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Post by ineffableone on May 8, 2015 2:20:54 GMT
Ever notice how often zombie shows and movies try to not use the word zombie? As if they are in a universe where the word was never coined? This is from a fun little fantasy web comic that took a quick poke at this. Thought I would share with ya'll as I think we have all seen this a time or two.
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Post by Vincent Dolan on May 8, 2015 9:11:59 GMT
I don't know about most series, but I do know of one where this trend is discussed, albeit obliquely. In the apocalyptic manga/anime series, Highschool of the Dead, the initial outbreak happens during school hours, which catches our heroes in the middle of class (hence the title); at the insistence of Hisashi, the three of them make for the roof of the school, rather than the front gates because, by this time, everyone in the school (probably some 2,000 people) is trying to get the hell out. Hisashi gets bitten before they realize what they're dealing with, though it soon becomes obvious as they watch things unfold below them. He acknowledges that they're being attacked by corpses, but since it's not a movie or video game, they're Them (Yatsura in Japanese).
In the arc immediately following where the anime left off, a newly introduced character praises whoever came up with the idea of calling them Them, because it allows you to disassociate yourself from the idea that what you're fighting were once living people; "zombie" implies that they're a reanimated corpse, possibly of someone you knew and loved. Them just reinforces that it's literally a case of "Us vs Them" and that They are less than human and so you shouldn't feel bad about killing them if it comes down to it. Considering a major part of HoTD is showing the psychological effects of a zombie apocalypse (particularly as it applies to the rather strict Japanese culture) and that one of the characters nearly goes off the deep end after having to perform a mercy kill on a loved one, the naming of Them is pretty inspired.
I'd like to assume that all the varied names for zombies stem from some subconscious necessity to do the same, but I'd just be fooling myself; most of them just come about to be different (and possibly to appeal to a wider audience than "zombies" would). That said, I do know that while, for all intents and purposes, the creatures from the video game The Last of Us are zombies, they're called Infected because they're technically alive rather than being animated corpses, so it's more a nuance than anything, but you get my point.
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Post by Lonely Wolf Forge on May 8, 2015 12:00:12 GMT
is it possible that someone owns the copywrite on the actual term zombies? you know how annoying rights and licenses can be in hollywood...
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Post by randomnobody on May 8, 2015 13:03:59 GMT
I doubt it's a copyright issue, at least it shouldn't be. Zombie as a word, never mind idea, has been around a very long time and should not be bound by copyright to any entity... But knowing how the industry is, probably.
I think a lot of it comes from the fact that most cases of "zombies" in modern entertainment aren't actually zombies, as in reanimated corpses. Most tend to be the result of some parasite or infection that attacks tissue and/or the nervous system. They're technically alive in many cases, and technically still "human" for all it's worth at that point, but because they're basically rabid and/or lepers, vicious and contagious ones at that, the only way to "deal with them" is by the classical "zombie" approach.
Can't call them zombies, though, because definitions.
It's like that thing that's been going around for years explaining why Jesus is a lich.
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Post by MOK on May 8, 2015 14:53:22 GMT
Oh yeah. It's an old and well known phenomenon. Enough so that less po-faced zombie movies have been making jokes about it for decades. is it possible that someone owns the copywrite on the actual term zombies? you know how annoying rights and licenses can be in hollywood... No. The word is way too old and widely used for that. It's just that for some reason writers, as a rule, have always liked to pretend that fictional works of their genre do not exist in their fictional world. So generally speaking zombie movies don't exist in zombie movies, superhero comics don't exist in superhero comics (well, didn't exist prior to She-Hulk), and so on. It's just a thing, no particular reason for it.
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Post by Timo Nieminen on May 8, 2015 20:47:16 GMT
To be technical, you can't copyright a word*. If the very first zombie movie had introduced the word "zombie", they could have gone for trademark protection. But, as above, it's an old word.
*Though a single-word "novel" would be protected by copyright. Thus:
is now protected by copyright (mine, or if somebody else did it first, theirs). But it can't stop anybody from using the word, or making/selling "zombie candy" or "Karloff's lifelike (deadlike?) zombie doll".
Even trademark protection isn't so absolute. "Xerox" has become a noun/verb in common use meaning "photocopy/to photocopy".
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Post by randomnobody on May 8, 2015 22:00:45 GMT
Annoys me how brand names have become common words for a given product. People always ask me where to find the kleenex and pampers. I make a point to tell them where to find facial tissues and baby diapers. For the record, most folk go store brand, the rest get either Puffs or Huggies. But yeah, "zombie" as a word kind of predates trademark and copyright, and since it's sort of difficult to trace its origin to a single entity, it's pretty safe within common usage. I really think it's more a case of how the word has come to be defined. Google searching "zombie definition" returns a pretty neat display of definitions and etymological origins: www.google.com/search?q=zombie+definition&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8Suffice to say, most "zombie" shows don't explicitly follow these definition. Also amusing is the rise in popularity denoted by the line graph. (If you don't see it, click the big arrow for "Translations, word origin, and more definitions" or at least this is how Firefox displays the page)
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Post by demonskull on May 8, 2015 22:18:43 GMT
Actually Random got it mostly right.
