent returns to the arcade, Ai eventually meets Neiru, Rika, and Momoe, three other girls struggling through their own traumatic situations who have, in doing so, started to walk the path of the “Egg Warriors” and who also seek to revive someone close to them. The process is overseen by Acca and Ura-Acca, two talking life-sized puppets whose actions in their former lives are revealed to be somewhat related to an uptick in teenage girl suicides in recent years. Once this information is discovered, Ai questions exactly what she and her new friends have been participating in and to what ends.
The series delves into some fairly heavy subject matter through the experiences of its various characters. Ai’s life, at least as it is at the outset of the series, is gripped by depression and social anxiety, as well as what could eventually be interpreted as grooming by an authority figure (more on that later). She harbors guilt for Koito’s death despite not knowing the entirety of those circumstances (or perhaps due to her incomplete knowledge of them). Rika wrestles with feelings of abandonment; her mother is a sex worker and doesn’t know exactly who Rika’s father is. She projects a brash, blunt attitude as a junior idol, but this façade hides the guilt she feels for potentially influencing a former fan to die by suicide (who she is now fighting to revive). Momoe struggles with her gender identity and wanting to be acknowledged as feminine. She fights for the life of a lost friend whose confession of love she rejected. And Neiru, a quiet, perhaps overly-mature girl who somehow heads a company, remains a bit of a black box throughout the story, but her trauma involves the suicide death of her younger sister, which occurred after she attacked and tried to kill Neiru.
This summary only begins to scratch the surface of this series’ narrative, but even so there are a lot of different things to unpack. That being said, this is the point at which I want to state that I don’t think I’m qualified to address all of it. Just as harm is done by creators who thoughtlessly paint canvases using other people’s lived experiences as their brushstrokes, so to can critics perpetuate harm by speaking on behalf of those whose experiences are depicted. So while I’ll say right here that, after a lot of deliberation and discussion I actually really enjoyed this series on the whole, I’m not here to convince anyone to change their mind against their own will. But I do relate to the story in many ways, so consider this simply a reflection of my own reactions as seen through the lens of my own very messy, complicated life experiences.
Frill
“Don’t pretend not to see me. I was born from the two of you.”
Frill, from Wonder Egg Priority episode 11
I struggled with where to begin my discussion of the series, because as I mentioned there’s just so much I want to try to unpack. Thinking back over my time watching the series, I decided to go back to the point in the story during which my personal feelings really seemed to differ from the rest of the fandom – episode 11, entitled “An Adult Child,” which introduces the character of Frill.
Frill is the progeny of Acca and Ura-Acca, two characters who up until that point in the series had the luxury of existing as unsettling background characters with vague, questionable motives. The two were formerly flesh-and-blood humans and scientists to boot, who thought it might be interesting to develop an AI just for fun. As is usually the case in these sorts of stories, they choose the form of a young girl to be the AI’s physical manifestation. The three play family nicely until Acca finds a real woman to fall in love with and marry. This causes Frill, who’s been raised in isolation with only Acca and Ura-Acca as companions, to become enraged and jealous; eventually she murders Acca’s wife Azusa and Acca locks her in a shed. Years later, the now teenage daughter of Acca and Azusa, Himari, dies by apparent suicide, despite there being no signs at all to indicate that she was unhappy. There’s reason to believe that her actions were somehow influenced behind the scenes by Frill, who’s been virtually connected to the outside world from inside her coffin. After this, Acca destroys Frill’s physical body in an incinerator.
This story is told to Ai by Ura-Acca following the horrifying events of the previous episode; after Momoe “clears” her game and frees Haruka, she’s confronted by Dot, a butterfly-headed creature who appears to have some connection to Frill and, more broadly, the temptation of death (referred to as “Thanatos”). The truth about Frill’s existence seems to be given as a concession to Ai by Ura-Acca, as some piece of information that’s supposed to help illustrate to Ai just what the egg battles actually mean. As an audience to the story, being offered something so late in the narrative that supposedly reveals so much about the supposed backdrop to what we’ve been witnessing feels disorienting. It’s difficult to see Frill’s story as anything more than a distraction, a feeble attempt to explain the mechanics behind what Ai and her companions have been going through. To this point, we’ve been led to believe that what’s really more important to the narrative is not really the broader “why” but the “why” that’s more personal to each character and their actions.
After watching “An Adult Child,” I recalled an anecdote from several years prior when I went to see the movie Ex Machina with my now-husband and some other friends of ours. In this film, Nathan, a techbro CEO “genius” develops an AI and clothes it in the visage of a beautiful young woman. He invites one of his employees named Caleb to his isolated compound to interact with the AI, named Ava, in order to administer a sort of Turing test. Caleb becomes attracted to Ava, whose desire it is to leave her underground home and explore the world outside of Nathan’s compound. Caleb helps put together a plan with Ava for her to escape; however, parts of the plan are confounded due to Nathan knowing more than he initially lets on and Ava is left to her own devices to find her way out – all the while the two men in the story end up being various flavors of adversarial toward Ava’s end goals. Eventually she kills Nathan, leaves Caleb behind locked away in a cell, and uses the artificial skins leftover from her departed older “sisters” to disguise her robotic body. She then enters the outside world and slips into the crowd, indistinguishable from a human woman.
As soon as the credits rolled, a man sitting behind us stood up and exclaimed “that conniving bitch!” a phrase that, at that moment, instantly entered my mental lexicon as shorthand for “man does not understand story of woman who wants nothing to do with transactional male attention.” While Ava’s story arc is disturbing, I think that kind of visceral negative reaction toward her actions reveals something even more disturbing about how society perceives the relationships between men and women. In the story, Nathan acts as a representative of the love-affair certain types have with “facts and logic™” – to him, his ability to create and program Ava’s intelligence to the point that she “fools” other people to the realities of her humanity is a measure of his own intellectual prowess, and any ethical concerns are merely the wailing of people too stupid to understand his greater motivations. To him, Ava is a tool that’s simply an extension of himself. Any “humanity” she may seem to demonstrate is not a real indication of her personhood but instead a simple measure of his skill. Caleb initially seems more sympathetic but is in fact the more insidious of the two men in the story, simply because his feelings toward Ava are incredibly transactional once you start digging into them. In short, Caleb meets a woman who lives in complete isolation and develops affection for her. His assumption then is that, because he’s “nicer” than Nathan and willing to help Ava get what she desires, that she’ll then owe him for his kindness – ostensibly by reciprocating his affection. I honestly think a lesser story would have gone this route. But the fact is that Caleb isn’t willing to confront Nathan directly for being gross and terrible; he commits subterfuge in order to help Ava’s plans succeed, but he never seems willing to take Nathan permanently out of the picture to the point that Ava’s task might become too easy – he doesn’t want to completely undermine the social system from which he also serves to benefit.
Acca and Ura-Acca’s actions remind me a lot of what happens in Ex Machina, to the point that I’d be surprised if writer Shinji Nojima wasn’t channeling some of its influence, purposely or not. More broadly, though, I think both stories serve as decent allegories of the ways in which social mechanisms, mainly patriarchal ones, affect marginalized people – namely girls and women.
