Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Wonder Egg Priority
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Panino Manino
 Posts: 738 |
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#12
Isn't finished, there will be one more episode. But should we care? They really "ruined" this series with "the plot". It was never brilliant but I could at least tolerate. After "the plot" started going and all the technical and BS jargon became relevant I got really disappointed. It's hard to have any patience and interest with these "anime-like" stories, full of complicated concepts and words and nonsensical philosophies. That's why I'm watching less and less anime each season and instead satisfying me hunger for stories on other media. For example, I'm watching a lot of (old) (japanese) movies and it's hard to have the will to watch anime like this just after watching so Koreeda for example, that it's all about pure and simple and mundane wisdom, makes me intolerant to scenes like the fight with Sawaki. This episode didn't answered my doubts and hopes. After all, was it saying that Sawaki was really a "villain"? I hope not and that he was only "bad" on that other "parallel" world. For a moment I thought that the original Ai would die, and the last episode would finish the story with the other Ai from the parallel world. Would be very interesting and would be a simple way to cut out the other girls and make the most from the lack of time to finish the plot. Maybe there's still some possibility that Ai will not fight Frill and will end this pacifically? After all, that last scene with the Accas felt like it was reminding that they were in the wrong all alone and Ura-Acca realizes this. EDIT: forgot something important!! Momoe, yes, she is really the worst. Last edited by Panino Manino on Tue Mar 30, 2021 8:46 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Panino Manino
Posts: 738 |
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What answers? Is not that the series is a "train-wreck", just not what it seemed. The parallel world is their gate way to a magical finale where everything is resolved. If the Acca could access a parallel world they would be able to undo their mistakes. But how would they do this? Maybe Acca and Ura-Acca have different ideas, like Acca just wants a world with Himari only where he didn't created Frill and Ura-Acca and to do better for Frill. |
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Mami-kouga
Posts: 161 |
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I think this episode has more of a place in the series than the last 3, I would have at least enjoyed it more if the "main plot" didn't exist and can accept this more than evil A.I. Honestly, I wonder if this anime as a whole would have been better if the other girls didn't exist and it was just Ai. Maybe they could have put more development on her relationship with her mum, how the supposed bullying she went through in school was like, more answers on what is up with Koito and Sawaki.
But the anime is kind of firm in it's own art housy-ness, so we're told that Sawaki is actually evil but "not really" and that it doesn't matter if we never know how Koito felt because Ai gets to move on which nice...I guess, but they really just dropped all those teases and said it's daijobu. And the way Neiru remains feeling irrelevant and disconnected from everything despite being the closest to the main plot is...yeah. Well, one more episode to go in 3 months time. Not quite the crash and burn finale I expected but it is what it is |
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Zeino
Posts: 1098 |
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Well, Wonder Egg may not claim the same sort of position as Madoka Magica did around this time 10 years ago but it can at least be the Filp Flappers of this decade, which it still a worthy status.
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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I love that the review literally ignore the opening scene with Momoe explaining why she didn't tell any of the girls about the bug headed girl... Talk about the writer throwing a character in front of the bus to cover they're awful writing.
Actually everything about the "plot" is ignored in the review just like the show should have done. If they had just removed Frill plot entirely they could have covered the Ai ending in 2 full episodes and wouldn't have to do any of that faux vagueness with it's veneer of deepness when it's all just just fart in the wind. It's perfectly fine for Ai (and the audience) to never learn what happened to Koito, but there's no reason to cut out Sawaki answer when she asked him, she was there, she heard his answer. While I do think the show is more interesting if Sawaki isn't the big bad one, the show just threw too many stuff at the audience to try and keep things vague to make that a possibility. Why didn't he tell Ai mom about his art gallery debut? That alone is way too weird to excuse and only fit with Sawaki being the bad one. Last edited by meiam on Fri Apr 02, 2021 2:48 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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whiskeyii
 Posts: 2245 |
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My take on Neiru is that her answer is that she’s decided the only way to win is to simply not play.
