#zombie politics

[braintasting]

DANGER WORD, directed by Luchina Fisher. A zombie short cowritten by Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, starring Frankie Faison (who you might recognize from The Silence of the Lambs or The Wire) and Saoirse Scott. Crowdfunded, 2013. Relevant to some prior thoughts about The Last of Us and Train to Busan.

#zombie theory #when there's no more room in hell.... #zombie politics

[gorofeet]

What I WISH so badly people would understand about The Last of Us is that its not about zombies. Its about people. It has always been about people. When i see people being like “why are there ‘politics’ in my zombie show” I want to rip my fucking hair out. Neither the game nor the show are about the fucking zombies. Its about Joel and Ellie. Its about Sarah. Its about Bill and Frank. Its about Riley. Its about Tess. Its about Tommy. The zombies just happen to be there. Its about the human condition and its about how humans continue to love each other and fight for survival even after enormous tragedy. Its about learning to love and care again. Its about loving someone so much you would sacrifice the entire world for them. If you cannot grasp that concept then maybe consuming media isn’t for you.

#tlou #the last of us #the last of us hbo #tlou hbo #ellie williams #joel miller #lgbtq people are not ‘politics’ #but thats just what people tend to say #they actively give the zombies a lesser role in the show. #how is this not clicking for people #i love u tlou <3 im so sad its over

[mysharona1987]

Get ready for the zombie apocalypse, I guess.

#Qanon #zombies #horror #horror movies #the walking dead #democrats #republicans #politics

[tomorrowusa]

Don't think that patiently explaining the legalities and details of the Trump indictment will change the minds of the MAGA crowd about it. Those folks, like Trump, simply don't believe in the rule of law.

There may be some Republicans who secretly believe the charges have merit but are scared shitless of what may happen if they say so in public.

A reasonably healthy party might give its indicted leader some benefit of the doubt, while calling for judgment to be withheld before he has his day in court. But Republicans correctly understand that their party will consider Trump an innocent martyr regardless. The sickness of the Republican Party as it is presently constituted is that there is no conceivable set of facts that would permit it to acknowledge Trump’s guilt. What has brought the party to this point is the convergence of its decades-long descent into paranoia with its idiosyncratic embrace of a career criminal.

Yep, the GOP has been drifting in this direction for a long time. Trump's emergence finally nudged them into being a full-blown paranoid cult.

The Republican Party’s internal culture has been shaped by what Richard Hofstadter famously described as “the paranoid style” in American politics. Hofstadter specifically attributed this description to the conservative movement, which, at the time, was a marginalized faction on the far right but has since completely taken control of the party and imposed its warped mentality on half of America. To its adherents, every incremental expansion of the welfare state is incipient communism, each new expansion of social liberalism the final death blow to family and church. Lurking behind these endless defeats, they discern a vast plot by shadowy elites. In recent years, the Republican Party’s long rightward march on policy has ground to a halt, and it has instead radicalized on a different dimension: ruthlessness. Attributing their political travails to weakness, Republicans converged on the belief that their only chance to pull back from the precipice of final defeat is to discard their scruples. A willingness to do or say anything to win was the essence of Trump’s appeal, an amorality some Republicans embraced gleefully and others reluctantly. Trump, by dint of his obsessive consumption of right-wing media, grasped where the party was going more quickly than its leaders did. This aspect of Trump’s rise was historically necessary. All Trump did was to hasten it along.

This is Trump's legal philosophy (if you want to call it that) in a nutshell...

Trump was not raised in a traditional conservative milieu. He came into a seedy, corrupt world in which politicians could be bought off and laws were suggestions. He worked with mobsters and absorbed their view of law enforcement: People who follow the law are suckers, and the worst thing in the world is a rat.

Trump is basically a petty mobster. That explains why he hates the FBI.

