 Hi, so I don't think many people are going to disagree with me when I say that most zombie-related stuff is extremely paint-by-numbers. I mean, so we have the zombies come in, and then all the governments and militaries of the world collapse, just usually very, very quickly, and then a few survivors will putter around, and that's who we follow throughout the story. Sometimes they'll be searching for a vaccine or a cure, you know, like, oh, we have to get this scientist due to a lab somewhere far away so that he can develop a vaccine slash cure for the virus, because it's pretty much always a virus, or maybe there's an immune person who's involved somehow, or maybe they're just trying to find a safe place like they hear a rumor about, oh, this area's safe, so let's go there. And pretty much all the time they will fight some sort of group of evil survivors. Like, I don't think you'll find many people who can disagree that my assessment here is accurate. Now, I recently played a video game called Dying Light, which is a good game, you know, it deals with zombies and stuff, but it is a lot of fun, and just like pretty much everything else zombie-related, the main villain of the story is a human. And part of the reason that I hate that, and really a big part of what drew this whole subject to the front of my mind is that when you fight human villains in that game, you mostly have to do a lot of gunfights and the gameplay just isn't designed for gunfights so it's not very good and it doesn't work that well, you know, the melee combat against zombies is just much better and much more satisfying. And then while playing I was realizing, yeah, we don't really need the human villains here, you know, we already have the threat of the zombies, obviously. We have the threat of running out of food and medicine and other supplies, and we have the threat of being bombed because you're in a quarantine city and the military might just wipe everything out in order to prevent the infection from spreading, so we don't really need more threats than that. We don't really need just this one person who's just there because he's evil, you know, he doesn't really have much personality to him beyond, wah-ha-ha, I'm evil, and maybe he'd be better if they flushed him out a bit more, but they didn't. And then we get to the final fight of the game and it's honestly kind of pathetic, you know, like that you realize that, okay, the villain here is dangerous because he has this army of followers, but he himself is not that big a deal and that's a cliche that exists in a lot of, you know, action movies and stuff. Once they get the main villain alone, once the hero gets him, once Schwarzenegger finds the leader of the terrorists and gets him alone, he'll kill him without much trouble, you know, that's an old cliche and honestly I can't say that I'm a big fan of it and so it's just kind of pathetic in this game. And the thing is that this is every zombie story that's ever been written, or at least every zombie story that's been written for a very long time. You know, even when they change some other stuff about it and make it a little bit more original, they always, always, always have to have human villains. Like, pretty soon after this video comes out, you'll see a review I did of a series called The Reigns, which is genuinely a very unique take on the zombie genre, you know, it does a lot of stuff differently and it is a unique story at the end of the day. But it's still, at one point, without going too deep into spoilers, at one point it does fall prey to, hey, let's just put in a human villain for a while. Like, it's not the main antagonist of the story, but they just have one human guy who decides to be a jerk and wants to take over for no real reason and it's really obnoxious. Another example of this, which is probably better known, would be the movie 28 Days Later, which is a good movie. And one thing I really liked about it is that, well, one, at the time, Fast Zombies was just, I don't know if it was unheard of, but it was relatively new. And two, rather than just making the government and military collapse because they're all idiots and they're all incompetent, they just made the zombies more dangerous. You know, these are, the zombies are technically still alive, but other than that, the infection takes hold much more quickly, they can infect people much more easily. They're fast, like I said. You know, they're just much more dangerous, so it makes sense how they could destroy everything, especially in such a limited amount of time. And so that's part of what I really liked about it, but the main villains of the movie are not the Zimbones, they're other humans. You know, they run into other humans and they're the main villains of the story. It's just, it's so obnoxious. Like, you were doing so well, you had this original story, you were doing different things with it, and then at the end just, eh, whatever, we're gonna resort back to the cliche list. Now, I would like to say that just having a human villain in your story about zombies is not always a bad thing. You know, like a Negan from The Walking Dead is genuinely a great villain. At least in the comics, you know, in the show, I only watched up until the point where they first introduced Negan, and I didn't really like him there that much. Like, Jeffrey Dean Morgan's a very solid actor, but they just, I don't know, he wasn't as much fun to watch and he wasn't nearly as interesting. But in the comic, he's really funny is the main thing. Like, he's just a manchild who has a very strange way of talking and he swears all the time, and it's hilarious, which makes him really fun to watch, but he's still very threatening. You know, he has this whole group of survivors who are very powerful and they can hurt you if you don't do what they say and they will hurt you if you don't do what they say, but Negan himself is not a pushover either. Like, you know, if you got along with him, he can and he would probably kick your ass. Another good example of this would be, like, Attack on Titan. And I know why you were probably thinking like, James, Attack on Titan is not a zucchini story. What are you talking about? Well, when you think about it, the first chunk of that series is basically about