Plausible horror
Jul. 26th, 2017 06:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI don't like adding to threads on tumblr because you never know where they'll go and you can't lock them if things get weird
but
I just saw a thing where someone was talking about apocalyptic fiction
and how unrealistic it is
because anyone in 2017 would recognise a lurching decaying human as a zombie
and go straight to guns and... like the zombie version of survivalist prepper fantasy.
To which my reaction is visceral horror.
Zombies? Scary.
People on first sight willing to believe you personally are a zombie? Horrifying.
I mean I wrote a thing for college based on the idea of the zombie in my building, from that time the guy was banging on doors, went off the balcony without appearing to notice, banged on more doors.
But even in my write a fiction assignment I know and noted that zombies? Are another of the ways humans write about mental illness.
People acting in illogical ways they can't be talked out of, with possible sudden eruptions into violence, scary. Especially if it's the modern take on infectious zombie, where the personality gets wiped out in minutes at most, and all is brain eating.
But people who see limited capacity for communication, lurching movement, and visible injury
and their first thought is hurt them worse...
I know which scares me more.
One side in this scenario has full control of their faculties and access to such expedients as calling the emergency services and getting medical treatment rolling.
The idea that responding within this paradigm is stupid or ridiculous, and that modern people know better, because movies?
*shudders*
And this is broadly why I am Done with zombie fiction and consider it real world dangerous. And why I used to get passionate about vampire rights. Because any framework that lets you look at humans and decide that one, right there, no longer counts... that's where the evil lives. Treating people as things. It's monstrous.
So I don't care what visible signs of being past saving the story uses, they're always going to be a problem, because humans are many and varied and really sincerely can end up horribly injured and moaning and still moving. Or super pale. Or whatever else, given makeup is in play.
Zombie preparedness plans are ways of talking epidemic and quarantine while setting aside some of the emotional pushback. Which makes them a dangerous tool. Especially when movies skip the whole quarantine concept and go straight to Kill Them All.
Being this kind of genre savvy, in this tumblr comment's case, is saying it's more realistic to accept a model with no empathy, compassion, or attempts to help.
Creeps me the hell out.
And yeah, I still watch Buffy, but their attitude to the undead was on occasion a tiny bit more flexible than outright extermination, so, there was hope around the edges. All that dark fantasy or urban fantasy bit where the story is made by stresses where different cultures with different physical needs collide, those are interesting. Lost Girl could have done so much more with its setup, but it had great stuff even so. Trying to resolve the clashes between different levels of ability that have different needs is pretty key stuff.
Setting out to destroy them all... isn't.
Also? It keeps reminding me of that comic where the dude gets bit by a 'zombie' and immediately chops his own arm off, and like a panel later they realise they're not even slightly zombie, let alone infectious, and now he has no arm. The conventions of fiction bear so little resemblance to physical reality they'll guide you very wrong. Which I would have thought was obvious.
Same like that bit in the Huff Blood books where people get paranoid about vampires and kill a night shift nurse. Expecting to see monsters is a *problem*.
And at the far edges there's those poor sods who turn up in the news trying to fight demons with a sword, who probably feel really bad about it when they get proper treatment.
So the idea that fiction can become implausible because people don't immediately react like they're in that specific subgenre of fiction is just... no, on so many levels.
And a horror.
but
I just saw a thing where someone was talking about apocalyptic fiction
and how unrealistic it is
because anyone in 2017 would recognise a lurching decaying human as a zombie
and go straight to guns and... like the zombie version of survivalist prepper fantasy.
To which my reaction is visceral horror.
Zombies? Scary.
People on first sight willing to believe you personally are a zombie? Horrifying.
I mean I wrote a thing for college based on the idea of the zombie in my building, from that time the guy was banging on doors, went off the balcony without appearing to notice, banged on more doors.
But even in my write a fiction assignment I know and noted that zombies? Are another of the ways humans write about mental illness.
People acting in illogical ways they can't be talked out of, with possible sudden eruptions into violence, scary. Especially if it's the modern take on infectious zombie, where the personality gets wiped out in minutes at most, and all is brain eating.
But people who see limited capacity for communication, lurching movement, and visible injury
and their first thought is hurt them worse...
I know which scares me more.
One side in this scenario has full control of their faculties and access to such expedients as calling the emergency services and getting medical treatment rolling.
The idea that responding within this paradigm is stupid or ridiculous, and that modern people know better, because movies?
*shudders*
And this is broadly why I am Done with zombie fiction and consider it real world dangerous. And why I used to get passionate about vampire rights. Because any framework that lets you look at humans and decide that one, right there, no longer counts... that's where the evil lives. Treating people as things. It's monstrous.
So I don't care what visible signs of being past saving the story uses, they're always going to be a problem, because humans are many and varied and really sincerely can end up horribly injured and moaning and still moving. Or super pale. Or whatever else, given makeup is in play.
Zombie preparedness plans are ways of talking epidemic and quarantine while setting aside some of the emotional pushback. Which makes them a dangerous tool. Especially when movies skip the whole quarantine concept and go straight to Kill Them All.
Being this kind of genre savvy, in this tumblr comment's case, is saying it's more realistic to accept a model with no empathy, compassion, or attempts to help.
Creeps me the hell out.
And yeah, I still watch Buffy, but their attitude to the undead was on occasion a tiny bit more flexible than outright extermination, so, there was hope around the edges. All that dark fantasy or urban fantasy bit where the story is made by stresses where different cultures with different physical needs collide, those are interesting. Lost Girl could have done so much more with its setup, but it had great stuff even so. Trying to resolve the clashes between different levels of ability that have different needs is pretty key stuff.
Setting out to destroy them all... isn't.
Also? It keeps reminding me of that comic where the dude gets bit by a 'zombie' and immediately chops his own arm off, and like a panel later they realise they're not even slightly zombie, let alone infectious, and now he has no arm. The conventions of fiction bear so little resemblance to physical reality they'll guide you very wrong. Which I would have thought was obvious.
Same like that bit in the Huff Blood books where people get paranoid about vampires and kill a night shift nurse. Expecting to see monsters is a *problem*.
And at the far edges there's those poor sods who turn up in the news trying to fight demons with a sword, who probably feel really bad about it when they get proper treatment.
So the idea that fiction can become implausible because people don't immediately react like they're in that specific subgenre of fiction is just... no, on so many levels.
And a horror.