It is the interplay of the two forces, the paranoia of the right and the seamy criminality of the right’s current champion, that has brought the party to this point. Trump’s endlessly repeated “witch hunt” meme blends together the mobster’s hatred of the FBI with the conservative’s fear of the bureaucrat. His loyalists have been trained to either deny any evidence of misconduct by their side or rationalize it as a necessary countermeasure against their enemies. The concept of “crime” has been redefined in the conservative mind to mean activities by Democrats. They insist upon Trump’s innocence because they believe a Republican, axiomatically, cannot be a criminal.

That Manichean view fits in well with the radical Christian fundamentalist tendency in the GOP. Though instead of Jesus Christ, the credo of Republicans is to accept Donald Trump as their personal Lord and Savior. By that reasoning, Donald Trump is incapable of wrongdoing.

#donald trump #trump's indictment #trump's guilt #republicans #the gop #maga zombies #the far right #the paranoid style in american politics #conservatives #election 2024 #jonathan chait

[coldgoldlazarus]

Seeing an ad for some zombie survival game made something click for me, about why the whole like, zombie apocalypse premise just doesn't click with me. (Aside from the gore and disturbing imagery I don't deal well with already.) Simply put, it feels like... dehumanization simulator, taken to a logical extreme. Those were people, but also not people, so there's no guilt in mowing them all down unflinchingly. It teaches paranoia, too, anyone around you could be hiding a bite and turn on you at any moment. The identity death is terrible to contemplate, but it's not contemplated, just used to make lethal force unquestionably justified, there's no point in trying to save them and the idea is almost never brought up to begin with. The world is out to get you, and other humans (they are people shaped, but not people) are the enemy.

#not a reblog #zombies #also IIRC it started as a metaphor for communism? #and was big in B-movies during the red scare #so there's a political aspect to it too #like that wasnt where they started I think? #but its where they got codified

[brother-emperors]

Out of Cassius, Trebonius, Mark Antony, and Brutus, do you think any of them are "genre-aware" of the type of story they re in, in the late Republic?

imo they’re all aware that they’re on the precipice of something (at a turning point, a fork in the road where the only option is forward/you cannot go back, etc) as people who live through these things often are, which makes them “genre aware” in a way that actually matters, but during his rivalry with Octavian post-Philippi, it would probably Antony after this specifically

But their competitive diversions gave Antony annoyance, because he always came off with less than Caesar. Now, there was with him a seer from Egypt, one of those who cast nativities. This man, either as a favour to Cleopatra, or dealing truly with Antony, used frank language with him, saying that his fortune, though most great and splendid, was obscured by that of Caesar; and he advised Antony to put as much distance as possible between himself and that young man. "For thy guardian genius," said he, "is afraid of his; and though it has a spirited and lofty mien when it is by itself, when his comes near, thine is cowed and humbled by it." And indeed events seemed to testify in favour of the Egyptian. For we are told that whenever, by way of diversion, lots were cast or dice thrown to decide matters in which they were engaged, Antony came off worsted. They would often match cocks, and often fighting quails, and Caesar's would always be victorious.​

Antony, Plutarch

#ngl I just spent several hours discussing gorillaz and genre/narrative awareness wrt to zombie genre/necromancy/resurrection etc #and looked at this line up of men and thought ‘well none of them are trapped in a torment nexus box of fame’ #before remembering how Roman politics (a torment nexus box) worked #anyway best start believing you’re the lead in a tragedy antony. You’ve already been cast in it. no longer a man but a character. etc #ask tag

[darkwood-sleddog]

He has zero regrets about kicking me in his sleep for two nights straight actually.

