So Jesus is a zombie?
SCTV used to get a ton of mileage out of mocking shows like iZombie. Take a standard, tired, worn out trope like a procedural, slather a thin veneer of something trendy on it, populate it with beautiful, angsty people, and you’ve got a show.
iZombie’s cardinal sin is that it is goddamn boring. But it is not primarily a zombie show. It is a show about angsty millenials in a police procedural.
With “zombies!”
Walking Dead is, indeed, more in the tradition of Frankenstein than of Haitian/African beliefs. That story has its roots in European folklore that also gave rise to vampire stories, and leads through H. P. Lovecraft’s Reanimator stories (and some others) directly to George Romero and TWD.
So yeah, they’re kind of totally different things that just look the same.
As I pointed out, there have been a variety of takes on this particular monster, including self-aware zombies. If you don’t like it, that’s fine with me. I happen to enjoy it, but YMMV.
But I don’t think your personal taste is the final arbiter of zombienss.
I thought he was more of a vampire…
OMG!!! GREATEST…PILOT…PITCH…EVER!!!
“Turn the other cheek, I’m done eating this one”.
For analysis of this credibility defying work by director Bill Zebub, I cannot do better than Diamanda Hagan:
Sweet Zombie Jesus!
NBC presents The Walking.
I thought I’d gotten these from this thread, but it must have been from io9 instead:
With apologies if this offends anyone, of course.
You need a keen insight into the minds of the average, network tv watching American. Just plain, normal folks.
Not a show, but my husband just contributed this: Does “Barfly” have to have so much drinking? Maybe they could go to a coffee shop instead.
There are George Romero zombies, which follow the precedents set by Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.
And then there are, let’s say, John Russo / Dan O’Bannon zombies, which emulate Return of the Living Dead instead.
With the energetic, talking, brain-eating zombies, and the mix of horror and comedy, and the sci-fi explanation for the zombie plague, the version of iZombie that we see on TV is based specifically on Return of the Living Dead.
Well, that actually raises an interesting topic. Jesus is, in fact, a zombie in the same sense as the characters in iZombie. So is Dracula. So is Frankenstein.
These are not separate takes on the same underlying idea. They are in fact entirely distinct underlying ideas. There are at least three ancient folklore traditions about reanimated dead.
Haitian/West African folklore. These are zombies because that is a word in their language. These dead are reanimated by a shaman, a bokor, and have no will of their own, not even a minimal prey drive. They are entirely the slaves of the bokor and serve his will.
European folklore.This tradition branched out in different directions. One branch led to vampires, another wandered through Frankenstein to H. P. Lovecraft to George Romero to Robert Kirkman. They aren’t zombies. They consume body parts, either for sustenance or components. They cannot be controlled and have wills of their own as well as self awareness.
Semitic folklore. Yet another independent development going back at least as far as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Jesus is a member of this tradition. They are neither slaves, are often helpful, and don’t eat people or people parts.
Smart authors know this and don’t use the word zombie to describe nonzombies. Lovecraft, Romero and Kirkman use words like Walking Dead, Evil Dead, Living Dead, Reanimated, but not zombie.
Others write for iZombie. Would it have killed them to call it iDead? I don’t like it because it is stupid and boring and mostly serves as an opportunity for beautiful young people to pose. But I would very much like it if people would use correct words according to their actual meaning. Language matters. When we ignore that, we get George Bush.
Third best Mickey Rourke movie EVAH!
Oddly enough, different stuff is available for looting if you wait a good amount of time before revisiting any given area. I wouldn’t mind a more verdant backdrop, though. Can this mod be attached to a console version?
I agree there is a variety of types of undead ghouls from a variety of socio-cultural contexts… but we’re specifically talking about popular culture zombies, which have clearly taken on a number of forms, some distinct, some more in line the three categories of the undead. I think what you’re getting at is you have a general problem with films/shows/comics, what have you, which employ the term outside of the specific context of #1. But as you can see by the list from wikipedia I posted, there are plenty of films which use zombies, which are taken from the post-Romero understanding of zombies, as the living dead ghouls, who like to eat brains (llater installments of the series, as others have pointed out in the thread).
I do agree that language matters, but it also evolves - it’s not a static thing, nor has it ever been. You could make the argument that any horror films/books/shows, etc not set in Haiti, West Africa, or in Yoruban influenced American communities shouldn’t use the word at all, which seemed to be a very different argument from what you were making above (you’ve given me more details on your view of it here, so I appreciate that).
But given the general plasticity that the term has taken on in popular culture over this past century or so, this show still fits within the wider definition of a zombie as we understand it through popular culture, I’d argue. You’re right that it’s different from original definition. Other ghouls and monsters have also transformed through mass media. The notion of a vampire has very much changed, starting with the publication of Dracula back in the Victoria era. Does that make, the vampires in Buffy, for example, any less vampires because they don’t conform to pre-Dracula conceptualizations of vampires (which weren’t sexy, etc).
Or what about changes between the understand of zombies from West Africa pre-slave trade to the post-slave trade new world? How much do you think that the cosmological views of West Africans changed over time as they were assimilated into the brutal world of the Atlantic slave trade and then trying to figure out how to live in a world of white supremacy after the end of slavery?
