Not sure its necessary to yell. Zombies don’t exist, so arguing about what counts as a “real” zombie is kind of silly.
But if your going to discount non-undead zombies as “not really zombies”, your going to discount a good chunk of the genre. Including most of the earlier films that popularized the concept, where a lot of the zombies were hypnotized/possessed/drugged living people. And even post-Romero a non-trivial chunk of zombie films/books/shows have zombies caused by disease or drugs (though the Voodoo angle seems to have fallen by the wayside).
The most “realistic” zombie apocalypse premise I’ve read is the one in John Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, which posits (spoiler about the method of zombification, but not the plot)
[spoiler]A genetically engineered virus based on rabies that causes extreme aggression, paranoia, and hallucinations of bugs crawling on the skin, which causes the infected to strip. This is spread via bites, but it originally is packaged up in a single strand of viral RNA that causes flu-like symptoms and is spread like the flu. The neurological symptoms don’t appear for a few weeks (and not in everyone) after some change causes the packaged crazy-virus to be expressed. Which is spread by nefarious persons unknown in dozens of transport hubs around the world.
So, by the time people start going all zombie-rage, the disease is all over the damn place and can’t be effectively contained.
Because the zombies strip, they can void waste wherever without quickly getting some pretty nasty infections, and they eat people or each other, so they don’t immediately starve to death.
This relies on some biotech handwavery, but I the theoretical concept of a single strand of viral RNA that encodes for one virus and carries a package that encodes for a second is well within theoretical possibility, though we don’t have the ability to engineer symptoms so precisely or to do that sort of virus-ception packing[/spoiler]So far I’ve only read the first book which takes place over a short enough timeline that all of the above holds together without much magic. I don’t know how or if it’s going to be possible to extend the timescale without a lot more.
It bugs me when zombie media attempt a scientific explanation for what’s happening, because said explanation is always self-contradictory. Best to stay with magic. God is pissed at humanity.There was a war between Yahweh and Lucifer, and Old Scratch came out on top.There’s no more room in Hell, so the dead will now walk the Earth.
In the “Did you give up on The Walking Dead?” thread, I postulated that Walking Dead/World War Z zombies have just too much going on to be anything but bio-weapons. A virus that reanimates and allows limited cognition and prevents decay indefinitely and provides virtually unlimited biomechanical energy without a functioning digestive system and motivates the reanimated entity to attack uninfected humans (but not infected humans) is unlikely to be the result of a spontaneous mutation. But if you allow Schlock Mercenary level nano-technology, it all starts making sense. Especially if you can come up with some fanwank for why the nanobots can’t just be air borne or why the enemy isn’t satisfied with just turning people into grey goo.
I guess this is the “Intelligent Design” theory of zombies. And, if you adopt it, then the real interesting question is, who created the zombies and what do they have planned for an encore?