#dogblr #alaskan malamute #dog #canine #slash #dog photography #anybody else pups have really dramatic REM dreams? all mine do #usually he’s pretty polite in bed and often sleeps under it or on the rug but uh not lately #he’s also the only dog with bed privilege bc Sigurd is the size of a human man #and sleeps diagonal #and zombie thinks beds are WWE wrestling rings

[w1lmuttart]

Had a fun thought about immortality, now this exists

#my cryptid designing game is not much to talk about #but i do like em. they look polite :) #this feels like itd be a backstory for a comedy that regularly breaks the fourth wall and have characters fight w the narrator lmao #most normal idea ever #tw corpse #kinda? it's more zombie like cuz they ain't dead

[just-a-little-unionoid]

y'all gay people in my phone aren't obsessed enough with The Visitor From the Future and it displeases me :(

#okay look season 1 isn't *that* great #it was made in 2009 by cinema students and some parts uh... aged... not so well‚ politically .. #BUT #it's still a cool series and it got canon queer characters as soon as season 2 #(actually in season 1 too but it was as a joke so it doesn't count) #also the movie can be watched on its own (even if it lack queer content...) and is like... really good??? #like please yall it got time travel and drama and robots and zombies and cops and capitalism as the antagonists what's more to ask for? #vdf

[dichotomoustessellations]

zombie movies were always cultural reflections of how political power and radicalization is utilized through poisoning or diseasing the masses

#Political #culture #zombie movies

[braintasting]

Zombie occupiers and BLOOD QUANTUM

I watched BLOOD QUANTUM (2019) after running across a reference to it on the former Twitter (I still look, I still look sometimes) by a professor who uses the film in his classes and has been intrigued at the way students respond to it.

The key bits in that convo are these:

She found the frank depiction of drug use, poverty, etc. on the reservation to be racist and said that even though the filmmaker was native the movie was offensive. I explained that the film was rejecting the “noble savage” trope that plagues representation of native people. And that its attempt to realistically represent reservation life was pushing back against white audiences who want sentimental depictions of indigenous people communing with nature. After I explained that, I asked if they still thought it was racist. Almost every hand went up.

Having read that, I went in expecting the film to be a certain way - jaded, grimy, something like MARFA GIRL or KIDS with zombies on a reservation. It wasn't like that, though. It was really like WORLD WAR Z rewritten for asymmetrical warfare.

It's a war movie for an occupation.

Maybe the most interesting thing about the movie is what it doesn't say. Like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, we don't really get any explanation for what's happening. Our first inkling is a fisherman gutting salmon he's netted and then being disturbed at them flopping and wiggling back to life. It's unnatural. But for this guy (and for a lot of the characters), unnatural is something they've been forced to live with for generations. The zombie plague is just another settler indignity, really.

The title is never really explained or referenced directly ... if you, like me, didn't recognize the phrase, "blood quantum" is a measurement of "of the amount of "Indian blood" you have. It can affect your identity, your relationships and whether or not you — or your children — may become a citizen of your tribe."

In this story, we get the impression that the members of the tribe are immune to whatever is making dead people rise up running and hungry. And the reservation is on an island in a river. It's not easy land to commute on and off of, but it's pretty easy to defend.

It seems like what a non-Native filmmaker would have done, and maybe what the prof's students would have been happier with, would be to layer on a couple of speeches about ecology, and then build a plot around desperate white folks leading an assault to try to take the reservation over. But instead, we've got something far more cynical and jaded.

It's taken for granted that the rest of the world has gone to shit. The only 100% non-Natives we see are refugees (mostly sick and dying) or else ravening zombie hordes. The conflict of the film is ... what do we do with them? And most of all, how do we draw a line between them and us? Who belongs here - and how do we decide?

Of course, disagreements over that problem lead to violence. Nearly every character in this film has been living with trauma since before the dead started rising. This is not done allegorically, like the race relations in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. It's right there on screen, stuff you might have read in the police blotter in the local paper 10, 30, 50 years ago. Delinquency and drugs. Despair and divorce. Even the sheriff and the doctor can't keep their personal lives together, for all the good they do for their communities.

Where the film succeeds is in making that the source of horror. There's some disturbing stuff beyond the gutted salmon flopping on the cleaning table, but the worst of it is people making grim decisions about each other and doing terrible things to each other and realizing, "Yeah, I can see why they'd do that."

