Zom 100: Zombie ni Naru made ni Shitai 100 no Koto has taught me that people don’t know what “dystopia” means anymore. For the last 5ish years, I’ve seen a lot of complains on why the generic isekai we get by the dozens are popular, but I find the answer to that question very obvious: escapism, as they provide an outlet for MC-kun to get free from the burdens of the real world, and enter a fantasy world where he can do whatever he wants, while the high school age viewers places themselves in his place. Zom 100 offers the same idea but for the working age viewer, with the zombie apocalypse replacing the travel to another world, showing our working-class MC-kun being able to do whatever he wants now that he’s free from his work so the overworked viewer can self-insert on him.

As a direct result of its escapism angle, the series isn’t actually horror, having a lot of light hearted moments and comedy to make it look like this is a superior lifestyle, which backfires on it hard because the comedy in this series is atrocious, I’m talking about “going naked is funny” and “fart jokes” levels of bad comedy, I wanted to slam my head on a wall when they unironically showed a zombie farting as if it was a punchline. This same light tone also undermines all the serious moments, not helped by the fact the series suffers from “getting character development means you’ll die” syndrome, so you get a scene painted as tragic because a character we barely knew is a zombie followed by the cast laughing at silly jokes. I’m a big fan of the style of Hiroyuki Imaishi, and one thing his series manage is to strike a balance between the serious character moments and the absolute batshit insanity going on around them, but this series clearly has no idea how to do that, as the tonal whiplash here is so jarring even Code Geass and its constant back and forth between racial politics and waifus eating pizza feels more balanced.

MC-kun, named Akira this time, is a self-insert character, as unlike any other person or even the other characters in the same show, he shows absolutely no horror or regret at the idea of the world ending in a zombie apocalypse, instead being happy that he doesn’t have to work anymore, obviously a tool to enable the escapism aspect of the premise. This behavior is just downright nonsensical, as we have no explanation or thematic point made by Akira acting like the death of most of humanity is his comfort catalyst, and in fact makes him come across as a sociopath rather than the sympathetic character the narrative tries to paint him as, something that’s very notorious in episode 3 where contrasted against his friend who has a far more logical reaction to seeing everyone around him turning into murderous monsters. A character acting in an extreme way CAN be done well, as shown by Shirou in Fate/stay night and Shu in Ima Soko ni Iru Boku, but only if said behavior is done to make a thematic or moral point, something that’s not the case here, as there’s really no clear reason for him to act like that beyond making it #SoRelatable to the viewers who also feel overworked. Also, what’s up with the fact he doesn’t even look like an adult? If you showed me his design with no context, I’d say he’s 15, and even watching the show he acts just like I’d expect an anime teen to do it.

The other characters aren’t really much better. Kencho has no character at all beyond being the comic relief, and by that I mean that he’s an obnoxiously loud idiot who clearly doesn’t know how to deliver jokes, with getting naked seriously being the best he can come up with in terms of comedy, just to put into perspective how poor the overall comedy of this series is. While I think that Shizuka was passable, given she seems to be the only sensible person here, she’s mostly used as a strawman damsel in distress despite her supposed capabilities to highlight how cool our MC-kun is, leading her to be a fanservice source at best. Bea is a westerner obssessed with Japanese culture - that's her entire character, everything around her revolves around being a weeb, and once again she's just a tool to provide some extra fanservice.

An aspect for which I wanted to give this series points, however, is the visuals. We live in an age of seasonal shows that all are filled with so much cost cutting like CloverWorks works being filled with blurriness, and the idea of what good animation is has been reduced to just “flashy visuals” rather than having any appreciation for the technical aspects with MAPPA churning out disaster after disaster that isn’t well animated to anyone who knows of animation but looks flashy so it gets called “good animation” by those who don’t know, making Zom 100 a show that stands out in this landscape because it actually tried. The first episode didn't have the generic simple shots made to save money, it had an actual visual identity, something that’s such a rarity in modern anime that I can see why people act as if this was groundbreaking, even if in reality it’s more of a minimum to look good, at least when they don’t use CGI, that still looks bad even here. However, this “carried by the animation” angle was only at first, as each episode got uglier and uglier to the point it got rid of much of the praise points I could give it, as it looked like any other anime by its later half, which very likely relates to its now infamous troubled production and grueling working crunch. Given that from what I read, this new studio BUG FILMS was created by people who felt overworked on their previous work at OLM, and the evils of overwork being the main theme of the series, the fact this new studio now perfectly reflects the very type of company the anime criticizes is incredibly hypocritical.

Overall, this series is just a failure all around, it fails at being entertaining, it feels at giving social commentary on Japanese work culture, it fails at being funny, it fails at building actual characters, and most importantly, it fails as an anime production, with its terrible development hell that postponed the last batch of episodes for months being a perfect example of the terrible state the anime industry is in nowadays.

Thank you for reading