Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Wonder Egg Priority
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Maidenoftheredhand
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Haven’t watched it yet but man the replies here are making me not want to
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Kicksville
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I'm not quite as shocked over the ending - it reminds me of the OVA days, where the "Oops, we can't make any more of this, sorry :<" last episode was commonplace. "That's just anime for you", is what I got used to, and I suppose I slipped right back into that mode here.
I do definitely agree the worst part is really bad, though, that is, the reveal about Koito/Sawaki. It comes off as ignorant and cold at best. I'm also used to the "Oops, turns out they let us make more, umm errr" sequel too, so I wonder if this is actually it or not. |
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tintor2
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Might depend on whether or not catches success. I think the Megalobox staff said they made a season 2 even though the series wasn't that popular in Japan as in contrast to the west. |
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ThrowMeOut
Posts: 259 |
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Honestly not shocked. As much as I liked parts of this show, a red flag or two would pop up every episode. A character would say or do something that would slap me with the reminder that this show about youngs girls dealing with serious young girl issues was definitely, absolutely, written by a dude. And not saying guys can't write about female issues, but there were these huge moments of ignorance that could've been avoided if they'd just passed the script to a few women to fact check. So that it ended as a dumpster fire, well, sad but not a surprise.
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Jafwasw
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I picked up on that too, the impression I got was that Neiru was more of a clone with an AI mind than an AI with a robot body like Frill. I could be mis-remembering but I'm pretty sure we saw Nieru bleeding in one of the early episodes. I must admit I didn't hate the ending, didn't love it either, the writing felt clunky compared to the previous episodes and it just felt a carelessly slapped together compared to the previous episodes. Compared to other people here the I didn't have much of a problem with the revelations about Koito, although WEP at it's best would have come up with a far smarter and more graceful way to present it (a criticism that can be leveled at the whole episode frankly). I felt there were hints about Koito being not quite right through the series, the body language in the scene where she is hugging Mr Sawaki and turns to look up at the audience/Ai had a very deliberate calculated feel like she wanted to be seen. The way the resurrected girls didn't recognize the core girls sort of made sense if they had come across from an alternate reality, which I think is what they were going for, likewise Kotobuki being the exception made some sense as she knew what was going on. Also am I the only one or does it feel like Ai's mum and Mr Sawaki broke it off in the end? The bit with her consoling Ai (one of the best rendered scenes in the final I thought) felt like it was just the two of them again. The bit that annoyed me the most was the way the episode treated Rika, the whole nope I'm outta here thing when finding out about Neiru just didn't sit well with me at all, it seemed perfunctory and spitefully out of character for Rika. I get the feeling the original plan for the episode was to open with Neiru's last fight, similar to the structure of some of the previous episodes. I guess time and resources must have scotched that idea but I suspect that is the reason for the way the whole encounter with Airu went down, it was to stand in for that without the need for a complex action animation scene. I thought it was telling that Airu and Koito were the only ones of the suicides we got to see, another example of the clunky tell don't show that the last episode indulged in. WEP remains for me a pretty amazing attempt at something different and the ambition and quality shown in the first eleven episodes still deserves to be commended, it's a shame the ending didn't serve the series better. |
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whiskeyii
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I mean, WEP was definitely building space for Koito not being as nice as Ai first remembered her to be (Ai admitted as much in the final episode), but it's a real leap to go from "Koito had a bit of a mean streak" to "Koito drove a grown man to suicide". And that's discounting all the ick surrounding the show's treatment of Frill, which feels an awful lot like a weird combination of Pygmalion meets Ai Magase of Babylon, and I genuinely can't tell if the show realizes what it's done or not, especially with this kind of ending tacked on. |
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LastPage 3
Posts: 193 |
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I normally try to be positive, but yeah, that was horrible. Just really no good at all.
I'm seriously mystified as to what the writers were thinking with this. The part with Koito especially was horrible. I mean, I originally believed Sawaki was creepy, but the way the characters kept speculating on it and how obvious the show presented it as made me think again about it, so that part didn't really surprise me. But making Koito some kind of crazy woman who was doing fake rape accusations just completely goes against the entire grain of the series. All the sci-fi stuff with parallel universes or whatever, just felt tacked on and this is coming from someone who really likes that stuff. Really, this whole episode almost felt like something you'd get at the middle of a show to lead up to a climax, but as an ending, it was complete garbage.
This is a literal insult to netflix anime. |
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AmpersandsUnited
Posts: 633 |
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Megalobox got a second season because it did well in the west. It was a total flop in Japan. Although Megalobox had the Toonami audience/crew backing it which WEP doesn't.