Acca and Ura-Acca create Frill as a representation of an idealized teenage daughter, one who’s both cute and flawed in ways considered desirable by those who put a lot of stock into how teenage girls “should” be. They act as though they’re creating a child, but their investment in how she looks and acts belies at least a conceptual (if not romantic/sexual) attraction to a sort of teenage girl “ideal.” Because Frill’s very real personality and desires grow too large to be contained inside this controlled, palatable box, and because the relationships she’s exposed to upon her creation – two adult men who muddy the line between father and potential lover – are so fraught and problematic, her jealousy of Azusa and her desire to punish the men who imprisoned her is really the only logical endpoint of the situation. Her value has been predicated on her ability to gain affection from men, and when that reality is destroyed through no fault of her own – when she cannot get what she needs where she is, nor leave to find validation elsewhere, what are her options?
I’m reminded of a thought I had back when I was very into the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series of novels – Cersei Lannister is what happens when intelligent, driven women are locked inside the prison of extreme patriarchy. Their only outlet is to seek for power and influence in toxic, harmful ways – Cersei, in particular, murders and manipulates people in order to put her own son in power because that’s one of the few mechanisms that she has to maintain her influence, and that certainly doesn’t end well for anyone. Frill, likewise, is a prisoner of the limiting role she’s been offered. When her central role in the lives of her fathers is about to be “usurped” by another woman and she’s treated like an object whose novelty has worn off, it makes sense to me that she would lash out. Patriarchy provides marginalized groups with limited resources, and it’s easier for those who serve to benefit from the system as it stands to let those it harms distract themselves from the bigger picture by fighting amongst ourselves rather than working together to dismantle the various injustices of the system. I see Frill and the toxicity she leeches to girls in the outside world – those who are influenced by the “temptation of death” – as a representation of this concept. She’s not the villain in this story, despite being framed as such through the words of an unreliable, prejudiced narrator; she’s merely the creation of two men with patriarchal motivations, who believe that youthful femininity is nothing but a game for them to play until they lose interest. And being influenced by patriarchy – being asked to portray a version of femininity that’s far from universal and which limits people for whom the mold is stifling – can be toxic.
In a way, I see this as partly an indictment (or at least a criticism) of the anime industry itself, an industry that’s turned fans’ ability to love certain characters into a way of building a market share upon those desires. The tsundere who says no when they mean yes. The yandere who would literally kill for you. The childhood friend who loves you no matter how milquetoast or shitty you are. While the industry has come to market these types of moé characters toward audiences of various genders, I find that by and large they’re still primarily embodied by female characters to appeal toward a straight male audience. Moé characters behave in predictable ways and their motives are often pleasantly uncomplicated. You know what you’re going to get and they embody who they are without complaint. With fictional characters there’s no having to deal with relationship complexities, disagreements, or any of the aspects that make relationships between equals a matter of give-and-take, communication and discussion. It is, for the most part (in my opinion) harmless escapism, but escapism that banks on the idea of characters that never ask for anything more of their admirers than they’re willing to give. But real people can’t survive life inside a box that doesn’t acknowledge their humanity; eventually they’re likely to rebel against it, in whatever form that takes.
Sawaki-Sensei
“People are easy to fool when you’re born handsome.”
Shuichiro Sawaki, from Wonder Egg Priority episode 12
When I was in high school, I struggled with feelings of low self-esteem. I felt like a failure a lot of the time because I’d grown up within my school’s “gifted and talented” program, but had also dealt with a lot of mental health issues (things that I think would be red flags nowadays, but which went unidentified at the time) and was no longer “living up to my potential.” I had some friends, but felt isolated from them because they seemed to have no trouble in school. In short, I struggled with a lot of self-hatred. The one bright spot in my day was band class, because I loved playing music and my flute-playing came easily to me. It was the one place where I felt like I stood out (in a good way!). I ended up spending a lot of time in the band classroom, whether over lunch or after school, and eventually formed a close bond with the band teacher.
To put things clearly, I was never directly harmed by this teacher. But one day a couple of years after I’d graduated, I got several frantic AIM messages from former classmates asking me if “I’d heard the news.” This teacher had been arrested for an inappropriate relationship with a former student, who was underage at that time. Not only was I initially shocked by this news, as my emotions began to level out I realized that, while I hadn’t been harmed directly, I had almost certainly been groomed. I suddenly recalled several inappropriate conversations with this teacher over the years. He had also begun to get very close with my parents after I left school – my dad even joined his bowling team where they saw each-other weekly. Certain other interactions he had with my classmates began to take on different meanings in my memory. Even thinking about it now chills my blood, because I suspect I may have been closer to ending up a victim than I might have realized even when the revelations were fresh. Yet at the time, I felt special; after spending years feeling like absolute shit about myself, who could blame me for feeling elated about getting positive attention from an authority figure I not only respected but held in particularly high regard?
It’s through this lens that I started to unpack Ai’s relationship with Sawaki-sensei, a figure whose presence haunts much of the series. Until the latter half of the series, Sawaki is this sort of hovering presence, appearing mainly in the background of certain scenes and in flashbacks as seen through Ai’s point-of-view; it’s through these brief images that we learn of Sawaki’s closeness with Koito and are invited to make all sorts of assumptions about what happened between them and whether it influenced Koito’s suicide. He also spends time in Ai’s apartment as he both works to get her to come back to school and, as we find out later, also to get closer to Ai’s mother. In the later parts of the series, Ai comes to terms with the fact that she has feelings for Sawaki, and confesses those feelings to him in a somewhat roundabout way – letting him know after a visually-symbolic rainstorm one day, almost elated, that she’s finally going to return to school. In the climax of her story, Ai is tasked with helping an alternate timeline version of herself within the egg world, and the enemy she defends her other self against is none other than Sawaki. Ai wins out by insisting that this “Sawaki monster” is only playing upon her own anxieties about her feelings for him and her misperception of his involvement with Koito. Coming to this realization triggers Ai’s anger, which turns out to be her super power, continuing a motif that’s been present throughout the series.
There’s a temptation to read these events as Sawaki being absolved of any wrongdoing; he has a monologue at some later point, portrayed in flashback, that the whole Koito situation was, in brief, simply “a big misunderstanding.” Considering Sawaki’s behavior throughout the series, often portrayed as borderline creepy, I can see how this would be an unsatisfying non-end to what otherwise appears to be a very important, heavy aspect to Ai’s characterization. However, I think the actual resolution falls much more in line with what might be the expected reality of what’s been going on, and while it may not ultimately result in the kind of justice that would be desirable the narrative definitely doesn’t let Sawaki-sensei off the hook even if society itself continues to disappoint in that regard.
