Zombie Book Club
Train to Busan: From Selfishness to Survival | Zombie Book Club #11
What happens when the undead take over a speeding train, and how can a father-daughter relationship survive the apocalypse? That's what we'll explore in our thrilling discussion of the Korean zombie movie, "Train to Busan." Get ready for a wild ride as we talk about the heart-wrenching bonds between characters, the theme of altruism versus selfishness, and the terrifying ferocity of the zombies chasing them.
We'll also dive into the unique aspects of South Korean zombie cinema, including zombie animals and the creative twists that set this film apart from its Western counterparts. We'll analyze the transformation of the father figure from selfish to selfless, and how the movie's characters embody different aspects of humanity – from the extreme selfishness of the CEO character to the selfless heroism of the blue-collar worker. Along the way, we'll touch on the consequences of capitalism and the moral dilemmas the movie presents, like the main character's decision to bail out the biotech company responsible for the outbreak.
Finally, we'll explore the portrayal of female characters in the movie and the implications of passing the Bechdel Test. We'll discuss the importance of better representation in stories and the need for a more inclusive narrative that addresses issues like racism and misogyny. And of course, we'll wrap up with our zombie survival tips and our final thoughts on "Train to Busan" as a whole. So grab your popcorn and join us, Dan and Leah, for this exciting and thought-provoking episode of Zombie Book Club!
Follow our linktree for social media links, and links to all the places you can find out podcast!
https://linktr.ee/zombiebookclub
Follow our linktree for social media links, and links to all the places you can find our podcast!
https://linktr.ee/zombiebookclub
ZBC Discord Server
https://discord.com/invite/8hCSb4eg
Zombie Book Club Voicemail
(614) 699-0006
Zombie Book Club Email
ZombieBookClubPodcast@gmail.com
Our Secret Website That Isn't Finished
https://zombiebookclub.io
Our Merchandise Store (Where you can find our Evil Magic Chicken Zombie Shirts)
https://zombie-book-club.myspreadshop.com
What happens when the undead take over a speeding train, and how can a father-daughter relationship survive the apocalypse? That's what we'll explore in our thrilling discussion of the Korean zombie movie, "Train to Busan." Get ready for a wild ride as we talk about the heart-wrenching bonds between characters, the theme of altruism versus selfishness, and the terrifying ferocity of the zombies chasing them.
We'll also dive into the unique aspects of South Korean zombie cinema, including zombie animals and the creative twists that set this film apart from its Western counterparts. We'll analyze the transformation of the father figure from selfish to selfless, and how the movie's characters embody different aspects of humanity – from the extreme selfishness of the CEO character to the selfless heroism of the blue-collar worker. Along the way, we'll touch on the consequences of capitalism and the moral dilemmas the movie presents, like the main character's decision to bail out the biotech company responsible for the outbreak.
Finally, we'll explore the portrayal of female characters in the movie and the implications of passing the Bechdel Test. We'll discuss the importance of better representation in stories and the need for a more inclusive narrative that addresses issues like racism and misogyny. And of course, we'll wrap up with our zombie survival tips and our final thoughts on "Train to Busan" as a whole. So grab your popcorn and join us, Dan and Leah, for this exciting and thought-provoking episode of Zombie Book Club!
Follow our linktree for social media links, and links to all the places you can find out podcast!
https://linktr.ee/zombiebookclub
Follow our linktree for social media links, and links to all the places you can find our podcast!
https://linktr.ee/zombiebookclub
ZBC Discord Server
https://discord.com/invite/8hCSb4eg
Zombie Book Club Voicemail
(614) 699-0006
Zombie Book Club Email
ZombieBookClubPodcast@gmail.com
Our Secret Website That Isn't Finished
https://zombiebookclub.io
Our Merchandise Store (Where you can find our Evil Magic Chicken Zombie Shirts)
https://zombie-book-club.myspreadshop.com
Welcome to the Zombie Book Club, the only zombie book club, where sometimes books is a movie and sometimes a movie is a train, and the train is an undead snowpiercer situation, but in Korea, instead of snow, it's zombies, and maybe the zombies have Wi-Fi. It's it's unclear, actually unclear. I'm Dan and I'm a writer, and I'm writing a book based on the zombie apocalypse, and one day, when it's finished, like a zombified Bernie Sanders, i'll be asking for your financial support.
Speaker 2:A zombified Bernie Sanders. That's how long it's gonna take. It's Bernie's gonna be a very not that far away. Alright, he's like 87 years old, alright yeah, he's pretty old, but we love Bernie here.
Speaker 1:My goal is to finish my book within Bernie Sanders lifetime.
Speaker 2:I think, so you can give him a copy before he's dead. Okay, i'm Leah everybody and I'm not watching zombie things alone with Dan. I'm also binging old seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race and my ultimate fantasy genre matchup is a story of drag queens in a zombie apocalypse, particularly if it could start. Vanjie, katja Latrice Royale and Danica Goodcock, which is Dan's drag name according to our good friend Eric. You just got coined that name yesterday. I don't know if Dan is pleased with it, but I sure am Danica Goodcock welcome.
Speaker 1:It's, it's clever, yeah. So today we're talking about Train to Busan, which I'd never seen before, but we watched it yesterday, leah and I, both of us. But before we do that, let's let's do some shout outs. We have shout outs, isn't that we do?
Speaker 2:I have an important correction. I said Danica and wrong it's Danava. Like Dan has a Dan of a good cock. I don't like that as much. I love it. Dan has a good cock. I said it. I said it on air. It's official now. I mean, you don't. What man doesn't want the world to know?
Speaker 1:look, i'm a very modest person when it comes to my penis okay, that's fair my penis is very modest. Yeah, so shout outs, leah. So special thanks to Brian from Zombo Zompocalypse on Instagram, who shared his feedback for World War Z. You listened to it right, leah.
Speaker 2:I heard a little yeah, yeah, i did listen to the whole thing shout out. Hi, brian, thank you so much for sending us your feedback. You actually shared it to us, just to be clear, before we had even recorded our own and we hadn't listened to yours yet, and it was very refreshing to hear that you also thought that there was an absolute hive mind.
Speaker 2:I think it mean after a train going on or yeah, maybe, but it was. Yeah, it was after recorded but it wasn't released yet. But anyhow, point being, we had a hive mind with Brian from Zombo apocalypse about the hive mind that was apparently in World War Z, which I thought was a new insight. Apparently not. Brian already figured it out long before us and also something we didn't talk about on the last episode is that Brad Pitt really should have died probably at least three times in the movie.
Speaker 2:Yeah, probably more honestly yeah that, that man survived, but it's Brad Pitt yeah, he almost had like super powers for not dying.
Speaker 1:Well, he had plot armors, what it was. That's what you get when you have a farmer a singular main character in a zombie story is that of course they're gonna survive. So we didn't even think about it. I don't think anybody thought about it like of course he survived a plane crash. He had his fucking seat belt Brian thought about it, we had a seat belt. Thought of course he survived the crash. Everybody else is dead, although zombies. They're dead because they don't have their seat belts on.
