The Curse of SAGA

"With the beginning of the Reiwa era, Saga will face a cataclysmic threat. A cataclysm wherin no one will think of Saga anymore, and it will vanish from their memories."

- Jofuku, about the prophecy of the curse,

The Curse of the Saga Prefecture (佐賀の呪い Saga no noroi), also known as The Curse of Saga, is the primary antagonistic force which has plagued the Saga Prefecture since ancient times and continuing into the present day.

Its opposite is The Prosperity of SAGA, which blesses Saga's future saviors with prosperity. The curse ensures that any person who may bring prosperity to Saga will be struck down before doing so, effectively dooming Saga to a path of ruin and destruction.

Origins
The curse of Saga (as it is known in the Zombie Land Saga universe) is inspired by the historical accounts of Xu Fu, an ancient Chinese alchemist who allegedly visited Saga in his search for the elixir of immortal life. The curse also seems directly linked to Jofuku, as he is shown to visibly suffer as a direct consequence of its power.

The curse takes different forms throughout time. For example, during the Meiji era, the curse tricked people into war and destruction. In the late eighties, when there was a period of relative normalcy, the curse was embodied by sagako, curses with physical forms who terrorized the residents of Saga. In modern day, the curse appears as natural disasters and/or freak accidents targeting Franchouchou's ascension.

Description
A mysterious and malevolent force that aims to erase Saga at all costs. Jofuku has been fighting the curse for centuries, as the curse threatening Saga means that his life is also at stake. It is responsible for endangering the people of Saga and trying to make the prefecture cease to exist. Franchouchou's bad luck is partly due to the curse, doing whatever it takes to prevent them from succeeding and spreading Saga's name. Once its subtle manipulations reach the point of not being able to defeat Franchouchou, it begins to look for more direct attacks such as "natural" disasters.

Sagako Outbreak
When periods of prosperity increase, the curse can manifest itself individually through Sagakos, supernatural beings that curse areas in Saga with a high level of prosperity. Defeating a particular Sagako might provide immediate relief to an issue, but it doesn't address the underlying issue that caused Sagako to manifest in that form to begin with, so to effectively defeat a Sagako it must purify itself via onions that are grown on the Hyodo farm. The first manifestation of these beings was through a baby that was found by Tae's parents, they raised the baby in the laboratories of their university until the government found out and went in search of it, considering it a biological risk. The baby eventually transforms into a spider-like Sagako killing the people around it and disappears shortly after its appearance to manifest again in 1989. During these times the Sagako are increasing throughout Saga and the Sagako Busters team is formed, who are in charge of sealing these creatures in order to save Saga. The Sagako spider would manifest again through a storm which would destroy the Sagako Busters headquarters, this time with the difference that Magatsuhi controls this curse. After its appearance, Sagakos would stop appearing but instead, Magatsuhi with a kitsune mask begins to kidnap women with an unknown purpose.

Curse of Reiwa
Franchouchou itself was created by Kotaro Tatsumi as part of his Zombie Land Saga project, designed and ultimately purposed to defeat the curse and thereby save Saga. Because the curse promises to kill any individuals who may bring glory to Saga, the project is Kotaro's attempt to elude its power by producing an idol group made up entirely of undead zombies, since as zombies the curse cannot simply kill them again. The curse throws out everything it has to do to stop Franchouchou, including lightning, blizzards, and a devastating flood that destroys Saga. When neither of those works, it instead manifests an alien invasion.

Its entire goal is to make Saga fade into obscurity and eventually cease to exist as a concept, and while it does so primarily by killing people, it is also open to manipulating situations to mentally break people so that constant artificial deaths don't are necessary to destroy Saga. The curse basically turned Sakura into its own personal cosmic toy so that she would never achieve anything in life before it finally decided would lead her to a car accident, and the fact that Ai and Lily went far enough to startbringing fame and recognition to Saga, only to have both careers tragically cut short, which largely implies that it intentionally held back and gave some points of hope to the prefecture so that it could instigate some incidents that destroyed Saga reputation.

Abilities

 * Ominous Presence - The curse manifests its power in response to a threat, the greater it is, the more effort it will make to stop it, which means that when Franchouchou's group were ready for their concert at the EFS and it itself would bring Saga recognition, Saga's curse would not hesitate to use all its available power to stop the girls or even destroy Saga days before they achieve their objective.
 * Misfortune - Franchouchou's girls were cursed by the curse with bad luck, but being dead and with Kotaro on top of them, this bad luck is not effective, in fact the curse tried to take them to the sea and try to expose the girls multiple times during the last episodes because the curse does not want the people of Saga to have something to remember.
 * Accidents - The curse sees as a threat anyone who wants Saga to be more popular, so it will generate accidents or small or large inconveniences that will hinder Saga in his progress.
 * Deaths - It is implicit in these season 2 episodes that memory is the factor that allows Saga to persist, not its official recognition as a prefecture, because committing an assassination against Saga's rebels effectively reduced the number of people who remember Saga in their hearts. The death of the girls is the last measure of the curse to end anyone who dares to interfere with Saga's popularity.