The secret society of ancient undead does have their brand copyrighted. They are declared as a non-profit organization for tax purposes and have publicly stated their goal is to change the public's perception of the undead.
Recent movies and tv shows have either depicted Zs as easy to dispatch thus removing the fear from the living or have shown them to be victims themselves gaining sympathy from the living.
I have publicly stated on many forums that I believe they are gaining funds in order to take over the world. Expect to see a good deal of Z merchandising over the next few years to fund their war chest. This has put me at the top on their hit list.
So if I go missing for an extended period, duck and cover.
:P
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Post by Deleted on May 8, 2015 22:48:43 GMT
Vampire and werewolf movies are almost always self-aware. The word "zombie" not existing in zombie media is a dumb gimmicky affectation and the pained lengths the writers go through to skate around including the word in dialogue is beyond tired.
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Post by ineffableone on May 8, 2015 23:05:13 GMT
Vampire and werewolf movies are almost always self-aware. The word "zombie" not existing in zombie media is a dumb gimmicky affectation and the pained lengths the writers go through to skate around including the word in dialogue is beyond tired. Yep. Most other "monster" movies and TV have no problem referencing the popular names of the monsters and will even often reference alternate historical names as well. But for some reason when it comes to zombies the writers go to extreme lengths to not use the popular name. It is just one of those things I have always found odd.
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JakeH
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Post by JakeH on May 9, 2015 22:37:11 GMT
Actually, it's pretty simple.
If the writers use the 'z' word, especially from the start, then they have to admit that the characters are genre savvy. At that point the perpetual litany of consistently bad decisions that plague zombie fiction becomes 'stupid writing' rather than 'well, they didn't know any better'.
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Post by randomnobody on May 9, 2015 23:00:23 GMT
Actually, it's pretty simple. If the writers use the 'z' word, especially from the start, then they have to admit that the characters are genre savvy. At that point the perpetual litany of consistently bad decisions that plague zombie fiction becomes 'stupid writing' rather than 'well, they didn't know any better'. This is also a great point.
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Post by MOK on May 10, 2015 15:53:45 GMT
Actually, it's pretty simple. If the writers use the 'z' word, especially from the start, then they have to admit that the characters are genre savvy. At that point the perpetual litany of consistently bad decisions that plague zombie fiction becomes 'stupid writing' rather than 'well, they didn't know any better'. No, that's stupid writing, regardless. If you don't want your characters to come across as clueless idiots, DON'T WRITE THEM AS CLUELESS IDIOTS. Nobody's holding a gun to your head, forcing you to use the same old tired idiot ball plots already copied by thousands of cookie-cutter hackjobs before. You can have smart, competent characters in a horror movie. Seriously, it's allowed. And as far as lazy ass excuses for stupid writing go, "durr zombie fiction doesn't exist in my fictional world BECAUSE" is just about on par with "durr cell phones suddenly stop working BECAUSE". Being aware of the "z-word" does NOT take genre savviness, it just takes being vaguely aware of modern pop culture at any level at all. At the point where the characters don't know what a zombie is, you're not writing a horror story set in the modern day real world anymore, you're writing straight-up fantasy and should at least have the balls to cop to the fact. PS. Uh, just for clarity, "you" refers to lame hack writers, here, not JakeH! PPS. ... unless he actually is a lame hack hack writer, in which case a pox on you, sir!
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JakeH
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Post by JakeH on May 10, 2015 22:48:45 GMT
No worries MOK. Your use of 'you' was pretty clear and no harm done. Just for the record, I'm not a hack writer, though I have been known to play someone who writes the part of a hack writer on TV.
You're entirely correct about it being bad either way. I'm proposing it as a sensible trope, I'm merely supposing that those who write such drivel delude themselves (deliberately or otherwise) into thinking that they're being clever by avoiding the 'z' word. It's my 2 cents worth trying to answer the question originally put in this thread. I could have said 'becomes monumentally stupid writing instead of typically stupid writing' but that seemed overkill.
Overall, I'm with you.
For fair disclosure, I should mention that I think that the entire zombie genre is proof that Sturgeon's Law is recursive so I may be a titch biased on the subject.
