At anime and sci-fi conventions there’s always a booth where some guy is selling swords. Err, sorry, ‘swords’. I put the word in quotes because, really, very few people know how to make bladed weapons anymore, and most of what you’ll see marketed as efficient weapons are, in fact, overly complicated, frilly decorative pieces that wouldn’t last five minutes in actual use. As an added bonus, they usually cost several hundred dollars. In short, they go on a nerd’s wall, perhaps in their office, as a showpiece while the would-be-paladin of righteous, steel swinging fury writes code all day.

It was only a matter of time, one supposes, before someone had the idea to adapt this longtime marketing strategy of selling heavily adorned and highly impractical weapons of unknown durability to the fever dreams of glory found in the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ set, and so I present to you ‘Zombie Tools’. From their delightful FAQ:

We are swordsmen and metalsmiths who create blades, and soon, other gear, that will increase your odds of surviving a zombie apocalypse.

Are you serious?!
Deadly.

You really think there’s going to be a zombie apocalypse?
We don’t put it outside the realm of possibility. The esteemed researchers at Cracked found 5 Scientific Reasons the Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen.

Beyond zombies, there’s no shortage of speculation these days that our culture lives just a good shock or two away from some serious destabilization. Pandemic, natural disaster, economic collapse, political upheaval—all have the potential to turn our world on its head and put you in a situation where your survival is in your hands. And should that happen, we’d rather our hands be holding something other than our dicks.

We operate under the premise that if you’re prepared for zombies, you’re prepared for anything

Yes, working from the fantastic ‘research’ of Cracked.com, a parody website with a documented Anti-Zombie bias and weak sauce science skills, they have determined that Zombies might be a threat. Or not. Maybe it will be the return of the Spanish Flu that you’ll be fighting with.. a sword. Perhaps an economic collapse… where that sword will come in very handy in a country with an estimated 192 million firearms.

I won’t even go into how you’re supposed to defend yourself from ‘political upheaval’ using a few inches of sharp steel, considering the fact that most governments own and operate *tanks*.

So we’re dealing with merchants of fantasy death, in the sense that, unless you want to become a spree killer who gets killed by the first cop on the scene, the only killing you’ll do with these swords is in your daydreams. Ok. And they market their high-end toys using the vivid and currently red-hot ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ fantasy, spreading hate and fear against the Differently Animated, which is despicable.

Anyone else they want to offend though?

Do you think your blades would actually kill a zombie?
It’s been estimate that around 600,000 people were killed with agricultural-grade machetes during the Rwandan genocidal war in the 90s. We’ve seen the machetes used in Africa. They’re thin, cheep, Asian-made tools designed to chop vegetation. So we’re fairly confident that our blades, which are twice as thick, made from quality steel, much sharper and designed to cleave, will have no problem with a decomposing walking corpse.
Why don’t I just buy a cheap machete from website X?
If you’d rather have something mass-produced without love by exploited Chinese grandmothers, have at it. But be warned, it make come back to bite you.

Wow. Marketing your sharp-edged toy blades using the Rwandan genocide as a selling point, then backing it up with a joke about elder abuse and slave labor. These guys are class acts all the way.

Got anything else offensive to say? Want to toss in some misogynistic language while you’re at it?

What do you mean when you say “bitch”?
By ‘bitch’, we mean ‘zombie.’

Ooh, thanks so much.

If you go to their actual blades page, you can see their handiwork in person. I can’t, obviously, attest to the material quality of these props/toys. They claim to make them from high grade steel, sharpened using blah blah blah. It’s the same schpiel you get a lot of places with their replicas, essentially. What I will note is that every single one of them is a: ludicrously expensive and b: decorated with a bunch of the silly adornments beloved by bad fantasy artists and 11 year old boys. Oh, and they acid etch the blades to make them look super cool.

Then you read their ad copy and marvel at how violent, crass, and disturbed they all sound:

If Zak is a pitiable bitch attached to a shadowy world of illusion and chained to the singular desire to eat your face, the ZT Vakra is a goddess of mercy come to deliver release. Rock the Vakra at the 5th chakra (said by the Hindus to reside at the throat) and Zak’s skull will be separated from the spinal column, and his reeking corpse from its desperate attachment to the world.

The ZT Vakra is modeled after the Nepali kukri, an ancient, time-tested design that, in the hands of the legendary Gurkha soldiers, has raised kingdoms and maintained empires, and is still in use today as a ceremonial decapitator of water buffalo. The Vakra is a few inches longer than the standard blades you’ll find in the blade shops of Kathmandu, and a bit thinner in the spine, making her a quick and fiercely efficient cutter that can be wielded for day long bouts of Zak group therapy.

Mesmerizing levels of machismo and stupid permeate the whole website. Talk about ‘warriors’ and ‘students of the art of war’, weapons modeled on ancient swords, all with acid-etching decoration, because, really, what you want in a tool you intend to use for survival is a pretty surface decoration that you can work to keep clean and shiny and a design based on an ancient warrior’s arsenal rather than something you might already know how to use. Riiight.

Brother. These guys are the sword version of the ‘Zombie Survival Nerds’ from Atomic Age Cinema TV 2, only with nastier language and breath-taking gall.

To the hypothetical Anti-Zombie nerd who is still salivating over these things:

I guess if you’d rather spend 200-500 dollars on a single super-fancy, arcanely shaped, fancy acid-etched toy than buy, say, 20-50 mass produced sharp cutting implements from the hardware store for the same price, these guys are the toymakers, sorry, *swordsmiths* for you. Because really, and let’s be honest, you’re not equipping yourself for the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ or any other large-scale societal misfortune. If you were, you’d want a large number of the most durable, practical, mass produced implements you could find, known quantities without individual variations and the potential for defects that hand-crafting imparts. And you’d want them to be as affordable as possible so you could get a stockpile together to arm your fellow ‘survivors’.

But that’s not what you want, is it, hypothetical Anti-Zombie nerd? You want something to put on your wall and point to when you fantasize with your buddies about a glorious end time that will never be over your PBR after marathon viewing the entire Zombie section of your DVD collection during the a long weekend. Let’s be realistic. The closest you’re ever going to come to using these things to cleave a skull is, perhaps, cutting a watermelon at the Fourth of July.

And even that’s going to go poorly since most of the melon is going to end up on the ground or soaked into your shirt and hair, assuming you don’t land in the emergency room with acid-etched steel embedded in your thigh.

Obviously, it goes without saying, Zombie Tools, the site, and their many toys designed to stoke vicious Anti-Zombie prejudice, receive our lowest rating, that of Living Supremacist.

Tags: Anti-Zombie Products

This entry was posted by John Sears on Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.