We hope you'll find this blog an educational, entertaining, and inspiring source of information, whether you're recently undead, a long-time member of the differently animated, or a still-living friend of your fallen, yet risen again, brethren. Everyone with an interest in zombie rights is welcome!
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Posted By John Sears on May 6, 2016
Fear the Walking Dead had a dubious start to its second season, with ample Zombie Rights issues, as previously dissected on the ZRC blog here. But perhaps after the premiere things could improve for the Differently Animated?
…Probably not.
(more…)
Posted By John Sears on April 16, 2016
For a different, and yet all too similar, tale of Anti-Zombie prejudice, we turn to the latest high profile anime series featuring the Undead, ‘Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress’, which is available streaming on Amazon Prime.
For some background on Kabaneri from a non-Zombie Rights perspective (if you need that), the ZRC would suggest going here.
Essentially, 20 years ago before the current story, Hinomoto was ‘overrun’ by the Kabane, a race of Undead who are nearly impervious to conventional weaponry. We don’t know the details of this conflict or who is *actually* to blame, but the Living population retreated to walled cities they refer to as ‘stations’, connected by rail routes patrolled by very large, armored trains.
In the opening episode we see that the Kabane are beginning to breach these cities, and the Living society’s government is both corrupt and ineffectual, as one expects in this sort of fiction.
But the trains roll on, without regard to the Undead in their path, which just might have something to do with the conflict, we think!
The main series protagonist is introduced as well: an engineer with a burning desire to create a steam weapon which actually can harm the Kabane. Obsessive, even. Hardly a role model.
Since this new show is from the director of ‘Attack on Titan’, by the end of the episode we have walls collapsing, invasions galore, and a protagonist soaked in blood and rage. So, at least in the alleged Zombie Apocalypse, SOME things remain constant.
The ZRC expects further Anti-Zombie violence, exclusionary practices, and copious steampunk in future episodes.
For shame. The ZRC for one cannot support any mass transit that bans the Differently Animated.
Let the Zombies onboard, we say!
Posted By John Sears on April 16, 2016
This television season, the ZRC is going to do short, episode-by-episode recaps of various Zombie and Zombie-related shows in order to provide the larger Zombie Rights Movement with a response to endemic Living Supremacist media.
Here we go!
—————
When last we left the ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Living cast, they had just settled in to a lavish seaside mansion with the sort of ocean view one normally has to commit serious financial services crime to afford.
Someone in LA seems to have left the gas on, though. So the gang feels it’s time to go.
Can’t say I blame them on that one. Looks toasty.
And then the local Undead Community shows up and our ‘heroes’ get unpleasant.
Something many people do not know, but that your ZRC President learned in law school, is that California has a legal regime in place whereby the public has broad rights to access the beachfront, even across privately owned land in many circumstances. Those rights long went poorly enforced, but a recent change to the law is finally ensuring that the public has the right to get to the beach. Huzzah!
So these Zombies have every right to go down to the waterfront, most likely. Certainly if they come up the coast.
But try explaining that to our entitled, lawbreaking Living cast.
Who sadly resort to violence to stifle our Undead allies’ rights under California law.
For shame! I am not a member of the California bar, but I would strongly suggest that any Zombies facing such a situation seek qualified local legal counsel or report it to the state authorities. They probably have a case!
But thwarting lawful beach access is only the start of the cast’s bad behavior, naturally. Our alleged protagonists take to the sea on Mysterious Strand’s shiny, largely automated yacht, the Abigail.
In the parlance of our times, it is very 1%.
They quickly find opportunities not to help others stranded at sea, which is just bad manners. Could also be a violation of maritime law, but I’m hardly an expert in that area.
Alicia meanwhile throws the whole ‘avoiding other people to save our own skin’ plan out a window, or porthole if you like, by blabbing all sorts of details about their swanky seagoing palace over a radio.
And the episode ends with a bit of light looting/piracy for good measure, as Nick steals from a boat currently operated by Zombies.
Shocking. An episode rife with illegality and Anti-Zombie prejudice. It bodes very poorly for the next season.
Posted By John Sears on March 17, 2016
The Zombie Rights Campaign has been going through some changes behind the scenes, and we are posting this short notice to let anyone who wanders by know things will be getting back up to speed here shortly.
Because the Zombies still need Rights.
Posted By John Sears on December 5, 2015
Well.. the ZRC President does, that is.
Namely me.
