Zombie Stage Explained: The AU, the Story, the Round 1 Duel

Zombie Stage is the first officially announced alternate universe of VIVINOS’s Alien Stage — the Korean YouTube animation project that has quietly become one of the most influential fan universes of the last five years. Round 1 arrived on 26 June 2026 and did over 8.7 million YouTube views in six days. If you are here because a friend, TikTok comment, or algorithm dropped the words “Candy Scar” in front of you, this guide will get you from confused to caught-up in roughly ten minutes.

What is Zombie Stage?

Zombie Stage is a series of animated music videos produced by STUDIO LICO with music by SCALAR (Rubyeye, C!naH) and creative direction by VIVINOS. It is set in the same multiverse as Alien Stage but with one crucial premise flipped: instead of eliminated performers being killed and forgotten, they are reanimated and forced to keep performing.

That single change reshapes everything. The elegant, brutal singing competition of Alien Stage becomes something closer to a horror show. Zombies are the entertainment. Living aristocrats pay to watch the dead sing. And the winners are not the ones who survive the round — they are the ones who die last.

Round 1 launched with two songs:

• Candy Scar — the duel between Mizi and Sua
• The Dressing Room — the pre-battle ballad heard in the same episode

Both songs are on the Zombie Stage OST Part.1, released simultaneously with the video.

The AU, explained

For readers new to VIVINOS, an AU (alternate universe) is a canonically endorsed re-imagining of the original story. It is not fanfiction — it is officially authored, and in the case of Zombie Stage, produced with the same studio, the same voice actors, and the same musical team.

VIVINOS has publicly confirmed a plan for ten total AUs within the Alien Stage multiverse. Zombie Stage is the first. Each AU takes the same core cast (Mizi, Sua, Isaac, Hyuna, Till, Luka, Ivan) and drops them into a different world with different rules. Because the characters carry across universes, fans get to see how each identity refracts through a new setting — and the emotional stakes stay familiar even when the world changes.

Zombie Stage is set on the same planet as Alien Stage, in what is best understood as a parallel timeline rather than a sequel. In this timeline, the arena’s technology to preserve losers was invented instead of the technology to erase them. The result: an accumulating cast of reanimated performers who each remember, to varying degrees, the round they lost.

Round 1 recap

Round 1 opens with Mizi in the dressing room. She is already dead — pale skin streaked with grey, her signature candy-pink dulled to something closer to bruise. Sua enters the same room. They are wearing the outfits they wore in the Alien Stage Round 1 that killed Sua the first time. Neither speaks until the pre-song, The Dressing Room, begins.

The song itself, Candy Scar, is a duet. Mizi sings the opening (“A sweet scar is calling my name”). Sua answers (“Your gaze pierces right through my heart”). The chorus is unison. The bridge is the reveal — a two-line Korean line that translates to “we used to be one / why must we tear each other apart on this stage?” It is the first time in the Alien Stage series that a losing pair confronts their own performance directly.

Sua “loses” again at the end of Round 1. But because she is already dead, she does not disappear. She walks off-stage on her own feet. That single detail — losers walking themselves off — is the entire promise of the Zombie Stage AU. See our Round 1 recap for a shot-by-shot breakdown.

The characters

Zombie Stage carries over the full principal cast of Alien Stage and gives each of them a new role that comments on their original arc. Here is the fast reference — click through to any character page for the full profile.

• Mizi — Zombified before Round 1 rather than the winner of it. Retains her memory of Sua when she should not.
• Sua — Preserved rather than destroyed. Sings Round 1 again, and loses again, forever.
• Isaac — Rumoured stage manager. Alive, wearing a directorial armband in Round 1’s B-roll.
• Hyuna — Elevated from a background character to the arena’s oldest sentient zombie and Mizi’s mentor.
• Till — The only living performer. Not yet in the arena — the audience for Round 1.
• Luka — The living headliner. Openly complicit in the reanimation system.

VIVINOS has hinted that a seventh performer, Ivan, will appear in Round 2. His color palette (#facc15, saturated yellow) is already in the arena’s lighting rig during the closing shot of Round 1.

What it is really about

Read one way, Zombie Stage is a horror story about aristocratic audiences and reanimated performers. Read another way, it is a very direct metaphor for the K-pop machine that VIVINOS grew up inside: performers whose careers are extended past the point of consent, whose stage costumes outlast their personhood, whose “comebacks” are literal.

The recurring image of the dressing room — a room performers cannot leave without becoming someone else — is the thesis statement of the entire AU. Every character enters it. Every character leaves it different. The reason Candy Scar hits so hard is that both Mizi and Sua know exactly what the dressing room does, and they sing to each other about it anyway, because it is the only place they still recognize each other.

That is the trick VIVINOS keeps pulling across every AU: the horror is always secondary to the tenderness. Zombie Stage lands because it is willing to be a love story about two dead girls before it is willing to be anything else.

Is Zombie Stage canon?

Yes. VIVINOS has confirmed on multiple occasions that all planned AUs are canonical within the Alien Stage multiverse. Canon here means two things:

1. The events of Zombie Stage really happen — they are not dreams, hallucinations, or non-diegetic covers.
2. The characters share a “core self” across universes. Mizi in Zombie Stage remembers Sua from Alien Stage. That is the point.

None of this contradicts the ending of Alien Stage proper. The two universes coexist. Loss in one does not erase happiness in the other.

What comes next

Round 2 has not been dated as of writing, but VIVINOS’s release cadence for the original Alien Stage was roughly one round per season. Reasonable fan expectation puts Round 2 in late 2026, with the OST Part.2 released simultaneously.

The most credible speculation, drawn from teaser B-roll:

• Round 2 features Till as a performer for the first time in the AU
• Ivan debuts as an antagonist
• Isaac’s role as stage manager becomes explicit
• A new song — currently unnamed — surfaces from Luka

If you want to keep up, the fastest signal path is: VIVINOS on YouTube for MV drops, r/AlienStage for immediate discussion, and this site for lyrics and character updates within 24 hours of every new release.

For a quick primer on what changes across universes, read next: Zombie Stage vs Alien Stage: Every Difference That Matters. For a shot-by-shot annotation of Round 1, jump to the Round 1 Recap. And if you have not yet, take the Which Zombie Stage Character Are You? quiz — it is designed as a light entry point, but the results describe each character in a way that matches VIVINOS’s own creator notes surprisingly closely.