Night Of The Loving Dead: Intermission/Revival

Hello once again, gang. As summer begins to wane, as the creeping chill of fall begins to cool things down, and as the spooky season looms... let's engage in a little alchemical necromancy. Let's bring a version of this blog that long since perished back, piercing the veil between worlds of living and dead. Before October hits and I become mega busy, we have to revive this bygone project. Dear friends, as the spell takes hold... it is once again time to talk about Zombie Land Saga. There are things both wonderful and terrible (presumably for the latter, at least, I'll explain momentarily) that we need to talk about, but I want to set the stage and cue the band before I let this shit stride on out to put on a show once more. The metaphor is getting away from me a bit, so let's try and give the briefest of primers on how we got here, why we stopped and let this die, and why we've now brought it back.

In 2022, deep into the tail end of my Utopian Idealist era, I did a blog project on here called Night Of The Loving Dead, discussing the anime series Zombie Land Saga. As befitting most media which struck a chord with me during that period of my critical analysis years, it's a lovely show about finding mutual understanding and building emotional connections using the power of song, told via the rather gonzo method of a group of Japanese idols who are all secretly zombies brought back from the dead to usher in a glorious new age for the backwater prefecture of Saga in southwestern Japan. If that sounds right up your alley, you should go watch the show, and/or better yet read my words on it. Well, I say that, but I have always had a bit of a disconnect with this particular project. In my mind, it's a bit of a failure: a rambling overlong piece in which I fall into the trap of plot summary over critical analysis. Maybe I'm just being too hard on myself there, but it's really how I feel. Nevertheless, it's one of those things where you learn and grow from your failure, and I'd like to think in the years since I have crafted some turbo banger critical analysis posts. 

I'd actually like to delve just a bit further into that, on my own journey of self-discovery and to reflect a little on where I've been and where I'm going. This blog started, after all, as a cheap imitation of Elizabeth Sandifer's style circa the 2010s, attempting to be an alchemist but really just being a imperfect homunculus of mimicry. As time went on I gained another influence, that of my ever-patient friend and mentor, Li Underhill, and you can see my style evolve thanks to her empathy and grace from 2017 to about 2022, the period which ended with these Zombie Land Saga words. In a sense, Zombie Land Saga was the last time I really felt like I was a lesser version of a critic I liked: after that failure, I came into my own. I mentioned Sandifer before, and in her TARDIS Eruditorum she coined a phrase. I don't know if it's one she lives by to this day, given that she's had her own self-discovery since writing it, but it stuck in my head: "The secret of alchemy is material social progress". I took to heart those words when starting this blog, but as for the me I've become since... they don't quite fit. They're very fitting for, say, a macrocosmic look at the history of the world through the lens of a blue phone box show. They're not me, though. I have come into my own, I'd like to think, and thus it's time for me to take a stand. To make my own declaration as an alchemist of critical analysis, to sum up all I've learned from my own self-discoveries. Let me tell you what I've learned.

The secret of alchemy is intimate personal progress.

Sometimes the simplest truths are the most powerful, and this one can apply to a great deal of things. Though it fits the microcosmic that I've come to align with myself better, there's no reason it can't be broadened to fit bigger stakes. The secret of alchemy fits all: be it as grand as, say, proving that humanity is not a savage warlike race by exploring strange new worlds and bettering yourself in your discoveries, spiritually aligning yourself with pagan deities to enrich one's faith, or simply just growing and changing as you go through life and experience things. Or even facing the ultimate putrefaction of death, life burning out in failure, and then getting a second chance to grow and learn and enrich yourself and others. Just like those zombie idol girls I'm so fond of. Just like my project from 2022, where I failed. The show remains a favorite of mine, don't get me wrong, it's just that I feel I didn't quite nail on the page how it made me feel in favor of trying to get across to a layperson what it was about, to the tune of several thousand words of plot summary. That's my bad.

