Part 4: RIP, Our Insecurities, Our Fear Of Failure, And Our Karmic Destiny Which Curses Us With Eternal Bad Luck!
Well, here we are. The beginning of the end of our look into Zombie Land Saga's first season. We've covered lots of the zombie girls in depth, learning the traumas of their deaths and the pain and loss their loved ones were burdened with in the intervening years. Even so, we haven't talked about three girls in any real detail. Yugiri is basically sort of there and the "mom" of the group, and her big backstory about the trauma of her death and what she left behind is going to be written about at length when we come to Season 2. Tae Yamada's just a stereotypical groaning zombie, As A Joke. (There is one big thematic resonant exception to this that we'll get to later in this very post.) That leaves Sakura. Over these 9 episodes, Sakura has been many things. A flustered nervous middlewoman in between all the other conflicts and crises we've been discussing, mostly. Throughout the show she's still been struggling to remember her past, only able to get those brief glimmers of witnessing an idol show somewhere. It's when those glimmers get stronger that we get the big issues, and get to really delve into Sakura's issues. Let's heal the heart of this dead idol. Let's talk about Sakura.
Sakura opens Episode 10 thinking to herself much the same of what we just said. Franchouchou is doing well, so many interpersonal conflicts and healing broken hearts have brought them closer... and yet, she still can't recall her past. Things change when Kotaro lets them know that they'll be holding their very own show at a venue called the Arpino in Saga, a huge space that Sakura feels familiarity with upon entering and checking it out with everyone else. As Ai remarks that her first show in Saga as a part of Iron Frill was back here, that familiarity only builds in Sakura. This is a chance for her to awaken her memory, to find out who she really is! I'm... not going to make any Doctor Who jokes. I promise. This enthusiasm leads Sakura to get carried away, super excited over this show because it could awaken all her memories, and she starts getting way too into it, practicing too fast and out of step with everyone else. Kotaro notices this and implements a plan.
Unfortunately his plan is to dump the girls off on top of a snowy mountain and leave them there for days on end with no further explanation. The rest of the girls immediately go into full survival mode, since they could still freeze up on this icy mountain and that would be bad. All Sakura can worry about is practicing for the show, though. After some days up here, Sakura is only growing more and more anxious as everyone is just focusing on gathering food and building fires and other fun happy outdoors-y things. Why doesn't anyone want to practice? There's a lovely little scene here involving Sakura and Junko. In writing this, I think Junko has become a part of my internal landscape, right up there with a lot of other important and resonant figures. During Junko's crisis, on the beach, Sakura was there to listen to her woes and let her vent. Here, as Sakura finds Junko fishing at the bank of a river, Junko hears Sakura's worries about the show not going well. Junko not only lets Sakura air her woes and worries, but she offers Sakura helpful advice as well.
(INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: I'll... I'll explain the zombie puppy at the end of the post. Couldn't cut them out of the images because it's important to what Junko is saying, but I'm sure it's raised a few eyebrows. Be glad I didn't show the shot of the zombie puppy as an exaggerated monster zombie dog. Yeah, I'm leaving out a lot of the comedic bits of the show for you to discover if you watch it yourself. Okay. Back to Sakura's dilemma.)
Sakura doesn't really take to the advice, resorting to practicing her dance steps on her own in the woods. There are some silly shenanigans involving her falling into a pit trap and having her head bitten off by a wild boar, and this is when she finally snaps at everyone else for fucking around when they have something so important to do. Kotaro comes back at this point, being his usual self, and Sakura snaps at him for his dumb plan too. What in the fuck was coming up to the cold mountains for days on end supposed to do to help them with a goddamn fucking idol show? After that outburst, Sakura feels super awkward around everyone with little time left before the show, only adding more stress to her plate as she still can't match everyone's pace. Again she lets her frustrations slip. If everyone else hadn't been fucking around in the mountains instead of practicing like she was, then they'd all be in sync already, now wouldn't they?
