Spoiler thread for Wonder Egg Priority
Jun 21, 2022 16:27:08 GMT 1
lentlsoup and astraldreams like this
Post by Nachtkern on Jun 21, 2022 16:27:08 GMT 1
!!! This is a spoiler thread, meaning there are unmarked spoilers for the show beyond this point! !!!
Also, due to the nature of the work, there may be discussions referencing mature or upsetting content,
including suicide, character death, child abuse, CSA, and violence/gore.
Also, due to the nature of the work, there may be discussions referencing mature or upsetting content,
including suicide, character death, child abuse, CSA, and violence/gore.
I got around to watching Wonder Egg Priority with lentlsoup yesterday, so I wanted to make a thread to talk about it without having to worry about spoilers!
Personally, I was sort of disappointed by it - everyone around me had been ragging on it and making it out to be an awful show, but I think it was more like a 3/5 at worst, so I felt let down.
You may already know this about me, but I go out of my way to watch some very terrible shows for fun. I think that to really understand what makes good works good, it helps to also look at and analyze what makes bad works bad, and it helps develop your own sense of taste and your own skills as a writer to step out of your comfort zone and look at things that just aren't for you normally, regardless of if they're objectively good or bad. So I was pretty excited to finally maybe find a "magical girl" show that I'd dislike more than PMMM - and disappointed that WEP wasn't as bad as I thought it was.
It was just kind of average. The animation was gorgeous, and the music was lovely. I was a bit surprised by how nice the character interactions are - especially the interactions between the girls felt pretty realistic, as opposed to them being reduced to archetypes or their "girl talk" being fiction-typical over the kind of talk and jokes girls would actually make towards each other. It had several scenes in the latter half serving shock value, but - and I realize that this is much easier to say with hindsight - they didn't really seem tonally out of place with the rest of the show to me, since from the very first episode it was about suicide and had young girls graphically harmed and killed on screen.
The ending was so-so; all main character's storylines were concluded and were mostly fine, but I felt what they did with Neiru was a bit too vague, and kind of unfortunately paced. There was that reveal about who she was, and it was the Big Thing there was to her character, but it felt kind of rushed past instead of really being a moment. The phone call bit was vague to me - it was obviously meant to be a really significant thing that Ai didn't pick up the phone, but I couldn't clearly tell why she didn't do that, or what actually the consequences of it were. It was also kind of weird for her to go from "I hope my good buddy pal Neiru is doing well and managed to become human :)" directly to "I gotta buy more eggs to see Neiru again", implying Neiru is dead, though nothing else ever suggested that?
My girlfriend said it seemed like sequel bait (to a sequel I don't think there'll be), and that there were a lot of loose threads to the story, but I think it's fine all of the Frill stuff didn't really get "resolved", since the story was about the personal journeys of the magical girls, and not about uprooting the system that made magical girls exist in the first place. At the end of all of that, my biggest gripe with it was that it had two full episodes worth of recap, even though the entire story without it would have been just 12 episodes long. I know what the reason for it was, but it didn't really do the pacing any favors (and also I just can't stand recap).
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I think, most likely, that the people who watched it and were so disappointed by it just had really different expectations of where the show would go and what would happen. For example, the character page for the teacher, is full of comments calling him a pedo and saying he should die - that should say something for the kind of outcome they expected and wanted the show to have. The deaths of the pets was upsetting, but I had genuinely expected something much worse. Stories have conflict, and something was bound to go wrong eventually that the girls would have to overcome - and this show started off strong with two of the main characters getting hospitalized, so I genuinely thought that the sort of conflict that this show would have could have been main character death. The reveal for Koito's motivations was uncomfortable and kind of sad, but made sense within the overall themes of the story and was foreshadowed, so it's the only thing I called correctly while watching the show.
And, although I'm sure the show could have been written better in this regard, I think it handled all its themes relatively fine. Throughout the whole, adults who harm children or take advantage of them have been the villains of this story. The children who had crushes on adults and made advances towards them were turned down or met with appropriate discomfort. Even Koito, whose actions are framed as objectively wrong, is still a victim in the whole of the narrative, and is forgiven and gets to live because she's a child. Frill may be an overarching antagonist in the show, but her actions are directly credited to Acca and Ura-Acca having created her the way she is, them failing to prevent her, and then making things worse themselves by trying to ignore what they had done, which Ura-Acca acknowledges in the most literal sense. Whether it was satisfying or good is another thing, but I don't think there was really anything wrong with it, other than that the subject matter is inherently kind of a rough subject.
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One thing that bothered me about the whole experience though, is the way I've seen people talk about one of the writers, Shinji Nojima. While the series was ongoing, I saw a lot of people giving it high praise, and having really high expectations about it wrt LGBT representation, and praising it for having a canonically trans character in it, and then after the end of the show backpedal to call the writer a lesbophobe and a transphobe and accusing the show of queerbaiting, and saying the way LGBT themes were handled in the show were actually weird and uncomfortable. And I think... that response was kind of strange and frankly uncalled for.
I watched the show, and I don't think it was particularly weird about any of it, nor that it was implying things it didn't deliver on. If anything, it was much less weird about it than most other anime I've seen, including some works specifically about a transgender character or LGBT themes? To then start digging just to find other works the author has made with badly written portrayals of LGBT themes and make him out to be some kind of overstepping cishet is genuinely an uncalled for response. I'll gladly believe everyone who says this guy's other works are dogshit portrayals of LGBT themes, but a guy who is consistently and regularly writing stories about LGBT characters - regardless of if they're any good - is probably not a raging lesbophobe and transphobe, but either someone who has reflected on LGBT topics for himself, or who has LGBT loved ones. I'm not saying this guy is secretly transgender or something like that, but I think it's overstepping a personal boundary and in bad faith to call him cishet just because his works aren't up to standard. And again, regardless of if it was well-written, the portrayals in WEP were clearly not written with any sort of malicious intent or disrespect, so if his other works are that bad, then this is growth on his part.
It's something that I have a hard time putting out of my mind. A writer can simply be a bad writer, and a show can simply not be your kind of thing, without any sort of moral implications. You don't have to find reasons something is problematic just to be allowed to dislike it - it's a show about girl's suicides of all things, so obviously it wasn't going to be for everyone. It wasn't for me! Like, man, I don't fucking know. It seems like such an intentionally hurtful response to have just because the high expectations that people had for the show weren't met.
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... And those were my experiences with the show. If anyone else has thoughts about the show you'd like to share, you can do that in this thread, without worrying about spoilers - things you liked, didn't like, theories you had or predictions you made, etc. I'd love to hear!