Throughout the series, Sawaki-sensei has been grooming Ai. People who commit sexual crimes often choose their targets in a very keen way, looking for those who are already isolated and lonely – those who will respond to any sort of positive attention. Ai has suffered from being bullied and has no friends at school. Ai also lives with her divorced mother; while their family situation is never really elaborated upon, it doesn’t appear that Ai’s father is in the picture, nor do there appear to be any other male role models in Ai’s life. So when Sawaki starts to give Ai attention, using her as a life model for his art piece and going out of his way to visit her at home, she’s in the perfect, vulnerable state to accept this attention. His weirdly inappropriate visualization of Ai as an adult in his painting feels uncomfortable to us, but to Ai his assertion that she’ll someday become a good woman “like her mother” feels complimentary to her and only prompts more feelings of affection. Sawaki seems to perceive that Ai’s caring, protective mother is an obstacle, so he ingratiates himself to her in order to get her to drop her guard. These are all the actions of potential abusers and the moves they make to establish access to their victims and to muddy the narrative enough that, should their victims speak out, other authority figures are much less likely to want to believe them.
It’s why, when he appears as the form of an adversary in the Egg dream world and then is revisited as a narrator in the “real” world, answering Ai’s questions about his relationship with Koito, there appears to be such dissonance in Sawaki’s words. On the one hand he confirms all of our suspicions, but then the series seems to backpedal and give him a way out of being rightfully accused. His perceived wrongdoing was simply said to be the ravings of an emotionally-unstable teenage girl, or so we’ve been told to believe. I’ve purposely tried to stay away from other reviews of this anime, but gleaned just from being on the internet that this seeming discrepancy, which appears to absolve a really creepy dude of any responsibility, is particularly frustrating to others. I think if I truly believed the series were actually attempting to pull a bait-and-switch, it really would be rage-inducing, and I’d be the first in line to offer criticism. But there’s a specific reason why I don’t think the obvious interpretation is correct here, and unfortunately it requires delving into a pretty dark time in my life.
My own story about navigating abuse doesn’t have a happy ending. While my interactions with that high school teacher of mine didn’t ultimately result in my becoming one of his victims, a couple of years later as I was battling through the gauntlet of my final year as an undergrad, another person brought to completion the acts of harm that had previously only been a threat to me. My boyfriend at the time was living in a townhome with some other students. When there was a vacancy to fill, the landlord accepted the application of a man who was nearly 40 years old to fill the empty bedroom. He made the nominal overture of asking the other residents (two young women and my boyfriend) whether they were “okay” with that living situation, but the implication was that the decision had already been made.
This person wasted no time ingratiating himself to us. He had a car and seemed to work odd hours, so he’d often offer us a ride to campus if we were late leaving for class. I remember one time he drove me and my boyfriend to the Mall of America so we didn’t have to navigate the local mass transit. As our barriers were worn down by his generosity, he’d begun to reveal bits and pieces of his personal life. He was divorced, with a young son he didn’t often get to see. He claimed that his wife was keeping his son from seeing him, and of course we thought that was terrible. What kind of horrible person would keep a father from being with his beloved child?
One day in early December I was in the townhouse alone in my boyfriend’s room, waiting to leave for class. The older man was in the living room, and as I came upstairs to have something to eat, we started talking. His negative opinions of his ex-wife bubbled up again, and he seemed truly sad about his broken family and the son that he cared about. He then told me that I seemed stressed and asked me if I wanted a shoulder massage. I remember feeling as though this was strange, but by that point I’d been convinced that he was just a really nice guy who wanted to help, and so I let him. I’ll avoid going into greater detail from here, but things progressed further from just a shoulder massage; my brain and my body froze and he molested me as I was unable to tell him to stop. I learned later on that this is called dissociation, and it’s a perfectly natural response to trauma, but my inability to speak up and escape later just caused me to bury myself in self-hatred. After it was over, he left for work, asking me to check if his necktie was straight and asking me not to tell anyone what had happened as I struggled to register what had occurred. Somehow I attempted to navigate the rest of my day while in a complete daze.
Even though this happened to me over 15 years ago, the act and the aftermath are still as vivid to me as when they happened. It took me three days to notify the police; I only did so because, once I revealed to my boyfriend what had happened to me, he told me he’d break up with me if I didn’t report it. Many years later, as our marriage was falling apart, he gaslit me about this detail during couple’s counseling, and I will never forget the coldness I felt when he told me, flatly, that he didn’t recall that part of the situation. The landlord blamed me for being alone in the house without my boyfriend; because I wasn’t technically on the lease I shouldn’t have been there by myself (implying what had transpired was somehow my fault because of that). One of the other residents, the daughter of the landlord, decided that it was her duty to forgive the perpetrator, due to her religious beliefs. The Minneapolis police investigator who was assigned to the investigation called me on the phone several weeks later and told me that he thought I was lying, and that he was dropping the matter because there was nothing more he could do. I remember biting my lip to hold back tears, as I received that call in a Half Price Books where I was hanging out with a friend, and I didn’t want him to be made uncomfortable.
Even after years of therapy, this series of events has left indelible scars on me. I no longer tend to be directly triggered or have flashbacks when I read, see, or hear about similar acts, but even writing out the vague details of the situation here has left me feeling tired and emotionally fragile. But for whatever reason, the fragment of my experience that my brain has managed to latch onto through everything else are that man’s complaints about his ex wife. How she was such a “fucking bitch” for not letting him see his son. What I think about that in particular, I begin to see the holes in his assertions. I’m not privy to the actual details of his divorce, but I have learned a lot more over the years about how custody arrangements are generally handled via the courts. It’s not common for a custody arrangement to completely exclude one of the parents unless there are extenuating circumstances – for example, abuse or criminality on the part of the person in question. I have no idea what this man might have done to be excluded from his child’s life; perhaps his ex-wife was simply alienating him as he claimed. But on the other hand, I feel in my heart of hearts that I couldn’t have possibly been the first woman that he abused, because his actions toward me in retrospect seemed so cunningly purposeful, escalating at such a rate that I didn’t perceive what was happening until it was too late. I wonder to this day whether there were more women after me who suffered by his hand.
When I look at Sawaki-Sensei and experience his words and see his actions, I see yet another predator and a liar. I think he, as many people tend to do, has created a world for himself built up around a lie that’s subsequently become the false truth behind which he shields the sickness of his true intentions. It’s unfortunately very easy for someone in Sawaki’s position to shift the blame for Koito’s death onto Koito; as someone who’s seen as an authority figure, he wields a form of unquestioned (and in this case, unearned) respect that can seem infallible to a certain audience. He has more social clout than some silly teenage girl who “slipped and fell” to her death. It’s also easy for him to slip into the role of the concerned teacher, whose interest in his emotionally-fragile student is pure and honorable.
Even though this isn’t directly stated (as with many things in this series, so little is made obvious), I think that this is the intended interpretation of his actions and motivations. The abhorrent motivations of all the other adversaries that Ai and her companions face – the bullying students, the body-shaming gym teacher, the molesting company man – are taken at face value. Their harms and predations are stated outright, and we have no reason to disbelieve the terrible acts they’ve committed against the egg girls. Sawaki is the the only one whose real-life persona we’re familiar with, and only through the eyes of a protagonist who’s being actively manipulated by him. His manipulation is so deep and insidious that, despite having battled many enemies over the course of the series, Ai refuses to believe egg world Sawaki when he states that “it’s easy to fool people when you’re born with a handsome face.”