But as for the rest of the episode... While I appreciate what I think the episode is trying to do in having our Ai come into her own as a “sunflower”, ie, choosing to look towards the future and trust in people rather than distrust them, I think the idea of this Sawaki Wonder Killer being somewhat imaginary really hurts what the other Wonder Killers represented in the past. Were they all Not That Bad and just exaggerated in the minds of their victims, or was the harm they inflicted true to life? I find it frustrating that WEP chose to go this route even if I can still see why they sort of needed to to bring about the thematic change they wanted (though it casts some serious doubt on the legitimacy of the bracelet girl; maybe the reality of what she saw only ever mattered to her in the end.) That said, man, Sawaki is still really unfit to be a teacher, and Ai’s gonna need a whole helping heaping of family counseling if her mom ends up marrying Ai’s first-crush-turned-former-teacher-turned-step-father. |
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Kelohmello
Posts: 14 |
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One of the eggs was a schizophrenic who needed empathy from someone and got none until Ai came along. The Wonder Killers have always been about how the girls in question perceived the sources of their trauma. We don't have enough information to doubt their experiences and that doesn't really change the fact that they're suffering. Why does the real Sawaki being an okay person take away from any of that? It doesn't. It just means there's more nuance to this show than that, which is good. Not everyone's struggles are with external forces and not every person that causes suffering is malicious or even necessarily in the wrong. |
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25thchestnut
Posts: 23 |
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Watching this episode after gradually falling out of love with this show (not that I've come to fully dislike it despite the many criticisms), this is what I feel as well. For me, the Ai-centred episodes were by far the strongest. This episode in particular reminded me of the tone and atmospheric surrealism of the early episodes that were what drew me in. It's not that I didn't like the other girls, but in terms of characterization, social commentary/critique, etc., the show was just trying to do too much with them in too little time that I just could not care about them or become fully invested in their stories. I'm no writer, but from a viewer's perspective, I think the show would have been more successful and less muddy if it pared itself back and focused on being a psychological character study of Ai and maybe just one of the other girls. What impressed me in the first two episodes was how careful and meticulous every writing and artistic decision/direction seemed to be as it set up Ai as its central character. I think they had hit every unsettling emotional note perfectly, without giving up that sense of mystery, ambiguity, and dreamlike quality. But the show seemed to progressively become less careful, more clumsy, and more overladen in how many topics and ideas it ended up raising at a fairly superficial level without saying anything particularly meaningful or substantial - and at times toeing the line into seriously problematic territory. I don't think it would've run into those issues if it had chosen one or two characters' stories to follow with greater depth and care instead of speedrunning through a sprawling checklist of various traumas. Overall, I applaud the vision that this show has that I could still see shining through at times, but it was simply too over-ambitious, and as a result, I think the execution fell short. I don't know if it's controversial to say that my lasting impression of it is 'style over substance', but it does pain me to say that because I think it had the potential to be a lot stronger than it ultimately was. |
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Panino Manino
Posts: 738 |
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My understanding at the time was that, even if she was "a bit" schizophrenic", that she wasn't imagining thing, that the things she was talking about where real but people just didn't believed in her. All the other girls suffered in silent, her purpose was to shown that even when the victim denounces the aggressors are the aggressors the ones protected by the people who should be around to protect the victim. Isn't that another very real world issue? |
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Kelohmello
Posts: 14 |
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Schizophrenia is also a real world issue. It seems more reasonable to me to see that episode as an indictment of the way we treat the mentally ill. The show is never indirect about the traumas of the eggs, so it seems more reasonable to assume that if no one else could see what she was seeing it's because she was hallucinating. |
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dm
 Subscriber Posts: 1359 |
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Maybe add Rika in the mix, to have an initially unsympathetic foil for Ai. Unless something happens in the last episode to better justify their presence, I can see the point of wondering what the point of having Neiru and her episodes has been. Momoe is another character with potentiality that I think could have been better exploited (though in her case it may be that I'm just too obtuse to have seen the subtlety of her situation). Still, it's a beautiful show, even when the story feels like a bit of a mess and a bit of a wasted opportunity. |
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whiskeyii
Posts: 2245 |
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I get that, and I don’t even dislike this interpretation, but to me, having Sawaki be Parallel Ai’s Wonder Killer seems to be there just to justify the shows murky portrayal of Sawaki. And it would be one thing if this were an unreliable narrator issue and it was Ai’s perception of Sawaki that was flawed, but objectively, this guy has done some inappropriate things that just end up muddying the waters and undercutting our Ai’s (I assume correct?) assertion that Sawaki is a genuinely nice person who cares about his students. |
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motormind
Posts: 89 |
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And with episode 12 I declare WEP worst anime of the season. It started out promising, but by episode 3 it had already turned into a festering mess and never recovered. I should have dropped it by then, but my morbid curiosity drove me to find out just how bad this could possibly get.
Well, extremely bad, as it turns out. The directors apparently got instructed to just make stuff up based on some vague descriptions.... and often they did not seem to do even that. The show just stumbles from one nonsensical "revelation" into the other while lacking any of the playful surrealism that could have made the confusion mildly bearable. I am especially baffled how the reviewer doesn't realize he has been punk'd by an experiment in audience endurance. Ai asks a straightforward question, we never get an answer, and this is supposedly clever story-telling about "never getting closure." I call it as it is: lazy writing. Well, that's another yuri-baiting piece of derp over and done. I sometimes wonder why I keep bothering. |
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Panino Manino
Posts: 738 |
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#13
This egg is rotten. |
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AmpersandsUnited
Posts: 633 |
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I honestly forgot this show existed until I saw people talking about the finale last night. Watched it myself and.. yeah, sorry for anyone who was actually looking forward to this. |
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