WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Zombie Land Saga Revenge Episode 7, "Maimai Revolution SAGA," now streaming on Crunchyroll.
When talking about normal anime, the biggest spoilers usually involve characters dying. With Zombie Land Saga, however, the big spoiler is that a character is alive. In Zombie Land Saga Revenge Episode 7, Franchouchou gets its first living member: a clumsy high school girl named Maimai.
How does a living human join a zombie idol group? In Maimai's case, it's by being mistaken for a dead person. In an opening sequence paralleling Sakura's death-by-truck in the Season 1 premiere, Maimai breaks her glasses, accidentally goes into the men's bathroom and trips on a bar of soap dropped by none other than Kotaro. Afraid of being held responsible for the death, Kotaro's natural instinct is to drag her unconscious body back home and make her into a zombie. Before he can do that, though, the newly-announced Franchouchou Number Seven wakes up... and takes everything surprisingly well for a kidnapping victim surrounded by zombies.
Maimai is already a fan of Franchouchou; if you look back at previous episodes, you can actually see her among the crowds at the group's concerts. She takes the revelation that her favorite idols are all zombies in stride, even with Yugiri threatening to actually kill her to keep this knowledge secret. Maimai takes the situation as an opportunity to voluntarily join Franchouchou. Maimai shares the idols' goals of bringing attention to Saga, and though her clumsiness causes trouble in practice initially, she has the enthusiasm and determination to catch up to the rest of the group.
Maimai makes a strong debut as an idol, performing with Franchouchou at her high school's culture festival. Almost as soon as she announces she's joining Franchouchou, however, she just as suddenly decides to retire from the group -- her second song on stage is her last. Talking with Sakura before the concert made Maimai realize that what makes the zombie idols great is that they're reclaiming their lost lives after death. Maimai still needs to focus on her own life right now, so she just doesn't fit in with the rest of the group. She leaves Franchouchou with a parting gift: her color Tamagotchi, which excites eternal '90s kid Saki.
Though she wasn't a permanent addition to Zombie Land Saga's cast, Maimai's story was a fun diversion. The only criticism to be made is that the fan service in Episode 7 gets a little excessive; Zombie Land Saga is usually ridiculous in a clever way but just showing close-ups of Maimai's boobs while she's giving important speeches is a much less clever sort of ridiculous. Having a living idol in Franchouchou was unexpected, and her accepting her zombie cohorts for who they really are is a ray of hope as the reporter gets closer and closer to exposing their zombie identities to the public.
New episodes of Zombie Land Saga Revenge premiere Thursdays on Crunchyroll.
