Sympathy for the Un-Undead
Oct. 9th, 2024 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malyminI find I have, since at least middle school, had a recurring pattern of being emotionally attached to characters who are undead, or have been turned into monsters. Characters that the narrative usually says should "move on [to the afterlife]" or "be put out of their misery." If they don't get mercy killed, because this is a more escapist or cheerful story, they usually instead get restored to exactly how they were prior to The Incident. Cleaned, purified, perfectly without any trace of monstrous corruption or ghostly despair. Often even without memory of the time spent in that state, so that neither they nor their friends have to think about it. The audience doesn't have to think about it, either.
A happier ending... but one that always dissatisfied me.
One of the closest things I've ever really seen to what I want. Was an AU that Zarla made for her Left for Dead OCs, back on Livejournal, in 2010. These characters of theirs were originally designed as genderswaps of the male-only special infected enemies in that game, but became full-fledged individuals with human personalities later down the line. I was an even bigger fan of those characters than I was of Zarla's art and musings on our shared fandoms, truth be told. Even though I never cared for zombie apocalypse fiction, and certainly knew nothing about Left For Dead itself.
They explored the idea of an AU where the characters, long after having become (special) infected, were given a miracle cure for zombie-ism! But the miracle cure wasn't a cure-all; physical and mental alterations remained, even with a return to lucidity.
Anyway let's explore a slightly different idea for a bit. EchoGarrote actually wrote a bit about this basic concept in some of his fics, but I hadn't really done any drawings or exploration of it myself until recently, haha.
Anyway, basically I was wondering if, should some kind of cure be developed for the Infection, what kind of aftereffects would linger if you'd been a Special Infected first. Being mutated that severely isn't something that just goes away, after all. So these are basic notes on what state they all might be in should they be cured of zombie-ism by some kind of miracle drug or another.
(We can suspend our disbelief for a broken curse leaving no ill traces behind, for curses themselves are as fundamentally magic and imaginary things as cure-alls are; but zombie apocalypse fiction has a pretense, however flimsy, of being grounded in a modern world of biology and science. On the spectrum of treating infectious monsterhood like a demonic curse or a deadly disease, the pop-culture zombie leans as far from magic as possible, compared to its werewolf and vampire cousins.)
And then Zarla went into more detail here. Here's a transcript of one panel.
Patient: S-so, does the s-shaking ever stop? I-it's hard to focus, heh...
Doctor: Unfortunately, your version of the virus seems to do some permanent nerve damage... none of the other Jockeys have stopped. The lack of mood control is pretty common... but you are one of the first female ones, so maybe it'll be different for you. You never know, right?
Of course a zombie virus would be permanently disabling. Why wouldn't it be? Their brains can recover but they'll never be the same. Their bodies will never be the same, either.
Zombie fiction has a survival-of-the-fittest streak, at times veering towards the openly eugenicist; not all zombie stories lack sympathy for the weak and disabled, but it's in the zeitgeist of the the genre, you know? So the notion of curing zombies, instead of just gunning them down? Of accepting cured zombies, with brain damage and scars from the virus' ravages, as human beings who deserve to live? Society can barely even accept real disabled people: people with brain damage, or massive physical scaring, as real human beings. Society often doesn't. There's certainly no room in that worldview for providing treatment, rehab, and accommodations to suffers of a homicidal-urge inducing virus.
But you know... I think about that binary attitude towards disease, and mental illness, and imaginary curses and afflictions. If you're a character in these stories, there's three outcomes, most of the time:
- You're cured with no ill effects.
- It kills you.
- It's a fate worse than death.
3 is effectively the same as 2, most of the time. You're not you once you've succumbed, there's no hope of saving you, and a bullet to your head is just finishing the job and letting your soul rest.
And I think about how it seems like people can't get it in their heads, in the real world, that Long Covid is real, and we should care about it. About how little society cares for anyone who can never be cured, whether it's as obviously physical as a lost limb or as invisible as a mental illness. You either die or you're fine, right? There's never a category in between. Nobody in our culture wants to think about a "damaged" survivor.
I want a world where we can think about this, though. The people who will never be the same again living and finding reason to live despite the things that have changed, that they've lost, that make it hard for them to live in the world. In melodramatic metaphor, as well as real and grounded truth.
Yes ...
Date: 2024-10-10 07:33 am (UTC)Compare with the tendency to kill or cure characters with disabilities. It's a form of erasure. The one that bugs me is introducing a pregnancy or baby for just one episode, then handwaving it away. As you said, dissatisfying.
Here is the Fries Test for disability representation. You could do something similar for undead.
>>Of accepting cured zombies, with brain damage and scars from the virus' ravages, as human beings who deserve to live? Society can barely even accept real disabled people: people with brain damage, or massive physical scaring, as real human beings. Society often doesn't. <<
Yyyyeah. That's a problem.