 * Natural Disasters - Shown in the latest Revenge episodes, Saga's curse is capable of causing natural disasters that will surely have killed multiple people.
 * Storms - When the curse decides to attack with force, it manifests storms that can attack the entire Saga or a specific area in order to finish off its targets.
 * Snowfalls - Snowfall only occurs in winter months, where the curse unleashes heavy snowstorms to stop Franchouchou.
 * Supernatural Beings - When the curse gains enough power from its counterpart, it can choose to physically manifest itself to make its job of eliminating Saga more effective.
 * Sagako - Spawn demons in Saga to destabilize the area and prevent people from thinking of Saga Prefecture. It can literally manifest itself as an alien ship in response to Franchouchou's benefit concert that became popular in various countries.
 * Magatsuhi - The God of Disaster, who manifests when he has enough power from Sagako and can deal heavy damage to Saga just by appearing once. This demon god searches for specific targets in order to regain 100% of his former powers.
 * Possession - TBA
 * Apocalypse  - The end of the world predicted by Jofuku.

Weaknesses

 * Onions Hyodo.pngOnions - Onions are the method of sealing in Sagako's demons, a physical manifestation of Saga's curse that attempted to end the prefecture in 1989-1999 .  Thanks to the power granted by Saga's prosperity, these onions can seal Sagakos indefinitely.
 * Memory - Saga's collective memory is what allows Jofuku and possibly the girls to exist. This is Kotaro's plan and that is the way Kotaro plans to save Saga and why it has to be the way he is doing it, if all mankind remembers Saga, it is impossible to destroy her from people's hearts And since the curse only operates in the Saga area, it will be impossible for it to do anything.

Presence
The curse doesn't just need to kill, it just needs to negatively impact the area.

Season 1

 * Episode 1 - The truck driver that killed Sakura claims he was blinded by a sudden flash of light when he turned himself in for manslaughter, as revealed in the end credits scene of “Episode 17”.
 * Episode 2 - Ai and Junko didn’t listen to Sakura and the three almost got shot by Policeman A. Later on, their identities as zombies are revealed during their performance, though, they were able to cover it up just as quickly.
 * Episode 3 - Their guerrilla performance was a bust.
 * Episode 4 - They lost the sponsorship from the unnamed pharmaceutical company.
 * Episode 5 - Despite doing well with the commercial shoot for Drive-in Tori and having Tae win the Gatalympics, their efforts were at naught since they ended up giving Drive-in Tori the publicity they planned on advertising themselves with.
 * Episode 6 - Ai and Junko’s quarrel causes a rift between the girls’ relationship regarding their fans.
 * Episode 7 - The girls are struck by lightning only for them to find out they are immune to its effects and have instead been upgraded by its voltage.
 * Episode 10 - A wild boar disrupts their “training in the mountains” montage.
 * Episode 11 - The flashbacks portraying Sakura’s life before her death was filled with misfortune.
 * Episode 12 - The snowstorm caused the roof of the stadium to collapse on the girls during their performance.

Season 2

 * Episode 14 - Frustrating White Ryu's radio by causing his station to lose popularity.
 * Episode 15 - Kotaro tries to separate Ai from the girls so they could stop depending on her too much. This catches the attention of Shiori Baba who tries to (re-)invite Ai to join Iron Frill.
 * Episode 17 - Kotaro sabotages the Japanese Got Talent twice to avoid drawing the attention of the curse, first with his interpretation of the mudskipper making the prefecture look bad and secondly sabotaging Lily's song by giving Light her song. When Light won, the curse didn't focus on the girls this time. Besides that Light emphasizes that nobody in Saga triumphs.
 * Episode 18 - Having Tae run errands for the week just makes Ookoba follow his instincts, revealing the girls' true identities after following Yamada all day.
 * Episode 19 - After accidentally knocking out Maimai Yuzuriha, Tatsumi brings her unconscious body over to the mansion, thinking she’s dead and makes her a temporary member of the group. Although her skills were good, she left the group on her own accord, thinking she needed to make the most of her life first.
 * Episode 20 - Kiichi Momzaki’s incompetence at his leadership skills accidentally causes a war within the prefecture.
 * Episode 21 - In an attempt to stop the rebellion, Itou attempts to get rid of Kiichi and Yugiri only to be stopped by her fatally injuring him, which subsequently led to Yugiri's beheading.
 * Episode 22 - The natural disasters are growing more prevalent as it has shown to have tried to off Kotaro twice in the present.
 * Episode 23 - The curse has tried to drown and kill Kotaro in different ways, but without success. It has also made Franchouchou homeless and without a place to practice the event
 * Episode 24 - Minor manipulations to prevent Franchouchou from reaching the stadium, causing it to constantly rain. However, it seems to have finally finds Kotaro's weak point, attacking his immune system, as he was seen coughing up blood after talking backstage with Franchouchou.

