Genre and Gender in Wonder Egg Priority
This article contains SPOILERS for all of Wonder Egg Priority and mentions of suicide.
Wonder Egg Priority is perhaps, by now, most famous for how it started out strong and then scrambled itself. The shift from dreamy fantasy to convoluted sci-fi and the show’s unsympathetic treatment of its young female characters, particularly in its finale, are two key factors in the series’ downturn. But these two storytelling issues do not exist separately; they intertwine and inform each other.
Egg is the story of grieving fourteen-year-old Ohto Ai, who is drawn into a strange dreamworld after purchasing “wonder eggs” from a gacha machine. A “captured maiden” (the spirit of a young person who has died by suicide) hatches from these eggs, and monsters chase after her and Ai. These monsters are the physical manifestations of their personal demons. Once Ai successfully defeats them — including Wonder Killers, grotesque creatures who symbolize each captured maiden’s worst trauma — the maiden’s ghost will be freed. If Ai completes enough of these battles, she will (according to Acca and Ura-Acca, the mysterious mannequin-like figures who oversee the system) be able to bring back her own dead friend, Koito.
Across the series, however, this setup becomes complicated: new worldbuilding elements like artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and parallel universes are introduced that disrupt the magical framing of Ai’s battles in the dreamworld. The raw and empathetic focus on the captured maidens’ trauma and the emotional motivations of Ai and her fellow egg-warriors is put to the side in favor of narrative interest in the backstory of Acca and Ura-acca and their scientific experiments.
Egg’s shift from magic to sci-fi coincides with its shift in character focus. Early episodes center on the four female protagonists. But by the end, its narrative authority lies with its adult male characters, the Accas and Ai’s teacher Mr. Sawaki, who explain the motivations of teenage girls rather than the girls themselves telling their own stories.
Intentional or otherwise, it’s worth examining this shift in priorities from magic and the emotional reality of young women to science and the “logic” of grown men. It provides insight into the author’s biases and underlying gender politics, anchored in a study of the series’ genre politics.
The question of genre is sometimes a tricky one, with multiple, interlocking layers. Genre is often determined by external, practical factors such as how a work is marketed, where it gets shelved in a physical store, or what tags it gets on streaming services. But genre is also determined by a conversation between the work and its audience. Tropes, plot devices, storytelling codes, visual language, and presumed knowledge of a history of similar works all build together to inform the audience of what sort of experience they’re in for. As Farah Mendlesohn suggests in her book Rhetorics of Fantasy, “In one sense, this is almost the definition of genre, the building of that common bible of expectations.”
This idea of a “common bible of expectations” helps inform why it felt so dissonant when Wonder Egg Priority began introducing sci-fi concepts into what viewers had come to expect was a fantasy series. Early episodes put certain familiar codes in place: characters travelling to impossible locations, monsters and magical weapons, talking bugs, girls hatching out of eggs. All of these switch on a little neon sign that says “fantasy” inside our media-aware brains. The devices, aesthetic, and tone all imply fabulism, or, to borrow from Mendlesohn again, “liminal fantasy” — a type of fantastical story where magic intrudes on realistic settings yet is treated matter-of-factly.
Much of Egg operates on the logic of dreams. How do the heroes get to the strange, liminal spaces where they fight the Wonder Killers? How do the souls of suicidal teenagers end up in eggs? The genre framing — surreal, dreamy, magical — means that the audience is not prompted to seek concrete answers to these questions. With Egg positioned as a character-driven fantasy, the “how” is less important than the “why,” with the magical elements creating a platform on which those emotional explorations can occur. The emotional reality of the young, female protagonists is the core of the series, and the fantasy weaves itself around that.
Until, of course, the genre shift occurs: not just taking the series away from codes of fantasy, but away from that central focus on adolescent emotions.
Gradually, Egg becomes couched in science fiction. Elements like artificial intelligence, cyborg bodies, and technological terminology take over as the dominant framing. What was once understandable as magic is now implied to be some sort of high-tech simulation. This diverts from the “bible of expectations” its earlier episodes were drawing from and hinges the series on new rules that viewers had not been prepared to engage with.
Crucial worldbuilding elements suddenly make less sense with the change in genre framing. How do the heroes get to the strange, liminal spaces where they fight the Wonder Killers, if it’s not a magical dreamscape — if it’s virtual reality, how do the girls access it? How do the souls of suicidal teenagers end up in eggs? Are we now being asked to believe that concepts like souls and trauma-monsters fit into the logical, tech-driven framework of a science fiction series?