When someone shows you what kind of a person they are, you should believe them.
Koito and the Impermanence of Friendship
“Be my friend. Let’s be best friends.”
Koito Nagase, Wonder Egg Priority episode 1
When we meet Ai in the first episode of Wonder Egg Priority, we learn quickly that she’s struggling with the loss of the one girl who tried to become friends with her. Koito was a transfer student who almost immediately reached out to Ai; it’s never directly stated but it’s implied that Koito was also bullied at her previous school (and it’s made obvious that she’s also bullied at her current one), and so the two girls had something in common with one-another. We also learn that Koito had some kind of relationship with Sawaki-Sensei before dying by apparent suicide, and it’s Ai’s need to both know the truth of the situation as well as simply to save the one friend she had that drives her to keep returning to the underground arcade for more eggs.
Koito almost immediately establishes herself (via flashback) as an unsettling presence. Her calm demeanor and her willingness to reach out to Ai are the types of things that make one wary. If you’ve had experience being lied to and picked on by other people, when someone comes to you seemingly selflessly and with calm kindness it’s difficult to take their motives seriously. Opening yourself up to friendship after being hurt is always a gamble, because making oneself vulnerable enough for intimacy also means letting down the protections you’ve created to save yourself from being hurt further.
The mystery of how Koito is related to Ai’s story hangs over the narrative for most of its run-time, and it’s only once Ai directly asks Sawaki at the art gallery about that situation and then his answer is provided that we can really start to piece together everything that occurred. Sawaki dismisses anything that may happened between himself and Koito, claiming that Koito was in a relationship with a teacher at her former school, causing that former teacher to die by suicide, and that her pattern of manipulation continued as she set her sights on Sawaki. That her own “suicide” was merely her slipping and falling from the school roof after threatening to cry “rape” when Sawaki didn’t return Koito’s perverse affections.
This explanation is gross and unsatisfying – it’s infuriating to think that the anime series had put so much stock in this relationship between two girls only to imply that somehow it was the supposed fickleness of teenage girlhood that was the culprit to the story’s central emotional crime. I’d argue that it’s meant to be perceived as such, and that the visceral feeling that we’re made to feel is the point, because it’s the result of having to listen to the manufactured truth of someone who we know to be a manipulative groomer and liar.
Back in episode 4, Acca and Ura-Acca make some sexist statements regarding the supposed differences between boys and girls. They’re the same sort of internet shout-man arguments that are made all the time, implying that men’s actions are dictated by concrete goals (“facts and logic™”), while women’s are ruled by their flighty, impenetrable emotions. There’s a flippancy to these statements that stood out to me at that time as almost comically sexist, and it was always my personal interpretation that they weren’t meant to be taken at face value considering the nuanced situations of all the different characters and the unquestionably meaningful reasons why they were choosing to fight their egg battles. They do, however, create a continuity that extends to Frill’s story (“this teenage girl, who we created in a way that appealed directly to our adult male sensibilities and then pointedly shoved to the side when her presence became inconvenient, is the problem, not us!”) and then to Koito’s (“this teenage girl, who may or may not have been previously abused by an adult man, came onto me like a hysterical bitch, then accidentally killed herself when I, an upstanding man, wouldn’t give in to her whims and wiles”).
Society’s treatment of and obsession with teenage girls and their perceived sexuality is an issue, to say the least. Some folks are much more willing to believe in the idea that there are sexually-precocious teenage girls out there who exist to make victims of innocent men who aren’t resistant to their devilish charms, than they are willing to believe that there are adult men in positions of authority committing statutory rape and then twisting the narratives of the situations to suit their purposes and obscure their own criminality. Recently I watched a video created by fashion video blogger Tyler Willis, focused around the history of the novel “Lolita” by Vladimir Nobokov. “Lolita” is a bit of a sore spot for those of us in the lolita and J-fashion community, because the content of the book often gets conflated with the style and goals of the fashion with which it unfortunately shares a name. I’ve written about my experience with the fashion already, so I’ll spare you an unneeded re-hash. What makes Tyler’s video interesting is that she delves into the history of reviews and criticisms of “Lolita;” the theme being that the perception of the book becomes more romanticized and, in her opinion, perhaps undeservedly put up on a pedestal, over time, as the interpretation of point-of-view character Humbert Humbert’s obsession with the 12-year-old Dolores is twisted into representing some kind of romance.
It’s been years since I’ve been able to engage with the book “Lolita;” it’s just not the type of story content that I can stand back and analyze from a point of distant detachment. Frequently I hear stories of girls being shamed or sent home from school for violating dress codes that limit their ability to dress for the weather, because a stray shoulder or knee is supposedly so sexually arousing to their straight male classmates (and their male teachers) that to wear shorts or tank-tops is considered an active disruption. It’s almost never (or at least it hasn’t been, until recently) seen as a responsibility of boys and men to re-think their casual sexual objectification of girls and young women, because the idea that girls and women weaponize their sexuality is so ingrained that the burden is placed on their (unfairly covered-up) shoulders. 12-year-old girls cannot consent, and sexual expression in children can be an indicator of prior abuse. Yet people still insist that “Lolita,” the story of an adult man and a 12-year-old girl, is an erotic romance, and some also seem to believe that an anime that involves a teacher engaging in inappropriate relationships with multiple students, and in one even approaches the mother in order to get at the child, is somehow condoning and absolving those actions, or explaining them away as if they didn’t happen at all. It’s easy to believe a narrator when he blames his victim, because there are obvious, high-profile examples in lauded fictional narratives that imply the same thing.
Interpreted in that manner, the narrative of Wonder Egg Priority seems to leave Koito in the dust. As Ai manages to “clear” her scenario and release Koito back into the world (albeit in a changed form), Ai appears to come to some form of emotional closure even though her relationship with Koito isn’t what it was before Koito’s death. I think this raises questions in the mind of the audience, because it seems to suggest that Koito never really even mattered, anyway. It’s much easier to put stock in Sawaki’s dismissal of her as a person, then; she was simply a silly girl with misguided, precocious sexuality, who died from her own folly in attempting to predate on an innocent, upstanding man. However it also would also seem to suggest that friendship is nothing but a limited-time offer, dependent only on very mundane things like proximity or shared trauma, and that that’s a bad thing.
I think we as a culture mythologize friendship quite a bit; as a character motivation it often sits alongside romantic love as one of the most powerful. In reality, though, I’ve discovered that in my own life there are some relationships that just have a limited shelf-life. I realize that sounds extremely cold on my part, but in my experience and with very few exceptions, intimacy is often born from a combination of repeated presence and shared experiences. It might be very dependent on a particular context; a club or organization, a class, a hobby, or even a connection to a related third party. But however it manifests, its longevity is never guaranteed.