zombies, you know, because you have this inhuman monstrous force who just want to eat humans and beyond that they're just mindless machines and they have destroyed most of the world except for this one small pocket of survivors and then they have to fight back against them. Like, there's differences, sure, but that is basically a zombie story. And later on in the series, again, without getting too deep into spoilers, it does shift to mostly being about fighting other humans, but I was okay with that for a couple of reasons. One, it's not just another group of survivors who happens to be evil, it's much more complex than that and it's much bigger than that. And two, they explore some really neat themes here. Like, they explore ideas about imperialism and ethno-nationalism and other stuff like that and the evil, the bad guys are pretty well fleshed out. So it still works pretty well and I found myself not really being upset about it. And it feels like a lot of the time, writers just kind of default to having human villains because it's just what's expected. You know, it's not really what they wanted to do or anything, they just decide, okay, well, this is what we're supposed to do in a story about Zs, so let's do that. And the thing is, when you do that, it kind of loses out on what makes them scary and what makes them cool for that matter. So Zimbabwe's are scary because they are this unending horde. You know, whether they're fast or slow or whatever, they are an unending horde that are always going to come at you. Like, you may get weaker. Like, your friends may die, you may get old or injured or something, but that's not going to matter to them. They might even get stronger over time and they're just going to keep coming and coming and coming until they're all dead and you do not have the capability to kill them all, so sooner or later you're going to have to either run or hide. And plus, they're just a reminder of death. You know, they're a slow inexorable march which will eventually get you, no matter what you do. And that's just, that's what makes them scary. The things that makes the zebras cool is that if you're smart, you're just in a lot less danger from them. You know, like, if you're prepared, if you have a nice little spot set up, then you don't really have to worry about them getting you as much. Like, you should still be wary of them, but if you're smart and prepared, then you're just in a lot less danger than people who are not smart and prepared. There's not any moral conundrums around killing them. Like, you can just stab them and shoot them in the head and whatever. Like, they will kill you if you don't do anything, so why would you bother trying to negotiate with them or anything like that? You don't have to worry about it. There's just, there's no quandary here. And, of course, there is the opportunity to be the last man standing, or the last one standing, I should say. And, hey, that appeals to a lot of people. Just the knowledge that, yes, I was better than everyone else. I was smarter or stronger or luckier or whatever. And I just, I outlasted everyone including my old boss, Gary. Fuck you, Gary. Like, you know, that's the thing is why there was such a big zombie boom a while ago is just that they're both cool and scary. Like, there is a wish-fulfillment aspect to these types of stories, even if they are a lot of the time, well, horror, let's say, a post-apocalyptic and horror, and they're trying to be awful and show you like, oh, yes, this would be horrible. Like, there's still a wish-fulfillment aspect to them. The thing is that when you just make the main villains humans, the Zambonis become background noise. You know, they're no longer as important to the story or anything. They just, okay, yeah, they're there, but we're mostly fighting these dudes. Like, well, what's even the point of having them at that point? Like, I'm trying to imagine a different type of this story where like, the zombies, Zambies are the main threat here, but you still have to worry about other things that come with the collapse of civilization. Like, getting enough food and water and dealing with disease outbreaks and things like that, you know? And I'm just trying to imagine like, the zombies plus these other problems compounding one another. Like, that just sounds very interesting and occasionally you'll get little touches of this, little sprinkles of this, but not that often. Like, I just, I came up with this idea after playing Dying Light, which is really a big part of what inspired me to make this video and I just thought like, okay, what if you were in a city or somewhere along somewhere that's prone to natural disasters? Say you're on the United States Gulf Coast and because there's no meteorology anymore, there's no weather channel, you don't know that there's a big-ass hurricane coming your way and so by the time it gets there, you're already really close to being overwhelmed by it and even if you have this like nice little compound or something that's safe from the zombies, you're still gonna have to evacuate to get away from the hurricane. So, you just have this group of survivors and they have to escape the city while the city is flooding, while all these crazy winds are going on and the zombies are also trying to kill them. Like, that sounds really cool to me. You know, and it involves no human villains whatsoever. Like, you could do a whole bunch of different ideas like this and just substitute like a wildfire or an earthquake or something like that. Like, there's potential here and no one seems to be tapping into it. Of course, this ties into my bigger overall issue, which is that the Zimbi stories are pretty much always the same. You know, like I gave you the run down at the beginning. It's basically always, okay, small group of survivors, okay, everything always collapses right away, okay, a lot of times they're just looking for a cure or a vaccine. Like, you know, it's just the same thing all the time and there's a lot of things that could change here, particularly with the zombies themselves. Like, even if you just leave the story and everything else alone, just focusing on changing up, the zombies can make things feel a little bit fresh. Like, here's a couple of examples. Like, the Z's hate