See, I saw this thing on a shelf in the mall once some time ago and, well, you know that urge to jump one sometimes gets in very high places?
So after a tough month in November with non-activism related work, your ZRC President thought an energy drink was one way to get back into the lurch of things.
Even if it is Resident Evil themed.
But what does this.. beverage.. taste like, you might wonder?
Well….
The first thing you notice upon pouring it into a glass is that it’s bright blue, in a way that few drinks are. Sort of a neon, tropical ocean color.
The second is the smell. The odor is best described as what a berry would smell like, to someone who had never tasted, or perhaps even seen, fruit.
The taste is actually not so bad. Slightly fizzy Kool-Aid. A bit too sweet, and chalky, perhaps from the various vitamins that make it ‘healthier’, as so many energy drinks do these days.
The ZRC supposes it would be another run of the mill energy drink, were it not for the Anti-Zombie medical branding. Though the bottle does not appear to make any actual claims regarding immune response to Zombie viruses. From what I know about the FDA they would frown upon that, even if the Federal Government as a whole is not exactly staunchly Pro-Zombie.
On balance, the ZRC rates this drink as marginally palatable but solidly Anti-Zombie.
Posted By John Sears on November 3, 2015
Believe it or not, there is more than one Battleworld event comic featuring the oppression of the Differently Animated. This time the ZRC is looking at Age of Ultron vs. Marvel Zombies.
You may recall from our last review that the Marvel Comics Multiverse is now collapsed into one giant, expansive world full of dangerous and mysterious regions. Feels a bit like early 20th century fantasy; Robert E. Howard or Jack Vance. In fact, Battleworld has its own explicitly similar region to those stories, entitled ‘Weirdworld‘, so I know it’s not just me thinking this.
But back to the Zombies. As previously discussed, the Marvel Zombies are cruelly being held behind The Shield, a massive stone fortification to the South of Battleworld.
It has yet to be discussed how this functions in a world where so many of the Zombies can fly, but…
At any rate, to the South of the wall, it’s not just Zombies. There’s a whole world’s worth of killer androids made by Ultron, who you may remember from a recent summer blockbuster.
They dislike organic life. Naturally they do not get along with the Undead. Tragic, really, given their shared oppressors.
Age of Ultron vs. Marvel Zombies is very much a first issue, briefly sketching out the world and telling us how two Living characters end up exiled south of the Shield for Zombies to eat or robots to vaporize. Cue complaints about how there always has to be a Living character or the audience cannot empathize…
But the comic is over almost as soon as it begun.
A few things can be observed, between this first issue and the first issue of Marvel Zombies Battleworld we looked at last time. One is that this is not a very heroic world at all, despite all the alleged heroes! Apparently they routinely ‘exile’ their dissidents, even children if Elsa is to be believed, beyond the Shield to be killed.
But the ZOMBIES are the bad guys. Supposedly.
Hmm. Somehow, we don’t buy it.
The Zombie Rights Campaign rates Age of Ultron vs. Marvel Zombies #1 as Living Supremacist.
Posted By John Sears on November 3, 2015
We’ve had a long and troubled history with Marvel Zombies here at The Zombie Rights Campaign. As one might expect from a phenomenon shepherded toward mass popularity in part by none other than Robert Kirkman of Walking Dead infamy.
Marvel Comics isn’t about to let a little thing like a grand reshuffle of their entire line of sequential art stop them from pushing some graphically violent Anti-Zombie stories, however, and so they present to us…
For those not in the know, Marvel, at least in their dead tree and not-cinematic universe, has a long history of alternate worlds. So many, in fact, that they are referred to with multi-digit designations; the one you’re most familiar with, complete with the iconic versions of Thor, Spiderman, the X-Men and the like, is Earth-616, but there are numerous others.
Well, there were. Now they are all smashed together in one enormous quasi-planet, ruled, apparently, by Doctor Doom.
But what of the universes overrun by people (allegedly) hostile to all other forms of life? Like the Marvel Zombies?
Well, they get exiled to the giant global south, behind an enormous wall called The Shield.
And some really unpleasant sorts guard that wall. Like Elsa Bloodstone, the alleged heroine of this comic.
Elsa gets overconfident while fighting a Zombie revolutionary and ends up far South of the Shield. She teams up with a human child and sets off, first to try and reach her posting, but then on a grander adventure to find out what lies at the edge of the world, in Here be Dragons territory.
