There was something refreshing about that. After all, we had already experienced the glut of zombie fiction in the late 2000s and early 2010’s from things like *The Walking Dead*, and recently saw *The Last of Us* assert itself as well. Given how stories sometimes try to justify its characters “having a deep purpose” for everything or insisting at some “deeper meaning” thematically within the material, *Zom 100* seemed to be a reminder that there is indeed a place for the wild and belligerent (if not also pig-headed) in entertainment. The show’s start seemed to celebrate the kind of B-grade joy that only this brand of slop (I use that term affectionately) could provide – lean into the joy of what you are, celebrate your liberation from important expectation, and go ham. Don’t concern yourself with having a point or a central argument to tie it all together. Embrace chaos and run with it!
And for Tendou Akira, he seemed to get that memo immediately. Having been nearly choked to death by his job and his boss, wrung dry from every ounce of life fluid within him, Akira nearly became another type of zombie himself. However, upon waking up and realizing that the world has changed with zombies running rampant both in the streets and his own apartment, he could not be happier! With his job at ~~OLM~~ his company effectively over, he sets out to do the things that he wants to do with the newfound sense of freedom. What other way could you celebrate than running like a madman, laughing at the change of fortune?
But naturally, it’s a zombie-infected country, so danger is just around the corner. Akira’s carefree and can-do attitude might be his MO, but it doesn’t quite translate to the most intuitive survival skills. It’s only after an encounter with Mikazuki Shizuka that involves just barely avoiding a rather painful greeting with a zombie-driven truck that he realizes that if he’s going to make the most of the time that he has left, he’ll need a list of things that he wants to do, even if it ends with his eventual infection. In the midst of this new understanding, he has a path ahead – and it involves more fun and crazy times.
This oscillation between the inherent over-the-top nature of the setting or situations and the tiny doses of cold reality gives *Zom 100* its life. The result is a strange kind of literally and metaphorically colorful funkiness to the whole, leaving the question behind of what type of preposterous happening will occur next. Akira is kept sober enough to realize that sometimes you cannot just go do whatever the heck you want, but not so sober that he doesn’t get preoccupied with his own vain desires and wants. Contrasted with Shizuka’s pragmatism, their dynamic (punctuated by Ryuuzaki Kenichirou and Beatrix Amerhausen) offers a steady string of collisions to roll the eyes and provide a chuckle. *Zom 100* doesn’t always manage to strike the balance perfectly, but it happens well enough to give the push the material needs to get on its merry way.
However, as the world expands beyond Akira’s gaze and intersects with the others around him, the material at times decides that pleasantries and laughter must be put on ice in exchange for rumination about life. In a manner that feels wholly antithetical to how it conducted itself at first, we take the time to get to know, or be reintroduced, to brief characters that are likewise trying to live their own lives in the midst of the zombie world. Yet, each of these encounters MUST tie into the historical past or the past / present anxieties of a main character like Akira or Shizuka, which screech the established tone to a halt. The sense of B-grade fun and kinetic energy that comes with the knowing wink that you should “just go with it” is thus replaced with something meant to be taken more seriously.
*Zom 100* is a series that, in one episode, will have the characters trying to stop a gigantic zombie shark from eating everyone, and then one episode later involves a dive into a character's darker psychological trauma and torments. It will ask you to buckle your seatbelt when Akira runs like a crazy person out of his apartment exalted at the new reality before him, then try to endear a one-off flight attendant character to "convey a message" to make you stop and appreciate the melancholy of it all. It handles lunacy far better than drama. *Zom 100* essentially employs whiplash as a deliberate storytelling tool between its episodes, but does not wield it effectively enough since it cannot fully commit to either tone it’s aiming for, leaving the material in an odd in-between suspension about what it really wants to do.
This in-betweenness also makes its way into the colorful aesthetic that was a central attraction before. It’s become well-known that the series, like several others released this year, fell victim to production delays due to either overambitiousness or an inability to get everything finished properly, if not occasionally both. Just a few days after episode one aired, Sakugablog already published an article expressing ambivalence about the production and whether it could even survive the seemingly-impossible standard that had already been set. The manifestation of such problems was already coming before the delay inevitably hit – the show’s visual identity was phased out in exchange for something markedly more run-of-the-mill, as though the shift to “more mature” storytelling accompanied the resulting change. It was not a wholesale replacement, but compared to what came before, it felt less like the absurd romp it once was.
The delays however are only the touch of bold print. Regardless of whether the delay happened or not, at the end of it all, *Zom 100* couldn’t uphold its own sense of hammy freneticism and wackiness because that somehow wasn’t enough for it materially. It slammed on the gas pedal with reckless abandon, then eased up while deciding to admire the scenery, and then thought to stop and take the time to dramatically ask what it all means for a character traumatized by their past. It didn’t need to be something that has a meaning; it just needed to be. But by trying to find meaning and pathos, it got greedy and textually collapsed in the process.
I miss the zombie shark.
