The upcoming high-fantasy, big-budget HBO Series ‘Game of Thrones’, based on George R. R. Martin’s best-selling A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels, has been getting a lot of press lately, and given our culture’s current Anti-Zombie fixation, apparently Undead individuals in said show are getting a lot of attention:

If you missed HBO’s April 3 sneak peek at “Game of Thrones,” you’re in luck. The network has released the first 15 minutes of the April 17 series premiere online.

…

Also? We get a fleeting glimpse at the “White Walkers” — which, to the best of our knowledge, are some yeti/zombie hybrid. But damn do they have some pretty eyes…

I haven’t read the original books, nor seen the preview. I do, however, have access to the Power of Google, so I was able to quickly determine what the ‘White Walkers’ actually are.

They’re not Zombies. They’re necromancers who apparently misuse Zombies to fight their wars:

The Others, known amongst the wildlings as White Walkers, are a race of creatures that have been recorded to exist north of the Wall.

Creatures killed by the Others reanimate as undead zombies called wights. The bodies of wights are freezing cold and their eyes glow blue. Wights will attack any living creature around them with surprising strength, and with a certain amount of intelligence and memories of their previous life (as indicated by an assassination attempt of the Lord Commander of the Night Watch). They feel no pain and will continue to fight regardless of injury. Though they can be stopped by total dismemberment, their limbs will continue to move if detached from their bodies. They are highly flammable and will be quickly consumed if set aflame. The Others hold some form of power over wights and can gather them together to attack their enemies en masse.

So once again we have a story that is purported to be about scary Zombies which is, in fact, about Zombies being unfairly used and abused by necromancers.

This is a story as old as time, and somehow it’s never the practitioners of infernal magic that get the blame, it’s the Zombies they enslave. Why is that, I wonder? Besides Anti-Zombie prejudice I mean.

Michelle Hartz, ZRC friend, explored this territory in her own book, ‘Helpless’, and agrees with us that the plight of the Differently Animated, forced to work under these hazardous conditions, is tragic indeed. So some people out there get it.

I just hope the American cable tv viewing public does, or we’ll have yet another fire to put out here at the ZRC.

As for the question in the title, I suppose it all comes down to the treatment of the poor, suffering, apparently enslaved Differently Animated wights. I feel for them. It’s not fun having bosses who mistreat you, even more so when they command dark powers beyond human ken.

In the meantime, to learn more about these harmful work relationships, check out ‘Helpless’:

Tags: Mainstream Media, Television

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, April 10th, 2011 at 12:52 am 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.