Sakura Minamoto

Sakura Minamoto is the former classmate of Kotaro Tatsumi and the main protagonist of Zombie Land Saga. She is also the first zombiefied human to gain consciousness out of the seven girls. She is the center of the idol group Franchouchou, with no legendary title as of yet, and is only known as Number 1. Sakura has straight , dark pink hair that extends past her shoulders. Part of it is tied up in a side ponytail with a blue and pink ribbon. Her eyes are a crystal blue. She sports a curvaceous figure that is proportionally identical to those of Tae Yamada, with only slight differences by sheer numbers mostly due to their height difference. She normally wears her school uniform which consists of a blue and white dress with white socks and brown loafer shoes. Like the other zombies, Sakura's skin color is grayish blue. She has a large scar on her forehead, some bandages that cover part of both legs, and also has a bandage on the left hand. This reflects the injuries she sustained when she was fatally hit by a truck. She keeps her usual school uniform but it is more rumpled. Sakura's idol outfit changes throughout the series: On the first 6 episodes she wore a dress with a pink t-shirt with the inscription of "number 1" in Japanese, a short pink padded skirt and blue tennis shoes with white knee-high stockings. After Saga Rock, her outfit changed to a red, argyle, short-sleeved blazer over a white, collared shirt, with a pink bow as a tie, a pink padded skirt, and black mid-calf boots detailed with the same red argyle as the blazer. She has proven to be incredibly talented in many fields. Sakura is shown to have had great potential in sports, as evidenced by her training hard enough to be the fastest runner in her age group in preparation for a relay race. One of her friends goes so far as to sat that she was pretty good at sports in general. She is also show to be promising academically, managing to get very high marks during the mock exams for the best high school in Saga. In fact, with the revelation that her death was caused by The Curse of SAGA, she was such an ace that the curse immediately saw her as a great threat with huge potential to revitalize the prefecture if she tried. Sakura adored Iron Frill, particularly Ai, in life. Ai's "never-say-die" attitude, as well as her performances, brought Sakura out of the learned helplessness and severe depression brought on by her many failures. Before she died, Sakura's attitude was similar to hers but due to the misfortunes of her life, she adopted a rather pessimistic attitude to the point that all her social interactions disappeared because she only focused on herself. She refused to go with her companions because she thought that she would fail no matter how hard she tried, but Iron Frill managed to inspire her, making her regain her hope. Her entire life before her death was a series of misfortunes that inhibited any progress toward a successful life. Her activities in athletics, education, etc. They were arrested by seemingly random phenomena like injury and illness, and, when she finally managed to regain some of her positivity, a truck killed her. The fact that this is all due in part to Saga's curse makes it appear that she is a cosmic pawn. Sakura is shown as an energetic young woman when she was still alive. However, that enthusiasm seemed to turn to confusion, anxiety, and fear after she regains consciousness as a zombie. She becomes very passionate, though, when she gets to sing to an audience like an idol. She is the most normal of all the zombies, being an ordinary high school student rather than a living legend at the time of her death. The first episode also has her as bewildered as the audience about the series' ridiculous premise. She understandably spends time asking a lot of questions, making her a surrogate audience for those less informed about the idol industry. Sakura serves as the emotional anchor that holds the group together. Notable examples include convincing the rebellious Saki to stay aboard Kotaro's plans despite their shared misgivings, inspiring Ai and Junko to restart their careers after seeing her determination to succeed, and helping Lily reconcile with her father after her death. Yugiri explicitly mentions it in Episode 12, stating that without Sakura, the strong wills of the others would have caused the group to fall apart much sooner. Sakura is overall very kind, emotional, empathetic and caring; her natural kindness makes her bond easily with others. However, just because she's nice and also somewhat naive doesn't mean she's a punching bag either. In Episode 2, after getting tired of Saki, Ai, and Junko's behavior during her performance, she does not hesitate to hit Tae's head from Saki's hands and verbally assaults them in a rap. In Episode 10, Sakura finally loses her patience with Kotaro's crazy ideas and attacks him after meeting her with a wild boar in the snow outdoors and then towards her groupmates for seemingly fooling around. Sakura took the time to take care of Tae, teach her movements, dress her and interact with her to the maximum of the entire cast. This has few, if any, negative implications for Sakura, and Tae is shown to be extremely grateful for Sakura's efforts in the season finale when she attempts to lift Sakura out of her own depression. Episode 10 shows how her determinism becomes a flaw when working in a group: she get so excited about something, she go ahead without stopping to consider anyone else, and if she cannot see how what others are doing is directly relevant to what she is doing, she thinks they are wasting their time, missing whatever hidden lessons there may be. While Sakura had forgotten her constant bad luck and the details of her death, she remembered being motivated by Ai and was just as joyful as she was at her introduction. She spends the entire series trying to regain the memories of her and finally does so at the end of the tenth episode, after being hit again by a truck. However, she loses all recent memories of her with Franchouchou and, worse, relapses into her deep depression from her constant misfortune. Sakura wakes up looking alive and finds herself in the mansion with no memory of how she got there. She scans the place only to be seemingly attacked by a hungry zombie, her attempt to escape her leads her to a room full of even more zombies, and she takes a poker to defend against her as they wake up and approach her. Upon finally leaving the mansion, she runs into the policeman she met the first night she was terrified of her zombie appearance, before Kotaro came to rescue him knocking him unconscious. At the end of the season, she recovers all of her post-mortem memories of her, giving him a full perspective on her identity. During the second season it is shown that now she is a fundamental part of the group, and that thanks to her actions of taking care of the rest of the group, they have been able to spend this month working to pay the great debt of her failure. In addition to taking it into her own hands to help Kotaro with depression and trying to talk to him so that he can go back to the girls and be his manager again. Although she has less prominence throughout the second season, with her memories of life and as a zombie she is more than willing to continue fulfilling her dream of being an idol despite the fact that she is dead, and she will not mind facing heaven and hell to achieve her dream in life and save Saga.