Speaker 2:If you know that's good seat belt propaganda. Yeah, where your seat belt folks? that's my zombie survival tip for the day, but truly it was really cool to listen to. We love to hear our listeners think so if anyone else has feedback on World War Z or we're gonna talk about today which we'll share in a moment, we're always happy to hear it also, i want to give a shout out to a lot of people on Instagram.
Speaker 1:I don't have their names available, i'll do it some other time but as a general blanket shout out, because there's been a lot of people that have been interacting with us on Instagram and I think it's great. You know, you know how it is when you're starting a new thing.
Speaker 1:A lot of times you're just talking to yourself and I'm glad we're not talking to ourselves anymore, but people have been commenting on our posts, watching our stories and stuff. When I'm, when I have the ability to do them, i did them a lot more before the paving season started, but, um, yeah, recently I made a post asking for people to give us some ideas for this future episode that I literally I came up with on the fly as I was making the image to upload. I'm like what can I make an image about? and I wrote it right there, so I didn't even talk to Leo about it. Really, here's a separate idea we're doing it well.
Speaker 2:I love it because I've got a lot of opinions. What was that?
Speaker 1:what was it about? yeah, yeah, the idea was these are movies or books that feel like zombie movies, but arts don't don't have zombies in them.
Speaker 2:I'm looking forward to that one. That'll be a fun discussion because I've got lots that I feel that way, but I was well.
Speaker 1:I almost want to spend a whole hour on like every single one of them, which maybe yeah, that's too off topic well, you know we this could be something that just is a recurring episode, like we just pick a few, we talk about a few and then, like a few episodes down the line, we pick another, another few, because it's a pretty good topic to talk about. I've got like dozens in my head just rolling through it all times. I read a few this week.
Speaker 2:Wow, i like, the road is a good one yeah, that wasn't even on the list.
Speaker 1:That was it.
Speaker 2:The road is definitely probably the darkest, actually apocalypse thing I've ever. I've ever watched or read well, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I feel like, since the road people have tried to one up, i forget the name of the author it's stuck in my mind forever, though, the way it was written. I want to. I want to read it. I saw the movie, but I think I should read the book the book.
Speaker 2:You should absolutely read it, but only if you want to. I mean, i guess you'll do like apocalypse is never mind. Yeah. If you want to be depressed and like think about the worst possible fucking scenario, yeah that's my vibe and the road, but honestly, what's better in my mind is parable of the sewer.
Speaker 1:I do want to read that, because you read that and you told me a whole bunch of stuff about it and I'm like that sounds really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, octavia Butler anything by Octavia Butler like she's a fucking prophet or was she's. She's dead now, but really really wild book and actually set. It's a fall on apocalyptic scenario set in 2025, which is not very far away.
Speaker 1:Yeah you know, i feel like I should read it before 2025, and then, on this podcast, we will determine how close parable of the sewer was to our actual reality.
Speaker 2:That would be amazing. I can tell you right now there is a very Trump like character, like yeah, and she wrote it in the 90s, so oh, 90s.
Speaker 1:Trump was around in the 90s was. I bet she was sitting there with her with her with her notepad out, like hmm, let's see what can I put in this book. She sees like Trump on Home Alone 2 was. Yeah, he pointed out a toy store for for Kevin to go to. I'm pretty sure it was a toy store. Anyways, we're getting off track. Leah, life update. We have a light, we have life updates.
Speaker 2:We do these yeah, so we're gonna do a little good news bad news back and forth here. Bad news Dan was the bad news.
Speaker 1:Work is slowly sucking the life force from our bones. Yeah, the paving season for me is in full swing. We're good, we're about. I'm about a month and a half in, so only seven more to go, so I'm hard as far as over.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it makes it's like I become like I go from being spoiled the shit out of when you're home to everything is on my shoulders until the weekend and it sucks. But good news we told you all about our broken hammock. We now have two hammocks.
Speaker 1:We have a great one to two we're like, yeah, that a whole one hammock situation that's broken. Now we're replacing it with two, because that's where we're at in our lives. Two hammocks, bad news, leah what we have no time to lay in them, and when we do, it rains yeah, that was really depressing.
Speaker 2:I really just or there's bugs fucking everywhere. I can't wait for the bugs to be gone those bugs are crazy, black flies but in good news, you know, keeping it real, we have a full fridge of food, which I think is a privilege in this day and age yeah, that's really full for that. I can't fit anything else in there now.
Speaker 1:I gotta make lunch for this this week for work and I don't know where to put it, we do have a really disturbing amount of condiments.
Speaker 2:Anyone else. I want to know do you have too many condiments in your fridge that you haven't looked at in like four years? I don't know what they are?
Speaker 1:and really, if we use ketchup and mustard, what are all these other things? yeah, bad news, leah, what I don't have time to cook.
Speaker 2:I mean I've been cooking, but it's been a slog, let me tell you.
Speaker 1:You know last year for my birthday, you bought me a vegan Korean cookbook and I was really excited to cook stuff over the winter and I ended up not doing that because I don't know the grind I guess the winter grind of me not being at work, i don't know. But I was thinking about that literally just before we came on and I'm like I really love to make like some, some spicy kimchi, fried rice or something and and I'm like I can't, i work now, i can't do anything that would have been really good for the movie that we watched last night.
Speaker 2:Well, i'm gonna go keep it on the good news, which is we bought a kick-ass riding lawnmower. Yeah, we call it bumblebee.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's so cute, so it's black and orange yellow, yellow, black and yellow, black and yellow black and yellow.
Speaker 2:Black and yellow that was a terrible rendition of that song.
Speaker 1:I think it was great. Bad news, leah, what it gets stuck going up the steep hills. We live on the side of a mountain, so our whole yard is a steep, fucking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's there's zero flat in our yard, which we found out when we put up our pool. Yeah, i had to. I had to go to the tractor supply and get a come along which is like a, like a heavy ratchet strap for basically getting vehicles unstuck from mud and stuff, and I had to like attach it to the truck as an anchor and then ratchet it up the hill. I didn't want to just pull it because I didn't know what would happen if I just like, because I, because I could only pull it sideways up the hill but I could only drive forwards on the driveway, so I'd like start pulling it at an angle up the hill and, yeah, i didn't want to see that thing like start tumbling down the hill towards my god house just bought it to like, yeah, cheap investment, oh my god but yeah.
Speaker 1:So now, now we get to make some modifications to our brand new lawn mower and and put some off-road tractor tires on them when they come in the mail. That's what you love doing is when you, when you buy a $2,500 lawn mower is by parts for an idiot admit it, you should believe about the amount of money.
Speaker 2:I'm embarrassed what we spent. For the record, we can't easily buy shit off Facebook Marketplace. We tried to get a used one near us. Everything was at least 90 minutes away, but I think this is honestly a secret ploy you had, dan, because I you know, i know you love modding cars and you talked about getting fixing up a tractor. So you're like you know what? I'm gonna just tell you I can't pull it up this side of the hill so I can start modding now for real.
Speaker 1:I could not get it up, but we have like a like a 30 degree pitch. It is pretty intense. Yeah, we need a mountain climbing tractor. Yeah, uh, you know I've most almost my entire life I've lived far, far, far below the poverty line, so like there's a real cheap skate inside of me. So, like you know the idea, i don't. I don't even remember what the price tag is on our lawn tractor, but I do remember thinking why would anybody pay that much when he can get one on Facebook Marketplace for 50 bucks?
