Review of Wonder Egg Priority: My Priority

Haiku review: What fresh hell is this? "Wonder Egg Priority" Dies by suicide Longer version (because haiku reviews aren't mainstream yet): One thing that anime can do really well is deal with issues, especially issues its primarily young viewers are likely to face. Consider "Rascal Doesn't Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai," or, in its way, any of the Monogatari series, for example. Suicide, especially among young Japanese people driven by ever-higher expectations, isolation, and fear of failure, is a real issue in Japan today.It was this issue that "Wonder Egg Priority" sought to tackle. And in every respect, it failed.

Things started off well enough. The show was captivating from the first notes of "Sudachi no Uta," last heard as the ED of episode 21 of "Nichijou," which announced that this show should be taken seriously, and in case you missed it, the cracking of the egg at the end of the OP drove home the point. So we got our boxes of tissue and prepared to cry.

But then the writers and producers started digging and kept digging. By the time they got to the "uh-oh, they're in trouble" recap episode, we wondered how they could neatly write their way out of the hole they had dug.

The great fear is always that the season will end, everything will be left hanging, and the show will never be heard of again, or when it finally does get a second season, it's a pale imitation of the original coming long after everyone stopped caring. So when it was announced, or at least rumored, that the season's finale would come in the form of an hour-long special solving all plot points and answering all questions, we all breathed a sigh of relief.

We shouldn't have. The special, the subject of this brief review, came weeks after the original series ended (unsatisfyingly), and, worse, instead of wrapping up the issues raised, the writers just kept digging.

It reminded me of one terrible time when I kept putting off a term paper, thinking I'd write it as usual on the night before it was due. Then, the night before it was due, I got involved in a game online and decided I'd get up and dash it off early the next morning. It turned out as you'd expect.

Here, the special was half recap, in case the recap we'd already endured was thought insufficient. And when they finally got around to new material, it solved nothing, answered nothing, and if we had hoped we'd learn something about young people committing suicide, we could kiss that hope goodbye. There were no answers provided, no insights gained. Instead, they dug up new stuff, added new threads, put together something that made "The Devil Is a Part-Timer" look neatly resolved.

A tragic ending to a series about tragic endings; a show about suicide becoming itself a suicide.