Winter 2021 brought a lot of anime that are still talked about today, from the beloved romance Horimya, to the first cour of Attack on Titan: Final Season. However, one anime that season is often forgotten by anime fans; Wonder Egg Priority. Why was this anime forgotten, and did it truly deserve to be largely ignored by the anime community?

Wonder Egg Priority is an anime about Ai Ooto, a blue-haired girl who is grieving over the suicide of her best friend. Ai ends up finding a magical egg that transports her to another world, where she is roped into a magical girl-esque job where she fights other's people's traumatic pasts. This leads her to believe she can possibly save her best friend from her own trauma, and prevent the past. Although the anime ranks relatively low in popularity rankings across anime tracking sites the anime still has a good score, with a 7.70 on MyAnimeList and 79.65% Community Approval on Kitsu, as well as a 76% score on AniList. If the anime was generally well received, why was it forgotten?

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Just as Treasure Planet was overshadowed by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Wonder Egg Priority had many big anime to share airtime with. Just like we mentioned before, the Spring 2021 season was stacked, with Attack on Titan: Final Season, Horimiya, Jobless Reincarnation, Re:Zero Season 2, and That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime, just to time the most popular anime from that season.

Unfortunately for Wonder Egg Priority, an anime not attached to an already popular series or manga didn't stand a chance. This tends to be the case for original anime, although some more recent anime such as Lycoris Recoil seem to be breaking the original anime curse. Wonder Egg Priority wasn't as fortunate, but more popular contenders wasn't the only thing holding Wonder Egg Priority back.

Four characters from Wonder Egg Priority

Anime trends change often. Sometimes thought-provoking slow burns are popular, sometimes it's action-packed shounen, and sometimes fluffy slice-of-life is popular. Wonder Egg Priority has found itself in its second case of being the right thing at the wrong time. Wonder Egg Priority is a slow burn philosophical anime, which the creator recently said in an interview is a "documentary that would highlight how dramatic adolescence is for a young girl".

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The slow-burn, thoughtful anime were more popular in the nineties and the 2000's, into the very early 2010s. This was when Satoshi Kon of Perfect Blue and Paprika fame was becoming idolized, as well as anime like Steins; Gate, Clannad, and Haruhi Suzumiya were among the long, long list of slow burn anime of the time. If Wonder Egg Priority came out ten or twenty years ago, perhaps it would be included with long-standing stapes of anime from that period.

The Heavy Content Hidden Behind The Soft Exterior

Wonder Egg Priority Gang Laughing

The accidental bait-and-switch with Wonder Egg Priority is another aspect that doomed this meaningful series. The anime had originally gone viral on the anime side of TikTok for how cute Ai was. This, unfortunately, was the final nail in the coffin. Many people, myself included, had gone into this anime expecting a slife-of-life anime with some magical girl elements. Although a bait-and-switch worked well with Madoka Magica in the past, it didn't work out well for Wonder Egg Priority.

Even the first few episodes leaned into this thought. Around the fourth episode though, as the plot of the anime became more clear than established in the first few episodes, many fans who expected a slice-of-life were put off, watching the anime expecting friendships and coming together rather than themes of suicide, self-harm, bullying, homophobia, death, and sacrifice being prevalent.

However, a case can be made for this anime because of this. Although many of the topics push it to be an adult anime, this anime does tackle subjects that many of the viewers, even younger viewers, have experienced. Not many anime normalize depression, self-harm, and suicide, despite Japan having the third-highest suicide rate in the world. Furthermore, not only having transexual representation in a series but having representation aside from a joke or fetishizing the token LGBTQIA+ character isn't very common in anime either.

The anime doesn't just deal with suicide either. One of the main characters, one that we root for, has self-harm scars; normalizing something like overcoming self-harm is practically unheard of. The protagonist is launched on this journey after her best friend commits suicide. There is a plot line near the end, albeit a jarring jump into the science fiction genre, featuring child neglect and favoritism and the trauma that can cause in a child. This anime boldly goes where not only not many anime have gone, but where many people today aren't confident enough to talk about.

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Wonder Egg Priority is available to stream on Crunchyroll