Weren't people upset over a dialog exchange earlier in the series that said something like "women are different from men because they're way more emotional compared to men who are goal-focused" (paraphrased)? The show never really had super progressive messages attached to it. |
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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 2941 Location: Email for assistance only |
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http://4NN.cx/.169258
The gender essential messenges was, at least according to the director, supposed to feel wrong to the audience. Acca and Ura-Acca were framed as misogynist and villainous. But they did Koito like that, so who knows anymore. |
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whiskeyii
Posts: 2245 |
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There's a reddit comment for the WEP subreddit that actually touches on this; supposedly while the director seems to be against this misogynist message, the writer of the story later did an interview where he basically said that it was this line of thought that inspired him to write the story of WEP in the first place. The translation seems to be backed up by at least one credible source (I think it's sakugabooru, but my memory's a little foggy.) So the director and the writer might be at loggerheads thematically. |
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yuzumei
Posts: 53 |
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Maybe I missed something but why nobody in the WEP world seemed to care that dead girls suddenly are back alive? These resurrected girls are back to their daily lives as if nothing happened? Nobody in the world noticed that?
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blahmoomoo
Posts: 459 |
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Ai mentioned that Acca told her that saving the girls causes a bit of noise (it's only mentioned once and quickly at that, so I can see it being easily missed). That suggests to me that the timeline shifted such that those girls didn't encounter the key event that led to their suicide. In all cases aside from Airu, knowing the girl in the egg friend group is what ultimately led to their suicide - Riku saying a mean thing to her fan, Momo telling her friend she loved her, and fake friendship with Ai being an opportunity for Kaito to get closer to a teacher. Last edited by blahmoomoo on Fri Jul 02, 2021 3:48 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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q_3
Posts: 132 |
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That's a good point. My impression was that reality had been rewritten so that the girls never killed themselves in the first place... but that doesn't explain how Sawaki would still know about Koito's death. I guess he gave the explanation before she came back, though.
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blahmoomoo
Posts: 459 |
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The recap helps explain that. When Sawaki showed off his painting of Ai as an adult, Ai asked him why Koito committed suicide. The scene then cuts. So his explanation in the special episode was Ai recalling what he said that after we the audience were cut off. A bit annoying they decided to do it that way, but that should answer your question. |
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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I’ve been skeptical of this show’s perspective on teen girls for a while, but Koito’s backstory and the reasoning behind her suicide was still egregious and shocking in a horrible, awful way. I mean, WTF?! And we’re meant to believe that Sawaki—a man who painted an *adult version* portrait of one of his students and told her she was as beautiful as her mother, who he was dating—wasn’t creepy? Come on!
But, no, he was innocent and falsely accused, and the inappropriate overtones were all in the teenage girls heads, because who can trust teen girls? I think one of the themes of this show might be “teen girls become erratic because they develop inappropriate feelings for adult men!” Frill literally became a murderer because she was inappropriately interested in and jealous of her adult male father figure; Himari came on to her uncle figure and ended up dead by apparent suicide; Koito drove one teacher to kill himself and then (accidentally?) killed herself after falsely accusing another teacher; Ai’s inappropriate crush and it’s aftermath was less dramatic, but in light of the other examples, still feels like the show is saying...something about false accusations based on inappropriate crushes that kids can hold? Like it’s blaming her for suspecting Sawaki. It’s like the writers wanted to send the message that, sometimes, teen girls hurt adult men, and adult men are the true victims of girls burgeoning sexuality. Never mind what sociology or psychology or neuroscience has to say about that dynamic. (To be clear, my issue is with the misrepresentation of who is more likely to be abusive or predatory in a relationship between an adult and a child or teen based on age dynamics, not gender.) It’s all the more jarring because this show had examples of children who were abused by adults or who were bullied, mistreated and abused by peers—more likely and resonant scenarios. So, yeah, that’s the biggest red flag for me.
That all said, I didn’t completely hate the show. I was especially disappointed considering how good the best episodes were. The animation was gorgeous sand it had so much potential. The ending was a mess—introducing new sci-fi elements (was anyone else surprised that the Egg Girls actually stayed alive? I thought they only revived for a minute before “poofing” into dust), revealing Neiru as an AI, not fighting or dealing with Frill or her bug AI at all, and worst of all, ending on a cliffhanger. I’d actually try out another season if they made one. Bonus points if they reveal Sawaki was as unreliable a narrator as Humbert Humbert (Lolita) all along. |
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