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A thought on Affliction
Nov. 15th, 2013 04:17 pmFirst, some rat news:
- Sam's mass is growing again :C
- I let Sid and Ratsputin play on my bed, and it's cold now so they just cuddled together under my blanket and made pissy faces at me every time I lifted my comfort and checked on them because MOM YOU'RE MESSING UP OUR SECRET FORT! Then one of them peed in there ON MY BED and I think it was Ratsputin because he was evicted from it shortly afterward. Sid came out at one point and got in my lap, and I thought he was being friendly but he pooped on me and then went back into the blankets. HE JUST DIDN'T WANT TO POOP IN HIS FORT!
- There are ferrets and baby hamsters at the shelter. Dad won't let me get the ferrets so I'm hoping I can have a hamster as a consolation prize.
And now, I am about to make something that I expect might be an unpopular statement, and I would like you to know that I am fully prepared for the resultant criticism of it and in fact welcome it, because I'm not sure I actually have all the facts in making it:
I thought that LKH actually did a good job making the zombie plague in Affliction fit in with how her universe already worked. I fully thought she was going to break the fuck out of her own canon just to get on the Romero-zombie bandwagon, and she didn't. At least, not as far as I can tell. Granted, I only read a spork (a lovely, wonderful spork by Duamuteffe, by the way!) and I was quite tired and skimming at some points, so I may have gotten some stuff wrong, so please do correct me if that is the case. But here is what I got from it:
There are what appears to be zombies running around attacking people, and with no animator in sight responsible for them. This would appear to break canon rules of all zombies needing to be raised by an animator, and of almost all zombie being harmless unless ordered to attack (the exception being animators, who, if raised as zombies, will be uncontrollable flesh-eaters, and that whole 'murder victim zombies go after their killers' retcon). These "zombies" are also stronger and faster than zombies in the series have thus far been shown to be, and, if one bites you, you become one, another huge break from canon in the direction of the more currently popular film zombies.
Except it turns out they're not zombies. They're rotting vampires and are being mistaken for zombies because they're appearing in daylight, not just night. It turns out that Morte D'Amour is possessing the younger members of his bloodline, forcing them into daylight (which rotters can survive), and making them bite people. I realize in a universe where everyone knows vampires exist and rotters are one of the types, people should generally know by now that, hey, rotters can move in daylight so these dudes are just as likely to be them as they are some kind of "new" zombie breed, but this is actually accounted for---it's stated in canon that though not a rare type of vampire in general, rotting vampires are rare in the USA, so it makes sense that most Americans wouldn't immediately recognize them. Americans are, on the other hand, familiar with zombies, given that there are several animating firms in the USA, and I'm sure that there have been cases in the past (or at least fear of it happening) of animators using zombies to commit crimes, so the idea that "some animator is controlling all these zombies and making them act weird" is not an unreasonable initial assumption over rotting vamps when the "zombies" first appeared.
Of course, then comes in the "if one bites you, you become one" bit. That gets explained too. It's been established canon before this book that a bite from a rotter can cause the tissue around the bite site to rot, and can even spread and result in the death of the victim (a process called "corruption" in canon). It turns out that this bite also lets Morte D'amour posses the victim once they've rotted sufficiently, even if they got the bite not from his own real body but the body of another rotter that he was possessing when it bit them. So these aren't zombies. These are rotters and their rotting victims possessed by the rot king. And since rotters are so rare in the States, most people are not going to be aware that this can happen, hence why the initial panic of a "zombie plague" could very realistically start up until someone pointed out that this is actually a rot thing, which should have happened...except LKH again manages to cover why no one would: Because it's not a rotter thing, it's a Morte D'Amour thing. It's something only he can do. Any rotter can make you rot with its bite, but only he can take control of them with it, from what I can tell, and Morte D'Amour doesn't seem to have ever been on American soil at all until this book, hence no precedent for this ever happening.
However, American history is of course not the be-all end-all of everything that has ever happened. There still surely must have been some case of Morte D'Amour doing this before, right? Well, remember, Morte D'Amour is most likely old-as-fuck like all the Council members are as a rule, so it's entirely possible that the last time he did this was hundreds of years ago, and that he's been sitting on this ability ever since, keeping it secret so it can be used as a weapon of surprise as it was here. So it's believable to me that nobody had any idea what the fuck they were actually dealing with until the truth was uncovered. Now, I think it could have been done better---like going through history books looking for a similar "plague" and finding a case and one of their older vampires saying they remembered something about it and that points of MdA and such--but I can still buy it as is.
And, most importantly, LKH didn't bust her own canon to pull this off. And that was all I asked for. It is also enjoyable to me for RP reasons, because it means my buds and I can set our characters during this "zombie plague" and have a good fun "zombie apocalypse" RP set in the ABverse without breaking any actual rules about AB zombies because these aren't really zombies, yay!
Naturally, of course, none of this changes the fact that Affliction still sucked major rotting donkey balls, and also that "don't break your own canon hideously" is a bare fucking minimum requirement for most authors, not something I should be pleasantly surprised at. And I'm also not entirely sure I actually got all this right; LKH may in fact have had other less-sensical things going on and my brain just re-arranged them all this way so I could understand what the hell I was reading about, because even filtered through a spork this was a baffling trainwreck.
