Usually you know roughly what to expect of a new anime series, but not this time. No synopsis, trailers that looked great but didn’t reveal anything, nothing to say what the series was going to be like. Just look at this one minute sequence that opens episode one Wonder Egg Priority though. That miniature fake shot of the neighbourhood that’s the first thing you see in the entire anime. The girl in the yellow hoodie, standing guard over a dying cicada late at night, burying it in a local park, when it pops up again, calling her name. That was all it took to hook on this series. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to watch something this good without having been spoiled on it going in. If you haven’t seen it yet and you like what you see below? Just go and watch it.
Honestly, the last time I was this fascinated with an anime was when four teenage girls decided to go to Antarctica. As I write this, four episodes have been released and I think I need to write about all of them. So let’s talk about structure in this first post then, before we dive deeper into the individual episodes. Because what this is, is a mahou shoujo, a magical girl show. These first four episodes are familiar to everybody who has ever watched Precure, as each member of the magical girl squad gets introduced in a spotlight episode. The girl in the yellow hoodie, Ohto Ai, would be the pink Cure in this context. The heart of the team, warm, kind and welcoming. Her sunflower hoodie fits her well, as acknowledged in episode four, the sunflower being a symbol of warmth. (Flower language is everywhere in Wonder Egg Priority). The other girls can be mapped to their various Precure archetypes in the same way. So far, each episode’s build up has felt very Precure too, with a monster of the week to be defeated in each episode’s climax.
Storywise Wonder Egg Priority is more in the line of Flip Flappers, Madoka Magica or Revolutionary Girl Utena than Precure. In Precure, the evil to be defeated is largely impersonal, threatening the whole world and the girls become magical out of a sense of responsibility. The reason why Ohto Ai and the other girls fight here are much more personal, rooted in their own past. Less fighting to save the world, more to try and undo their own fuck-ups. There are reasons why Ai is wondering the streets late at night and they’re not nice ones. It’s hard to imagine that anybody not as damaged as Ai would actually follow a talking cicada down the rabbit hole to fight off monsters for a chance at redemption. In Precure‘s world at least you can trust the mascots that give you your power; here…?
Throughout this episode and in every episode so far: Ohto Ai, if not happy, if struggling, still cheerful. She is the “pink Precure” for a reason. Warm, sweet, utterly adorable in her yellow hoodie, she is why I got hooked in the first place. With a series like this there’s always the worry in the back of your mind. Will the story grind her down or worse, will it become meaningless misery porn? Is she being set up for a fall, or will she be allowed to win? So far, Wonder Egg Priority has been dark without being edgy, has kept a sense of optimism even when its characters struggled. It’s this what has kept me hooked, when your typical edgy dark Mahou Shoujo series just bores me.
