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📘 Wonder Egg Priority – Full Anime Summary (Pages 1–7)
✦ Introduction
Wonder Egg Priority is a 2021 original anime produced by CloverWorks, directed by Shin Wakabayashi, and written by Shinji Nojima. The anime explores intense themes such as suicide, trauma, bullying, gender identity, and mental health through the lens of dream-like, surrealistic storytelling. The narrative follows Ai Ohto, a reclusive 14-year-old girl who is drawn into a mysterious world after the death of her best friend Koito.
In this otherworldly space, Ai is given a "Wonder Egg" — a literal egg that, when cracked, summons a girl who died by suicide and needs saving from grotesque monsters. As Ai and other girls engage in battles against symbolic representations of trauma, they begin to uncover deeper truths behind their friends’ deaths, their own suffering, and a broader experimental reality that binds them all.
✦ Episode 1: "The Domain of Children"
We meet Ai Ohto, a girl with heterochromia and low self-esteem who has stopped attending school after the suicide of her best friend, Koito Nagase. Ai believes Koito’s death is connected to her own failure to understand or help her. One day, a mysterious voice lures her into purchasing a Wonder Egg from a gachapon machine in an abandoned garden.
When she cracks the egg in a dream world, a girl named Kurumi emerges. Ai is thrust into a terrifying battle to protect Kurumi from monstrous beings called Seeno Evils and a towering Wonder Killer, a horrifying symbolic manifestation of Kurumi’s abuser. Ai defeats the monster with a giant pencil-like weapon, and Kurumi disappears, presumably saved. The dream ends, and Ai wakes with a flower-shaped mark on her arm.
The rules of the world are not explained outright. Ai is informed by two mannequin-like beings named Acca and Ura-Acca that if she continues saving egg girls, she might eventually bring Koito back to life.
Themes Introduced: Bullying, suicide, guilt, survivor’s remorse, magical realism, social isolation.
✦ Episode 2: "Friends of a Friend"
Ai continues collecting eggs and protecting the girls inside. In her next dream, she saves Minami, a gymnastics student haunted by the trauma of abusive coaching. Ai struggles to understand the mechanics of these dreams but grows more confident in battle.
She also meets Neiru Aonuma, a stoic, genius girl who is similarly invested in saving someone she lost — her sister. Neiru is cold and analytical, contrasting with Ai’s emotional vulnerability. The two briefly connect, and Ai begins to see this strange journey as a form of redemption for her failure with Koito.
Outside the dream world, Ai’s homeroom teacher and mother remain concerned about her school absence and mental state. Flashbacks show Ai’s intense attachment to Koito and the complex social dynamics that led up to her friend’s death.
Important Detail: The “Wonder Killers” represent real-world abusers or traumatic forces that drove each girl to suicide. Their forms are grotesque caricatures of oppressive authority figures.
✦ Episode 3: "A Bare Knife"
Ai befriends Rika Kawai, a brash ex-idol with bleached hair and a sharp tongue. At first abrasive, Rika reveals her own trauma — she was involved in a fan’s suicide after mocking her appearance, a regret that now drives her to fight in the Egg World.
Rika’s relationship with her alcoholic mother and abandonment by her father adds to her emotional volatility. Despite her snark, she forms a tense alliance with Ai. The two share experiences, battle monsters, and protect egg girls together.
This episode reveals more of the world’s surreal logic. Rika’s Wonder Killer is shaped like a grotesque reflection of her past, further stressing the theme that inner guilt manifests externally in this dream realm.
Emerging Pattern: Each main girl must fight her way through symbolic versions of their pain to save others, gradually healing themselves in the process.
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