There's a nice little scene after this between Kotaro and Yugiri (hey look, I did get a chance to talk about her before season 2!) where Yugiri correctly identifies the point of the big dumb mountain trip. Its intent was to try and take Sakura's mind off of the stress of the show, to help her relax. The strength of a group like Franchouchou is the ability to make up for each other's individual weaknesses, resulting in a greater collective strength. Sakura's not seeing that right now, and if she can't see what's going on around her, she won't grow stronger. Sakura's in a total anxious panic now, worrying that her blowup has just driven a rift between them further and wondering how to fix it. That's when she actually sits back and watches the girls practice, and wow. They're all in perfect harmony and sync with their dance moves! They're all planning things out, talking over their routine... working together. Just like they all did in the mountains when they were trying to survive. Who was the one not working with anyone? Who was truly out of sync? Oh. It was Sakura. As she realizes this she rushes in, finally understanding and apologizing for everything. She was so focused on herself, on getting it all right, on chasing that feeling of her memory, that she didn't think of her friends. From now on, she'll do her best to work with them though! With that conflict resolved, everything seems to be going great! The routine's perfect, she's in sync, the show's in a few days, and as Sakura heads out for a little jog it really seems like this idol shit is going to work--
For fuck's sakes. Just when you think everything's going fine for these girls, life has to throw a truck/plane crash/300 million-volt lightning strike/stress-induced heart attack/motorcycle crash their way. I mean, at least Sakura's already dead, right? It's not like the truck can kill her twice. Yeah, about that. What the truck does instead is scramble and flip-flop her amnesia. Before, Sakura could remember nothing of her life before she awoke as a zombie, and was dealing with trying to unlock those memories. When Sakura wakes up again after the second truck hit, she remembers everything from her living life... but not a thing from her un-life as a zombie we've been seeing for the past 10 episodes. Once again we're back to the episode 1 territory of being in a spooky house with a lot of fucking scary zombies, Sakura terrified and picking up a poker to defend herself... but it's a lot more fucked up bow 'cause these are her friends she's threatening! They're not a bunch of rotting corpses who have no place in modern society, and so it's fucked up. A strange thing happens here, once Sakura realizes she's surrounded by the walking dead. She sort of just gives up. What's going on there?
This, my friends, is the Sakura we didn't see in the opening. The happy-go-lucky Sakura from the opening of the show, before she got hit by a truck and died, seemed to be in line with the amnesiac Sakura we've learned to love over 10 episodes. This was a front-facing facade. Behind the mask is a different Sakura. A Sakura who, when she learns about what she's been up to with Franchouchou and their impending big show, simply says "It's fine, go without me". This Sakura has no joy, no optimism, no hopes and dreams. She's a depressed loner who insists she doesn't have what it takes to be an idol, opting out of even making an attempt at it. She proceeds to barricade herself up, just like Junko did before when she couldn't reconcile this brave new world of the future. One by one, the girls all get up in the middle of the night to try and convince Sakura to get back with the band. All of them are refuted and rebuked by the pessimistic Sakura, the girl behind the bubbly facade who was hiding in the fog of amnesia. Why is Sakura like this now?
It's always been this way for her. An entire gloomy cloud of bad luck and misfortune hanging over her, ruining any and every opportunity she has to change her fate and make something good. She reminisces about every bit of bad luck in her life that snatched any of her hopes away. The Snow White play in third grade, where she was going to be the lead and worked hard to learn her lines? She got sick on the day of the show and missed out. Practicing for the yearly relay race in middle school? Three years in a row she pulled a muscle the day of and couldn't compete. Study really hard at the expense of other hobbies to get into a prestigious high school? Get distracted by bad luck on the day of taking the entrance exam, and fail it. Every single time Sakura tried at anything, the dark cloud of bad luck would strike her hopes down and ruin it. This eventually left her in the depressed and gloomy funk of nihilistic nothingness, a couch potato not bothering to do anything because fate would just snatch all her dreams away. Then, sitting on the couch, eating her chips in her gloom, she caught an idol being interviewed...
That statement gave Sakura a little hope, a new perspective. She became a fan of Iron Frill. She saw them live. She began to hope again, even becoming inspired to apply to be an idol herself. We saw how that ended. Sakura Minamoto, 16 years old, a self-professed klutz and scatterbrain who doesn't have everything together. Things will be different this time, though. She's turning over a new leaf, she's going to send off a submission form to become a pop idol, and she will become the girl she wants to be. A girl who can hope again. Fate decided she was flying too close to the sun, and for this transgression Sakura paid with her life. The ultimate punchline, except fate couldn't even be satisfied with that and revived her as the living dead to torture her some more. Gloomily reflecting on all this out in Saga at night, that stupid goddamn cop who's kept popping up shows up again and Sakura doesn't even care when he freaks out about A FUCKING WALKING CORPSE ON A SWING SET SHOOT IT IN THE HEAD FUCK FUCK FUCK. Kotaro saves her, again, and takes her up to look out at a big hilltop view of the town by night.