The central figure here is a pregnant girl. She's the white girlfriend of the Native cop's troublemaking son. Whether her baby has enough "Indian blood" to survive becomes a big question. Who belongs here? Who decides? And will the wrong decision mean we get eaten from within, either personally or as a community?

It's a film that could maybe be remade in any occupied land (Ireland during the Troubles, Sri Lanka with the Tamil Tigers, South Africa under apartheid, and of course, now, again, Gaza and Israel). Anywhere "us" and "them" become life-or-death definitions, and where the act of defining comes with its own cost in the blood of the innocent bystander ... if you even believe there is such a thing.

#zombie theory #know your zombies #zombie politics #they are not like us

[astrowarr]

(slaps the roof of my roomies zombie apocalypse au) there are so many political nuances in this bad boy

#there's watcher lore. no one said i could help myself #also for the record all the politics come from pre-plot stuff #so the actual story takes place about a decade after the start of the apocalypse #by now the politics have simmered down and just the after effects can be seen on the story #but i basically have the entire pre-plot history stuff down which is so cool #rmzau #roomies zombie apocalypse au #secret life #trafficblr #grian #ethoslab #zombie cleo

[daz4i]

watching lots of videos abt horror in my free time and i noticed smth interesting. american horror very much follows the "if you do bad things/make irrational decisions, you will get hurt" rule, while japanese horror tends to not care about who the victim of the monster is - you can be a perfect person who's never done anything wrong, you can do everything in your power to avoid the monster, but you'll still get hurt

i think it's an interesting thing to study. I'd love to hear abt horror in other places around the world and what sort of rules they follow, and compare and try to figure out where they came from

i may be wrong, but it's easy to assume that the american rule of horror - do bad things and bad things will happen to you - is very christian. there's other things like leftovers from the hays code (like having sex means you'll die later, for example) but these are usually more abt specific actions, while i'm talking more generally now. i think it's affected by the whole fear of hell, obviously - if you do things right, you get to go to heaven, you get to escape the torment. and even non-christians are affected by these ideas bc this is just what american culture is like.

i can't speculate much abt the japanese rule (or rather, the lack of rules in that regard) bc i'm not as exposed to japanese culture and history as i am to american culture, but i will say, on a personal level, this is way more scary to me 😳 for obvious reasons.

also ngl it can get annoying to hear american youtubers try to analyze japanese horror and fight for their life to find Wrong things the protagonists do in order to justify their torment. i swear they end up demonizing the most mundane shit 😭

#i'm trying to think abt my country's type of horror and i think we're closer to the japanese type than the american one #our horror tends to be more general? like zombie apocalypse sort of thing. everyone's getting hurt #(which i can very easily explain actually but it will def get political unfortunately) #another more fun type is just like. stupid ppl doing stupid shit. and i don't mean it in a mean way #i mean it in a 'people are fucking around and finding out' way. a neutral type of stupidity. if that makes sense #like it's less abt making mistakes and more putting yourself in danger lowkey on purpose. to see what'll happen (death. usually) #but i also don't know a lot of local horror. there's not a lot of it. we're more comedy oriented here i think.

[wolves0nmars]

american healthcare by penelope scott but make it leon s. kennedy.

verse 1, "when i was seven years old i saw a dead man in the road..." could relate to the early loss of his parents and leon's first experience with a police officer. plenty of children are exposed to violence at an early age, and leon is no exception. this experience desensitized him to violence and to cope with it he focused on the positive experience he had with that cop, and decided he wanted to be an officer in order to help people.

he helped claire, sherry, ashley, etc. there's actually kind of a pattern of him "saving" female characters and kind of affirming his own masculinity by doing so. this makes his interactions with ada and luis very interesting, the former of course being a woman that doesnt need his saving and the latter being a man that desperately needs his saving. but thats a conversation for another time.

