2.3: RIP, The Secret Of Our Undead Lives And The Dehumanization Of Thinking, Feeling Zombies!
Now we're delving into the real crunchy stuff, y'all. The first five episodes of this season are all pretty good, and gave us some fun things to look at and talk about. The next seven episodes of the season all call back and respond to what came before in various ways, and we'll be looking at them for the rest of the analysis. We'll talk about episodes 6 and 7 this time, and though things in 6 are going to echo out to the rest of what's to come, they make quite a pairing. I promised you terrifying threat of narrative collapse, and not just in the last post. It's been hanging over us since the end of Season 1, with that post-credits tease of Ookoba the reporter musing over pictures of Ai, Junko, and Lily and comparing them with the Franchouchou girls. The implicit and terrible threat of what would happen if someone learned the truth; if someone learned that the girls of Franchouchou were zombies. It's going to happen. It's imminent. It will happen, and it is going to happen in episode 6: Tae Yamada's very own episode.
Tae Yamada, if you'll recall, is the still-unawoken stereotypical moaning groaning zombie girl "voiced" by legendary VA Kotono Mitsuishi, who among other things voiced Sailor Moon herself. There's a lot of possibilities with the concept of giving Tae her very own episode: will she awaken? Will we learn the details of her mysterious past? None of this happens. No, this episode is just a slice of life sort of thing as Tae is sent out to go get groceries and ends up in a series of misadventures. All of this happens while Ookoba, who's still very curious about Franchouchou and how almost half of them are lookalikes of famous dead media personalities, starts tailing Tae on her leisurely day out in search of a scoop on the most mysterious Franchouchou member of them all. As Ookoba memorably puts it for us:
For a day out attempting to shop for groceries, Tae has a wild one. Helping this zombie do her shopping at the grocery itself is Maria, the current leader of the Dorami biker gang who we've seen before. Dorami's now become a dance team, Maria having gotten inspiration from seeing Saki's moves on stage. This way, Reiko won't worry about her so much, and they might even share a stage with Franchouchou some day. After getting the groceries for Tae, Maria's pals come to pick her up after her shift for a dance-off, and Tae tags along. There's a whole bunch of cute callbacks to Season 1, including that pharmacy lady who got traumatized by the zombies in one of the episodes I didn't really cover, but the gist of things is that the damn chicken man shows up again to dance off and Tae hops on stage to try and gnaw on him, which is taken as a dance challenge, which Tae wins by doing a headstand and spinning her body while her head remains motionless on the ground. Zombie skills. Tae wins a bunch of money, but tries to give it to Maria and Maria won't accept. Then that dumbass cop shows up and suggests that if they don't want to keep the money, he'll show them how to spend it... leading them to a boat race betting track.
Who should be at the track but Maria's former rivals, the members of the biker gang Kurosuke? They're not here to start a ruckus, though. Their boss is a boat racer now, working to chase the dream of ultimate speed after losing chicken to Saki. The only problem is, she hasn't been able to win a single race. Through a whole bunch of random happenstance, Tae sucks ink out of a pen and sneezes onto the betting card before placing her bet, imitating what everyone else is doing. What follows is a thrilling boat race in which Kurosuke's boss sees Maria in the stands, and gets the motivation and drive to successfully pull off a tricky turn right at the end of the race, winning it to the cheers of Kurosuke. It's when Maria and Dorami see Tae's bet that they nearly pass out from sheer shock. Tae won 30,000 yen from the dance-off, and she bet it all on the Kurosuke boss who hadn't won a single boat race before now. As such, the odds were 66,700 to 1 against. Tae Yamada, through some sort of divine coincidence of sheer prosperity, just hit the jackpot to the tune of about 20 million yen. Maria takes Tae home with her winnings, and everyone promptly loses their shit. Tae even loses her head, but Sakura manages to slap it back on before Maria notices. 20 million yen! That's enough to pay off Franchouchou's EFS debt in an instant! What a joy! What prosperity! What a blessing!! Everything's going great for Franchouchou. Unfortunately...