Zombie Land Saga Gaiden

 * Chapter 1 - Eikichi suffers a shoulder injury that prevents him from being a better baseball player.
 * Chapter 2 - A Sagako makes couples start fighting each other.
 * Chapter 3 - The Maryina club is attacked by Sagako due to its popularity.
 * Chapter 4 - Karatsu Burger stores begin to close due to the influence of the curse.
 * Chapter 6 - A Sagako prevents high school students from confessing, Takeo is repeatedly struck by this curse.
 * Chapter 7 - A Sagako on the coast and a missing Anna cause the group to weaken.
 * Chapter 8 - A storm seems to approach Saga, the Sagako is defeated.
 * Chapter 9 - The Sagakos multiply, the curse prospers.
 * Chapter 10 - The curse is powerful enough for Magatsuhi to manifest.
 * Chapter 11- Magatsuhi begins to recover its power and kills Higashino.
 * Chapter 12 - Sagako is born from a strange-looking orphan child, murdering the people at the hospital and Tae's parents in the process.
 * Chapter 13 - Magatsuhi manifests with a fox mask kidnapping women in the Takeo city, all between 20 and 40 years old. Hanako and Anna are also victims of this being.

Franchouchou and co.

 * Zombieland Saga - 01 - 02.jpgSakura Minamoto - Sakura's bad luck makes much more sense in the context of the curse. It wasn't because SHE was unlucky, the curse of the Saga prevented her from succeeding and pursuing her dreams, since then she would have saved the entire Saga, and the universe set out to make sure that didn't happen. And after trying and failing several times to discourage Sakura, only for her still not to give up, it finally decided that the only way to stop her would be to kill her. According to Arata's files, the driver of the truck was blind by a mysterious light and his truck, like a toy, was thrown at high speed towards Sakura killing her immediately. When Sakura proved to be physically unkillable due to her being a zombie, the curse tried to kill her in an emotional sense by recreating the incident that killed her and giving her amnesia, causing her to lose her memories of her time in Franchouchou and get depressed again and not want to continue. Though thanks to the efforts of her friends, Sakura was able to move on and finally regain her passion for being an idol as well as her memories of her.
 * Saki Nikaido - She is the leader of a biker gang who wants to take over the island of Kyushu and then her country. Saki was discovered alive at the crash site, but suffered severe lacerations from the crash and burns from the blast, and died approximately two hours later in hospital. The police suspected the involvement of a group called "Dorami", suggesting that the Saga police are as stupid as they are now, or Saki (if she was still aware) and/or Reiko Amabuki manipulated the details to avoid implicating other Dorami members. Due to her influence and the growth of the gang, the curse tried to stop Saki and as a last resort left her to die in a motorcycle accident which she initially survived, but leaving her alive for her gang to be traumatized by the accident, and stopping the project of them taking over Kyushu.
 * Ai Mizuno - Iron Frill is a very popular group and Ai is their center, a living legend. Her concert at Tosu Stadium (EEF) would be one of the biggest in the area. The curse killed her before the concert became a success and in a way that will leave a negative impact on the place, so no one wanted to remember the place, much less Saga. Even newspaper articles highlight the rarity of the incident as she was the only one affected by lightning.
 * Junko Konno - She has already become popular and well-known, a living legend similar to Ai. Junko's flight ("DSN Airlines Flight 842") appears to have crashed into the sea, as the Japan Coast Guard was responsible for recovery efforts, other glimpses of the article suggest the plane "broke up in two" around the middle of the fuselage, and that there was something strange in one of the parts of the fuselage. The curse was not afraid of collateral damage, as Junko was in a plane crash with hundreds of other passengers.Farewell S2E21.jpg
 * Yugiri - Victim of the curse or, more accurately, of an exchange. Kiichi was a nameless boy who wanted to get Saga back, but who became a potential victim of the curse (and politics) in the process. Meanwhile, Yugiri had friends in high places and her death was almost covered up and wiped off the map. If her death had been made public in some way and it had been made public that by helping a child to recover Saga, it was accidentally started caused a riot/attempted revolution. Saga would have gotten a lot of attention from that kind of news, like news worthy of a history book. The curse would have had a harder time keeping Saga "forgettable", preferably non-existent." This also implies that the wars that destroyed Saga after its prosperity were the fault of the curse itself in the area.
 * Lily Hoshikawa - She was a popular actress in Saga. She makes Saga popular and known for she goes against the intentions of her curse, so the curse killed her by taking advantage of her mother's weak heart condition and her hair as a trigger, triggering cardiac arrest.
 * Tae Yamada - The curse is already stopping her to "save Saga" by spawning Sagakos to stop her group, we still don't know anything about Tae, but most likely she was brutally killed by a very powerful curse.
 * Kotaro Tatsumi (attempted) - The curse has tried to kill him many times by trying to drown him in the sea and the bar where he is, as well as trying to crush him with a figure from Tosu's stadium. As of now, he has been shown coughing up blood once (and hid it from the girls), suggesting that he's not well on the inside.
 * Romero - Though it is currently unknown what caused his death, he is the first ever known zombie to be successfully resurrected by Jofuku.

