The Walking Dead

[communicator]

I have just watched the finale to the second season of The Walking Dead on Channel 5. This is another AMC program. It's not in the same league as Mad Men or Breaking Bad, but I like to watch it. The next season begins in October, and it has David Morrissey in it

Comments

[nostalgia_lj]

I have a bit suspected in the past that the popularity of zombies is from people assuming they'd be leading a pack of zombie-hunters and basically getting to be bastards to everyone. Nobody seems to imagine themselves getting eaten on the first day. I'd probably get killed by the bastard people for being too much effort to keep around, which is disturbing.

[communicator]

They wouldn't kill you but you would probably have to marry some oafish survivalist, so thank goodness it won't happen.

[executrix]

I'm not worried about how I'd survive a zombie apocalypse, because if there were one I wouldn't want to.

However, I'm much less interested in zombies than in vampires, who can be classy and seductive. Zombies are just gross.

[communicator]

They are gross, but I am super-scared of them, so a somewhat mediocre show has an extra veneer of emotional charge that gives me nightmares.

[white_hart]

We might have rationing and national service and social welfare to get through the worse times

There's a Le Guin short story set in a future where the population of Earth has been massively reduced by plagues and food shortages where a character mentions that the British lost fewer people than some nations because they were happy to queue and take their share and didn't fight among each other.

I don't like zombie films at all. Except Shaun of the Dead.

[communicator]

I wonder whether we have lost that (queue and share) or if it would resurface in a crisis

[executrix]

I saw a quote from a survivor of a WWII Japanese prisoner-of-war camp that you could always tell the chaps you had been to public school because they felt right at home.

[azdak]

It would probably make sense for men to have multiple wives.

Although if the underlying real-world paradigm is that there are too many people and not enough resources, this makes no sense at all.

I think you're absolutely right that zombies, like orcs (and, very often, Nazis), are a convenient way for people to have fantasies about fighting for Good without any of that messy awareness that the bad guys are human, too, and that some of them might even be good people (as good as me, anyway).

[communicator]

Yes. I don't mean sexism makes sense in our world - the real world with overcrowding - but in this zombie world which is a right wing fantasy, where only 'our' group is important, and the rest can go to hell, and women need to stay home and men should be in charge and all the rest of it.

(none of this is about open relationships, quite the reverse, I'm talking about a fascist fantasy)