Furthermore, the Zombie Land Saga project is punctuated by an infamous crashout on my part. See, the teaser ending for Season 2 is that a flying saucer shows up out of nowhere and shoots a laser beam at the countryside. The only supernatural element prior to this was bringing people back from the dead. This, combined with some loredrops contained in ZLS spinoff media that I accidentally learned about while doing research for the writeup, completely made me crack. To put my mindset into context at the time, I had just survived an Enterprise watch in 2019 where a pretty good show succumbed to the same macrocosmic bullshit and cared more about reminding me that Captain Kirk reruns existed than telling stories set in Star Trek's past. I was also enduring Chris Chibnall's run on Doctor Who, which was a whole can of worms also wearing me down with middling plotlines and lore bombs aplenty. Seeing it happen in my goddamn zombie idol girl show that was, up to that point, a more intimate and personal story about failure and building connections and learning and growing just made something in my brain fucking snap, and you can see it all on the page. Thankfully, I got better. I touched grass, watched Quantum Leap and Twin Peaks, and got way better as a writer (at least I'd like to think so). I failed, yes, but I learned and grew from that failure. Intimate personal progress. What, then, was Zombie Land Saga doing in the meantime?

A whole lot of nothing for many years, as it turns out. Oh, there were rumors here and there. Stirrings that the next project would be a movie. One year becomes two, two becomes three, and before you know it it's been half a decade since I've seen anything with my zombie idol girls. The gears were turning, though. The followup was a movie, released to Japanese cinemas just shy of a year ago: Zombie Land Saga Yumeginja Paradise. The trailers worried me with their one-two punch, even though I was healed. First, we were not shying away from that teaser. It was not a trick or a hallucination. The plot of the movie actually is zombie idol girls vs. an alien invasion. Secondly, the trailers soon revealed another big element of the movie: a sentient Tae Yamada. The joke character of the series, where the gag is that she never gains sentience and remains as a stereotypical moaning groaning zombie (and "voiced" by Sailor fucking Moon, no less), given agency for this film. That gave me pause, because the very spinoff manga which kickstarted my crashout along with the alien teaser was a big macrocosmic demon-hunting extravaganza that promised to delve into the cyclical nature of the Curse Of Saga and featured a sentient Tae Yamada. Oh. Oh dear. The day finally came, earlier this summer, when I could finally watch the movie. Would I be able to handle the macrocosm this time? Had I healed enough to endure this without having another legendary freakout session?

Not to take too much gas out of the tank, but... the Zombie Land Saga movie is a masterpiece. I fucking loved it. I didn't have to worry at all, and putting my faith and trust in my zombie idol girls as I always had led me to inner peace and prosperity. More to the point, the use of sentient Tae Yamada in the movie is a stroke of genius. Even without knowing the particulars of her backstory, there's enough lip service paid that I can see what the movie is trying to contrast her with, and how connection and understanding and all that utopian feel-good shit I love wins out in the end. Banger movie. So I have to talk about it on my little blog, to show how much I've healed and grown as well as how my beloved little zombie idol girl franchise has done the impossible and tamed the macrocosm. Great! Lovely! Why aren't I doing that to begin with, and why am I rambling on for a thousand words or more? Frezno Inferno you dumb blue-haired bitch, weren't you just complaining that you lost any sense of brevity with the old project and that's why you can barely re-read it? That's true, and I'll get to the point. I'm here setting the stage because there's one more cheeky thing I want to do.

I want to measure my abilities to weather the macrocosm. I want to take what I've learned from my mellowing out and touching grass and apply it to that which nearly drove me mad with but a glance. That, and also since I know where Tae Yamada is going to end up in the movie, I can use my future knowledge as both a shield against the macrocosm and a surprise tool to help me later when I actually talk about the movie. So, this is going to be in two parts (or more, depending on if I really have a lot to say, but I'm going to do my goddamn best to keep this brief-ish). In the first part, I confront the source of my crashout and read the spinoff manga, Zombie Land Saga: The First Zombie. We'll learn all about the legendary Tae Yamada, properly delve into the Curse Of Saga, and fight demons like this is fucking Chainsaw Man and not a side story spun off from a show where zombie girls sing pop songs. Once we do that, we'll talk about the movie and discuss how, despite how impossible it seemed to me half a decade ago, they took "zombie idol girls vs. THE ALIENS" and made that shit fucking work.

I am geared up and ready to go, sluts. Let's fuck up this manga. I won't crash out this time. You hear me, you shitty little macrocosm? I peeked ahead at the ending. I failed, grew, and became a full-fledged critical analysis alchemist of my own. I am ready to stand with my peers, instead of in their shadows. I'm ready for you this time. Bring it on.