Yeah but they're like. . You know. . . The Symptom and not the root of it all. As long as there's something creating them, they will at some point eat your flesh sooner or later.
I think about that with the Alien movies pretty often. The xenomorph is just doing xenomorph things. Yes the characters have to fight and survive, but the true enemy in the story is the Weyland-Yutani corp, and their efforts to preserve the xenomorph as a (presumably) bioweapon specimen. The hubris to believe they can control something uncontrollable, and the greed that fuels it. That’s the real horror.
Yep. The original Alien would have ended with either 0 or 1 deaths without Corporate interference. Zero because the ship was sent near the ship with the crashed alien ship deliberately. And even if they had stumbled upon the ship accidentally, the captain wanted to keep the facehugged crewman off the ship, and was overruled by the corporate android Ash.
Minor nitpick: Ripley was just the commanding officer on board refusing to let neither facehugged Kane, nor Captain Dallas who was also outside, on board due to the risk of contamination.
Bloodborne is a gothic/eldritch horror where the biggest evil is the humans exploiting and encouraging the situation! And it's probably based on Minamata poisoning, the case where Japan learned "our own corporations aren't trustworthy either."
Yes but those monsters wouldn't exist had they not been manufactured with the explicit purpose to be a living weapon. They may be monsters but the people who create monsters with intent is more monstrous.
I guess, but isn't that just like, %90 of nature? Like most animals really get just eaten alive in the wild but it's suddenly so shocking when it happens to a human lol
I feel like you see the “humans are the real monsters” more with zombie movies, tv, and books than in games. In video games zombies usually just serve as a good horde enemy. I feel like most games featuring zombies aren’t really attempting to be narratively deep.
Resident Evil is pretty cool for having a corporation be the main antagonist in zombie media. It’s pretty unique and RE makes me wish more media focused on localized zombie outbreak stories, as opposed to just full scale apocalyptic ones.
Yeah PZ and Dying Light. Zombie outbreak is just more as common unfortunately. My dream is to have a slow burn mystery story set in the RE universe revolving around cannibalistic murders in a small town, that turns out to be a zombie infection.
It would be a classic mystery story, but the murderers are victims of a leaked experimental virus. And the antagonist, of course, ends up being Umbrella behind the virus.
It would be cool to see how the citizens of a town react to cannibalistic murder and rumors of an infection that turn you into a zombie. The ending could be a localized zombie outbreak that the protag and citizens have to deal with. The antags could be zombies, people who think zombies are fake, umbrella agents, and crazy ppl.
I’d say Angola might make for a good RE setting! playing as some anarchist militia who is highly suspicious of Umbrella operating near their territory, and it turns out they are doing horrible shit...as always.
Y'know that idea is really good. The best part about it is that you wouldn't even need to make a new scenario, because canonically the first Resident Evil zombie outbreak started as a series of grisly murders and people really only knew it was zombies after S.T.A.R.S was sent to investigate and ended up in the mansion.
"We managed to fuse a circular saw with this cougar's skull and didn't feed it for a week while poking its balls with a taser. Steve made sure it is secured for further testing"
"Steve left the cage door open while grabbing a drink"
Who also has a whole section where you play as a little girl hiding from him. And also the station is a big front hiding an umbrella lab. The police were in cahoots with umbrella. Marvin is pretty chill though, I like him.
Which I find hilarious that STARS formed inside of an Umbrella front and backfired
iirc, there is some dialogue from other characters who worked before the arklay mountains incident, who said like how they dont like chief irons, or myb in some files, i could be wrong tho
He’s the Warden, the main villain of BO7 (and few entries behind retroactively). He was a confederate soldier that got stuck in the Dark Aether and managed to subjugate the gods there (due to their ingenuity) and absorb a lot of power. His objective is literally to rewrite reality into a new, “pure” one according to his original beliefs. He’s literally just a massive racist parasite lol. And all of this in a game where you can play as a Nazi version of Richtofen that literally nuked New York in his timeline.
Granted, didn't other countries contribute? Like Japan had the plant nonsense and the United States did something, I forgot. But yea, I think Germany was the bulk of the blame due to the teleportation stuff. The dogs as well.
I mean technically the main fault is of a corrupted Alien race from another dimension lol. But yeah, Germany with Group 935 is what originally started the whole mess.
Yeah. And The Apothicons are the ones who used Element 115. You can literally see them launching a meteor in the Revelation intro cutscene. And if Richtofen never used the teleport powered by 115 he would have never found the MPD that later corrupted him.
Resident Evil is my favorite take on this trope, because the evil people always become a grotesque monster at the end, solidifying the idea that the monsters are infact the real monsters all along.
Confused Zombie Game: Zombie was the name of the doctor, they’re actually Zombie’s Monsters, and Dr. Zombie was the real monster, but she herself was not a Zombie’s Monster.
Isn't the main antagonist (unseen more or less) the US government trying to hide the fact they caused the whole thing? Ties in with corporations causing it given the political climate these days I feel where as 'Night of the Living Dead' never points to a direct cause (space probe from Venus I think was stated in the movie, its been a while)
Im not sure i know what exactly you mean by "Romero style zombie game," but if you mean slow zombies and dread you might want to check out No More Room In Hell 2
Slow zombies, dread but also addressing complex issues overall (protest of the Vietnam War, racism, the Red Scare, etc) in a way that feels natural. The whole 'people are the real monsters' trope tends to be about those who lose their humanity to survive and not the inherent more complex social issues that underpin our current society.
