Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

 “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” — William Shakespeare, Hamlet

This line from Shakespeare echoes with unexpected precision in Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead. At first glance, the anime appears to be a colorful zombie comedy, loud with splashes of blood and brighter splashes of paint. But read closely—truly closely—and Zom 100 reveals itself as a modern existential text, one that interrogates work culture, freedom, fear, and the meaning of being alive with the same seriousness found in classical literature. Beneath its playful surface lies a deeply literary meditation on survival, identity, and liberation.

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Life Before Death: Plot as Existential Allegory

The most radical move Zom 100 makes is this: the apocalypse is not the tragedy—corporate life is.

Akira Tendō’s life before the zombie outbreak is a quiet horror story. Trapped in an exploitative company, stripped of time, dignity, and selfhood, Akira exists in what Hannah Arendt might call a state of living death. When zombies finally flood the streets of Tokyo, Akira does not scream—he smiles. For the first time, he is free.

This inversion of expectations transforms the plot into an existential allegory. Like Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger or Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, Akira lives under a system that crushes individuality. The zombies merely externalize what society had already done to him: turned humans into mindless bodies driven by routine.

His “bucket list” is not childish escapism; it is a manifesto. Each item is an assertion of agency, a declaration that life must be lived consciously, even—especially—when death is everywhere.

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Akira Tendō: The Anti-Hero of Modern Literature

Akira is not a traditional heroic figure. He is exhausted, traumatized, and emotionally hollow at the beginning—closer to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa than to a conventional shōnen protagonist. His transformation is not about gaining power, but recovering humanity.

Where classical tragic heroes fall because of ambition (Macbeth) or pride (Faustus), Akira’s suffering is born from obedience. His journey suggests a devastating truth:

In the modern world, conformity can be more destructive than rebellion.

His joy is radical. His laughter is resistance.

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Zombies as Symbol: Capitalism, Dehumanization, and the Crowd

Like George Romero’s zombie films or T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Zom 100 uses the undead as a metaphor for spiritual emptiness. These zombies are not just monsters—they are reflections of society itself: bodies moving without thought, purpose, or memory.

The anime repeatedly asks:

What is the difference between a zombie and a salaryman who has forgotten how to dream?

This question places Zom 100 firmly within the tradition of social critique literature, alongside Orwell, Dickens, and even Marxist readings of industrial society.

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Companionship, Ethics, and the Human Core

Characters like Shizuka Mikazuki introduce moral and philosophical counterweights. Logical, cautious, and rational, she represents the Enlightenment mindset—reason over impulse. Yet even she must confront the limits of pure rationality in a broken world.

Together, the characters enact a debate central to literature itself:

Is survival enough, or must life have meaning?

This question echoes Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, where the problem is not whether one can live—but whether one can live rightly.

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Why Zom 100 Is Literature

If literature is defined by:

• The exploration of human psychology

• Moral and ethical inquiry

• Symbolism and metaphor

• Reflection of social realities

Then Zom 100 qualifies without hesitation.

Like modern dystopian fiction, it critiques systems of power. Like existential novels, it centers freedom and choice. Like satire, it uses humor to expose painful truths. The medium may be animated, but the intellectual labour it demands is unmistakably literary.

To exclude anime from literary studies is not a scholarly decision—it is a generational blind spot.

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A Mirror to the Contemporary World

In an age of burnout culture, mental health crises, and performative productivity, Zom 100 speaks directly to the present moment. The anime resonates because many viewers recognize themselves—not in the zombies, but in Akira’s former life.

The apocalypse becomes a metaphor for what many secretly wish for:

a break from a system that consumes life without nourishing it.

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Conclusion: Storytelling Beyond Medium

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead proves that storytelling transcends form. Like Shakespeare’s tragedies or Orwell’s dystopias, it forces us to ask uncomfortable questions about how we live, what we value, and whether survival without joy is life at all.

Anime, when crafted with such narrative depth and philosophical clarity, does not merely entertain—it interrogates existence.

And in doing so, Zom 100 earns its place not just on screens, but on bookshelves of thought—standing proudly beside literature that has always sought to answer the same enduring question:

What does it mean to be truly alive ?

The Expendable Pawns: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as Prototypes of the Marginalized Asset

Initiative of the Blog

This blog post is written as part of the Thinking Activity assigned by Prof. Dilip Barad, focusing on the theme of marginalization in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The purpose of this blog is to explore how both writers, though separated by centuries, depict the exploitation and disposability of individuals within systems of power. Through a Cultural Studies perspective, this analysis moves beyond the personal stories of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to examine how larger political and economic structures—whether in the royal court of Elsinore or the modern corporate world—reduce human beings to mere instruments. By highlighting the expendable position of these two characters, the blog connects their fate in literature to the modern condition of workers who face similar marginalization in today’s globalized systems. Click here for Worksheet

The marginalization of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (R&G) in William Shakespeare's Hamlet provides a profound and enduring commentary on the mechanisms of power, hierarchy, and human disposability. A critical reading of this dynamic, through the lens of Cultural Studies, reveals striking parallels between the 17th-century royal court and the modern corporate system. By examining their role in Shakespeare’s tragedy and their transformation in Tom Stoppard’s existential tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, we can trace a continuous line of critique against systems that routinely exploit and discard the "little people," framing them as expendable assets rather than individuals with inherent worth.

