Sarazanmai, Desire, and Judgment
(Slightly spoilery up through ep 7)
I've seen Sarazanmai referred to as "kink-shaming" a few times, and while I totally see where that's coming from, I feel like if anything, the narrative is going in the opposite direction. The zombies' desires are all kinky, absolutely, and yeah, they're always revealed in a jokey way, but at the same time—the problem in the story is not the kinks themselves, the problem is that they did bad things in the ways they acted on them. Which actions in many cases probably stemmed from the fact that they saw these desires as shameful things to keep secret, because that's… kind of a recurring theme of the show so far.
If anything, judging other people for their secrets basically never ends well. It's pretty much set up from the first episode: when Kazuki tries to steal the first zombie's shirikodama and the zombie protests, Kazuki's immediate response is 'it's your fault for having an embarrasing secret,' but the narrative immediately turns that attitude back on him as blatant hypocrisy when he's horrified by his own secrets getting leaked. After Kazuki's comment that first time, the only people in the shirikodama-stealing scenes saying 'oh no, this is shameful' are the zombies themselves. By contrast, the kids' reactions when they get the shirikodama and see the secret are always just flat-out 'oh, I see, this is what was going on here,' said in a tone that sounds (to me) more like dawning comprehension than judgment.
Actually, pretty much every time the kids are judgmental after that one instance, it's not about the zombies but about each other's secrets getting leaked, and it keeps getting turned back on them later. Tooi is weirded out by Kazuki's cross-dressing; oh, guess what, Tooi's box had a gun in it, which is maybe a bit bigger of a deal than Kazuki's cosplay. Enta is deeply freaked out by the reveals of Tooi's secrets and tries to paint him as Obviously Untrustworthy; now it turns out that Enta is… doing what Enta's doing. (Note: haven't seen spoilers for ep 8 at the time I write this, but I am assuming it's not going to go well.)
All the central trio have desires they've kept secret, and pretty much all their problems have arisen not from the desires themselves but from an inability to look at and act on them in a healthy way; they've all been driven to do stupid things, and bad things, to greater or lesser degrees of "bad." But things have a chance at getting better for them not when they stop desiring, but when they find a way to be more honest about what they want, and to find ways to balance their own desires with everyone else's.
Which makes sense, as the way we're told the shirikodama work paints desire (in whatever form it takes) as literally integral to human existence. People will always want what they want, and they'll always have things they want to keep secret; it's how they act on those desires that's good or bad, and that lets them strengthen their connections to others or isolates them further. It's through seeing everyone else's secrets that the kids are (hopefully) starting to understand this, I think, and—back to the zombies' kinks—the zombies feel to me like they're basically just one more piece of that puzzle.