Speaker 2:basically brand new.
Speaker 1:And then my eyes start twitching remembering the, the plow truck that I bought a few years ago. My god never worked out.
Speaker 2:We could have a whole podcast just about, like the fucking up of adulthood, like adult fuck ups that we've made in our lives the pool in the truck or two good, i mean.
Speaker 1:I'm a I'm a handy person, but sometimes there's just you buy something off of Facebook Marketplace and there's just no fixing it. No, especially up north. Because, like you look at it on paper and you're like, oh yeah, all the needs is this, isn't this easy? easy 15 minute job in the shop. Then, uh, then it comes and you're like, oh, the floor is rusted out and there's rats living inside it. That is not a true story. The frame is split in half and somebody has been using it as, like a garbage disposal unit for 15 years.
Speaker 2:Well, field, and there's plants growing inside sounds like an apocalypse, which is what we're here to talk about. I think we should talk about who and what we're gonna talk about today, dan yeah, trying to boost on, we watched it last night.
Speaker 1:I've never seen it before. I am never seen it before. You know my, my, my one, my one sentence review is it's good, watch it. That's the end. That's the end of the podcast, right?
Speaker 2:yeah, we're done. Now let's go back to talking about our two, our uh, so uh yeah, just in short.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna give away the whole movie, but it's uh, the trend of Busan is a South Korean zombie apocalypse movie directed by Yon Sang Ho, if you know who that is actually. I learned that that the person who made this movie also made all of us are dead the Netflix show that we watched one episode of I don't remember, and then it's in a Korean high school, and yeah, Oh, I thought we watched the whole season. No, we watched one episode It felt like the whole season.
Speaker 1:It wasn't bad, it wasn't terrible, but I could tell right away that I'm like I don't know if I want to go through this whole thing one day. We probably will. Anyways, i digress. A father who's a hedge fund manager or something. It's his daughter's birthday, his daughter's like six or seven, i think And he's a workaholic and he didn't do her birthday good. He bought her a Nintendo Wii And apparently she'd already had one, because For Children's Day, which, i must say, i think in South Korea Oh, i wish I had Children's Day when I was a kid Do we have?
Speaker 1:adult day now. Yeah, let's have adult day. It's tomorrow. I'm going to take off work, But yeah, so for her birthday. She just says that she wants to go visit mom who lives in Busan.
Speaker 2:They're not divorced, they're definitely estranged, yeah Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he's like all right, well, i guess we'll get on the train and we'll go see your mom, all right. And then, once they get on the train, it starts becoming evident that there has been a zombie outbreak, as they are leaving Seoul And somebody gets on the train who's been bitten, and then panic happens and it spreads throughout the train And that's it. That's all I'm going to give you, because I mean, honestly, that's kind of it. The rest is just like zombies. It's scary.
Speaker 2:Well, it's all set in a single day, right Like it's one day There's a lot to happen to this one. It's like that morning. Yeah, it feels like it's. I don't know how long it was, maybe a two-hour meeting or meeting. Oh my God, that's like a two-hour meeting.
Speaker 2:A two-hour movie But it felt like it moved really fast and there's a lot that happened. I think there's some interesting like themes of altruism versus selfishness. We'll talk about more and like whether or not humans have the capacity for courage when there's extreme horror, or are we all just selfish assholes who panic?
Speaker 1:Yeah, once they get on the train we meet a few more characters. It kind of starts instead of being the single character driven plotline. We've also got a working class husband and his pregnant wife, a high school baseball team with a girl who claims to be their only cheerleader but wants to date one of them and he doesn't want to date her.
Speaker 1:That was never really fleshed out fully. Yeah, it was really odd. Maybe he's gay, he might be, we don't know, we will never know. No, i'm pretty sure he's dead now, and a selfish corporate executive and a few others, including a couple of hajimahs, which are really grandma characters. Yeah, they were sweet And yeah, we learned a little bit more about these characters And that was kind of a relief because I didn't really want to watch a movie. That was another Brad Pitt marathon where it's just about one dude.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i mean, the dad and the daughter are definitely the central characters, but they do some interesting side characters, and what's interesting is that they're going to work with Busan, which, just conveniently, is a city that has fended off the viral outbreak. I don't know how or why. That's never clear.
Speaker 1:Well, along the along the way, they make a few other stops at other cities that they think have also been worded off by the military, and they are not. I don't know. That's not the truth. That's not how it happened.
Speaker 2:So what kind of zombies were in the movie Dan?
Speaker 1:So I would classify these as your highly motivated zombies. You know you're. 28 days later, don is dead. World War Z like to World War Z, the, the, the 2000s and up, fast moving zombies.
Speaker 2:I found these ones particularly scary And I haven't been able to pinpoint why they were scarier to me than, like World War Z, fast zombies.
Speaker 1:I actually did pinpoint what made them scary. What is it? And it's not the zombies themselves, i mean unless you're thinking about something entirely different, but no what? one thing that I really loved about this set is not done in any other zombie movie that I know of is that, as far as I can tell, they didn't kill a single zombie. They were incapable of incapacitating zombies. It's not that they were invincible, it's just like they didn't have any weapons, but the best thing that they had were baseball bats from the, from that.
Speaker 2:That should have been enough, as it wasn't strong of the dead.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, that's the thing is, like it's not so easy to cave somebody's head in, even with a baseball bat. You really got to get a really solid hit on somebody to do some serious damage. And then like, as they're fighting these rabid things that are coming at them, it's really difficult for them to get a solid hit on one of their heads, so like they might have killed a few, but they didn't really like it wasn't really celebrated, it wasn't. It wasn't clear that that had happened And the entire movie they didn't ever make us feel like these characters were powerful in any way.
Speaker 2:No, they definitely weren't. Well, they had a couple of the annoying moments where, like, there's like two dudes staving off through a glass door, like holding a glass door closed, and there's like 15 zombies, which really annoys me because I'm always like that is not, i can do it humanly. Put up, dan. You could not be Dan of a good cock, could?
Speaker 1:maybe if both of us were here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, But the other thing that was interesting about the zombies was like and Dan, you and I have debated this is it because they can't see in the dark, which is Achilles heel, or what is it about?
Speaker 1:like they just seem totally And yeah, so they realize as they go through this tunnel, they're like fighting their way back through the train because they like they locked down some of the cars that had zombies in them, but later on they have to go back through these cars to save somebody. And and they, what they realize is that when they go through the tunnel, all the zombies stop trying to attack them. And it seemed like they couldn't see So either. They either have like extreme night blindness, because the the main characters could still see, but the zombies couldn't. But one of them also said something that suggested maybe they thought that because they were going through a tunnel, that like they were losing signal, or something like like these zombies have Wi-Fi and like they went through a tunnel and they're just like oh, i lost it.
Speaker 2:I lost it. Are they controlled? but they do respond to sound in the tunnel. They do.
Speaker 1:They respond to sound.