There’s a Season 3 episode of the TV series Seinfeld entitled “The Dog,” in which characters George and Elaine find themselves at a movie without Jerry, their mutual friend. Their interactions with one-another are stilted and awkward (until they start laughing about Jerry, of course). It’s clear that their friendship is conditional and based around their shared relationship with Jerry; when he’s not around they don’t have much in common or any reason to hang out with one-another. While it may be folly to hold up the characters in Seinfeld as model human beings, especially since the show is known for its portrayal of bad or at least flawed people, I find that there’s often a lot of truth to be found in the things that they do. Even if we wouldn’t be doing them ourselves, we might very well be thinking about it.
When I was still in college I made a lot of friends through the school’s anime club. It was this shared hobby that brought us together, and considering that, we always had something to talk about. While I’m still connected to some folks from those days (mainly because they either still attend the same anime club with me or belong to one of the other local fandom organizations with which I have dealings), there are others who I’ve simply lost track of. At the time our friendships may have held a lot of importance; some of these people even served major roles in my first wedding. I don’t consider my relationship with them to have been disposable or unimpactful or unimportant. But even so, we ended up drifting apart because the things that brought us together were no longer a commonality, and the lack of a shared interest simply may have thrown our differences into sharper contrast than those relationships were meant to tolerate.
My interpretation of Koito’s role, if there’s some nugget of truth to be found in Sawaki’s slandering of her, is that she may have seen in Ai the same potential to be taken advantage of that she had experienced, and was drawn to her in order to protect her from being victimized by a predatory authority figure. Her methods were imperfect; perceived only through Ai’s incomplete point-of-view and through Sawaki’s words, it would be easy to fall into the trap of believing that she was just another nymphet out to cause trouble in the lives of those around her. But as often as I’ve seen this assessment exclaimed angrily and with complete assuredness on Twitter since the series was completed, I still can’t make myself see it that way. I think that Koito was there for Ai when Ai was at a crossroads that she may not even have entirely perceived herself. By the time Ai finds her footing as a savior to other egg girls and builds friendships with those sharing her struggle, her friendship with Koito has served its intended purpose. This doesn’t make it disposable, it simply reflects its bittersweet liminality.
While comparing this series to an all-around classic like Revolutionary Girl Utena might seem a little bit gauche on my part, I feel that, although it’s an imperfect synthesis of a similar idea, Wonder Egg speaks to me similarly in the way in which it demonstrates the fleeting moments in life that somehow manage to completely change the courses of characters’ lives. In Utena, Utena Tenjou fights again and again to release Anthy, the rose bride, from being a pawn of her awful older brother, Akio. The climax sees Utena, beaten and bruised, pry open the coffin within which Anthy has locked away her own emotions and true sense of self. Utena and Anthy’s hands touch for just the briefest of moments before the two are separated by the violent, piercing swords of the society that has blamed Anthy for the fall of their beloved prince. But that final, brief touch is all that it takes to give Anthy the courage to leave her brother and his duel game behind. Just as Utena was inspired by a prince to transform herself into one, subsequently became disillusioned by this fallen masculine ideal, and was then reborn into her own more meaningful expression of heroism – that of women helping women – so too was Anthy inspired to seek after Utena, or at least the freedom and self-assuredness she came to represent.
Wonder Egg Priority provides a much messier examination of girls dealing with the harm brought on by a society that that considers them complacent with or instrumental in their own victimization. Sawaki’s evil is much less obvious, almost mundane; we don’t actually see him raping anyone, even in an obscured, symbolic way as it’s presented in Utena. His evil is easy to miss or to ignore, or to explain away. The lack of hard proof is frustrating. It’s so simple to believe the assertion that Koito was a mentally-ill nymphet at face value. But I choose to see this not as the series condoning the status-quo and blaming a girl for becoming a victim, but instead a nod toward the ways in which the world we live is cruel toward girls and twists them into imagined, predatory beasts and architects of their own victimhood. I think Koito, to her credit, awakened something in Ai through her indirect intervention. Ai, in turn, having awakened to her anger at the world as-is, was inspired to help others like her escape into a better world.
As Ai, Rika, and Momoe clear their scenarios and release their friends back into the world, they find that these restored versions of the people for whom they so valiantly fought aren’t the same as when they knew them. They seem to come from worlds in which their relationships never existed. The restored Koito appears to be well-adjusted, with other friends and a distinct lack of melancholy that suffused Ai’s recollections of her. She also no longer seems to remember Ai. And why would she? Harm and trauma aren’t things that can be wiped away magically from a person’s soul, so this version of Koito is one who has never experienced the pain of the version who died. This isn’t to say that this Koito could never possibly become friends with Ai, but it would never be under the same context or circumstances. The relationship, if it ever came to exist again, would be fundamentally different in its form and function.
This part of the series really speaks to me, because as I said I believe there are simply some relationships that exist because of a time, a place, or a situation that’s limited in scope and reach. It’s bittersweet, but it’s also simply a fact of life.
Motherhood
“My mom really trusts Mr. Sawaki, and I’m always making her worry.”
Ai Ohto, from Wonder Egg Priority episode 5
“When I stopped going to school, Mom never blamed me even once. She was always worrying about me where I couldn’t see, so that I wouldn’t know. She said that she’d support me no matter what. I want to support her, too.”
Ai Ohto, from Wonder Egg Priority episode 12
As I’ve been chipping away at this piece over the past several weeks, I’ve been thinking more and more about the role Ai’s mother, Tae, plays in the story. Mothers aren’t always given the meatiest roles in anime; they’re either there to cook dinner and bug their kids about their homework, or they’re there to die tragically in some form to provide a protagonist with sufficient trauma and character motivation. But Tae doesn’t get slotted into either of those roles. Instead, she exists as a kind of subtle background support for Ai whose full purpose doesn’t become completely apparent until very late in the story.
I’ve recently re-watched Stars Align, which features more than its share of problematic parenting situations. One mother treats her older son like the golden child and treats the younger son (with whom we spend the most time) like a terrible emotional burden. Another orders her son to give up his club activities and spend 100% of his time studying. One of the primary protagonists is physically abused by his father. The series does a good job of making it clear that the club activity at the center of the series serves as a place where these characters can be away from their troubles for a while, but the sheer number of abusers among their parents starts to toe the line of unreality at times. Yet, I think I prefer that more brutal style of storytelling, one which speaks to the many variations that familial troubles can take in the lives of children, than the parental absenteeism that defines so many anime series.
That’s really what makes Tae stand out, even as she often melts into the background of the narrative; she’s a constant support in Ai’s life who’s just trying to do her best to help her struggling child deal with a nearly insurmountable emotional obstacle within a troubled world. I have to admit, I don’t know what the “right” answer is when trying to support a kid who’s being bullied, and I suspect there probably isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to those sorts of problems. Forcing the kid to go to school and face their bullies can just lead to more abuse, but keeping them home doesn’t feel like a long term solution either. But Tae opts for the latter and gives Ai the space to come to her when she’s ready to talk, which I feel like is probably the best to be done in a bad situation.