Others

 * Mr. Hibiya - Who bought Yugiri and brought her to Saga, was the victim of the curse as he was someone very powerful and who could bring prosperity to Saga, he was killed from a "sudden illness".
 * Tae parents 4.PNGTae's parents - They were killed by the physical manifestation of the curse when they planned to bring prosperity to Saga Prefecture. Both unknowingly raised the first Sagako and when it manifested, it killed them indirectly.
 * Kiichi's father - Who was in the revolt of Saga and died at the hands of the enemy.
 * Sachika - She died shortly after giving birth to Lily due to her frail heart condition.

Influence
Since the gaiden manga takes place about three decades from the anime’s setting, there could still be people living in Saga who remember the times when monsters once roamed the prefecture and spread stories about them which explain why almost everyone who sees the girls in their zombie states immediately pegs them as monsters. As for the various reactions to the supernatural of the girls, that could depend on the age of the characters.

Cops and rappers, who were young adults, wouldn't have existed when Sagako were prevalent, but they would have heard stories of monsters attacking people in Saga, so when a group of reanimated corpses move around at night, naturally your reaction would be: get scared In the second episode, the audience at Saga's castle barely reacts to Tae's head falling off, which they could attribute to special effects. However, since they would have been old enough to live in Saga when the Sagako prevailed, it is possible that they recognized Franchouchou as something supernatural, but since they were clearly not hostile, with Tae just eating the squid and not chasing the humans and thanks to Sakura and Saki's performance that inspired them to make the most of their lives with their rap, they decided not to make a fuss about it. The Hinasaka president in the bathhouse, like the old ones, would have been living in Saga during the Gaiden manga. Unlike the old men who would see the girls on a more neutral stage at a performance, the lady of the company had the misfortune to see the girls at night with them seemingly acting hostile (yelling and chasing after her). The fact that the bathhouse was apparently the previous site of a Sagako attack, as depicted in the Gaiden manga, would have only reinforced the lady-in-waiting's fear that these "beings" were clearly malevolent. Then there is Maimai who immediately recognizes the girls as zombies and accepts them. As the police, she would have heard stories of supernatural monsters roaming around Saga. Unlike the policeman, who had no idea who these zombies were, Maimai recognized them as Franchouchou and, being a fan of them she had been regularly attending their concerts and thus was not afraid of them; It also helps that she wasn't wearing her glasses, so she couldn't see her zombie forms clearly, which made them seem less hideous. Ultimately, the kids at the shelter didn't think Franchouchou were real zombies at all, ironically compared to the older characters. Being young children, they would not have existed when the Sagako existed in Saga and their families may have avoided telling stories about the Sagako to avoid scaring them into not knowing that real monsters like zombies could exist outside of fiction. Like Maimai, they would have gotten used to Franchouchou not seeing them as a threat, plus the zombie reveal that takes place during a performance makes it easy for Franchouchou to pass it off as zombie makeup.

Relationship with the Bagua
The curse generates bad luck to those who curse, therefore they even Franchouchou's bad luck coughs were generated by the intentional curse or as a result of their deaths, this is because all the girls died or Butsumetsu on a bad day and therefore the by-product is that in post-life they have bad luck. But the eight girls had extreme bad luck, in Bagua philosophy, going too far to one extreme will take you to the other extreme, so the extreme bad luck of the girls really gives the group great luck to counter the effects of the curse of Saga.

The only people with good luck in the series are Kotaro and Tae, with Kotaro explaining his name change based on the Bagua system which gave him the good luck necessary to prevent Saga's curse from reaching him easily as it did with the girls. Tae for her part is shown in episode 16 that she has good luck to a surprising level since in one day she earned 20 million yen to pay the debt of the girls and Kotaro, so even with that excessive amount of good luck Curse found a way to kill her, surely in a brutal way.

Trivia

 * After being mentioned by Jofuku in the anime, the curse manifests a devastating storm that destroys Saga and leaves Jofuku incapacitated.
 * It does not appear to be a living being in the traditional sense, but rather a force of nature that can influence the events of Saga and its people.

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