Undead Rant

You know how the elderly are often stereotyped as grumpy, disconnected and bored with everything? Well sometimes I wonder if I'm already a little too close to that. Well something that's been bringing me closer to that ultimate destiny recently is the undead. Oh how I'm sick of hearing about the undead. We have vampires in every teen romance novel, we have a zombie mode in every video game and I'm altogether over hearing about it. I'm sick of vampires being sexy, I'm sick of zombies being the cause of the appocalypse and I'm sick of nerds getting excited about pretending they'll survive it. So I thought what I'd do in todays blog is vent a little of my annoyance and explore the stupidity of the undead mythologies.

The Name
The first thing to ever bug me about the undead is that they're called "the undead." Let me explain to you how the English language works people. When the prefix "un" is placed before a word is juxtaposes the meaning of the original word so that the new word means the opposite. So then the word "undead" would literally mean "not dead". Now this in itself is fine because zombies seem to posses very basic signs of life and Vampires are able to pick up chicks at bars so it's easily argued that both of these beings are not actually dead. But then comes the problem, neither are we. Regular, 9 to 5 workin' John and Jane who deliver your post and have sex with the highschool swim team, none of them are dead either. So is everyone  not buried or cremated also "undead"? That doesn't really work does it. A better word for it would be "semidead". Semi, for all you dickhead writers out there who can't fucking get it right, meaning partly. THAT one makes sense. They're not quite dead or alive but exist in a weird grey area. Easy.

The next thing that pisses me off about the name is that I can't count the number of times that vampires have said the words "I'm already dead." Excuse me. No you fucking aren't. Dead people can't be arrogant, tall-talkers for one. Vampires can be killed too, by stakes and what not. If there's one situation in which you can NOT be killed it is if you are already dead. But apparently vampires, who are supposedly already dead, can die. So let me get this straight. The undead, are named in a way that literally means they AREN'T dead, are actually already dead but that doesn't mean much because they can still die. Die, die again. Maybe all this is just a scam on the part of the vampires so that they can collect 2 lots of life insurance? Besides which vampires all seem to "outlive" human beings, which is something the mopier ones often sulk about. I mean it's rediculous, are they dead or not? Try and get it together people.

The Zombie Appocalypse
I realise that by this point in my post I haven't given much attention to zombies. Want to know why that is? It's because zombies are fucking boring. I have no idea why or how people manage to talk about zombies so fucking much. Here's what they do. They shuffle. They kill. They sometimes gurgle out a single word. How the hell are people able to go on and on about them? At least vampires are trying to be interesting. But the main reason zombies are talked about so very, very is because the entire Geek Kingdom (ie, the internet) is obsessed with discussing the Zombie Appocalypse.

The annoying thing about the zombie appocalypse is how seriously it's taken. Everyone acts like it's going to happen like it's the Y2K all over again. Nerds actually have models for how the zombie appocalypse will play out depending on factors like the weather and the method in which a person becomes a zombie. It's pretty stupid. I can see the fun in pretending like it's the end of days and you just wanna live a little while longer in your stronghold, but actually making predictions about something that is never, ever, going to happen seems like a perfectly good way to get institutionalized. Let me put things in perspective for you. You know how people think that dice-based role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons are for losers? Well thoroughly planning how best to survive the zombie appocalypse is for the alpha-losers. The losers who other losers bully. And let me just leave this with you to think about. If you can't even function in human society without having your lunch money stollen how the fuck are you going to survive wave after wave of mindless killing machines who can smell you sweating into your Batman underpants?

The Undead VS Daylight
This one only really starts to unravel as you think about it. In many fictional universes the undead, be it zombie, vampire or werewolf (assuming they count, I don't see how they're any less dead than a vampire anyway), are often tranformed or killed in some way by sunlight. Now watch as I suck the fun out of this one.

Vampires usually only come out at night to avoid exposure to sunlight which would severly weaken and eventually kill them. Assuming that this is true, why is it then that moonlight doesn't do the same thing? Moonlight, after all, is just the exact same sunlight being bounced back to earth off the moon. Perhaps you could argue that reflected light doesn't have the same effect, which is fine I suppose except I'm pretty sure I've seen mirrors used to reflect light at vampires to weaken them.

Werewolves have the same sort of issue. Why does the full moon trigger their transformation? again, it's just reflected light. Perhaps you could argue that the other lunar phases do not have sufficient light to triiger the tranformation? But then why do they not transform in sunlight?

The problem with almost every one of my complaints is that they're basically all based upon anchient folk laws and the like, back when people didn't understand things like the moon or death. But I don't see why we have to continue with these laws in our current fiction. People defend these stupid old mythologies and thing like they're fact. You know how in the Twilight Saga vampires sparkle in the light instead of dying and everyone teases it saying how they're "not real vampires." Well here's a news flash dickheads, there ARE no real vampires. Even if sparkling teenage hearthrob vampires is extremely lame at least it's new. At least it's not just retreading the same old nonsensical shit and acting like changing this arcaic mythology would somehow be an affront to mankind. You'd be forgiven for thinking I hate the undead, but that's not quite true. I just hate the way they're getting treated these days. People have stopped being creative with them and are just happy to throw them all in together or randomly shoehorn them into some irrelevent story or game. It's the laziness of it that annoys me. Put in zombies and your game will sell. Put in vampires and you're teen romance novel will sell off the back of Twilight. Fuck you all. How about this for an idea? Get creative and do something new. Make your vampires weak against musicals, make your werewolves temperature sensitive, make your zombie hordes unable to go outside in the rain. Just do something fucking new.