- Sam's mass is growing again :C
- I let Sid and Ratsputin play on my bed, and it's cold now so they just cuddled together under my blanket and made pissy faces at me every time I lifted my comfort and checked on them because MOM YOU'RE MESSING UP OUR SECRET FORT! Then one of them peed in there ON MY BED and I think it was Ratsputin because he was evicted from it shortly afterward. Sid came out at one point and got in my lap, and I thought he was being friendly but he pooped on me and then went back into the blankets. HE JUST DIDN'T WANT TO POOP IN HIS FORT!
- There are ferrets and baby hamsters at the shelter. Dad won't let me get the ferrets so I'm hoping I can have a hamster as a consolation prize.
And now, I am about to make something that I expect might be an unpopular statement, and I would like you to know that I am fully prepared for the resultant criticism of it and in fact welcome it, because I'm not sure I actually have all the facts in making it:
I thought that LKH actually did a good job making the zombie plague in Affliction fit in with how her universe already worked. I fully thought she was going to break the fuck out of her own canon just to get on the Romero-zombie bandwagon, and she didn't. At least, not as far as I can tell. Granted, I only read a spork (a lovely, wonderful spork by Duamuteffe, by the way!) and I was quite tired and skimming at some points, so I may have gotten some stuff wrong, so please do correct me if that is the case. But here is what I got from it:
There are what appears to be zombies running around attacking people, and with no animator in sight responsible for them. This would appear to break canon rules of all zombies needing to be raised by an animator, and of almost all zombie being harmless unless ordered to attack (the exception being animators, who, if raised as zombies, will be uncontrollable flesh-eaters, and that whole 'murder victim zombies go after their killers' retcon). These "zombies" are also stronger and faster than zombies in the series have thus far been shown to be, and, if one bites you, you become one, another huge break from canon in the direction of the more currently popular film zombies.
Except it turns out they're not zombies. They're rotting vampires and are being mistaken for zombies because they're appearing in daylight, not just night. It turns out that Morte D'Amour is possessing the younger members of his bloodline, forcing them into daylight (which rotters can survive), and making them bite people. I realize in a universe where everyone knows vampires exist and rotters are one of the types, people should generally know by now that, hey, rotters can move in daylight so these dudes are just as likely to be them as they are some kind of "new" zombie breed, but this is actually accounted for---it's stated in canon that though not a rare type of vampire in general, rotting vampires are rare in the USA, so it makes sense that most Americans wouldn't immediately recognize them. Americans are, on the other hand, familiar with zombies, given that there are several animating firms in the USA, and I'm sure that there have been cases in the past (or at least fear of it happening) of animators using zombies to commit crimes, so the idea that "some animator is controlling all these zombies and making them act weird" is not an unreasonable initial assumption over rotting vamps when the "zombies" first appeared.
Of course, then comes in the "if one bites you, you become one" bit. That gets explained too. It's been established canon before this book that a bite from a rotter can cause the tissue around the bite site to rot, and can even spread and result in the death of the victim (a process called "corruption" in canon). It turns out that this bite also lets Morte D'amour posses the victim once they've rotted sufficiently, even if they got the bite not from his own real body but the body of another rotter that he was possessing when it bit them. So these aren't zombies. These are rotters and their rotting victims possessed by the rot king. And since rotters are so rare in the States, most people are not going to be aware that this can happen, hence why the initial panic of a "zombie plague" could very realistically start up until someone pointed out that this is actually a rot thing, which should have happened...except LKH again manages to cover why no one would: Because it's not a rotter thing, it's a Morte D'Amour thing. It's something only he can do. Any rotter can make you rot with its bite, but only he can take control of them with it, from what I can tell, and Morte D'Amour doesn't seem to have ever been on American soil at all until this book, hence no precedent for this ever happening.
However, American history is of course not the be-all end-all of everything that has ever happened. There still surely must have been some case of Morte D'Amour doing this before, right? Well, remember, Morte D'Amour is most likely old-as-fuck like all the Council members are as a rule, so it's entirely possible that the last time he did this was hundreds of years ago, and that he's been sitting on this ability ever since, keeping it secret so it can be used as a weapon of surprise as it was here. So it's believable to me that nobody had any idea what the fuck they were actually dealing with until the truth was uncovered. Now, I think it could have been done better---like going through history books looking for a similar "plague" and finding a case and one of their older vampires saying they remembered something about it and that points of MdA and such--but I can still buy it as is.
And, most importantly, LKH didn't bust her own canon to pull this off. And that was all I asked for. It is also enjoyable to me for RP reasons, because it means my buds and I can set our characters during this "zombie plague" and have a good fun "zombie apocalypse" RP set in the ABverse without breaking any actual rules about AB zombies because these aren't really zombies, yay!
Naturally, of course, none of this changes the fact that Affliction still sucked major rotting donkey balls, and also that "don't break your own canon hideously" is a bare fucking minimum requirement for most authors, not something I should be pleasantly surprised at. And I'm also not entirely sure I actually got all this right; LKH may in fact have had other less-sensical things going on and my brain just re-arranged them all this way so I could understand what the hell I was reading about, because even filtered through a spork this was a baffling trainwreck.
