#gurps fascism ttrpg campaign

[cantsayidont]

@what-alchemy added:

#i think this shift also has everything to do with racism#the broader US narrative appropriates folklore from Black enslaved populations#and then reconceptualizes it as a threat to their (white) personhood to be suppressed in the most violent terms#boy if that aint the history of this country in a nutshell

This is all true, but I think if anything it undersells the openly colonialist and fascist underpinnings of the U.S. (and UK) zombie movie narrative. The genre is arguably the ugliest example of terra nullius post-apocalyptic fantasy, a genre in which apocalyptic events provide a pretense for "culling" undesirables — even within one's own community — and recolonizing entire territories in some ostensibly purer form. The undesirables are reframed as more or less mindless monsters who cannot be rehabilitated or negotiated with, only destroyed, and insofar as their presence reflects some implicit right or claim to the territory, the nullification of that claim is made both necessary and implicitly righteous by the inhumanity of their new, irreversible condition. For example, if you find undead shambling around in what in life was their own house, the narrative makes it both justifiable and appropriate for you to destroy those former inhabitants and claim their belongings (if not the home itself) for your own more urgent needs.

Perhaps the most blatant example of this vicious narrative trend is THE WALKING DEAD comic (I have seen almost none of the TV shows and don't want to), which is startling in its increasingly explicit celebrations of fascism. I have no idea if Kirkman saw it that way, perhaps not, but the narrative has its protagonist, Rick Grimes, repeatedly embracing fascist actions and ideals, which are rewarded each and every time, and which the finale suggests eventually made possible the recreation of a "civilized" world with an unsettling resemblance to the America of the late 19th century.

"The shift from the Afro-Caribbean zombie to the U.S. zombie is clear: in Caribbean folklore, people are scared of becoming zombies, whereas in U.S. narratives people are scared of zombies. This shift is significant because it maps the movement from the zombie as victim (Caribbean) to the zombie as an aggressive and terrifying monster who consumes human flesh (U.S.). In Haitian folklore, for instance, zombies do not physically threaten people; rather, the threat comes from the voduon practice whereby the sorcerer (master) subjugates the individual by robbing the victim of free will, language and cognition. The zombie is enslaved."

— Justin D. Edwards, "Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas" in Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture.

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