Speaker 2:Visual, though. Their eyes are also like glazed over and white. So I think it's. My theory is that it is not aliens, it's not 5G. They just can't see well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you know what? that's also great too if the, if the characters like think that it is aliens or 5G, because the, the characters really shouldn't know what's going on. So it would make sense if they're making up stories about 5G, you know, like it doesn't. It doesn't matter what the truth is. If they believe it, that's what they believe, but else, as the audience should know, it's not 5G.
Speaker 2:They just can't see in the dark. Yeah, it was a little bit. I mean, it was a little conspiracy theory of that character.
Speaker 2:The thing that I think was interesting about the zombies was like they would transition pretty fast to zombie Like you get bit, you've got minutes before you become a zombie, but but also there's like this liminal state, this in between state, where their eyes are glazed over and white, they have all these veins popping out everywhere, but then all of a sudden they're like talking about their mom or they're apologizing and they have like a little bit of willpower left. They're having like flashbacks of things they love And then they become zombies, which I've also never seen before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it seems like they would. They would suffer like a sort of mental decline, but they were still capable of like saying things. And then, like one character, the main character was talking to them on the phone And they were turning, and then they started getting mad. They were just like fuck you, fuck you or something. I don't know what they said, But they were just like they started getting really angry. But then you started hearing zombie noises.
Speaker 2:It was the daughter's grandmother calling the daughter's mom a bitch. That's what happened. Oh right, very kind of character. You're like that bitch, yeah, and that's what you do. What else do you think was new? Like, do you think it added new things to the zombie horror?
Speaker 1:genre. I know one that you, that really tickled you Yeah.
Speaker 1:In terms of the end they're speeding away on a train engine. Like they separated the engine from a car. They had to switch trains, that was the whole thing. But it's speeding away and zombies were catching up to the train as it was accelerating. One of them grabbed like the rear handle, but then another one grabbed that one's feet, and another one grabbed that one's feet. Before you knew it, you had this giant zombie sled, like 50 zombies maybe, yeah, and they're like right behind after it And they're like climbing over the zombies that were holding on to the ground. And this is just like like imagine if you had like a carpet of zombies dragging behind a train.
Speaker 2:It was hilarious to look at, but also.
Speaker 1:it's like I could see that, Like that would that make sense It's also kind of hive of mind.
Speaker 2:It reminds me of that scene in World War Z where they're climbing up the wall over each other. But it was but the. I think the sled vibe was very funny to me. The zombie sled Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then he just kind of bashed some fingers of the zombie. It took a lot for him to break the grip of the one zombie that was basically the Pental Hitch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that zombie was oh what the fuck's? a Pental Hitch. I'm assuming it's what holds everything else together.
Speaker 1:Something that, like it's a special type of trailer hitch.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, Yeah, it's kind of that's that kind of shows some superhuman strength of the zombie that it could hold on to like 50 zombies dragging behind it. I don't like 50 miles an hour or something. But my other favorite thing was that there were zombie animals Not enough. This is my biggest critique, other than we'll get into the misogyny of living dead later, Because that's probably going to be every single show we watch or every book we read. But love zombie animals. A first hint that it is a zombie apocalypse coming is that a man runs over a deer and then the deer reanimates and it was wonderful Zombie deer. And then there were news reports like they had TVs on the train and they showed a news report of like zombie fish. Holy fucking shit. I don't think I've ever thought about fish zombies before, but it makes me really happy. I don't know why.
Speaker 1:So what happened originally is that the, the bio, the biotech company that made the zombie thing happen that was responsible for the zombie outbreak in the first place. There was chemicals that leaked into the water and the first things that were infected were the fish. Yeah, and they were all eating each other. But could you imagine if, like you're just going about your day, zombies are not on your radar and a fucking zombie deer comes out of the woods and starts attacking you?
Speaker 2:I mean, we had our own Fisher Cat encounter. But I think a deer would be extra scary because they're supposed to be flight animals.
Speaker 1:It's like a, very like a Bambi deer.
Speaker 2:You still look cute, even at the zombie. I still want to pet that zombie deer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe, maybe we could have just given it grain or something.
Speaker 2:We have a whole bag of grain in our house we still need to get rid of. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, this brings up the obvious thing that we thought of after. This is like what if we combine other forces of nature with zombie animals? And if we do that, what if there was a Zom shark NATO?
Speaker 2:See, I can't get with this.
Speaker 1:Well, there would be zombie sharks because, like the sharks, would at least eat the fish. Even if the fish couldn't bite the sharks, the sharks would eat the fish and would become Zom sharks for sure.
Speaker 2:Wouldn't it be amazing if a cute little zombie bit a shark and then made all the shark zombies That?
Speaker 1:would be a great like origin story.
Speaker 2:What about an octopus zombie? Holy fucking shit. I would not want to run into an octopus zombie.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're way too smart.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's got all those tentacles that just wrap around. And yeah, no, no thanks. Regular octopi are dangerous enough.
Speaker 2:Octopuses, as I like to call them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, octopuses, something that I noticed and you know this is just kind of like my personal opinion about the state of state of zombie cinema in Korea. Like I haven't really been like a huge, a huge follower of of K drama. I know my brother watched a lot of them, so I all of my knowledge that I have of K drama I have from my brother. I remember him watching a show where there was a Oh God, it was like a ghost chef But like ghost. Yeah, she was part of this friend group and she was a chef but also a ghost, but and to to move on to the afterlife she had to make some guy fall in love with her.
Speaker 1:I don't know, it was weird, interesting, okay, but like. So I feel like Korea is at like this very early stage of cinema, especially with zombie stuff. Like they're not burdened in the same way that we are with the current state of our zombie, our zombie movies and stuff. Like there's no, like it can just be a simple story with a focus on tense moments and character development. It doesn't have to be like this huge, giant thing, like kind of like how World War Z needed like these zombie tsunamis and this worldwide catastrophe, and it had to be like this bigger, bigger, bigger story, always bigger and bigger, more gore more action.
Speaker 1:Bigger cars, more fire. This is much more like George Romero movies in the 70s, where it's just like I wanna focus on a few interesting characters. There are zombies. Society has collapsed, go.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think actually, like I don't know if I've just become really desensitized. I don't think I found this very gory, did you?
Speaker 1:No, no, it was. Its score levels were pretty low And probably just probably a lot of that was that it didn't turn into like a zombie massacre. Power finish movie.
Speaker 2:I mean at the same time, though, like literally, how many people would be on a train to start with? Do? you think like a few hundred.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it started like a few hundred people on the train and then two I guess three if you count a soon to a baby that's about to pop. Yeah, two people survive. Yeah, out of hundreds of people. So it is chaos, like it is constant chaos, and the zombie, like virus, spreads very, very quickly. But, yeah, there wasn't a lot of like walking dead, just like seeing somebody's eye pop out. Yeah, heads getting smashed, arms being like limbs being ripped off. None of that was present.
Speaker 1:Well, also these zombies.
Speaker 2:I never had to look away once, which is kind of nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, These zombies. They didn't. they weren't the. They didn't wanna like consume people, They wanted to bite people. So, like once somebody was bitten, they moved down to somebody else. There was only a few times where somebody got ganged up on. Yeah, that's true, they didn't do the horrible part, they just wanted to spread the virus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i kind of like that. Yeah, i don't think there needs to be so much gore, like I literally have to look away for that stuff. I can't watch it because I don't know why I can watch a lot of things but I can't watch really nasty shit on TV, so it still felt scary to me. I would love to take a quick ad break, dan, and then let's come back and talk about some tropes that we saw in the movie that we still loved. Yeah, like the moral of the story, trope Ad break, i'll be right back.