1. Marginalization in Hamlet: The "Sponge" Metaphor

In Hamlet, R&G function less as fully realized characters and more as interchangeable instruments of the Crown. They are summoned to Elsinore by King Claudius’s directive, immediately positioning them as extensions of his power. Their lack of distinct identity—often confusing their names or being addressed as a single unit—underscores their collective subservience and marginality within the grand political drama.

This expendability is crystallized in Hamlet's famous dismissal of Rosencrantz as a "sponge":

“...A sponge, that soaks up the King's countenance, his rewards, his authorities.”

— Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 2

This scathing metaphor reflects the power dynamics of the play’s aristocracy: the "sponge" is valuable only for what it can absorb—the monarch’s favor and resources. Yet, as Hamlet warns, the King's ultimate intention is to “squeeze you” when he needs the contents. The power structure requires functionaries to absorb the details and dirty work but reserves the absolute right to destroy them once their utility is exhausted. Their subsequent, unceremonious execution abroad—met with a chilling, “They are not near my conscience,” from Hamlet—confirms their status as disposable political fodder.

2. Modern Parallels to Corporate Power

The fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern serves as a stark prefiguration of the modern worker’s vulnerability within multinational corporate systems. The core critique is that the distance and impersonality of royal power find their modern equivalent in the bureaucracy and indifferent scale of globalization.

The Bureaucratic Mandate:

When a multinational corporation decides to downsize or relocate a facility, the impact on individual workers mirrors the displacement of R&G. Like the courtiers, modern employees—often labeled "human capital"—are reduced to a resource on a balance sheet.

Impersonal Execution:

The decision to terminate thousands is made by distant executives based on impersonal financial metrics. The worker losing their job due to a spreadsheet calculation is the modern equivalent of R&G being sent to their execution via a sealed letter—a top-down, cold, bureaucratic mandate that utterly disregards the life and labor of the individual.

Economic Expediency:

Just as R&G were victims of a ruthless political expediency, contemporary workers are victims of a ruthless economic expediency that deems them replaceable.

3. Existential Questions in Stoppard’s Re-interpretation

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead profoundly deepens the critique of marginalization by shifting the focus from political victimization to existential alienation. Stoppard takes the characters' textual uncertainty in Hamlet—their confusion and their being lost in the larger plot—and makes it the very subject of his play.

The Indifferent Plot:

R&G are plagued by an inability to recall why they are there, where they are going, or even which of them is which. They are perpetually waiting for instructions, desperately trying to discern the “script” of their own lives from the main action happening offstage.

Powerlessness in Corporate Environments:

Stoppard emphasizes their search for meaning in a world indifferent to them to mirror the feeling of powerlessness in today’s corporate environments. In the 21st-century workplace, the sheer scale of global corporations often leaves employees feeling like cogs in an incomprehensible machine.

Contingent Purpose:

Stoppard’s characters face the terrifying realization that their purpose is entirely contingent upon others, reflecting the modern worker’s anxiety that their value and identity are wholly dependent on the unpredictable will of their employer. Their final, sudden disappearance underscores the ultimate, meaningless termination that can strike any worker whose utility is finished.

4. Cultural and Economic Power Structures

Comparing the two works reveals a significant evolution in the critique of systems that marginalize the "little people."

Hamlet (Shakespeare)	R&G Are Dead (Stoppard)	Resonance with Modernity
Critique Focus	Political and moral critique of an absolute monarchy.	Metaphysical and bureaucratic critique of an indifferent mechanism (a "script" or "universe").
Source of Insecurity	The individual tyranny of a powerful, corrupt figure (Claudius).	The anonymous, massive mechanism of a bureaucracy that transcends personality.
Contemporary Issue	Political betrayal; corruption of moral authority.	Job insecurity driven by algorithms, global supply chains, and financial speculation.

Stoppard’s existential take resonates profoundly with the modern condition: the source of insecurity is no longer a single king but a pervasive, anonymous system. His play captures the sense that one’s life is governed by rules, policies, and algorithms that no single person understands or controls, making the marginalization far more insidious and terrifying than mere political betrayal.

5. Personal Reflection: The Dispensable Asset

The parallels between R&G and the modern experience of being seen as a dispensable “asset” offer a crucial insight for Cultural Studies. Their narrative illuminates the concept of reification, where the human subject is transformed into an object, a resource, or, in corporate parlance, "human capital." The moment an individual is stripped of their unique narrative and defined solely by their utility, they become susceptible to the ruthless calculus of efficiency.

Studying these parallels forces one to look beyond the individual tragedy and recognize the systemic nature of marginalization. Cultural Studies gains valuable perspective by centering the narrative of the marginalized—giving voice to the "sponge"—and actively critiquing the cultural and economic language that attempts to normalize the view that some lives are merely footnotes to a greater power plot. The ultimate reflection is the sobering understanding that while the political costumes have changed, the fundamental architecture of power that values profit and expediency over human dignity remains tragically familiar.