I know you disagree with me, but I hope you’re not comparing me to Dubya! 
Also, do you have a specific interesting in horror and these sorts of mythologies? You seem to have invested a fair amount of thought into this…
I think the original Interplay team were simply just enamored with those 1950s sci-fi movies and Mad Max (and its clones), and just wanted to mash them together for a game. It didn’t necessarily make a ton of sense, but it was a distinct and familiar style, which has been important to the success of games. Thinking things through and making internally consistent worlds has traditionally not been a big concern (so you get these various narratives that seem as though the world has “just died” even though it hasn’t - something that also is a result of the pastiche of different narratives that make it up). Those elements became the things that identified the series, so no matter what the location is, or how much time has passed, it’ll look the same. But that gets old, and yeah, it especially gets old now that gameplay is shifting towards shooters with the occasional bit of conversation.
You can blame the success of Minecraft for that - everyone is feeling the need to add those kinds of things into games, now.
The fundamental problem for me is that they’re locked into this style that’s 1950s retro-sci-fi for the past (which is fine and potentially flexible), but a Mad Max desert for the present (except where there are throwbacks to the past), regardless of where it’s located or how long after the war it is. Plus, the Bethesda games tend to be repeating the original game in many ways, while also dumbing it down. The original had a huge breadth of approaches available to the player depending on how you created the character and what you did. Want to ally yourself with some raiders? You could do it. You want to ally yourself with a rival raider camp? Sure. Want to pretend to ally yourself with both raider camps in order to manipulate them into facing off against one another, Yojimbo/Fist Full of Dollars-style to save the local village? That was possible. You also got totally different experiences depending on how you allocated characteristics and abilities. You could go through the game without hurting anyone - as someone who just talked to people and resolved their problems through negotiation and diplomacy, or by sneaking around and stealing stuff, for example. Being very strong or tough or smart or social or dextrous or having perks opened up unique opportunities - as did being incredibly stupid (you could communicate with other low-intelligence creatures, for example). Now it’s being reduced to more of a shooter, unfortunately, a shooter in which the world is consistently made up of those two styles.
It’s a very, very indirect reference. “Zombie” entered US vocabulary as a reference to Haitian zombies, but quickly became a way of referring to anyone who had no will of their own (because of, say, an alien mind-control ray, a B-movie staple), that also usually led to them being mindless and shambling. When George Romero did his unofficial adaptation of the vampire novel I am Lengend, Night of the Living Dead, he didn’t call his undead “zombies,” but the label got applied - and stuck - because of their mindless shambling. His film inspired countless imitators (which themselves inspired imitators), and now “zombie” gets used to refer to those (usually) mindless, (usually) shambling, cannibal undead.
To be fair, a bunch of that was still possible (and encouraged!) in New Vegas. I liked the way the faction system worked, except for the fact that if you killed too many of the wrong guys, you could instantly and permanently alienate a whole faction. I’d have appreciated it if that knowledge of your betrayal spread gradually (especially if you weren’t seen or caught redhanded doing the deed). That would have been an easy thing to implement.
NV did those things too. I wish Fallout 4 had taken more cues from New Vegas, which was a much, much smarter game. As relatively pretty as F4 is compared to NV, it’s a pretty braindead game when it absolutely didn’t need to be.
Well you can think that if you wish. But so far as I’m aware the original Interplay team has stated that their love of that particular area of Southern California played a big roll. And I think its foolish to assume that if they had decided to set it in say, rural Pennsylvania they wouldn’t have either made things resemble rural Pennsylvania and/or came up with an internally consistent reason for rural Pennsylvania to now be a desert. With southwestern region derived plants and animals.
But otherwise I don’t think the concept is as rigid as you’re letting on. “Post apocalyptic 50’s retro-futurism, with a Mad Max flavor” is a hell of a lot broader conceptually than dusty western towns emblazoned with rocket ships. There’s more in it and more to it, even in the source material. And even the original 2 games acknowledged that. There’s a serious spike in societal development, and environmental changes, between 1 and 2. So “the entire world stagnates for centuries” clearly isn’t inherent to the franchise, or even the state of the original 2 games. Just like you can plausibly make a 1st person shooty RPG and have it still be Fallout (see also New Vegas). You can shift the region or timeline as you see fit. So long as it fits with the established setting and fiction in a plausible way, and doesn’t break suspension of disbelief its still a functional Fallout story. Bethesda seems to have missed that, they bumbled enough on the setting to break suspension of disbelief. Certain aspects are too close to the Original to make sense, given the geography and time line. Looked at from the other direction the place and time selected are too far from the Original to make sense given the selected art direction. Pick a direction and make it work. Don’t half ass your way to an unworkable middle ground. Follow through on the implications of the changes you make, or don’t make those changes.
That puts the phylacteries that Jewish men wear during prayer into a completely different perspective.
To be fair, you could replace the zombies with basically anything else that resulted in societal collapse and make almost exactly the same series. The bulk of the story is about how the people who survived deal with each other and the collapse of society.