Well, here we are. A season and a half in, and someone else knows. The reporter Ookoba knows that Franchouchou are a bunch of fucking zombies. The show does not do anything directly with this until episode 10, where Ookoba will confront Kotaro directly with the truth. It's what the show does in between Ookoba finding out and that confrontation between Kotaro and Ookoba that really adds context and flavor to Ookoba's beliefs, words, and deeds. Before he can properly express a flawed worldview, the show takes a quarter of its runtime to debunk and vilify that worldview in the most beautiful and moving detail. Let's not mince words, you and I. When I started this project, way back at the end of January, I made a melodramatic metaphor out of the show reaching a hand from the grave and grabbing me to insist I write about it. This three-episode stretch is what fucking did it. Lest you think the final three are lacking in power, just you wait. I uncovered some really good parallels thanks to my research. I also uncovered some terrible fucking forces in my research, but shhhh. We worry about those at the end. It's time for episode 7. It's time we met... Franchouchou's Biggest Fan.
On the opening to episode 7, we are introduced to yet another girl. Maimai Yuzuriha, 16 years old, a Franchouchou fan and a bit of a klutz who manages to trip and crack her glasses while on the way home from school. She rolls with the punches, deciding to head to the public baths for something relaxing after a long day. Unfortunately, with her busted glasses she misreads the signs and wanders into the men's bath area, where Kotaro just so happens to be washing up. Kotaro drops his bar of soap as Maimai strides in, and she slips on it, flying up into the air as the same death metal wails which welcomed us to the show on Sakura's death blare. Maimai smashes down onto the hard tiled floor of the bath, motionless, and... we cut to the zombie dungeon meeting room, focused on a humanoid figure wrapped in towels as Kotaro nervously mumbles about the newest member of Franchouchou.
Ahem. If I may. Jesus FUCKING CHRIST. Now, to reassure you, Maimai isn't dead. That reassurance comes soon enough when the mysterious toweled figure gets up and starts running around in confusion, at the horror of everyone else. The show just skirted the edge of the really dark joke of Kotaro's dumb slip-up causing the death of another human and him covering it up by reviving her as a fucking zombie. Good sweet lord. So yeah. Maimai's not dead. Now all that Kotaro's done wrong is a kidnapping! Wait, that's not that reassuring at all when I say it like that. Jesus. Shit. Son of a bitch. Well, it gets worse. In the flailing panic struggle of Maimai running around in confusion, she knocks Sakura's head off just as the towels come free, and so Sakura's head lands in her hands. For the second time in as many episodes, someone else knows that Franchouchou are zombies. Once they get Maimai some of Sakura's spare clothes to wear, they have a little meeting to try and sort this out, and then it happens. Yes, Ookoba found out that Franchouchou were zombies just last episode, but the show hasn't shown us how he feels about that yet. Maimai finally makes them, and for the first time in this show's history we get a reaction to their true selves.
You see? This is the kind of shit I live for. I spent so much time in January, all those months ago, watching zombie apocalypse hellscapes. I watched people prove the worst of humanity in a crisis, becoming no better than the supposed "monsters" outside at the gate. I watched trigger-happy bigots cackle with glee at societal collapse, now that there was an excuse to shoot people that aren't like them in the head indiscriminately. I watched institutions fall, squabbling and hypocrisy rampant as they desecrated the walking dead as things to be taunted and put down while also being infuriated at the desecration of their own dead in the name of advance for a better tomorrow. I watched zombies be demonized, otherized, and destroyed even as one brilliant mind had glimmers of a better tomorrow in his eyes. It didn't arrive until his lifetime, but here it is. Here's the better tomorrow George Romero was able to half-envision for the zombie he helped popularize.
Maimai Yuzuriha, 16 year-old girl in the sleepy backwater prefecture of Saga, stares at seven members of the walking dead, undead shambling corpses across the table from her... and she accepts it with mild surprise. No screaming in terror, no brandishing a poker to keep these monsters from eating her fucking brains. Her idols were zombies, and she's surprised only because they're all so cute and pretty on stage. It's okay. I don't know for sure if there are any popular bits of zombie media that have such utopian acceptance baked into them. I would like to hope that someone else other than this show is playing with that. Taking a grim and gritty horror monster that's been done to death, and making it better. That's material social progress, and in one sheepish smile Maimai Yuzuriha is infinitely more accepting than Robert Kirkman, Zac Snyder, and countless others. Nonetheless, our girls still have to play it safe. They can't exactly run out without makeup and say HELLO WORLD! IT'S US! or anything like that. So, Kotaro humbly asks Maimai to keep their secret... and Maimai's response is to ask to join Franchouchou.
