Dead Rising 2, Fake Zombie Advocacy and You: A Zombie Rights Campaign Expose
A very important ZRC Expose on Dead Rising 2 and Fake Zombie Advocates below the cut.
It’s important to know who you can trust, in this crazy, 24/7 media environment, where political issues devolve into screaming matches over cable and facts are rare and nearly mythical creatures.
So when the ZRC started getting word of a Zombie Rights party in the recent UK general elections, we were thrilled to hear about their participation. Indeed, initially everything looked quite good.
The upcoming British General Election, has taken an encouraging twist, no more politics as usual.
The regular guys are all there, Labour, Conservative, Lib-Dems., UKIP, and a few minority parties, but we have a new kid on the block and they will be contesting at least five seats in the House of Commons. CURE which is an acronym for Citizens for Undead Rights and Equality. CURE is in effect, the Zombie Party.
Glad to see, at last, someone is taking politics seriously and treating it with the respect it deserves.
Yes, that would indeed have been a positive change, and finally some serious advancement for Zombies in the world of politics. Actual representation in Parliament! What a chance that would be for the Differently Animated.
The ‘CURE’ party has a website, of course, and it takes the form of a blog about their electoral activities. Apparently they managed to run in four constituencies in the recent election, and actually came in ahead of other parties in most of them, though they did not win a seat in Parliament.
So why doesn’t this make the ZRC happy? I mean, sure they lost spectacularly, but isn’t it still a major step forward just to try?
It would have been, certainly… if it wasn’t an elaborate hoax. For you see, the CURE party is, in fact, a front group for Capcom, a surreptitious attempt to undermine Zombie Rights as a movement in order to sell more copies of its latest odious product.
It didn’t take too much digging to reveal this errant fraud, this despicable co-opting of a legitimate civil rights lobby. The signs are everywhere.
First, examine their blog a bit more carefully.
In this image you can see the top left portion of their site. Who is this mysterious CG woman that is used as a site identifying image? The CURE website curiously doesn’t seem to mention her. For that matter, why is a Zombie Rights organization looking for a ‘cure’ for Zombies to begin with?
Coincidentally, I found the answer when using Google to poke around at my own site archive to see where I’d listed something about Dead Rising on the ZRC blog. When you run this search for Zombie Rights and Dead Rising, the ZRC is your top two google results. As it should be.
However, the third result takes you to a Dead Rising 2 discussion page featuring fans poring over Dead Rising 2 images, noting the apparent presence in the game of a ‘Zombie Rights Activist’.
Does this image look familiar?
Yes, that’s right; Dead Rising 2 apparently features Zombie Rights Activists. I shudder to think of how we’re portrayed in the game. More to the point, CURE is nothing more than a front-group to virally market Dead Rising 2.
It gets better though. Not only has Capcom deviously co-opted Zombie Rights to promote their game, even going so far as to field a fake political party (or so they claim – I’m finding it hard to verify the actual election results) in a UK election; they also decided to abuse a Fake Zombie in public at E3 so that their pet Faux Zombie Rights organization could show up to protest the cruelty:
Above is a picture of a sad zombie who has been captured and brought to the E3 Expo this week as an exhibit for Capcom‘s booth. Those that attended the expo pointed and laughed as the helpless zombie growled and was obviously not up to being made fun of. Some even took pictures by the caged undead and surely will be posting their photos on the internet. But a group of individuals weren’t going to sit idle while zombies are captured and treated like (dare I say) animals.
C.U.R.E. (Citizens for Undead Rights & Equality) flooded the E3 Expo with fliers such as this:
…
On the back of the flier was information regarding how zombies were treated poorly and a website (citizensfortheundead.com) with a petition that asks you to get active. It’s quite the impressive campaign idea.
Passing out fliers? Staging protests? Man, next they’ll be raising money for cancer research.
No, wait, I’m sorry; they’re a FAKE civil rights organization, they have no interest in actually doing good or helping people. They’re here to sell a videogame.
Check out CURE’s US website, which, again, purports to be a real Zombie Advocacy organization, though strangely here not mentioning that they’re also supposed to be a political party in the UK.
For a Zombie Rights lobby they’re also awfully keen on spreading unfair stereotypes about Zombies:
“What rights should Zombies have?”
Zombies should have the right to equal consideration of their interests. For instance, a living human has an interest in not having pain inflicted on them unnecessarily, so we’re obliged to respect that rights. Zombies don’t always have the same rights as humans because their interests are not always the same as ours, and because of their inability to articulate their needs.