the cold, you know? Like, they just can't stand it for one reason or another so they stay away from cold areas. That would mean like, okay, there's some areas that are dangerous in the summer, but they're safe during the winter. There's some areas which are going to be dangerous year-round. There's some areas where you'll never have to worry about zombies ever, like in the mountains. But that means you'd also have like, people fleeing from areas near the equator or hot areas in general to the cold areas and that could cause some issues. Like, that could be interesting. Or vice versa, the zombies just hate heat and so you'd have people fleeing to the hotter areas. What if the virus, because zombie stuff is always a virus in recent years. Sometimes they'll have it get mixed up a little bit like the last of us, it's a fungus which does help things change a little bit. So, hey, we'll throw that there. Just change it from a virus to something else. That's a little bit original. But anyways, what if the virus, rather than just being spread by bites or just bodily fluid, could spread via the air or the water? Like, that would change things up quite a bit. Like, you might have to wear a gas mask or you might really have to be careful with what you drink because that could infect you as opposed to only having to worry about getting infected when you're directly in contact with the disease. What if there's several types of zombies? And, like, a lot of video games do this, mostly because, you know, you get boring to fight the same enemy type all the time. But, you know, they'll have, like, the regular zombies and then they'll have, like, the big strong tank zombies. They'll have one, there's always a type that can, like, spit some sort of projectiles at you. There's usually a type that can explode for some reason. Like, you know, just having multiple types of zombies and maybe being a little bit more original about it than just copying the same formula that every video game seems to do. But just changing that up a little bit can also be unique and make things feel different. What if the disease or whatever only affects part of the population? You know, what if only Jews turned into zombies? Okay, wait, no, that sounded mildly anti-Semitic. But I'm going to leave it in, whatever. But what if only men turned into zombies and women were fine or only women and men were fine or people of a certain age turned into zombies and everything else was fine? Like, you know, I mentioned the Reigns earlier. That one is everyone above the age of 18 turns into a zombie. And you don't get infected if you're younger than that but as soon as you turn 18, that's when you're in trouble. Or The Enemy is another series that did that. And that one, I believe, was everyone over the age of 16 got turned. You know, there's some room to work with here. What if you made immunity to the virus somewhat common? Like, in pretty much every series where this is a plot point, it's like one person, and it's like, oh, they got bit, but they didn't turn. Whoa, that's crazy. That has never happened before. Whereas other series, and actually the only one I can think of that did this was The Maze Runner, where immunity wasn't common exactly. It was still a small chunk of the population that could do it, like a very small percentage. But it wasn't unheard of. You know, if someone was immune to the flare virus, then they could be around infected people and not really have to worry about getting sick or getting others sick. And actually, oh, that could be interesting. Like, if they're immune that prevents them from getting sick but it doesn't stop them from being a carrier and getting others sick. That could be kind of interesting. Or what if the virus only affects animals and humans are fine? You know, like you have zombie bears and dogs and birds running around, but there's no zombie humans. That could be fun. Or what if ultraviolet light hurts the zombies? Now, I've mentioned dying light several times and that is a plot point in there. There's some type of zombies which get burned by ultraviolet light so they don't come out during the day. Or the strain, which in that series, the Strigoi are basically a mashup of vampires and zombies. So it makes sense that, yeah, again, sunlight hurts them, ultraviolet light kills them. Like, yeah, that's something a little bit different which does change up the calculus of how you're going to fight them and how you're going to protect yourself quite a bit. And so on and so forth. I came up with all that in, like, five minutes of brainstorming. I'm sure if you sat down and thought of it yourself then you could come up with tons more than that. And the thing is pretty much all of these have been done before in some form or another, but just by tweaking them a little bit or by mixing them together, you could make them feel new. You could make them become something new. And I think that's a lesson to be learned in general, is that you can take a lot of ideas that people have used before and then just tweak them a little bit or combine them and it's something totally new. That doesn't just apply to zombies or any one genre whatsoever. That applies to every genre, every type of story, everything. And, yeah, that's all. I just kind of wanted to talk about zombie stuff for a few minutes. Bye. Special thanks to absolutely everyone who watched this far and especially to all of the names on here. These are my patrons. Without them, I don't think I could do this. And a huge thanks to my $10 Nut patrons, Apo Savilainen, Aris Targaryen, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotys, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Dan Anceliovic... Wait. Dan Anceliovic, Dark King, Echo, Carcacatsune, Liza Rudakova, Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett, Marilyn Roxy, Matthew Bodgero, Michael Weingartner, Peepe the Toad, Return of Cardamom, Sad Martigan, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie, and Vaivictus. All of you. You're just, you're just the best. I love all of you. Please, please continue sending me money. If you, if your name isn't on here, then just, you know, like the video, subscribe, all that stuff I'm supposed to say at the end here. Good, goodbye, have fun. Please don't die. Bye.