and in the chorus of the song, "you corporate fucking prick, i did not become a doctor just to suck the devil's dick" relates to him a lot. because leon s kennedy sucks a lot of d---he has a lot of experiences with "corporate overlords", like simmons. but also this doesn't just apply to specific individuals. leon is in law enforcement because he wants to protect people. he was a police officer because he wanted to protect people, he is an agent because he wants to protect as many people around the world in the long run optimally in the most efficient way. but he consistently runs into the problem that his job as a police officer is not to protect people. its to protect private property. his job as an agent is not to protect people. its to protect corporate interests. he's in the wrong job.

i really hope we see leon be a firefighter or an emt some day. like, obviously hes a little old and definitely traumatized enough, but those are occupations where your job literally is just to help people, not keep corporate interests in mind.

and in verse 2 "I asked the right questions, i never even really got bored" relates to him really well too. leon quite easily slipped into his role as "right hand man", never wondering or asking just what exactly left hand was up to. because truthfully, he didn't want to know. he preferred the comfort that came with not knowing.

or in verse 3, "it trickled into both my ears, it got louder over the years, until all that i could hear were fuckin' flies" probably relates to leon the most out of any line from this song. it perfectly represents how incredibly corrupted leon has become. it's also worth mentioning how resident evil viruses do sometimes take the form of insects. you could kind of look at it like a direct parallel between government corruption and the viruses he's fighting. they're both equally parasitic, infectious, and harmful. i imagine sometimes leon just wishes he'd be infected finally, because it's better than this torturous process of corruption. in the pre chorus, she says "sometimes it's like they'd rather die" and i think sometimes it's like he'd rather die.

it's such a great song about american capitalism and how easily it can corrupt people's naive hopes and dreams of helping people. because leon s kennedy... has been corrupted. time and time again throughout the RE franchise we see commanding officers from private corporations, governments, law enforcement, etcetera being revealed as evil and every time... the main characters just kill the guy and get back to work. they never stop and consider... maybe it's not about just one guy. maybe its not about just this one individual that happened to be evil. maybe something made him evil... maybe something allowed him to be evil... and maybe its the exact same thing that i work for... or something like that idk lolllllll.

i really hope we see leon kind of "break the cycle" and have the kinds of realizations that are in this song because like... BITCH... that stupid little boy is lucky hes so pretty!!!

also im really sorry for derailing a song about a womans experience in academia and social services under capitalism and stuff to be about this white boy in the CIA... i hope this little analysis doesnt detract from the actual song. cause like... its a great song and we dont need to make it about leon stupid little bitch kennedy for it to be good.

#leon kennedy #leon s kennedy #leon scott kennedy #re #resident evil #re2 #re2r #resident evil 2 #resident evil 2 remake #re4 #re4r #resident evil 4 #resident evil 4 remake #re4make #re4 remake #sorry for making the dumb little zombie game about POLITICS #in MY VBIDEO GAME? #its more likely than you think

[degenderates]

Actually after having binge watched 5 seasons of the walking dead in one week I can safely say that ideological wise, this show is pretty conservative. Not that it *literally* is conservative but it leans right in the way horror media leans right and especially monster stories lean right - zombies as an other, even other people as otherized, where the cop protagonist holds near-autocratic leadership and whenever not in control, seeks to regain it, and the story portrays this as right and good for him to do. Whenever people have alternative views about the zombies or other groups of people, they're always proven wrong. Holding fear is important. Keeping an us-vs-them mindset is essential. Obviously in-universe, all these things are needed for survival, but that's the point - and I do wonder if the show is self aware about it

#its also worth noting that zombie media has always been political with the black protag of night of the living dead #getting shot by the cops at the end bc they thought he was a zombie #etc #the walking dead #twd lb

[miguelinileugim]

Comedy movie where a bunch of southern racist white cops have to fight hordes of zombies all of which are black for some reason.

The joke is that they act exactly as they did before the apocalypse. Beating them after they're no longer a threat. Shooting them in the back while pretending they're afraid. Claiming "you can tell they're a zombie by the way they look!".

It's not even real and it's already banned in Florida.

#not a real movie #movie #comedy #acab #police #cops #antiracism #zombie #zombies #goncharov #politics #writing prompt