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kimberlysteeleTrue confessions: I still have Netflix. To be specific, my husband still subscribes to Netflix and I occasionally watch a movie or a television show on my computer from it as I do not own an actual TV. At any given moment, Netflix has at least fifty zombie-themed shows on it. If I subscribed to other streaming services, I’d have my choice of several hundred zombie movies and television series with which to waste a chunk of my time, and this is to say nothing about the plethora of zombie novels I could be reading or the zombie video games I could be playing. Zombies are such a dominating theme in our culture that it begs the question: Why is our culture so obsessed with the undead? What are we trying to work out of our collective system?
Fear of Death
I state the obvious (plus I sound like a broken record) when I say our culture suffers from an excessive fear of death. The reason most people cannot calmly and rationally process natural death and become complete emotional basket cases when presented with random or unnatural death is twofold: there is a general disbelief in reincarnation and because of it, most people have many dramatic misconceptions about the afterlife.
I didn’t believe in reincarnation myself until five years ago. It’s only due to my study of occultism that I’ve arrived at my current set of beliefs. When I was raised as a casual Christian, I held the equally casual belief that a life of good works would mean my immortal soul would spend an eternity in heaven and a life of debasement would mean an eternity in hell; a binary. I didn’t honestly believe in either one despite having an extremely vivid imagination. By the time I reached my late teens, it was obvious that hell was immediate and all around me in the form of severe depression, night terrors, and suicidal ideations. Christians and Christianity had zero remedies for my depression or nocturnal attacks from the creatures of my “imagination”, which of course I was told to dismiss as my own brain playing tricks on me. Imagine if I had been shown how to pray by an actual devotee of the Lord Jesus instead of being feared and hated for dabbling in witchcraft in a desperate bid for magical defense. Alas, it was not to be, and there were no competent witches leading the way either. By age twenty, I threw the baby out with the bathwater and became an atheist out of disgust and frustration. As an atheist, I faced the idea of death as an eternal void. From nothing I came and to nothing I would return. I was not bothered by such an idea, in fact, I welcomed it. No pain, no joy, just nonexistence on all levels.
The zombie’s dead-but-not-really-dead state reveals confusion about what happens after death. Instead of letting go of a deceased person’s mortal shell so their higher bodies can rest before reincarnating into new material selves, there is a fear that their spirits will become wraiths clinging to the mortal form shortly before being returned to the endless atheist’s void that lurks behind the Christian’s binary belief in eternal heaven or hell. The real death of Christianity happened when Christians began questioning eternal heaven and hell: to do so was a tacit acknowledgment of the potential superiority of Buddhism and Hinduism, at least in regards to beliefs about the afterlife.
Profit and Loss
Somewhere along the way, western culture lost the plot and let stigma about death run wild. The Irish wake and sitting Shiva were antiquated customs before the salary class lost its damn mind over Covid 19, nowadays, the suggestion of such practices as good ways of processing grief would get you laughed out of the socially-distanced Zoom room. Speaking of manufactured isolation, it’s no surprise that doctors and nurses who should have known better than to fiddle while Rome burned expressed their pathological need for peer approval by using their copious free time to choreograph complex dance routines in empty hospital wards, especially when said hospital wards were allegedly overburdened with Corona patients. At this very day and hour, medical professionals continue to make money hand over fist for each new patient admitted with the label Covid 19 victim stamped on his paperwork. The unaddressed stigma surrounding death has become so acute, much of the world has allowed the travesty of forcing those who are close to death to face it alone, or worse, surrounded by forcibly-vaccinated strangers who may or may not look after their needs between TikTok twerking parades.
Pod People
Scratch the surface of Resident Evil or The Walking Dead and the truth bubbles to the surface: hell is other people. The zombie trope comes from the fear that other people cannot be reasoned or empathized with and that the only remedy for their kind of stupid is an axe between the eyes. Atheism was satisfying to me because it engaged my inner serial-killer misanthropy. I wasn’t worried about being judged for what I felt, said, and did because there were no judges. It’s incredibly easy to feel like one of the smartest people on Earth as an atheist. The atheist is the ultimate Libertarian. Zombie movies are scary because they are reliably about mass infestations. The whole world of doofus poop-for-brains goes against the hero and her band of plucky survivors.
The above is why I say leftists are playing with fire as they try to usher in communism. They have given the average casual Christian and atheist every reason to believe himself a plucky survivor on an onrushing zombification of his part of the world. Leftists, in their Piscean fashion, are struggling to instill a hive mind, hegemonic, unified way of life. They are doing this utilizing most of the key features of National Socialism, Stalinism, and Maoism. In the eyes of the right, they are communist zombies: unthinking, dangerous, and diseased. I personally maintain that Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, the Clinton family, and various other rich leftist figureheads will go to the modern equivalent of the guillotine in my lifetime. I don’t wish for this to happen because I don’t do that anymore. It’s just what I see as the logical progression of events when you inflame a bunch of average people to imagine themselves as heroic defenders against the zombie horde.
The Boy Who Cried Apocalypse
Another trope getting an ample workout these days is the Apocalypse narrative. In both the film and the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the world has become a hellish battle for survival for a seemingly-chosen few who have kept their souls and morality intact. Everyone else in the nearly lifeless hellscape of (possible) nuclear winter does things like rape little boys and eat newly delivered babies. The Road is not a story for those with weak stomachs!
It’s much easier to see one’s enemies as slavering, cannibalistic villains instead of considering them as flawed human beings capable of a spectrum of goods and evils. The Apocalypse narrative frames existence as Us Vs. Them, the Saved Vs. the Zombie Horde that’s headed to hell quite soon.