However, you just did a great job of defining the limitations of the zombie genre and its relatives. Everything outside that narrow bandwidth? It's open to development through original writing, with little or no competition. That's a lot of valuable literary territory out there. I've done it with superhero fantasy and postapocalyptic hopepunk.
You could do it with undead. Really, it's not implausible that a major disease would have people trying to cure it, would have stages of cure moving through marginal to better, and would eventually have bunches of people who might have quite a wide range of different after-effects. Post-traumatic brain injury syndrome is an excellent comparison.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-10-15 12:08 am (UTC)Yea - I definitely consider the way that characters with real-world disabilities are treated a more obvious and immediate "issue" to solve compared to zombies/vampires/werewolves/etc, where the latter can represent ideas that fall far outside of a disability-metaphor framework. But monsters reflect our cultural anxieties (see "Monster Culture: Seven Theses"), and I think the unwillingness to consider a framework outside of kill/cure for such fantastical scenarios, reflects our culture's unwillingness to think about permanent disability as something that can't be ignored and needs to be accommodated. Too often, people with physical disabilities, people who have suffered psychological trauma, etc are effectively told "If I was you, I would kill myself!" Because the able-bodies, the untraumatized, etc in those circumstances think lives like that aren't worth living.
Regarding pregnancy and babies... I do understand that a lot of media is so episodic in nature that it can't really handle changes to the status quo like that in the first place... but if so, why include circumstances that would change life drastically in the first place?
Right now, I've been focusing on fanfic more than anything - using it as low-stakes writing practice, and as a creative way way to sort out thoughts and feelings about source material that I can't quite express through analysis alone. But if I ever do write original fiction, the question of "what would it look if people turned into monsters (whether it be zombies, or werewolves, or whatever else) could be healed, but there were chronic long-term symptoms even afterwards" is one I want to explore, someday.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-10-15 08:59 am (UTC)Often true.
>> and I think the unwillingness to consider a framework outside of kill/cure for such fantastical scenarios, reflects our culture's unwillingness to think about permanent disability as something that can't be ignored and needs to be accommodated.<<
Well reasoned.
>> Too often, people with physical disabilities, people who have suffered psychological trauma, etc are effectively told "If I was you, I would kill myself!" <<
Yyyyeah.
>> Because the able-bodies, the untraumatized, etc in those circumstances think lives like that aren't worth living.<<
By some people's standards that is true -- but not always about the same things. I suspect that everyone has circumstances they would not be willing to live with, but one person might find blindness a bother while another found it life-shattering. Some manage to live with depression while others die of it rather quickly one way or another.
I consider the bigger issue to be that disability is far more social than physical -- in a great many cases it is horrible because of how society shapes the experience more than how a disease or damage shapes the experience. So often there are solutions to a problem that are withheld for money, or a solution is pressed on people that is ugly and miserable. Just as one example, people will put a hideous and unstable metal ramp on a front door and consider that okay, instead of building a sturdy ramp that nicely matches the house. They're capable of doing the latter, they just can't be arsed because they hate disabled people. It's evil. But in the face of that, "Fuck you, I'm out of here," has considerable validity.
For an alternative, look at the Montessori system. It's designed mainly for small children. It includes the principle that beauty is good for people, so the tools are all made from quality materials that look and feel nice; and principles of dignity and independence, so tools are child-sized and designed to help them accomplish more by themselves instead of always needing adult aid. Imagine applying that to adaptive equipment -- that it should be beautiful and should improve independence and confidence as human rights. The prepared environment is enabling.
>>I do understand that a lot of media is so episodic in nature that it can't really handle changes to the status quo like that in the first place... but if so, why include circumstances that would change life drastically in the first place?<<
I think they just want to play with it, instead of treat it seriously. That mocks the very real problem of unplanned pregnancy. I may be pro-choice, but I resent the "let's always kill off the episodic baby" routine. It's not entertaining, it's just irritating.
>> Right now, I've been focusing on fanfic more than anything - using it as low-stakes writing practice, and as a creative way way to sort out thoughts and feelings about source material that I can't quite express through analysis alone.<<
That is an excellent plan.
>> But if I ever do write original fiction, the question of "what would it look if people turned into monsters (whether it be zombies, or werewolves, or whatever else) could be healed, but there were chronic long-term symptoms even afterwards" is one I want to explore, someday.<<
It would make great original fiction. But you could just as easily test it out in fanfic for any canon that has the "monstrosity from disease" trope -- which is most of the zombie / werewolf / vampire stuff nowadays because people shy away from magic so hard. They want a "scientific explanation" and a virus is easy. But then each different setting has its unique points, so a treatment or cure would play out differently in each. You could knock around ideas in fandom, then take your favorites to build something original. I've done it. I routinely mine fanfic for things that readers love so much they will write their own. It works.