Kaomomo

"Tall, cool beauties like you are totally my type."

- Kaoru to Momoe, (Episode 10)

Kaomomo is the het ship between Kaoru Kurita and Momoe Sawaki from the Wonder Egg Priority fandom.

Canon
Momoe Sawaki meets Kaoru Kurita in the Egg world where she is fighting with her pomander, Panic. Although they are only together for a short amount of time, both mutually understand the others' struggles, and catch feelings quickly.

Kaoru introduces himself with the masculine pronoun, "Boku", making Momoe wonder why he speaks like that. She assumes Kaoru is like herself, a girl who is mistaken for a boy, and assures him that he looks feminine enough. She also suggests if maybe Kaoru is trying to seem more masculine, to which the shorter looks up in interest. Momoe tells Kaoru to call her Momotaro, but he quickly realizes that it wasn't her real name and starts playfully guessing. He goes through Momo, Momoko, and then finally lands on Momoe, which gets a reaction out of the redhead. When Kaoru playfully flirts with her, she sighs and thinks that Kaoru was going to be yet another girl who liked her. Kaoru quickly dismisses the idea, saying that he was actually a boy.

They hear Panic finishing up with the Haters, so they duck out from behind the sign they were hiding. Suddenly, a gas fills the room, rendering them both useless. Momoe calls out for Kaoru, but when she can't find him, she sets off into the gas. She spots a heart-shaped hole in the wall, and hearing a Wonder Killer on the other side, she advances into it.

Momoe spots Kaoru trapped in a translucent heart-shaped vessel, and immediately asks who the Wonder Killer is. Kaoru explains that it was his Kendo Club Advisor, whom he went to for advice after realizing he was a boy. The teacher instead beat him and raped him, making him pregnant. Unable to continue on, Momoe understands and begins to attack the Wonder Killer. The Wonder Killer assumes that Momoe is after Kaoru, and fights back.

Momoe manages to incapacitate it for a moment and quickly attempts to break the glass holding Kaoru. She isn't fast enough before the Wonder Killer recovers and throws her across the tracks. It holds Momoe by the throat while all Kaoru can do is watch. He starts crying, repeatedly saying that he is a boy. Hearing this, Momoe gains momentary strength and yells out that she is also a girl. The Wonder Killer is pushed off, and Momoe stabs it through with her spear. The glass holding Kaoru is shattered, and he jumps off into Momoe's arms right before the Wonder Killer explodes.

They sit together at the train station, where they talk and banter playfully. Kaoru promises to be the one protecting Momoe in his next life and then asks her to make sure she doesn't get a boyfriend before the next time they meet. Kaoru then leans over and kisses her, before disappearing into dust. Momoe is left shocked and begins blushing madly.

Quotes
"Next time I'm reborn, I'll be the one to protect you."

- Kaoru to Momoe.

Fanon
is a well-received one within the fandom, because of their canon attraction towards each other, and the buildup to the kiss they shared right before Kaoru disappeared. It is sometimes rivaled by MomoRika or AiMomo, but the fans don't cause a lot of drama and casually accept the other ships. There is a bit of fanfiction, with just over 10 works on AO3, and a decent amount of Kaomomo art scattered around sites like Tumblr and DeviantArt.

Their relationship and alleged attraction caused a lot of specific controversy during the broadcast, as due to Kaoru's biological gender, one part of the audience considered Momoe to be bisexual and their relationship yuri, while another insisted on Momoe's similar respect for Kaoru's identity and leaned more towards reading the episode as a metaphor for accepting the former androgyny. Given the context of their subplot, fans tend to think more about their pairing as a het one than femslash.

Those who interpret this ship as a femslash are usually based on the fact that Kaoru is still not passed the transition and almost openly talks about his bisexuality, while Momoe's sexuality is somewhat ambiguous and some fans read her as bisexual due to the lack of any disgust at female attraction to her (according to her, she feels uncomfortable when girls fall in love with her because of her male appearance, but not because of their feelings per se), and also because of the ambiguity of whether she was attracted to Kaoru as an androgynous person or a boyish biological girl.

This ship has become particularly popular with the show's trans audience, as Momoe and Kaoru not only openly discuss the intersection of sexuality and gender identity, but Momoe subsequently fully and wholeheartedly accepts her new friend's gender identity, sincerely agreeing to meet him in the future if he is reborn as biological boy and to find her. The fact that Momoe was already known as a character often interpreted as a trans boy also added to her popularity among trans viewers.

The show has also been praised for its rather positive and serious portrayal of the trans character, who is depicted as a realistic person with a queer gender identity instead of repeating overused androgynous fetish tropes or jokes.

Fandom
FAN FICTION

FAN ART

TUMBLR

Trivia

 * Kaoru's age isn't confirmed, but it's suggested that he's younger than Momoe because he asks her if she minds younger boys.
 * Their stories parallel each other because while Kaoru is a boy mistaken as a girl, Momoe is a girl mistaken as a boy.
 * The colors that Kaoru is depicted with are white, blue, and pink, which are the colors of the transgender flag.