All the while verbally savaging anyone vulnerable enough to be in her path, whether they be dying subordinates, wayward human waifs, or of course, the Undead.
And being Marvel Zombies, she just HAS to slaugther a lot of the Undead after demeaning them.
It’s not a promising start, and one The Zombie Rights Campaign rates as thoroughly Living Supremacist.
Posted By John Sears on October 18, 2015
The ZRC likes games you can play on a convention floor, and so we had ‘Zombie Dice’ from Steve Jackson Games recommended to us at many a convention.
Well, now we’ve tried it!
It’s not kind to Zombies.
The rules are simple enough. You have 13 total dice, and a dice cup. You pick 3 out of the cup at random, and roll those. You keep the brains and shotgun blasts you get, but get to roll the ‘feet’ dice again, along with however many random dice you need to get to 3 each time. This iterates until you accumulate 3 shotgun blasts or quit. Unless someone reaches 13 brains, at which point you finish the round, tally up scores, and highest brains count wins.
Meanwhile as one might expect, 3 shotgun blasts is bad. You lose all your brains if you get there.
The dice come in three colors, green, yellow, and red, with a progressively higher shotgun-to-delicious brains ratio in that order.
So a roll could go something like this, for one player. I rolled my first 3 dice and got a shotgun blast, a brain and a foot.
I foolishly decided to roll again, using that foot and two new dice…
Oops. My character, a poor, defenseless, hungry Zombie, is now deceased. Again.
So how is this game in terms of Zombie Rights? Honestly it’s a bit disturbing how abstract it makes the experience of surviving rampant Anti-Zombie violence in society. The Unlives of the hungry Undead searching for sustenance in a hostile world is reduced to pure mechanics, simulating the probability that they will meet a tragic end.
Mere gambling with virtual Zombie unlife, if you will.
Meanwhile of course the best outcome the Zombies can hope for is another day of toil, struggle, and desperate attempt to obtain food while avoiding gunfire.
That’s no way to Un-Live, and it’s not the sort of escapist fun the Zombie Rights Campaign can endorse.
The Zombie Rights Campaign therefore rates ‘Zombie Dice’ from Steve Jackson Games as Anti-Zombie.
Posted By John Sears on October 18, 2015
Over the years I was in law school the ZRC acquired, or was given, a wide range of Zombie merchandise and memorabilia, not all of which was usefully reviewed. Oops.
But there’s no time like the present to delve into the archives/clear out my desk drawers and see some of the odder things our culture is making about Zombies lately!
A Soft, Yarny Zombie Keychain!
This jolly fellow appears to be a rare two-headed Undead individual. Which we support.
Not so sure about this negative copy on the back of the box though.
Zombies are a ‘mindless’ bunch? We hardly think so.
Moving on…
Zombie Lip Balm! Or as the label describes it, ‘Lip Embalm’
The ZRC approves of this product. As we all should be aware, Zombie skincare is crucial, and hydration is essential to keep one’s Undead self preserved.
Zombie Stickers!!
Some of these are witty, but many promote unfortunate Living-Dead divisions. Eating Honor Students is hardly model behavior, nor is running pell-mell from the Differently Animated. And a blanket distrust of the Living, while understandable, is not a viable long-term solution either. Allies are essential!
As is housecleaning, we suppose.
Posted By John Sears on October 9, 2015
The Zombie Rights Campaign’s art director has to take a trip to Las Vegas this November for her day job, and so your ZRC President knew he had to acquire two things.
The first was a copy of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’.
The second? A deck of playing cards, naturally.
But not just ANY cards:
Yes, we need some gambling practice before heading into the desert’s shrine to sin and excess, so naturally I found a deck of Zombie playing cards.
Too bad they’re not Zombie FRIENDLY playing cards. In fact, each one has an Anti-Zombie ‘tip’ on the player facing side.
These tips are… not kind, to say the least.
Strangely enough, our eternal adversaries over at the Zombie Research Society would also be displeased by some of them, as it’s clear the cardmakers haven’t been following the Max Brooks school of Anti-Zombie strategy.
Most harmful though, in the ZRC’s opinion, is the series of emotional attacks on Zombiedom. Contained, as they are, in what is normally a tool for harmless diversion (or in my near future, losing a few bucks at the blackjack table), these slights are especially vicious.
Zombie kids, a parent’s worst nightmare? What an unfortunate sentiment.
The Zombie Rights Campaign rates this deck of playing cards by Bicycle as Living Supremacist.
For shame.