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Post by Deleted on May 10, 2015 23:25:13 GMT
The characters being genre savvy really isn't that big of a problem, from the pop-culture king ____ of the Living Dead series alone, you've got everything from straight horror to border line slapstick if you want to throw the Returns in there. Origins everything from military to space radiation to the old classic "Hell is too full", transmission from random corpses digging themselves out of the ground to bites, to inhaling weird smoke. Dealing with the actual zombies anything from dismemberment to decapitation / brain trauma to complete incineration, and so on. You can easily have some smart-alecky nerd character rely on his video game lore and have it either pay off or cost him dearly.
A sick part of me would love to see a movie or setting where it turns out the obvious "He's bitten so shoot him" thing is flipped around and the characters realize they killed their friend for absolutely no reason...
I don't think they used the word "zombie" in the 2004 Dawn of the Dead, but the thing was they managed to work the script in such a way that its absence wasn't so glaring that it took you right out of the feature by having every third person come up with some obtuse term for the thing trying to eat their faces.
Another classic example was Peter Jackson's (yeah the Lord of the Rings guy) Dead Alive - whether the characters were "genre savvy" or not just didn't matter to the story, as simple as it was, you weren't really rocked out of it by wondering if any of the fictional characters fighting zombies had seen a movie or read a comic book, they just told their story and whether zombie fiction existed in the continuity of the imaginary world where the story plays out doesn't get addressed one way or another and it doesn't harm the over all concept.
If anything I think going to extreme contortions to make it so zombie fiction absolutely never happened in the fictional continuity does a lot more harm to the construct. The "sky juice" punchline pretty much nails how simply absurd it is to make unnecessary and arbitrary calls like that.
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Post by justin520 on May 11, 2015 0:07:47 GMT
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JakeH
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Post by JakeH on May 11, 2015 0:41:40 GMT
Jon, yes, right on. Going out of the way to avoid a term while simultaneously hitting the audience over the head with contrived ersatz terms is indeed jarring.
Moreover, Genre Savvy shouldn't matter in a well crafted story. If you have good writing the characters can know and understand the problem, can act intelligently and you STILL get to have a compelling story. Any story that is predicated on 'idiot tropes' (80's slasher movies are the king of that hill... two people have been killed, lets sneak off to have sex and let our guard down) and other cognitive holes is bad writing unless it's done entirely deliberately such as in a parody (and sometimes not even then)
That's all the more reason why avoiding genre savvy in the characters (perhaps by trumping up an 'alternate reality' where the well known genre never existed . . . ) is a sign of poor writing.
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Post by Deleted on May 11, 2015 2:10:45 GMT
The unfortunate thing is in cases like "The Walking Dead", it seems like the only innovative spin is ... that the popular culture phenomenon of zombie horror didn't exist. And at this point in the continuity, it doesn't even matter anymore because everyone knows you can gently push a ballpoint pen through the mushy skull to make the zombie stop biting. If you're starting with the premise that there was never any zombie fiction, but then you fail to do anything compelling or innovative with it, the original intention doesn't really get you anything. It doesn't materially change a thing, it's an arbitrary decision that's just awkward at this point.
I totally agree that genre-awareness in and of itself isn't an indicator of quality one way or another. "Let Me In" from a few years back was one of the very few non-campy vampire movies that I thought was executed brilliantly, and I found the portrayal very compelling with characters that didn't really know they were in a vampire movie or whether vampire movies even existed in that world. It was beside the point.
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Post by MOK on May 11, 2015 9:00:40 GMT
That's all the more reason why avoiding genre savvy in the characters (perhaps by trumping up an 'alternate reality' where the well known genre never existed . . . ) is a sign of poor writing. Yeah, it's a common crutch. Although, of course, there are exceptions, as with anything. For example, in Alan Moore's Watchmen - seriously one of the most painstakingly composed and polished texts of the entire 20th Century - masked crimefighters are real, so rather than superhero comics dominating the medium they have wildly popular pirate comics, instead. And, in a somewhat less cynical vein, I actually think one factor in this is that all these copycat hacks are essentially writing fan fiction. And if there's one thing most fan fiction is deathly afraid of, it's viewing the source material as fiction; and if there's one thing most fan fiction is loath to do, it's acknowleding fan fiction exists. (To be fair, it must be said that good fan fiction frequently manages to avoid both tendencies.) So the easiest thing to do is to treat the source material as baseline reality, and pretend nothing else in the genre exists. Which would not actually be a problem except that usually the hacks plain forget to indicate this - because they're hacks! - which produces a stark disconnect between their intentions and the resulting work. And because they're still hacks, they never even come to think about the whole thing at all and are mystified when audiences proceed to pick their creations apart, simply because we were never let in on the most fundamental premises thereof. But then, of course, some hacks are just plain hacks. (In the words of late sir Terry, "All bastards are bastards, but some bastards is bastards.") I mean, there's a marked and all-important difference between Ed Wood and Uwe Boll, and I'm not talking about their production values...
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