Speaker 1:Do you like duct tape? Buy duct tape because you can wrap it around your forearms when zombies bite you. For some reason, it's only happened in two movies so far, where people decide to protect their forearms. Defensive bites are the leading cause of zombification. Buy duct tape, not any specific brand. Just, you know, don't buy the cheap stuff, of course, but if you get like duct brand or gorilla tape, that'll probably do. Just get duct tape Any color. Any color is fine, just brought to you by duct tape, any brand of duct tape.
Speaker 2:My favorite duct tape is gorilla tape and I love it in a high visibility orange. That would be my preference of duct tape.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i like pink duct tape. At work we would wrap our tools in pink duct tape because in the trades world homophobia is very much alive and nobody wants pink stuff. Because then somebody will be like oh my God, that's a girl color. I don't want somebody to think I'm a girl and they won't steal your tools. So if you have expensive tools, cover them in pink duct tape or buy Ryobi And Ryobi's never going to sponsor, but I love Ryobi. Ryobi sponsored me. I'll cover all your stuff in pink duct tape.
Speaker 2:I think it's so sad. Pink used to be a quote unquote boy color. But let the real folks. Gender is an illusion, Yeah. You know, and if you don't believe me, you can write me a letter and I'll give you all the evidence.
Speaker 1:In Japan, pink is the color of a warrior, because white clothes, when soaked in blood and then washed, would be pink. So Samurai's often wore pink so that you wouldn't see blood seeping through their clothes and also so that they wouldn't have to worry too much about washing them too thoroughly.
Speaker 2:That's smart.
Speaker 1:Got the blood of their enemies all over their nice white clothes.
Speaker 2:That's smart. So much of it really is just culturally arbitrary. What we decide is gendered and not. But let's return to our beautiful train, to Busan movie. Want to talk about tropes? There were some tropes, but I still really enjoyed them because they're kind of comforting, you know, you kind of like can predict what the storyline is going to be, especially when they're zombies, i don't know. It soothes my soul. So one of the tropes was definitely the moral of the story of like, should you be selfish in a crisis scenario or should you help others? And of course, i think the movie was saying you should help others, but I'm not totally convinced. So, as Dan had said, in short, dad of the daughter and I can't say their names because I know I'm going to butcher it.
Speaker 1:That's why I'm just saying that I also will never remember their names either.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I'm an embarrassingly uniling ghoul person who can, like maybe, speak a teeny bit of Spanish and French, and by teeny I mean ask where the bathroom is.
Speaker 1:But anyhow, like How do you ask where the bathroom is in Korean?
Speaker 2:I don't know, but is it Donde Elbaño? Yes, that's right Espanol. Ok, i didn't even know that you spoke Korean. It was no accent whatsoever.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. It's like you've been speaking at your entire life.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's so embarrassing to be uniling ghoul. Anyhow, the dad of the daughter's shitty and selfish at first, like he's 100 percent only interested in his own survival And honestly I'm not even entirely sure he cares about his dad about much. In the beginning Like he loves her, but Yeah but he's a workaholic. Like a burden.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and he's, and he's not really emotionally available to his daughter. His daughter is just sad and just wants to go home to his, to her mom, and yeah, they don't explain why they're separated to that degree, like why she's living with her dad. But and here's. and he's like here's your, the Nintendo Wii you wanted, and she's like dad, they made those in 2008, when I was born.
Speaker 2:But what was kind of nice and like things I've seen before is like the wisdom of children, because it's the daughter's job to show him that it's important to be kind and generous. So he keeps doing things that are like very anything even says to her like quote unquote we should only take care of ourselves. And she does things like she helps the pregnant lady and her husband get away from a crisis situation And at one point, when they're all safe in a car but there's zombies in other cars, she's sitting in a seat and she gives the old woman her seat on the train And her dad literally is like you didn't have to do that. And she was like, yes, i did, dad, yeah grandma.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she also said like grandma's knees always hurt when she stood up for too long.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so the character does transform, like the dad does become kinder and like thinks about other people, like all of a sudden he really actually starts to care about the grandma characters, about the baseball characters and the pregnant woman and her husband. Oh, and the guy that was clearly like had PTSD from saying Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, online everybody refers to him as a homeless character, and I don't think that's true. I also thought this, but I think I'm pretty sure it's the character that we meet at the very beginning of the movie, who's driving his farm truck, he's talking about his pigs And he's like, yeah, you're going to make me bury all my pigs.
Speaker 2:I'm pretty sure it's him. Oh, that's interesting. We should go back and look and see if that's true. But he's definitely not He's. He said the very, very beginning, but anyhow. So there's like this. There's definitely this theme of selflessness, to the point where the dad sacrifices his own life and gets bit at the very, very end to save his daughter and the pregnant woman and keep them alive. They're the only people who survive, as we said. But also there's this like mirror character of the CEO. I think it might be the CEO of the biotech company that happens to be on the train.
Speaker 1:I think so. He says what company he's the. He says he's the CEO. Oh, I don't know what a CEO is.
Speaker 2:Chief operations officer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I didn't recognize the name of the company that he said, but like, let's just say it's the biotech company, because why would it be anything else?
Speaker 2:Yeah, i don't know, but he was a total asshole. He was like the extreme version of the dad. Yeah, the point where, like he deliberately killed people repeatedly, he used people as decoys to get eaten by zombies and get away.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I mean on the other, on the flip side, the blue collar worker, that who's the who's the husband of the pregnant woman. He's like the opposite as well, in the sense that he's very selfless. That's right. So like you have two sides of the same coin and he's in the main characters in the middle, we're like one side is going to go selflessness, the other is selfishness.
Speaker 2:Yeah, But what's interesting to me about it is that all three of these characters the selfless character, the husband of the pregnant woman, the dad and the CEO they all die, even though they had different approaches. It's like, at the end of the day, none of them survived. And is the question, Dan, like, is it better to die for someone you loved than to just die anyways and also have sacrificed a bunch of other people for you to live a little bit longer? What do you think, Dan?
Speaker 1:I mean, look, if I think I think it's always best to be selfless, especially in a crisis, because, like and like they don't. They don't know that they're all going to die. But, like, especially with the knowledge, if you had the knowledge, that doesn't matter what you do, you're going to die. Wouldn't you want to die knowing that you weren't a total piece of shit and that you helped people, instead of, like, literally throwing innocent people in the path of zombies while you run away?
Speaker 2:I think human beings are designed to want to help each other, because I know that when I do a good thing for someone it makes me feel nice, like I don't even know if it's selfless, because inside I'm like oh, i did a nice thing and I feel good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i mean this is this is a trope of zombie apocalypse stories Is that, like the worst in humanity comes out? And while I believe that is somewhat true, i think for it to be true, the person, that the it all depends on the person, the person. If a person is deep down broken and bad, that's going to come out in a in in a life or death scenario. But what we've seen with evidence over you know all of human history when faced with, like natural disasters or crises that people need to come together, for people tend to come together and help each other, even if, like they have their own needs that need to be, that need to be satisfied, people will go out of their way to help other people who all of them, in a way, to help other people who also need the same things. Because, deep down, i think we realize that if we work together, it's, it's easier because somebody, if you save, if you save somebody, that person might save you.