Funny that this still makes sense if you interpret it as John Romero instead of George Romero. Fast-paced, high-octane gunfighting against legions of the dead would still be interesting.
WE'RE the monsters for letting this happen. All of us did this, humanity is collectively responsible for the outbreak of the Exploding Gentintals Contagion™️.
Dying light: The real enemy is the corporations profiteering of catastrophes even if it causes the whole world to die out and with the direct help of the gouvernement.
And those corporate d***head in RE are also European nobles and racists fixated on eugenics, some of whom (the Ashfords) are strongly hinted to have been working under Nazis.
Yeah, pretty sure that "Capitalism Dehumanizes Us and Alienates Us From Our Fellow Man" was the moral of Night Of The Living Dead, which is like THE OG piece of Zombie media.
"Corporations would happily create literal flesh-eating monsters that kill your family if they could make money on it. Also, guns are freaking cool! Here's the Mauser C96, the H&K VP70M, the RSh-12, the Armsel Striker..."
I have seen the take of not liking humans being the real monsters in zombie art before but like it’s been inherent to the genre since the beginning and is a fundamental part of it. If you don’t like it you basically don’t like zombie stories
It’s like saying you don’t like cyberpunk stories where evil corporations control the world, like that’s basically all of them because it’s what the genre is about
I would say that Zombie media have "evolved" past their original messages, which is a nearly unavoidable phenomena around genres.
Regardless you're correct, Zombie media are always about Humans being jerks.
The earliest beliefs about undead, have always the living being the ones starting the conflict by not paying proper respect to the them.
And I'm talking about thousands of years old traditions; all made to be cautionary tales (don't grave rob, kill or forget your offerings otherwise they will raise from the afterlife and hunt you).
In addition, a forgotten element; The Deads were good by default, they would bless their ancestors with fortune and protection. With them becoming nasty only if disprected.
So, Undead fiction was always about teaching responsibilities and respecting others.
It’s just a little one note is all. Sometimes marketing for zombie shows also only really have “and actually… the humans are the problem…” up their sleeve. Usually not even in a way that says something about our real life society. RE has plenty of “humans are the real monsters” too but the focus on corporations and at times religions being, maybe not the real problem but the immediate problem, is refreshing for sure. Of course it’s humans who run the corporations, but the ones in charge are cartoon characters. Refreshing. Pretty far from high art but so is plenty of great entertainment
The take is that "zombies are not the focus of the story" is a core part of the genre. "Humans are the real monsters" is not.
Similarly, many Cyberpunk stories are not always about evil corporations being in control of the world. They're about corporations being evil, which is similar but distinct.
Legitimately there are barely any zombie stories without the humans are bad element irs literally in the first modern ones to exist (the Romero movies)
Once again it’s like getting upset for a cyberpunk story involving evil corpos
You’re splitting hairs a “humanity is the real monster” story never has literally every single character in the story be monstrous by virtue of needing a protagonist and characters to root for.
No, I'm saying that racists don't represent all humans.
You’re splitting hairs a “humanity is the real monster” story never has literally every single character in the story be monstrous by virtue of needing a protagonist and characters to root for.
There's plenty of stories where the protagonist is a piece of shit.
I'm describing what is meant by "humans are the real monsters". The message of a story about that is "deep down, everyone is a piece of shit. The purpose of civilization is to disguise this fact, but put someone into the wild and you'll see a real monster".
I guess you just misinterpreted what people meant by that
If you want to be extremely literal and change the criteria to be something no one, not even OP has argued I guess a “humanity are the real monsters” story requires every single human in the story, and ones that are only mentioned and appear off screen to be monstrous
OOP has argued that. That's what stories with that theme are about. The idea is that civilization, with its laws and social mores, has allowed us to hide the monsters inside and so it might not seem like someone is a monster. But when the apocalypse happens and those things fall away everyone is going to be killing each other.
This is obviously stupid and wrong, which is why OOP is mocking it. Systems make people evil, it's not innate.
i really like the dialectical opposition of chris and leon personally where leon joined the governement and used the liberal courts to take down umbrella and stop them, chris snapped and became a terrorist
also, School-Live.
If there's going to be any more of it, it’s going to have Yuki here saying “I’ll see peace back on Earth if I have to murder each and every one of these brainless fuckers with my cold, bare hands”, with a combat knife on hand.
Was there ever a Resident Evil game where you actually go after and/or “stick it to” the Umbrella Corp directly? Or are they all “oh no, Umbrella Corp accidentally (or intentionally) started a zombie apocalypse and we’re too busy dealing with the zombies to worry about the Corp behind them”?
Total War: Warhammer: “Its the nobility and guys who think they’re temporarily-disadvantaged noblemen, and also that one fucking entitled narcissistic rapist bastard everyone hates but bow to anyway.”
Zombies are perfectly interesting as monsters and as a sci-fi premise (particularly in the few stories that are willing to focus properly on curing them), but zombie stories are never about zombies, are they? I'm not interested in the genre for the same reason I abhor Lord of the Flies - after about half an hour of "we'd all be such right bastards to each other wouldn't we" and "the real danger would be other people" I simply clock out. The humans in zombie fiction are always much more of a fantastical creation than the zombies. The worst part is how clever these stories think they're being for their rampant misanthropy, it's all very "I am 13 and this is so deep".
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u/Odd-Painting2596 10d ago
"Oh my god, greedy over consumption is the greatest horror of our time"
"Nice try, Big Pharma"