The ZRC Reviews ‘High School of the Dead’
I watched ‘High School of the Dead’ a while ago actually, and then completely forgot to review it, because the sheer, steaming, reeking *awfulness* of it must have scoured my mind clear of willpower and left me desperately trying to develop amnesia through force of will.
Then BuyZombie had to dredge up the painful memories today:
Now I’ll be honest, I’m not ‘overly’ familiar with this anime/manga series. I know it exists. I know it’s supposed to be pretty damn good – that’s about all I can say on it though. However that being the case – fans of the show should love the simplicity of this shirt to be able to feature a series they are a fan of!
The shirt in question is at Think Geek, and…
My first thought is, ‘Is this actually licensed, or are they just knocking off what is surely a trademarked phrase and hoping not to get sued?’
My additional thoughts were, ‘What, precisely, is this shirt supposed to be? The high school had a name, it’s not like these kids went to school every day at ‘High School of the Dead’. So it’s a shirt that claims to be the property of… the show? But stylized like it’s a piece of athletic equipment, which logically should belong to a school? Then of course, there’s the fact that it’s in English, and modeled on an American cliche; do they even mark equipment that way in Japan?’
Oh yes, and of course, it’s Anti-Zombie. But it’s referencing ‘High School of the Dead’, which makes it far worse than just hating on Zombies.
Because ‘High School of the Dead’ is a plague, a plague on civilization. A plague on intelligent life. A curse, suitable for vengeful Old Testament God to inflict on his wayward children, only I know for a fact that it came out of an anime studio, not the heavens.
(Madhouse, for you anime fans amongst our readership. They’ve done all kinds of stuff over the years that didn’t completely suck; this isn’t one of those things.)
Uggh. Let’s start by saying that, yes, ‘High School of the Dead’ is an ugly, Living Supremacist take on the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’. One day, for no reason, people start getting sick, dying, coming back as something like Zombies, and attacking others, who then come back, who then attack others, lather rinse repeat. So you can expect lavish attention to be paid to gratuitous, gruesome violence against the Differently Animated, and naturally this is presented as being both necessary and proper behavior.
Of course, if that was all there was, it wouldn’t have produced quite the reaction it did. Quite frankly I’ve seen enough Living Supremacist media to be able to steel myself to it a bit by now. No, ‘High School of the Dead’ goes beyond hating just Zombies. It hates men, it hates women, it hates liberals, it hates people generally, and it passionately despises modern society.
‘High School of the Dead’ also hates grammar; they abbreviate the series as ‘H.O.T.D.’, which is just plain wrong.
Basically, let me sum up the show for you. An everyman cipher character becomes a hero when the evil Zombies, always referred to as ‘Them’, at least in translation, overrun the planet in about an hour. He does this by beating the Undead about the face and head with a baseball bat. Meanwhile, an ever-larger series of women, with ever more enormous, cartoonishly animated breasts, literally fall all over him, along with one sad, military-geek nerd who I can only assume is a stand-in for the sad, militarily obsessed author of the original manga.
The show doesn’t objectify women; it treats objects with far more respect. Especially guns. Oh man. The NRA would probably love this show as propaganda, except that every time a gun goes off some teenage girl’s enormous breasts are flopping around, and they tend to run a bit in the blue-hair crowd at the NRA.
No, women are less than objects. They’re anime stereotypes, here to bounce, flop over, occasionally remark on how useless they are or how they need a man to have meaning in their lives. Literally. The swordswoman in particular is fond of saying that she lives for a man. Not a specific guy; she doesn’t initially have one, though of course, she falls for the male lead in the end. No; just any man will do. Then you have the mouthy pushy nerd (some people would call her the ‘Asuka’, as in Evangelion, but that’s too mean by far for Eva fans). The mousy best-friend-wants-to-be-more. The ditzy blond nurse with the absolutely ENORMOUS chest endowment. Who falls over a lot. When she moves, the show actually makes a ‘boing! boing!’ noise.
I’m not kidding. She has wacky boob sound effects.
About now, you’re probably thinking I’m exaggerating when I say that ‘H.O.T.D.’ exists almost exclusively to slavishly cater to the crassest possible combination of cheesy juvenile sexuality and pointless violence. That’s all right; I get your skepticism.
So I’ve got a video to show you.
Back? Done vomiting yet? I sat through an entire *season* of that for you, loyal readers.
It gets worse, if you can believe it. For one thing, the quasi-Zombies, the ‘Them’ who are so cruelly mistreated by the alleged protagonists? They’re all blind.
Yes, that’s right; not only are they picking on the Undead, they’re picking on the blind Undead. What’s next, drive-bys at deaf schools because they can’t hear the cars coming?
Oh, and by the way, the show is peppered with fairly extreme right-wing propaganda, particularly on gender relations, but also politics in general. See, the original manga pushes extreme right-wing Japanese politics heavily; they toned it down a bit for the tv show… but not that much.
There’s an extended story arc where the extremely wealthy, extremely, well, traditional-aka-fascistic father of one of the characters lets them take shelter in his castle-cum-house, which he rules with an iron fist and a sharp katana. There are a lot of digs at the Japanese government that still make their way into the anime, as well as constant demonstrations of how hard-nosed crypto-fascism is a noble way to survive the apocalypse. Not to worry though, commoners; if you have a strong feudal lord, you can die to protect them from the Zombies.
Between that and the female characters being ditzy, annoying, or unhinged (the swordswoman, Saeko Busujima, is a legitimate psycho who is sexually aroused by murder. Not making that up), not to mention Saeko constantly talking about how a girl’s role in life is to serve a man… yeah. This show is sick on a half dozen levels.
In summary: ‘High School of the Dead’ is a nauseating exercise in tawdry violence against poor, almost defenseless and actually blind Differently Animated mixed with grating ultra-right wing politics and near-constant debasement of women. It will eat at your heart and soul. You’ve watched the Youtube video; that is all you will ever need to see to understand this show.
Go now, and be free of its awful influence.
‘High School of the Dead’ is rated Living Supremacist because it is an awful pile of violent Zombie-hating dreck.
About The Author
Finally there’s some criticism about this sexist and fascistic anime!
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