Speaker 2:Well, i think, yeah, we are by nature, social creatures and we rely on each other. We are not crocodiles or fish or cats Like. We need each other to survive, and I think we've been. This society has trained us to think that that's not true, and then we can just, like you know, do the individualism Yeah yeah, i'm only responsible for me and me alone.
Speaker 2:But I think it is interesting that in crises situations people gather together. I mean sometimes other situations, people will watch somebody have something terrible to them happen to them and do nothing. So humanity is, we're just a fucking weird species. I want to be something else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's go to the moon. I want to be a zombie. Yeah, some years on the moon, if we were zombie deers, we could go to the moon. It wouldn't, it wouldn't bother us, we could be.
Speaker 2:I thought that was diabolical shrimp thing about the moon. I don't know if we could steal the idea. I'm pretty sure that Josh owns the moon OK well, you know what We'll we'll.
Speaker 1:We'll ask him if it's OK. OK, yeah, we'll follow, we might have to pay rent On the moon. Let's move on to our capitalism critique.
Speaker 2:Yeah, except I have one more very important thing. Oh, tell me about the moral of the story, which is also one. It's like I have decided that the how do you say grandma's in the Hajima.
Speaker 2:Hajima. Yeah, so the Hajima, the two Hajimas I think, are lesbians. I really want to believe that And I want to know if you've watched it, if you're going to watch it, do you think there might be a love affair happening there? And the reason I think about that is because there's this moment, speaking of the selfishness, where the main character group has been trying so hard to survive and they've been like gone through fucking hell, getting through multiple cars of zombies that are trying to kill them, to finally get to the point where they are at the other side of the door of the car that has all the other survivors that are left And they won't let them in because they're convinced that they're infected. And somehow the Hajimas get separated I don't remember the details because it's me, but they get. Well, you know what? Hey, this will give you a reason to watch.
Speaker 2:Why do the Hajimas get separated? But they're separated and she's listening. The one who the one that's separated from her is obviously becomes a zombie, and the one that's surviving is like listening to all these assholes being like it's. You know, we got to take care of ourselves, blah, blah, blah. And so she's like you know what? Fuck it, i'm going to kill them all And she goes and she opens the door.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hajima opened the door.
Speaker 2:She let them all in to kill him. She's like you all deserve a consequence for being jerks And I have no reason to live because my lover has died. That's, that's the storyline I tell myself when I watched it. I like to think of them as a couple.
Speaker 1:They could. They could have also just been like bingo friends.
Speaker 2:But it's clear that they're.
Speaker 1:It's clear that their relationship was strong, that she was so broken up that this woman had been had died, just because the, the COO, didn't want to open the door for the survivors trying to get in. Yeah, he was a dead. If he'd just opened the door, two people wouldn't have died. And then, when she's like, you know what these people don't deserve to live, open the door.
Speaker 2:Well, you know what I mean. It's kind of the perfect metaphor of capitalism too. He's like fuck everybody else, we're OK. Too bad, you're all dying over there. And she's like let's make there be consequences for that Speaking of capitalism My favorite topic?
Speaker 1:Yeah, mine too, except it's not So. The main character works for a hedge fund company. This is something I actually. I had to read about this after because it wasn't clear to me what had actually happened, But the biotech company that was responsible for the outbreak was facing bankruptcy. Oh And he chose to bail them out.
Speaker 2:That was not clear through the subtitling, but also the subtitling was hard to read sometimes.
Speaker 1:So And later on the main character's on the phone with his business partner who is blaming himself for all of this. Going down, He tells him it's not his fault, But you can see in his eyes that he's like it's not your fault because it's my fault. Main character questions if he's responsible for the outbreak because he contributed to the biotech company in that way.
Speaker 2:That also gets to a real moral dilemma of living in a capitalist society, which is like all of us are doing what we need to survive And right, like hedge fund guy obviously playing the game, he's decided to play the game, yeah. And so it's like can you work against capitalism and change things or do you just buy in? But if you buy in, then you are participating and other people are suffering because of your choices. That's just like a hard reality, yeah.
Speaker 1:I think that's the real. one of the main stories being told here is that as you are climbing over, over all the corpses to climb that corporate ladder, yeah, the people underneath are suffering and you're just like, well, it sucks to be them. Bye, which brings me to the CEO character, or the COO character. I'm just going to call him a CEO.
Speaker 2:Yeah, why not? Who cares? He's a powerful dude with a lot of money.
Speaker 1:We're in choice in this movie, not to make him the CEO, but whatever, he's unapologetically terrible, like he really makes you hate him. He's a selfish coward And he literally single-handedly derails everyone's survival by only thinking about his own safety. There are times where he literally throws people in front of zombies so that he can get away. He leaves doors wide open as he's running away from zombies. He could have taken like a second more to close a door and he could have saved a lot of lives. But then he said he's just like I've got to get out of here And he's just running, running like a crazy person. And then towards the end, after he's been bitten and he's in that state of mind that, like the in-between state before he's full zombie.
Speaker 1:He starts crying about how his mother's waiting for him And he just wants to go home to see his mom.
Speaker 2:He was really heartbreaking.
Speaker 1:He's asking the people who he doomed to death earlier to take him home to his mother, and we realize that he's just a scared little boy who wants his mommy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like I think his character is an example of somebody who's been really warped by society And that was, i feel like that was a moment of like showing his humanity. It was obviously too late on many levels, but, at the end of the day, who would that man have been if he had been raised in a different context?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe he's still a sociopath.
Speaker 1:Who knows. And that's showing this path that the main character's on as well, because the main character is only thinking about his safety and his daughter's safety. And he calls up his business partner. Halfway through the trip. They stop at the city that they say that the military has made safe, and his business partner claims that he knows somebody in the military and he can arrange for them to be picked up by a military escort instead of going through quarantine. The rest of the passengers are getting in line to go to quarantine And he walks off through the station through a cordoned off area. Oh right, because he's going to meet up with the back alley deal that he made. As somebody with influence and power, he's managed to get this special thing going. He doesn't have to go through the process that everybody else does And well, it doesn't work out.
Speaker 1:No, he dies anyway, He's going down the same path as the CEO character, where it's just like I'm going to use my power and influence And I don't have to follow the same rules as everybody else And I'm only going to think about myself because of rugged individuality of capitalism. I'm only thinking of myself and my daughter. We're going to be safe. We don't care about everyone else.
Speaker 2:It's also an example of just if you happen to have financial privilege in that way or power, you're more able to protect yourself, but only for so long. Actually, just as you were talking, i had this revelation that I think probably speaks for all zombie apocalypse movies, but this one in particular. I'm really like this is the first time I really thought about this, which is like we're all going to die anyways. Literally, this is a fact, a foregone conclusion. All of us are going to die And the question is how do you want to spend your life?
