Stray Notes on Anime in Spring 2016
Added 2016-07-21 15:36:42 +0000 UTCLet's focus on Kabaneri.
This is probably the video I'm most familiar with, since I studied Gramscian and NeoGramscian power during grad school. In that context, there's so much in Kabaneri that made sense to me that I really couldn't think of anything being more appropriate for understanding it.
Zombies come up quite often in studies on economics, particularly after 2008. The nature of Kabaneri, however, is that they're both vampires and zombies, primarily in how sapience is retained on specific conditions. In this case, Kabaneri's zombies are more reminiscent of thralls.
In some contexts, Kabaneri's zombies aren't really reminiscent of a Romero-esque zombie or zombies you'd see in frenetic Japanese films like Wild Zero, but Nollywood. Serials like Vampire's Call frame vampiric and zombification intricately tied together, and some scholars argue this may be because of economic factors that influence how social power structures are conceived.
There isn't much of a thesis to my position here, but I thought it was something interesting to note, because zombies are very vital tools of discourse, particularly in politics. It's no surprise that political and personal strife are intertwined at the center of Kabaneri.