It’s Tae’s relationship with Sawaki that reveals her true mettle, however. I’ve already outlined my interpretation of Sawaki’s character, why I think he insinuates himself into Tae’s good graces, and the general insidiousness of these actions, so I won’t elaborate on them again here. From Tae’s perspective, I can see why she’d be smitten by an attractive teacher who seemingly has a vested interest in the wellbeing of someone for whom she likely cares about more than anyone else. But one thing that Ai speaks to at one point is that she realizes that her mother has always been helping her in the background, interacting with Ai with a smile on her face and saving her own negative emotions to experience in private, so as not to trouble her daughter further. I think that this is an important aspect to acknowledge – that her mother is a separate entity with her own feelings and experiences, who’s been living her life in the background as we’ve been watching her daughter’s progression and growth.
It’s the final episode of the series that I think really proves how important Tae is, although I think in an episode that’s so deeply crammed full of information, some of which I personally consider extraneous, it can be easy to miss. A large part of Ai’s character growth is her coming to terms with her feelings toward Sawaki-Sensei, her relationship with Koito, and eventually leaving all that behind in order to grow past it. She goes from being a potential victim of a predator, to someone who’s learned that she has other relationships that are more important to her and which allow her to find value in herself. I don’t think she entirely recognizes the specific nature of this transformation, only that after encountering the “new,” more well-adjusted alternate universe version of Koito and realizing that she “can’t go home again” so-to-speak in regards to their friendship, she’s able to kind of put the situation to rest. Yet, despite this emotional growth Ai remains young, idealistic, naïve – unaware of whatever potential danger to which she may still be exposed. After Ai ignores a call from Neiru and throws her phone away, there’s a scene in which she sobs to her mother while Tae comforts her. The scene feels almost like a snippet; it’s not clear what Ai revealed to her mother – was it simply related to this act of ignoring a call from a friend? Did the conversation involve more of Ai’s feelings and experiences? It’s a question that will likely never be answered concretely, nor should that be a requirement. But I feel like the aftermath, the epilogue of the series, provides a certain amount of closure that’s poignant in all that it manages to say over the course of a few minutes.
In one of the very final scenes of the show, Ai narrates from her diary and shares that her mother transferred her to a different school. Ai pouts, not really believing it was a necessary move, but as these words are spoken there’s a blink-and-you’ll miss-it scene of Ai and Tae sitting across a table from a man who appears to be Sawaki-Sensei seen from behind. Ai looks embarrassed, but Tae has a look of fierce determination on her face. To me, this isn’t the look of someone who’s disappointed or apologetic about having to take a controversial action on behalf of her child; Tae’s expression feels angry and protective, while Sawaki’s body language has the distinct look of defeat.
Animation is an interesting medium. While it takes some of its cues from live-action filmmaking, because its construction relies wholly on sequential images drawn by human hands and because that process is so labor-intensive, I feel that what ends up in the final product (aside from errors or other issues that arise due to production troubles, of which this series has reportedly had many) is intentional in a way that live-action filmmaking cannot be. While the scene I’ve just mentioned passes in a heartbeat, It also went through a storyboarding and layout process, an animator had to draw it, a colorist applied the required tones and a compositor added whatever finishing touches were needed to bring it to life. The characters’ body language wasn’t a fluke of how the actors were feeling that particular day and the director couldn’t ask for multiple takes, choosing from one that most fit their vision. That’s all to say that I think this scene was meant to be presented exactly in this way, and we as the audience were meant to draw meaning from it.
The meaning I’ve chosen to draw from it is that Tae “breaks up” with Sawaki, or tells him off, or says whatever words need to be said to get across the meaning that she’s making the decision to do what’s best for her daughter. Whether she fully sees through his mask and identifies his predatory machinations on Ai is a question that’s left for folks to answer on their own, but in my mind she becomes Ai’s savior, and in fact has been all along. Koito may have been there for Ai at a certain time when she was needed, but Tae has been her daughter’s champion from the shadows, even if she too was momentarily led astray by a handsome face.
One thing my own mother said to me once was that she regretted teaching my younger sister and I to be so “nice.” It’s a trait that’s lauded, especially in girls and women. We’re often brought up with the idea that our actions should be mature, our attitudes pleasant, and that we shouldn’t act in a contrary way toward authority figures, even as “boys will be boys” right alongside us. Even when it’s not explicitly stated, this is often the message that we receive from society and frequently end up internalizing. It’s also something that’s led both my sister and I (and many other women) to tolerate abusive relationships without sticking up for ourselves until very late in the game; it’s difficult to act contrary to your own programming, and even more so when doing so will cause trouble for others. It’s something that Ai may have struggled with as well without outwardly realizing it, and perhaps relaying the story of her broken friendship (and perhaps many other experiences) to her mother caused Tae to come to a realization. When Tae stops being nice, she sees her lover for who he really is. She becomes the mother bear protecting her cub from the hunter hiding in plain sight. It’s an action that, in the show proper, receives very little attention or glory, but its ripples are still with me as I sit here weeks later, recalling it with admiration.
As it is, or As it Should Be
I personally find a lot of meaning in stories that help to shed light on the various circumstances that women have faced through the ages. One of my favorites is Mononoke, an anthology series in which a traveling Medicine Seller encounters various spiritual anomalies that all happen to be the manifestations of injustices committed against women. After revealing the truths behind these abuses, the Medicine Seller is able to release his full power and exorcise these demons from the world.
Stories like this certainly run the risk of reinforcing harmful ideas rather than revealing them as injustices against which action should be taken. I’ve seen this criticism leveled against Mononoke in the past; if I’m recalling correctly, the criticism was more specifically that the individual watching it felt as though women were somehow portrayed as causing the world’s problems. I disagree with this; it’s made very clear that the issue is not the women themselves, but instead the men (or, more broadly, society) causing them harm. But this difference of opinion speaks deeply of the need to be sensitive and conscientious when telling stories that involve the specific and varied injustices committed against marginalized groups.
Wonder Egg Priority is the story of girls helping other girls who’ve been harmed by living in a world that actively works against their well-being. For that alone I think the story is laudable and worthwhile, especially for those willing to do a little legwork in interpreting it in that light. That said, this series is deeply flawed in that it doesn’t often take the extra step to clearly lay blame where blame is warranted, which ultimately hamstrings its messaging, especially among folks who (rightfully, in many cases) would be better served by seeing it spelled-out. While this might seem contradictory for me to say, I don’t necessarily think it’s a storyteller’s responsibility to close every loop or tie a knot in every thread; for me, an emotional story arc can be just as satisfying as a plot-heavy one, and sometimes meanings are up to the eye of the beholder. A friend of mine recently reiterated during a virtual panel the concepts of mousou (妄想) and nounaihenkan (脳内変換), which both imply interpreting the meanins you want to from ambiguous material. I think that there can be a lot of value in being able to do that (as I’ve done for the majority of this essay). But when a storyteller makes a choice to present and feature real-life issues that affect marginalized populations, and especially if they aren’t also a member of that group, I personally believe it behooves them to not only be extra sensitive to the realities of those groups, but also to be clear about their intentions and messaging. The struggle of marginalized groups within the framework of the patriarchy isn’t simply pretty window dressing that exists to add flavor to a narrative; I feel this personally and deeply every time a fictional character is harassed for their gender, or is raped as some furtherance of their character development. What’s the purpose of showing this trauma? Is it merely a shortcut towards developing flaws and “damage” for the purposes of avoiding the character being labeled as a “Mary Sue?” Or is it meant to further illuminate the very real ways in which we experience trauma and the manners in which our lives reflect these experiences? And why does there always have to be trauma for our characterization to be seen as realistic?
