Thursday, June 26, 2008

Yaoi Jamboree and Zombies

Yaoi and Zombies.   Not two terms one expects to see together, unless you happen to be reading a gay zombie romance.  Which I have, and it was surprisingly a little hot.  And that probably says something about my psyche that I'm not going to delve too deeply into.  I'll just let it lie.

Even though that's terribly hard to do, really.  How do you stop thinking about that? Zombies in love.  An undead love story - how does that even work?  Can the nerves still feel?  Can you get it up, or is it just rigormortis?  Is that what being undead is like: one constant erection?  Is the climax going to be figuring out how to do the deed without breaking off important bits? Eeeuuuuuw.

So, yeah. Yaoi and zombies, on the brain.  

Or more precisely, Yaoi Jamboree and Zombies.  

Yaoi Jamboree, for those who haven't heard of it, was a brand new Yaoi convention held in Phoenix, Arizona this year at the end of June.  It was new, it had some problems and some great stuff, and I plan to go next year to see how it improves and changes, as I'm assuming it will do both.    At the very least, I met a butt-load of great and interesting people. 

But back to the zombies...

Have you ever seen a zombie movie?  It's dark, but moonlit (because otherwise you can't see them coming and have that delicious shiver of horror).  Fog crawls over the ground in writhing tendrils of skull-white.  Nothing moves until the shambling undead slowly take form and come close to feast on your blood.  Or eyeballs.  Or that new gucci bag that you love and now wish you'd left at home so your sister could at least enjoy it after your possessions have been divvied up.

Well...that's the scene I was met with as I drove with my friend to Yaoi jamboree.  Minus the zombies.   We left late, well past sunset.  Driving in the middle of nowhere, on backroads, we got a bit turned around.  There was the mist, there was the moon, there was the complete lack of people, and the land around us looked like abandoned fields with stunted, mutant vegetation to complete the picture.  No lights on the roads, and no way to tell where the nearest people might be. 

Any movie maker worth his salt would have added the zombies.  It almost felt like a crime not to have them shuffling along side the road.

And I said as much, to which my friend replied that I had enough trouble with not killing us when I tried to dodge the rabbits and mice that might run in front of me.  It's an instinctive sort of thing.  Run over the zombies, dodge the cute and furry forest critters - run off the road either way.

And of course the moment she says this, a rabbit runs in front of the car and I almost kill us swerving out of the way.  And then another rabbit, and then a couple of mice.    As far as I'm concerned, that was a little message from the deep beyond.  

Which brings us to the moral of this story. If you're in a place that needs zombies and lacks them, be very, very careful.  Because the zombies that the world decides to add to the picture may just be you. XD