Ah yeah. There's an actual episode of television happening here, and it's one that's very much about Maimai getting to know the real Franchouchou. No, not just the fact that they're all zombies, but their hard-working nature and their never-give-up attitude. Maimai at first seems to have much the same; she has no formal training, but she's memorized all of Franchouchou's songs and dance moves. Unfortunately her feet can't keep up with her body, and so it's a rough first day of stumbling around trying to replicate the dance moves of a honed idol group, but Maimai has spirit and determination in spades if nothing else. At the end of the day, sun setting over Saga as Sakura walks with Maimai, Maimai explains how she came to find Franchouchou. She'd given up hope for Saga and its prosperity, the poor obscure prefecture out at the back end of Japan, until she saw an article in a magazine about them. She was there, at the Arpino, when Sakura and Franchouchou rose up to try and defy their own bad luck, and seeing that live on stage... well...
Wow. Ain't that moving and wonderful to think about? It's like a cycle of positive inspiration. Ai helped inspire Sakura out of her gloomy funk, and Sakura eventually grew to be an idol in her own right... one who would end up inspiring Maimai and breaking her out of her own little shell of hopelessness. It's a lovely sentiment of passing down hope and positivity throughout the generations, and keep in mind that Ai inspired Shiori to rise to the heights of Iron Frill as well. I have to wonder, then; who or what inspired Ai to become an idol herself? Did she see a popular idol group from the 90's and take her own positive inspirations from them? Who can say for sure... but I know what Maimai can say. Even more stuff about Franchouchou being great and not monsters.
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She just said it. It doesn't matter that you're zombies. You're the same as living folks. Exquisite. Absolutely exquisite. Maimai, I'm starting to like you more and more. It's at a school meeting, where her council is struggling to think of ideas for their upcoming festival, that Maimai gets an idea. Let's invite Franchouchou! Kotaro approves of the idea, wanting to get their profile out to an idol group's usual core demographic, and Maimai is going to be the star of the show. This will be the rebirth of Franchouchou as an 8-girl group! As they tour Maimai's school to get a sense of the place, Sakura and Maimai have another chat wherein Sakura answers the question of what she was like in high school by matter-of-factly stating she was kind of dead inside. Still, she lets Maimai know about everything we learned about the true Sakura at the end of Season 1 of the show. How she was depressed because of miserable luck, how Ai and Iron Frill inspired her to try again, how she died before she could send in her application. Still, though, now that she's a zombie she can try new things and take on new challenges, even their big revenge at the EFS. Maimai is taken aback by that last one, wondering why in the holy fuck Franchouchou would want to wade back into the hellscape of their most horrific bomb yet again... and Sakura replies.
In that moment, Maimai Yuzuriha, Franchouchou's biggest fan, has learned everything about the group she idolizes. Not just that they're zombies, but the sheer depths of their determination and drive. Franchouchou perform their show, introducing their brand-new girl, No. 7, to the surprise of the students. Maimai steps up after their song to introduce herself... and promptly announces she'll be graduating from Franchouchou after the show. So, for No. 7's swan song, they perform... the ending theme from season 1. It's so lovely to hear this be an actual song in-universe, as it was a poignant ending theme that always stirred a chord in me. As Maimai explains to her bandmates, her idols, her new friends...
Maimai Yuzuriha. 16 years old, a klutz and a Franchouchou fan... but a Franchouchou fan who understands them deeper than most. Again, it's not just that she knows their secret. She knows them, and is going to do what fate never allowed them to do. She's going to live well, grow and change into a fine person, and enjoy her life to the fullest for herself and for them. Franchouchou, in turn, idolize her right back for this. Their secret is safe with her, and she'll go on idolizing them... but the heart and soul of saving Saga? It's beating in the living heart of Maimai, and that to me is what "saving Saga" is all about. Good on you, Maimai. Live well. Love well. Run fast. Be kind. That's all. Of course, that's not quite all. The end of episode 7 reminds us that Ookoba knows too, and now he's dug up articles relating to the tragic deaths of all of Franchouchou. That's looming over us, a dark storm moving in to encircle us. Before that, though, we're going to retreat into an age long past, to witness a utopia squashed before it could bloom.
Back to Meiji-era Japan, and the story of Yugiri and the Saga Incident.
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