Related to this, I’ve struggled with how the antagonist of this series, Sawaki-sensei, never really sees any sort of concrete consequences for his actions. He may no longer have Ai to prey upon and his relationship with Tae has come to an end, but he seems to otherwise be right where he has been all along – a teacher with continued access to other middle school students, and whose predations may yet continue basically unabated. What are we meant to take away from this? I found myself both relieved that Ai’s safety was more assured, yet frustrated that this ending simply seemed to shrug its shoulders at the follow up. Yet, this is very reflective of what happens in real life – predators often go on to assault more victims until they’re finally (and generally much too late) outed and punished. Is this series meant to be realistic in that way, resigned to the fact that there really are not perfect endings, or are its fantasy elements meant to imply something more outside of reality, which might lead us to believe that something better than real-life’s might happen in service of punishing a creep?
This series adheres fairly closely to magical girl anime in many respects. In magical girl anime, the heroines are able to transform into beings that are both beautiful and powerful, and there’s a certain romanticism in being able to watch this sort of feminine energy portrayed as a positive force for good. Often the girls in these stories face off against enemies that represent oppressions that act against girlhood in real-life; this manifests in series as varied as Sailor Moon and Madoka, and many before, after, and in-between. And yet, as cathartic as it is to watch those with power acting in opposition to oppressive societal forces, there’s also a sinking feeling once you realize that these girls are often the only ones working to counteract these oppressions. Seen in an unfavorable light, these narratives seem to suggest that the oppressed, on their own, are made to bear the responsibility for undoing their own oppression. I feel internally conflicted in that I love watching heroines bravely defend one-other, and yet resent the fact that they’re the only ones who seem inclined to want to speak out or do anything about it. I recall Sayaka’s descent into depression in Madoka. As she rides the train, she overhears two men say some incredibly vile things about women. One is then prompted to question the entire scenario – what’s the point of sacrificing yourself to fight for a society that thinks so little of you?
I believe deeply in the idea that having more marginalized voices in media leads to richer, more varied narratives. And yet, I also believe that it cannot be the sole responsibility of marginalized storytellers to ensure that their stories are told. I continue to fight my own battles, recounting the fact of my assault survivorship, even as rape continues to be utilized thoughtlessly as “special seasoning” in edgy narratives without those storytellers being willing to do the more substantive work it takes to show how deeply affecting those sexual crimes really are to people. It’s a difficult fight to keep having, especially since there continues to be very little change. At the same time, because so much emotional harm is inflicted upon the world by thoughtlessly told stories, it’s difficult to discern who the actual storytelling allies – those who may not have firsthand knowledge, but who are sensitive to the implications and are willing to ask questions and learn – might be. How do you decide who you should allow to speak on your behalf? How do you know that letting them into your world in service of telling a version of your reality won’t ultimately inflict more harm than it does manifest good?
Having to navigate these questions is like owning a sandbox. You’re constantly forced to make decisions about who’s welcome to come in and play. One neighbor might come when invited, play nicely, and clean up after themselves, while another is more likely to demand all of your toys, make a mess, and generally wear out their welcome before thoughtlessly returning to their house. Still others might let their cat come shit all over the sand. When I ask myself, “who is allowed to tell my story?” I have a very difficult time coming up with a concrete answer. Just speaking personally, I want more women’s voices to be reflected in the media I consume, but despite progress being made in that realm we haven’t reached parity by a long shot. I also think that allies can serve as powerful voices, using their privilege to tell stories that may not otherwise be told. But again – what defines good ally-ship when telling a story outside one’s personal experience, and what’s simply appropriation in pursuit of more brownie points?
I think what continues to haunt me is that there just isn’t one final catch-all answer that’s going to draw a dividing line between “good feminist narrative” and “failed mess,” because as I’ve witnessed in the past several weeks, even my messy, complicated feelings about Wonder Egg Priority differ from the abject hatred I’ve seen expressed by others who I consider to be similarly-minded. When I think back to Isabel Fall’s experience in the aftermath of releasing her very personal short story onto the world, I can’t condone the manner in which the wave of critical vitriol spewed forth from Twitter users, especially those whose only knowledge of her work was a seemingly problematic title and an assumption about its content and the author. But for those who’ve had their gender questioned and taunted, and been hurt again and again by society’s basically unchecked transphobia, I like to think I have some idea of how and where those feelings of “oh shit, here we go again,” may originate, and in that sense I can’t entirely blame them.
When you allow someone into your sandbox, even if you think you know them well, you’re taking a risk; they might play nicely and observe your boundaries, they might even ask you how you feel about this or that game they want to play. Or they might betray your trust and toss fistfuls of your own sand back in your face while other people look on and laugh. I wouldn’t criticize anyone who’s uninterested in any media that doesn’t get representation near-perfect, because no one ought to continually be expected to put themselves through hell to chase after scraps. Ultimately, though, I do get to decide what I do and how I feel, and for all the shit that the anime medium has put me through over the years and how frustrating some aspects of its storytelling might be, I still love so much of it and find so much meaning to be had in even very flawed series and stories. That doesn’t mean I want to ignore its weaknesses, but I simply can’t bring myself to dismiss an entire series that manages to attain some amount of greatness even if it makes some substantial mistakes along its journey to the finish line.
Wonder Egg Priority is one of the most frustrating, beautiful, problematic, and cathartic anime I’ve watched in recent memory. It’s flawed in that it presents foul acts and trauma without following through and clearly implicating those who are actually responsible for causing them. It does not, to summarize Galbraith, prompt the audience to interrogate their role in the violence being portrayed onscreen. And yet, it’s rare for me to feel so seen by a story; I truly feel as though parts of it reached directly into my heart and helped untangle experiences that continue to color my perspective on life and relationships.
While I don’t expect to have changed any minds by writing out my feelings here, I hope those of you who’ve made it to this point will allow me the luxury to celebrate things worth celebrating, even if their meaning is mine and mine alone. And perhaps you’ll even join me in wishing for a future world filled to the horizon with beautiful sandcastles.
