An interesting topic was recently brought to the Zombie Rights Campaign’s attention by our friends/occasional ideological sparring partners at BuyZombie.com: Why weren’t Zombies represented in the Harry Potter books?

We’ve seen recent hubbub over religious representation in the books, but honestly, I had not given a lot of thought to Zombies at Hogwarts.

Now, the books do, of course, have reanimated corpses, tragically and unfortunately trapped in abusive necromantic legal practices. They are also somewhat shamefully used as ‘mascots’ for sporting events.

But the Inferi from Harry Potter are more like golems in many respects than Zombies. A corpse is just a convenient object to put a complicated enchantment on.

Don’t get the ZRC wrong; we aren’t in favor of exploiting golems, and that issue gets little notice outside of the Discworld novels (which have done an excellent job advancing the rights of many non-traditional humanoids!)

But more traditionally Zombie-zombies are absent.

It turns out there are reasons for that:

“While zombies of the Vodou tradition can be nothing more than reanimated corpses, a separate but related tradition has it that the sorcerer uses their souls, or part of their souls, to sustain himself. This conflicted with my Horcrux story, and I did not wish to suggest that Voldemort had any more use for his Inferi than as guards of his Horcrux.”

Honestly though it really broke down to one key moment in her life that she couldn’t ignore.

“I’m part of the “Thriller’ generation; to me, a zombie will always mean Michael Jackson in a bright red bomber jacket.”

These almost sound like… Zombie labor rights concerns! Interesting. And the ZRC is of course strongly in favor of Thriller Zombies and their rights to dancing.

But overall, the ZRC is most thankful to JK Rowling just for putting the issue of Necromantic labor practices back into the spotlight.

Tags: Books

This entry was posted by John Sears on Tuesday, January 20th, 2015 at 11:36 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.