I agree with this. Like movies take place in another universe where none of the actors exist.
[/quore]
Or at least are less famous, or have at least one doppleganger who is less famous.
And there’s other variations. There are times when it seems that DC Comics properties exist (as fictional creations, I mean) in the Marvel Comics universe; I can recall Donald Blake (Thor’s mortal identity) once running into a store room to change to his godly self and musing that, while this was basically a bad idea, it did seem to work for Christopher Reeve. They’re not consistent about that, though.
Well, we don’t get to hear every thought of a fictional character, not even Bridget Jones. She’s so self-involved that I can easily imagine her overlooking the similiarities, since in her mind, nothing in her life has any precedent elsewhere.
This, by the way, is covered in the TV Tropes site under Genre Blindness. Possibly nobody has linked to this yet because like me they fear the site as an enormous time suck.
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure pal. I promise I’ll never try to put this discussion in the context of the broader discourse again. Well, okay, maybe a little more:
Individually, we’re all aware that story telling often depends on characters who are bafflingly unaware of the conventions of the genre, despite the fact that they are equipped with other unrealistic assumptions of the genre. Alien invasion stories are old enough that writers no longer bother to treat them as previously unimaginable (I haven’t seen the newer War of the Worlds, so I don’t know how it was handled there). Zombie movies are new enough that you can still milk a little tension out of people not understanding what’s happening, but increasingly this is a source of humor or annoyance rather than tension.
Of course, it still beats the convention in vampire stories of couching the explanation of the new Vampire Rules by insinuating that you’d have to be pretty stupid to believe a different set of Vampire Rules. Just shut up and explain your premise.
As pointed out, the connection between the voodoo zombie and the Hollywood “Romero” zombie is tenuous, at best. Depending on what source you look at, the voodoo zombie is not even dead, just a heavily drugged and hypnotized person.
I’ve been thinking about this,* and I don’t buy it. The black plague didn’t have airplanes when it killed a third of everyone in Europe, and that disease was less infectious than the zombie virus (every bitten by a zombie gets infected) and less fatal (everyone infected turns into a zombie). If the virus gets into a major medieval city like Paris or Constantinople, it’s curtains for Europe and Asia. Probably Africa, too.
[sub]*Yes, I’ve been thinking about it for two days. Shut up![/sub]