This is not to say that fantasy and sci-fi elements cannot co-exist or mingle together in interesting ways. Puella Magi Madoka Magica — which Egg is drawing at least some inspiration from — had its magical girl genre elements enabled by the meddling of aliens, landing it simultaneously in fantasy and sci-fi. FLIP FLAPPERS, which similarly, literally explores the “inner worlds” of its characters, anchors its fantastical possibilities in advanced technology.
Indeed, whether Egg pulled this off or not may vary from viewer to viewer. However, the mid-series shift from fabulism to sci-fi coincides with another narrative shift that also betrays the expectations built in earlier episodes, and its impact on the show goes beyond convoluted worldbuilding.
The switch away from fantasy and dream-logic also switches the series away from its central focus on the trauma, healing, and development of its teenage girl characters. The more time spent explaining new elements like parallel world theory and cybernetic clones, the less time there is to develop the protagonists. But, more egregiously, the focal shift towards sci-fi also leads the series into the narratives of adult, male, and ostensibly antagonistic characters like Acca, Ura-acca, and Mr. Sawaki.
This issue is crystalized in Episode 11, devoted to a flashback — from Ura-acca’s perspective — wherein the two scientists build an AI, Frill, modelled after a teenage girl. This Frankenstein-esque side story takes Egg entirely into the realm of sci-fi, and while Frill is central to this story, she’s not the one telling it. The focus is not on her emotions or her interior world, nor does she get a narrative voice to tell her side of events. She is observed and narrated by Ura-acca, with his account going unquestioned and thus cemented as the “truth” of the narrative.
Given how much the early episodes centered on the inner thoughts, feelings, and motivations of Ai and the other adolescents, Episode 11 is a stark departure. The episodes that follow only exacerbate things, dropping character development of Rika, Momoe, and Neiru, and having the central mystery about Koito “solved” by the words of Mr. Sawaki. Rather than Ai speaking to Koito’s ghost or discovering any evidence of this in her own investigations, she is simply told “the truth” by Sawaki: that Koito’s death was an accident, and that she had been attempting to seduce Sawaki, and falsely accusing him of preying on her, before she fell.
As with Ura-acca narrating Frill’s actions and motivations, what Sawaki says is presented as narrative truth. Koito herself does not get any screen-time to have her say. Narrative authority rests entirely with these adult male characters, and the emotional landscapes of the teenagers are left to the wayside.
It makes the finale ring hollow, and it feels like a different show. Egg transforms from a liminal fantasy about girls and their complex grief and motivation, into a sci-fi about grown men and their careers. Teenage girls appear in their narratives, but they’re secondary characters — or, in Frill’s case, outright villains — rather than meaningful main protagonists.
Egg effectively abandons its own characters in favor of swinging the focus to the highly intellectual experiments of Acca and Ura-acca and the artsy woes of Mr. Sawaki. The change in framing of these men is yet another example of the show betraying its own coding and expectation-building, using all the tools in its basket to set them up as untrustworthy earlier in the series before shrugging that off in the end.
Perhaps it’s a complete coincidence that the shift from fantasy to sci-fi, and the shift in centrality from teen girls to adult men, happen around the same time. The parallels are worth examining, however, because they could imply an authorial anxiety. Perhaps the writer felt that it wasn’t enough to build a show around dream-magic and the emotions of adolescent girls. For this story to really have weight, to really explore Big Ideas, it must be built around hard science and the logic of adult men.
For all Egg’s disappointments, this is the greatest tragedy in the show’s writing: its refusal to let adolescent girls’ grief, emotions, and motivations drive the series. Its refusal to see them as important enough to carry the narrative. Traumatized young women fighting for their peers in fantastical dreamscapes wasn’t enough, clearly, as Egg felt the need to swerve into a whole different genre. The writer, in the end, opted for technobabble and flimsy scientific framing to “explain” a mechanic that should have worked just fine as magic; not having faith that the inner worlds of troubled adolescents were a suitable setting and dragging the audience into a laboratory instead.
Wonder Egg Priority establishes a “common bible of expectations” and then throws them aside in favor of new genre conventions, making a mess of its own worldbuilding along the way. Simultaneously, Wonder Egg Priority establishes that it has teenage girls and their magic at its narrative heart, then nudges them aside and lets men do all the talking. The fantasy trappings and the emotional catharsis of the girl protagonists are all but abandoned by the series’ finale, and the disappointment at these factors goes hand-in-hand.