Speaker 2:Because you're going to die, you're going to give up everything that you've ever had. You can't take anything with you. That is the cliche saying, but it's cliche because it's true. And how do you want to live your life? Do you want to live your life grabbing and grasping for everything to keep for yourself And ultimately you're going to lose it all anyways? Or do you want to live a life where you share what you have and you have community and people who love you and will remember you as someone who cared?
Speaker 2:I think that's kind of like an interesting thing because, like I said, all of them die And at first I was like well, that makes it ambivalent, but actually I think it makes the message more clear, which is just like you're going to die, so how do you want to live? Who do you want to be? I choose to be like the little girl, a nice person, i think. I mean, we'll see if I'm ever in an apocalypse, if I turn into a total selfish asshole. We probably won't have this podcast to report back, but I don't think I would.
Speaker 1:You know, going back in my history people who haven't heard previous episodes where I talk about things like this I'm a veteran of both the Iraq War of 2003 and the Afghanistan War, And one thing that I had a really difficult time with when coming back from Iraq was that I had this clear sense of how short life is and how important it is to have meaningful friendships and relationships, and how easily those things are taken advantage of by people who, just like, they just want something from somebody or they don't value a person. And coming back, I felt like I was all alone because I was surrounded by people who didn't have the experiences that I had And they were all playing games with each other, you know, just like messing with each other's emotions, not like taking their time seriously, just kind of like floating through life. And I'm just over here freaking out like, don't you realize we could die at any second.
Speaker 2:That's real, i think. I mean that's the thing is that, like we, just we do live in a society where it's really easy to get caught up in the rat race and the like petty politics and to not actually see the bigger picture, which is that we're here, we don't know how long we're here for, and every single moment counts. You can make it count And that can include, like watching zombie movies. I think that's making it count. I'm enjoying myself, but it's like I think that it's that lack of consciousness, like you said, that is disturbing. And then when you realize that, it's usually too late because that means you're going to die.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my goal in this world is to never have the moment where I look back and have regrets about how I spent my time and energy, yeah, and just, oh sorry, i was just going to say it's not like I'm out there rock climbing and whitewater rafting or anything.
Speaker 1:You know, most of the time I'm watching shit on Netflix, but you know I'm with Leah who. Leah is my favorite person in the whole world and has been since we were 14 years old, and you know I'm not going to waste my time or energy on people who aren't worth it, and Leah is 100% worth it. So are Nero and Ziggy are dogs.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I never want to look back and say, ah, where did all the time go? I should have spent it better.
Speaker 2:Thank you for saying that. You made my nose a little tingling. I feel the same way, but I will say like, hey, i don't know who you are that's listening on the other end of this, and who or what you love, but next time you have the opportunity to be near them or doing like near a person or a being that you love, or doing a thing that you love like, take a moment and be really present and grateful, because nothing lasts in this world. In 300 years, we're all going to be dead.
Speaker 1:And I promise you that hug will be extra wonderful.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, if you're on mushrooms, you can't help but be fully present. Yeah.
Speaker 1:At least once in your life, do mushrooms?
Speaker 2:Yeah, unless you're allergic. I've got a couple of friends that are allergic. Don't do then do LSD, which is the synthetic.
Speaker 1:There's an option for everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so let's finish up. We think we had one or two more things we want to really talk about. One of them is, you know, my favorite segment other than capitalism, which is misogyny of the living dead.
Speaker 1:Leah loves misogyny.
Speaker 2:It's yeah, misogyny and capitalism is what I live for, Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, before we get too deep into the misogyny section. I know that there are times where you are worried that, like, like, too much talking about feminism and misogyny would make people upset when they listen to the podcast. I just want to say they can go fuck themselves. It was nice to hear your message on that. As zombie survival fans, we look for the deeper meanings in things And beyond the fact that obviously misogyny is wrong and racism is wrong, and these are the types of things that zombie stories do a really good job of pointing out in a roundabout way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i feel that in the effort to be less misogynistic and be less racist and not cling on to old, tired tropes and stereotypes, we get better movies and books, like it's really lazy to have one-dimensional female characters just because you don't want to think too hard about feminism. But if you think more about the experiences of other people, you produce better work.
Speaker 2:That is very true And I would never I'm going to double negative it here for all the writers listening be prepared to cringe. I would never not talk about it, because it's essential to talk about these things. You have to talk about these things because otherwise we're never going to change them And at the same time, I'm aware, just because I've always been kind of the person that's like, hey, wait a second. This is not OK. Often, if people don't want to hear it or don't like it, I've lost relationships and friendships over these kinds of things. So I hope that the people that are listening to this podcast are part of our community and are interested in exploring these things with themselves too, because I think it's really important. So, on that note, train to Busan. This is an interesting moment, actually, where I was so caught up in the storyline I wasn't really paying attention, And Dan was the one that was like what the fuck?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I win at feminism. It's terrible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you do. You win feminism. Tell us, Dan, what do you think about misogyny in this movie?
Speaker 1:Yeah, every female character in this movie isn't even two-dimensional, purely one-dimensional. They need to be saved all the time. They have nothing to say. Even the male characters and none of the female characters talk to each other about anything. Even a male character.
Speaker 2:Yeah, except for the. I mean, i guess the daughter does give the device of like being a moral compass, but that's really it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the daughter's probably the most well-rounded female character in this story.
Speaker 2:She probably doesn't count, because she's doesn't. She hasn't hit puberty yet. Right, like, once you hit puberty, then you're not really a full human anymore. Yeah, just a device.
Speaker 1:You have children and then men and women. That's our binary society.
Speaker 2:God, It definitely does not pass. or it does pass a dectal test, but again it doesn't mean that it does.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i read about it. There's an article from the feminist Elizabethan blog which is really clear. There's not a lot of women in, i think there's like three, four that I remember, five, five women, five women that I remember, and a whole train. Yeah, but just to remind us all the dectal tests, you have to have at least two named women in the movie So it does pass that test. There's women with names. They have to talk to each other about something besides a man, and so that does happen when the little girl girl gives the old woman her seat, and that's why it passes the dectal test. But for every other that's like the floor, that's like the fucking basement.
Speaker 1:Because they gave one line of dialogue to two women.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not. And you have the one moment where the hajimahs love each other and one of them decides to fuck everybody else over because they're mad. But that's really really it. So that was disappointing, but it was an interesting thing where it's a good reminder for me that, even though it's something I care a lot about as a person with a uterus, i don't always see it either, because I get swept up And it's also like the water I've swam in my whole life. So I appreciate you, dan, pulling it out. Thanks, very sexy, i did it, Just so you know if you're a dude, if man feminist men.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. I mean I could give a webinar at this point of all the things that men could do. That would be much more progressive and would make them very attractive to the ladies. It's real One go to horse shows. Go to horse shows and wear a petticoat.
Speaker 2:We don't wear petticoats at horse shows. What do you wear? But don't go to horse shows because riding horses is unethical. That's a whole other conversation.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, i'm a person who roars my whole life.
Speaker 2:So I hate to break it to myself and everybody else, but they don't want, they don't want, they don't want you on their back. Sorry, this is my hookup artist, ted talk. All right, i'm gonna go to talk about ethics.
Speaker 1:That's not feminist, then Now you're just Yeah, how to use feminism to be very not feminist.