Epilogue
To paraphrase a thought I saw expressed on Twitter recently, there’s a certain line of thinking that states that it shouldn’t be necessary for a media consumer to do all their own legwork in interpreting a text; the author should bear part of that responsibility. It’s made me feel very self-conscious about having written so many words about one anime series, because perhaps if Wonder Egg Priority were a “better” series I wouldn’t have been compelled to try to justify my own interpretations and opinions of it by writing an entire novella’s worth of an essay. I think a lot about the ways in which so many of us construct our identities around the media we love, though, and in that light it begins to make more sense. We defend the things we love so passionately because we see them as extensions of ourselves. Yet, despite this being a perfectly understandable compulsion, it might not always be especially healthy.
I follow a lot of anime writers and bloggers on Twitter, including many that I personally admire and aspire to emulate in certain ways. When I found my final opinions on WEP to be so misaligned with the general critical consensus about the show as a whole and especially its last few episodes, my self-confidence took a big hit, frankly. I never expect to agree with everyone about everything all the time, because that’s obviously impossible – we’re all different people. But for my own reactions to be so far removed, especially in this case where the plot elements and my interpretation of them felt so personally applicable to some of the most traumatic moments of my life, it honestly made me feel deflated.
I think it boils down to feeling dumb. Or perhaps “dumb” isn’t quite the right word, but more lacking confidence in my own ability to experience and synthesize media. My undergraduate degree is a liberal arts degree, and much of the work I did during that time in my life involved reading fiction, watching films, and interpreting them in various ways. I like to joke that a liberal arts degree trains you for nothing, but prepares you for everything, but I’d have to say that media analysis is probably the closest thing to “training” that I got (not to devalue other parts of my education, which I consider invaluable to the person I am today and has generally served me well). So to put it bluntly, when I find myself in these sorts of quandaries, I can’t help but feel like maybe I’m just not that smart in my media analysis as I may have thought.
But I don’t really think it’s about being smart or not. It’s simply the consequence of being different people with different experiences. And there’s something kind of amazing to me about different people experiencing the same input and yet coming to completely different conclusions, and that’s something I’d ideally rather celebrate than fret about or condemn.
I began writing this essay hoping to touch on all the points that I eventually ended up discussing, but at some point a couple of thousand words in it began to take on a life of its own. I think perhaps somewhere in my mind I felt like I had some responsibility to provide some counterbalance to every angry blog post or every dismissive tweet. This turned out to be a fool’s errand, but hopefully my passion shows through even if the grandiose word count might simply be a mask for my own inadequacies. I endeavor to be someone who doesn’t make other people feel bad about their opinions, because I’m so overly-sensitive when it comes to mine. Hopefully, even if those of you who’ve made it to the end haven’t found anything else of value here, you’ll be able to at least take that away from this essay.
Wonder Egg Priority is a rarity; a series that delves deeply into so many troublesome social issues that it barely stays afloat. It’s also frustratingly average in how it became sidelined by the sort of production issues that have become sadly emblematic of modern animation production. I always try to remember the hard work that goes into creating even a flawed series; even if something looks ugly, animators and other staff members likely worked themselves to the bone in order to complete it. Ultimately, I hope that, even if readers choose to dismiss the content of what I’ve written here, I will have still managed to make this a sort of testament to the hard work of the animators who not only made something interesting to talk about, but beautiful to look at and emotionally poignant.
3 replies on “Playing in Another’s Sandbox – “Wonder Egg Priority” and Finding Personal Meaning in Messy Storytelling”
I recently watched a show with my Mother-in-law called Mare of Eastown and there was a scene near the end in which a character confesses to a gross thing they did, in a way that framed it as good, actually. This went unchallenged in a show where many other times people were bullshitting it did get called out.
I thought about it while reading this essay because it stood out in a way that I feel like is described in this essay for Wonder Egg. I like the idea of reading Wonder Egg in a way where we assume that essentially all the adult authority figures are blatantly lying for personal gain. For me, it leaves the show in a strange place though, because ultimately we don’t get to hear Frill tell her story like we do for the other girls (to varying degrees). Without that, it feels somewhat incomplete to me, especially with what I consider to be an unnecessary use of Freudian terminology that is adopted by Frill in addition to the Accas.
I’m glad you found the show to be affecting in positive way. I’d say my relationship to it is more fraught. In many ways I felt like it was split between two sides of itself, one that saw real trauma and harm and wanted to uplift those affected by it, and another side that wanted to be a high concept sci-fi that was largely unconcerned with the emotional stakes of the story. To me it felt like the latter side slowly ground the other into the dust as the story progressed. Despite that I’m still glad I watched it. I think there is a lot to learn from it whether from a critical or rehabilitative lens. I just wish that what felt like the heart of the story to me had carried on, instead of fracturing. I don’t think all the girls needed to be in a good place by the end of the series, but it would have been nice to see their feelings more front and center in the narrative as their group split up, rather than just having it happen pretty abruptly without comment.
I can see where you’re coming from, especially re: Frill. We never really get her perspective; her story is told only through the eyes of men who have their own strong and biased opinions on the matter, and whatever echoes of her exist out in the world as expressed through other girls who’ve died by suicide. I’m reminded of the saying that “history is told by the victors;” since those men are still around and still talking about what happened, it’s their narrative that gets to be dominant. Then the burden is on the audience to fill in the gaps by digging for other perspectives and extrapolating from whatever other limited there might be.
Even though I don’t know much about the creators of the show, I suspect that this is possibly a lack of perspective brought on by their own limitations of trying to speak in voices that are different from their own, about matters that they might not have direct experience in (though I can’t say for sure and don’t want to diminish any experiences they may or may not have actually had). A fault of wanting to tell a specific story a specific way without allowing the characters to speak on their own terms. I’m not a fiction writer (or, at least, I haven’t tried in a long time), so I guess I’m only speculating. But I can see what you’re saying about the characters, whose emotional growth has been important, suddenly getting swallowed up by a bunch of plot stuff.
I think I was lucky to be in a place where I could allow more gracious feelings to this series in spite of its problems. I rarely feel represented directly in fiction, and I could feel this one trying really hard to do that, like an ache in my bones. This might sound weird, but I’m reminded of internet mathematician/comedian Matt Parker in an older Numberphile video about magic squares. He’d tried to create his own unique magic square, with decidedly mixed results. It got dubbed the “Parker Square” and made into a little bit of a joke. But at the end, the message to be conveyed was that he’d “given it a go” and simply come up a little short. I don’t necessarily think that every little bit of trying deserves a big pat on the back, but having the luxury to interpret “Wonder Egg Priority” as a good-faith effort to tell bits and pieces of my life story, I’m happy that the creators “gave it a go” anyway.
Ultimately, I’m not sure if we’ll ever know whether or not the end of the series was entirely the intended ending of the story that had gotten too big for its creators’ hands or just something that collapsed under the realities of anime production, or even just something that was deeply flawed from the start. I think I’d be willing to believe just about anything at this point.
Thanks so much for your comment. A lot of the critical comments I saw immediately after the end of the series were just so harsh and absolute that I honestly felt ashamed for a hot minute and worried that there was something that I was missing. Now I think it was more a matter of just passions running hot at that moment. I’m glad you could share your thoughts and critiques with me, and it’s given me even more to think about.
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