Sakura, ever the pessimist, insists that their idol show will go better if she's not there. That she doesn't have what it takes to be an idol. She learned from the traumatic reality of her death, alright. Seeing Iron Frill live, Sakura wanted to be just as strong and cool as Ai looked on stage. She wanted to try one more time, to try and find something good in this world. In her excitement and haste, she ran out of her house earlier than usual and got slammed by a truck. This is what she deserves for hoping. Nothing she tries ever fucking works, and it was stupid to think otherwise. Now look at her. She's fucking dead. As she puts it, she's the girl who died and tried for all her efforts, and the others can do all this saving Saga bullshit without her, so Kotaro just leave her to rot away like the hopeless corpse she is. Kotaro moves away from her for a while, and as Sakura sadly ponders her new existence...
And so we come to the climactic finale of Zombie Land Saga's first season. Kotaro is insistent. He doesn't give a single solitary fuck. Sakura Minamoto is going the fuck on stage with her idol comrades, no matter how much of a sad sack she is. Sakura isn't bothering to practice, but she's beginning to have flashbacks to her life as a zombie. Like it or not, she's being confronted with that other existence, the happy and slightly nervous Sakura who we've been following. She sees her happy self on a flyer, wondering what in the fuck her idiot self was thinking. At a meet and greet, two fans come up to her to shake her hand, telling her how much they love her singing and dancing. When Saki lets her know that she's actually a pretty popular member of the group, that makes her wonder what her performance was like. No! No, bad! You're getting your hopes up again, and you know what that leads to! Hoping, trying, failing, and regretting. It really is for the best if she doesn't go on stage. She's thinking of the other girls, too. Why drag their good thing down with her by letting her karmic destiny overwhelm them and ruin the show? And yet, those words echo in her head. Kotaro will never abandon her. It's getting harder and harder not to feel that hope in her heart.
Hope? Is that hope you mentioned? If Sakura needs that utopic inspiration to heal her heart, have we ever got the candidate. It's time to talk about Tae Yamada. Yes, the unawakened zombie girl who goes "rrr argh" and tries to bite people all the time. Her. As Sakura is moping and not practicing, the girls have been sending Tae out with little reminders of their past together to try and motivate Sakura. The chicken thing, their Saga Rock magazine article, stuff like that. The latter makes Sakura angrily slap the magazine away, locking herself away again as Tae tries to beat down the door. There's a fun gag where the others think Tae is crying at this, before it's revealed she's just drooling a lot. Tae then proceeds to bust through a window to get at Sakura, dragging her into their practice room and trying to teach her how to dance. The other girls remark that this must be a reciprocal thing for Tae; Sakura never gave up on Tae and always tried to teach her the dance moves, and now Tae is trying to motivate Sakura with the very same tactic.
Here's where this gets really resonant for me. You see, the joke with Tae isn't just that she's a stereotypical zombie who just moans and groans. There's the added context of the show's creators hiring a legendary anime voice actress to "voice" Tae, using their talents on just... moaning and groaning. Who did they get to enhance such a performance? None other than goddamned Kotono Mitsuishi. Yes, that's right. Sailor Moon herself is at the heart of this zombie idol anime, a zombie girl moaning and groaning and trying to help her friend out. The sheer personal resonance is simply astounding. As the girls watch Tae try to inspire Sakura, they realize that it was Sakura who was always there to back them up when they were in trouble. She always worked to resolve conflict between the girls, helping them out, talking to them, letting them vent. Junko notes that Sakura always tried to encourage her, and now it's time to repay the favor and back her up! And Sakura is having none of it. This leads to our final conflict resolution: Yugiri slapping Sakura. I didn't mention it, but this is the rule of three payoff to a running joke over the series where Yugiri has been slapping people with an entire "how dare you say that!" sort of vibe, the joke being they're always like "but... but i was agreeing with you.". Yugiri again reiterates that, like it or not, Sakura will be joining them on stage. When Sakura calls this selfish nonsense, Yugiri doesn't deny it. Sakura then asks why it matters so goddamned much. What difference does it make if she's not there?