Enter a little boy born in 1983 named Vyacheslav Krasheninnikov, who died at age 11 from leukemia and prophesied the zombie apocalypse. The child, who was nearly canonized for his powers of prophecy and healing, said there would be:
global passports for the population, which will look like little grey plastic cards; in order to obtain this card, people will have to subject their right hand and forehead under machines which will mark them with the number (666). This was a warning that under no circumstances should anyone accept this number or mark, because this act will never be forgiven by God.
I have mentioned before that Christianity in its death throes is using Pedogate and the globalist conspiracy concept to use as a much needed adversary with which to strengthen itself. The leftist powers that be are not doing themselves any favors by calling their newest injectable enzymes “Luciferase”, despite their bioluminescent properties.
Only time will tell how the zombie trope will continue to act itself out in real life. Surely it’s a case of art imitating life at this point and not the other way around.
Bio phobia too
Date: 2021-07-28 07:54 pm (UTC)I think it goes along with the biophobia exhibited over the past year and a half. Don’t touch each other, don’t breathe each other’s air, don’t celebrate what’s joyful about being alive. Don’t breathe fresh outdoor air….
How can you fully, joyfully live fearing both life and death?
I don’t have a death wish, but I want to die fully experiencing my life up to my death, and with the same curiosity I’ve lived with on my best days. I’ll finally get to find out what I’ve been arguing with friends about my whole life: what happens after death?
Annette
Re: Bio phobia too
Date: 2021-07-28 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-28 10:00 pm (UTC)People really need to get a grip: death is not something we can just avoid for ever...
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Date: 2021-07-28 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-29 02:07 am (UTC)Tamanous
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Date: 2021-07-29 04:04 am (UTC)I notice that some of the children I teach are fascinated by the eighties. Of course they'll never know how scary the religious right became during those times, and also they'll never know the nihilistic horror that permeated that era.
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Date: 2021-07-29 03:18 pm (UTC)Politically Correct Bedtime Stories - 1994 (https://www.amazon.com/Politically-Correct-Bedtime-Stories-Modern/dp/002542730X/)
I once read a book, of all things written about the Romance novel genre, written in the late 70s and published in the early 80s even, that foretold what was to come again in the early 90s and in the 2010s-today. Endless Rapture (https://www.amazon.com/Endless-Rapture-Romance-Female-Imagination/dp/0684179172/), and who in spite of the dangers of the Christian conservative movement were clear sighted about what the opposition stood for.
In a lot of ways looking back it feels like it didn't matter who you rooted for because whoever won, you lost. As a recovering Democrat myself, the lack of historical perspective pre-80s absolutely colored my perspective of the relative dangers of left wing thought compared to the way the Christian right acted in those days, but I don't really know who else was out there to support. The young people of today likely are in the same situation.
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Date: 2021-07-30 04:04 am (UTC)Endless Rapture sounds like a fascinating read. I'll consider buying it for the library.
I remember feeling apathetic because neither political side was anything I wanted to stand for as a young woman. In Illinois, voting anything other than Democrat is a gesture. I watched as two election officials looked at my ballot in disgust in 2016 (I voted for Trump). I should have confronted them about it. I was in a bit of shock at how brazen they were about looking at people's ballots.
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Date: 2021-07-30 11:05 am (UTC)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCU_(film)
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Date: 2021-07-31 01:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-30 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-30 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-31 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-31 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-29 08:38 pm (UTC)But zombies are like the nightmare version of vampires--what happens when the vampire dream doesn't work out and the undead life isn't actually so cool.
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Date: 2021-07-30 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-30 05:34 am (UTC)For that matter, if you look at Japanese media there are all kinds of casual references to Goetic spirits dating back decades. They don't even necessarily appear themselves, but their names do as codenames / nicknames / character names. I always assumed that to them it was "exotic" the way Yokai would be in the West.
And for what it's worth there's a running subthread in the /x/ board all about summoning succubi.
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Date: 2021-07-30 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-30 05:55 am (UTC)I’m holding out for a show about orcs. Not to mention the orcettes. Where are they and what are they doing while the malefolk are out batting Gandalf and friends? Tolkien struggled with the orcs, never really making up his mind how to use them. For 50 years I’ve been wondering about a throwaway line in Return Of The King. Frodo and Sam are in Shelob’s lair, pursued by orcs who think Sam is a giant elvish warrior. Shelob has wrapped Frodo up; Sam, thinking he’s dead, hides nearby. One of the orcs says that the big warrior seems to have abandoned his companion—“regular elvish trick.” To me this says three things:
—The orcs have some kind of morality of their own, such that they disapprove of someone pulling a “regular elvish trick”;
—The elves might, just might, not be quite as perfect as they’re made out to be;
—Mordant humor comes from people not happy with their situation, so the orcs might not be totally willing servants of Sauron and Saruman.
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Date: 2021-07-30 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-30 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-31 02:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-31 03:47 am (UTC)Orc sexuality
Date: 2021-08-01 05:30 pm (UTC)As well as conveniently explaining where baby orcs come from, this also meant that any planet on which orcs had been present would some day randomly have an orc uprising occur, for which the only remedy was to 'glass' the planet sterile with orbital bombardment...
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Date: 2021-07-31 03:15 am (UTC)The Goblin Quest trilogy by Jim C. Hines is from the goblins perspective for the D&D fantasy tropes.
A good break from the media cess pit to be sure.
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Date: 2021-07-31 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-03 07:34 pm (UTC)...
Ok, did a bit of searching and here's the trailer. Will Smith is a cop with an orc for a partner! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EZCBSsBxko