“Zombies don’t always respect our rights, so why should we apply our ideas of morality to them?”A Zombie’s inability to understand and adhere to our rules is as irrelevant as a child’s or as that of a person with a severe developmental disability. Zombies are not always able to choose to change their behaviors, but adult human beings have the intelligence and ability to choose between behaviors that hurt others and behaviors that do not hurt others. When given the choice, it makes sense to choose compassion.
If you scroll all the way to the bottom you’ll see a strange banner ad:
Crass. In case you aren’t following the marketing for this game too closely, ‘Zombrex’ is a fictional drug found in Dead Rising 2 that can apparently delay or even prevent Zombification. Naturally, it too has a website.
The meat of the site is hidden behind an age-registration barrier, since this game is rated Mature, but the ZRC can offer you a peek at the slickly designed fake Pharma website hawking this anti-Zombie medication.
‘Zombrex’ also has ties to the Dead Rising Sun movie that was mentioned in our post about the Anime News Network interview with the Dead Rising creators, naturally. Zombrex is a fictional sponsor of this ‘film’ about Zombiism, made to ape the low budget Japanese horror style.
Then you have their page on ‘symptoms’ to look out for in secretly infected friends and relatives hiding their condition. This bit is amusing at least:
E is for EXPOSURE
Could they have been exposed to infection? Have they been on holiday to zombie-themed resorts recently? Have they been consorting with groups defending ‘zombie rights’?
So now we’re not just advocates for an oppressed minority, we’re plague carriers.
Zombrex even has a prospectus not-too-subtly mocking the pharmaceutical industry’s preference for maintenance drugs (which represent a continuous revenue stream) as opposed to cures for ailments. Nice social commentary there, you Romero-wannabes.
I will give the Capcom marketing demons credit though, they certainly go all out. Their E3 spectacle apparently culminated in having fake security guards violently suppress the Zombie Rights protest. Watch this E3 video, especially starting at around the 1 minute marker:
Wow.
(As a CJUS degree holder and longtime observer of criminal justice practitioners, I might note that, while designed to be shocking, this choreographed event is more than a little over the top. Real security personnel are trained to be calm and keep control of a situation, and even when security or police engage in cruelty and oppression they’ll attempt to maintain a more controlled atmosphere. All the incoherent yelling and shouting? Overdone. Plus the costumes need serious work; what professional security guard in this day and age carries no sidearm of any kind? No pepper spray, no Taser? Seriously? Also, there’s the friendliness with the press; real cops or security hate to be observed on camera, it invites lawsuits… if your targets are actual protestors, rather than fakes, at least.)
To recap: as a stealth promotional campaign for an Anti-Zombie videogame, the marketing minions working for Capcom have embarked on what is without a doubt the most ambitious new media campaign ever waged against Zombies. You have fake political activism in the UK, fake advocacy groups in the United States, fake drugs, fake movies, fake crackdowns on fake protests at videogame events. The sheer scale of the lie on display here is breathtaking.
Less dedicated advocates of Zombie Equality might be given pause, seeing the breadth of this campaign, the power and money involved and the effort expended by Zombie game makers like Capcom to marginalize our voices and diminish our impact. Not the Zombie Rights Campaign, however. We remain committed to The Cause, not in spite of fearmongering and oppression perpetrated by corporate titans like Capcom, but because of it. These stunts will not deter us, and this effort to silence us will only make us more bold and determined to spread the word about Zombie Rights, to anyone who will listen.
That’s one reason I’m taking the time, here and now, to assure you that The Zombie Rights Campaign is not now, nor will ever be beholden to a Zombie Oppressor like Capcom. We are not a front group of any kind; we’re not fakes, we’re not pimping some product, and we don’t get our funding from Anti-Zombie groups, though of course we do engage them in dialogue. We strive for transparency in everything we do here at the ZRC, because we respect both the Zombies we advocate for and the public we speak to on their behalf.
Let me say something else, Zombie Rights fans: Capcom won’t win. In the long run, I assure you, Zombies will get their day in the sun and recognition of the wrongs done against them, and on that proud day, the ZRC will be there. Until then, however, we will not rest, and we will not be beaten back by the forces of oppression; instead, we will remain your tireless Zombie Rights Advocates.
We promise.
(If you’d like to fight back against this propaganda campaign and see what real Zombie Advocacy looks like with your own eyes, feel free to join the ZRC when we protest the latest big budget cinematic spinoff of yet ANOTHER Capcom anti-Zombie game franchise, Resident Evil: Afterlife in Chicago on September 10th)
[Updated a couple of short passages for clarity.]
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