Ai goes on to say something Sakura, in her funk, hadn't considered or even asked about: they all have a cloud of bad luck and unfortunate karmic destiny hanging over them. Sakura's not the only one with bad luck here. Every single one of these girls, in life, felt that things were finally turning around and going great for them before they died tragically young in horrible ways. None of these girls have any semblance of good luck, but fuck luck. Ai repeats the words she said all those years ago, about mistakes not being a bad thing, and they ring even more true now that we know all she's been through. All those hardships, the confrontation with the material reality of her own death... it all made her stronger, thanks to Junko at her side to help her through it. She's the best Ai she can be now, and they'll make Sakura the same. Sakura can only make sure. They know, right? They know the whole thing could crumble down because of her rotten luck, right? They know. They don't care. The first sense that fate might be pushing back comes when Sakura, newly motivated, practices in front of a mirror, and...
To hell with being a sad sack worried about bad luck and misfortune haunting their undead souls for all eternity. They're all going to face bad luck like Ai and Junko faced their deaths and rebirths, like Lily and Saki faced the people they left behind. Head-on, no fucks given, all hopes on the line... because they're idols. Of course, karmic destiny has bigger plans. As Sakura sleeps in a big cuddle pile with her friends, her family, her zombie pals... it's Kotaro who we see checking his phone to hear of an incoming snowstorm the night of the Arpino show. It's Kotaro we then see remembering his own past, and...
That's right. He was her classmate all along, back in 2008. Those words from the end of episode 11 sure do take on a different meaning now, huh? Anyway, here we go. It's one hell of a snowy night in Saga, but there's a big crowd gathered for the Arpino show. All the fans the girls have made over the weeks, all the people they've inspired and healed... they're all here to support the idol group they find inspiration from, weather be damned. Sakura's all ready along with everyone else, but that nervousness is still taking hold. Not stage fright. Fear of her own bad luck. There are so many people out there, and it's not just about letting down her own hopes, or even the hopes of Franchouchou any more. It's about letting them down with a bad luck show. Indeed, fate is playing for fucking keeps here, as snow begins to pile up on the eaves of the venue. Before Sakura can even get the first goddamn line of their opening number out of her, the weight of the snow has collapsed the eave and broken a window behind them. Sakura stumbles, but the rest of the girls keep going. Kotaro insists they be allowed to play on, and so they do.
Everything around them is fucking breaking, bad luck manifesting. You can feel it, can't you? Everything they worked for, all their hardships and hopes, karmic destiny determined to tear it to shreds, to melt the wings of these seven Icaruses for deigning to hope and dream and love. This was never going to work. They're just a bunch of dumbfuck zombies. As part of the goddamn stage itself collapses, knocking everyone down, Sakura lays there and finds herself back in that familiar place. She hoped, she tried, she failed, and now she regrets... and even worse, she knew it would happen. She brought them all down with her. She truly has no place in modern society... but then, in the stunned silence, the sound of a single man clapping in rhythm. Then, the sound of someone singing with no backing instruments. One by one, they all rise, singing along. Hey. Hey. Bad luck, karmic destiny, everything and anything that says zombies can't do this. Hey. Fuck you. Sakura remembers all the words of motivation her friends and Kotaro gave her, and as the crowd now claps in rhythm...
The lights hit back on, the music starts again, and the girls finish their song. It's one we've heard the beat to in the series before, but until now it has remained unsung. The song, Yomigaere, is poignant. It's literally a song about rising up and trying again, and that is the essence of the show. These girls got revived, to rise up and try again, and by God they're going to do it. With karmic destiny truly defied, Sakura remembers everything. Her sad sad life, and her second chance at it with her zombie friends. The girls finish their song to uproarious applause from their adoring fans, heading backstage as Sakura apologizes for everything. Kotaro chides them as the crowd calls for an encore, and they head on out to sing their next song, the closing number of Zombie Land Saga Season 1. As we see in the closing credits, even Iron Frill are watching a stream of the girls. Wow. Though Kotaro says they haven't saved any of Saga yet, this is indeed a victory for the girls. They lived, they died, they lived, they loved, and they won the first battle over their rotten luck.
 |
| Victorious. |
The battle is far from over. Bad luck and misfortune will strike Franchouchou again. Franchouchou will attack it aggressively. It's time for Revenge.
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