Speaker 2:That's horrifying.
Speaker 1:People pay a lot of money for this Leah. I can quit my job.
Speaker 2:Do not. You're giving me flashbacks. This is totally off topic, but this is a real thing. Don't pretend that you're a feminist in order to get laid or like be a predator. I actually had a man who wore feminist slogan t-shirts and during my divorce to my ex-wife yes, newsflash, i'm not straight If you haven't figured that out So during my divorce to my ex-wife, i thought he would be like somebody I could lean on as a friend. I didn't know him very well, but he was. he reached out to me and very quickly I realized that he is a wolf and she's clothing and he wears those kinds of shirts and says those things so that he can take advantage of women. to the point where he literally was in a car with him and he kept trying to touch my thigh and I kept literally being like stop touching me and he didn't listen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, then he continued to fucking stalk me on the internet for years. Thankfully I haven't heard from him for a couple. I hope he's moved on, hopefully not to some other human being that doesn't deserve that kind of harassment. But anyhow, don't be one of those. Actually really truly explore your internalized misogyny. We all have it.
Speaker 1:I have the email addresses of every single person that he works with, so I had a plan, dan the hacker, ready to defend me.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Once upon a time, Dan was not a truck driver.
Speaker 2:No, you were definitely not a truck driver when you were in the army, that's for sure, doing some technological warfare. But there were two more tests. I prefer techno wizard. That's a great LinkedIn tagline, techno wizard. But there were two new tests that I learned about from this article, from the feminist Elizabethan I can't say that word Elizabethan, elizabethan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, elizabethan, whatever, i'm really pride and prejudice and zombies, so I know these words, is that?
Speaker 2:in the Elizabethan period? Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1:I don't even know what it is. It's Victorian, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Why are they all named after the? okay? going down another rabbit hole. But there were two new tests that I want to use in the future when we're watching movies or reading books. One of them is the Vito Russo test, which is specifically about the LGBTQIA community. The test is three requirements that they actually have a character that identifiably says you know that they are a lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, transgender, whatever The character must not be solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation, gender identity or being intersexed I think is a really key one And the character must be tied into the plot in such a way that her removal would have a significant effect.
Speaker 2:Clearly, this movie does not pass the Russo test. Even if my fantasy or the hajimas are actually a couple, it was true, It still wouldn't because their removal from the plot does not have a significant effect. So I want to use that one in the future. And then the other one that I thought was really cool Oh no, I don't know what I've. I lost the name of it. I'll have to look it up, But it's a race test, which is it has to have two people of color talking to each other in it about something other than a white person? Obviously this one does, because it's a Korean made movie.
Speaker 1:Right But.
Speaker 2:I think like if we had done Shaun of the Dead, for example, it would have miserably failed all of the tests.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there was one black zombie in the in the dead.
Speaker 2:There's also a surprising lack of black zombies in the walking dead. I've always found that very odd Mostly white people are zombies. But yeah, i think like these are all great tests as a ground floor to start to be aware of these things and how they show up in media and perpetuate these points of view in the world that are problematic and hurt people. So we'll use them more in the future. Yeah, zombie survival tips. Shall we talk about those?
Speaker 1:Yeah, i could really do with watching this movie again to really just like look for the survival tips, but we saw a few interesting ones that we hadn't seen in other movies other than like World War Z, the first one being wrapping up arms with newspaper and tape. They pulled that one out of the bag and made me really happy when I saw. I'm like finally somebody's protecting their forearms.
Speaker 2:Yep, although the one guy who had a protected forearm still got his hand bit. So yeah, we put on some gloves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, also, he put his hand around the inside of the door and that was a totally unnecessary move. He deserved to get bit.
Speaker 2:That's true. Bad, bad choices. Also, this is a great survival tip, i think, which is be rich And have access to people in power who can help you get to the only safe place left, or at least your kid, yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, I listened to a survival podcast and one of the best survival tips that they often give is have money. Like the best survival tip you can have in an emergency like if there's a flood, if there's a tornado, if there's a hurricane is like an extra thousand dollars in cash and like a ziploc bag and your bug out bag Because, like, even if society is collapsing, that money will be worth something for a little while.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, people still are diluted enough to think that it's worth anything. Yeah, a very short period of time. And then, last not least, have a little kid with you, a little kid, or a puppy, more likely to get help Like that couple, the pregnant woman and her husband, would not have helped the asshole fund manager dad if it was not for the cute kid It's true, yeah, and also the cute kid was nice.
Speaker 1:So maybe a third zombie survival tip is be nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as my grandpa says, it's nice to be nice, yeah, if you be nice, people might want to help you.
Speaker 1:If you're an asshole, no one will want to help you. That's really true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Dan could you do anything better.
Speaker 1:Oh, better. Yeah, So you know there were a few times where they had to leave the train And you know, I feel like they could have really hedged their odds better if they took the information that they'd gathered earlier in the movie that these zombies either are connected to Wi-Fi or, more likely, night blind, and they should have just holed up somewhere and waited until darkness, like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that would engineer.
Speaker 1:These things are total line of sight. So there's this one scene where the zombies are on the other side of a pane of glass and they're going crazy because I can see everybody and they want to eat them. And the pregnant woman. The only time a woman in this movie is not useless is in this scene. She grabs a water bottle and some newspapers, she splashes the water on the window, puts the newspapers on the window and, like that was really smart, yeah, in a few seconds the zombies on the other side calm down because they don't see them anymore. So they, they, they stop trying to get through the door. So I feel like if you just went inside somewhere and lock the doors and covered up the windows and didn't make any noise and then waited for nightfall, you could use the cover of night to get anywhere where you needed to go, probably even like got in a car, drove, drove somewhere and probably would have very minimal interactions with zombies.
Speaker 2:As long as you made minimal noise. I think the underlying tip of that is figure out what the weakness of your enemy is right And then utilize that for your survival. That's the basic. Like it's going to be different depending on the zombie, but that's the overarching one. As rage against the machine would say know your enemy Yeah know your front of me too, any other like deep, dark thoughts you have about trained Busan Dan.
Speaker 1:I liked it. Yeah, it was. I liked that it was simple. I like that it wasn't too complicated. But also I had all of the underlying, like messaging that zombie movies are great. For You know, it was a survival movie that had zombies in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was really character driven.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I don't know if it would have been a great movie if there were no zombies in it, but I think it would have still been a movie. It would have been like a travel movie And there would be characters that you would come to know and like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there could have been some other disaster or other like crises that could have shown the exact same things. Yeah, pulled the same story around.
Speaker 1:If it was an earthquake, it could have been the same movie, yeah.
Speaker 2:Why you should care about strangers and be a community oriented person. How many Zeds would you give to this movie, Dan?
Speaker 1:Hmm, well, you know I I don't want to just be handing out Zeds Like free candy, but this was very good I I liked it a lot. I'm going to give it four Zeds. I think that's pretty fair.
Speaker 2:I, having like watched a few more recently, i think I'd give it a three and a half. Am I allowed to do half points of Zeds?
Speaker 1:I'm going to say I'm going to say I made up the Zeds I can give them any one Yeah. It's six Zeds, then It's. It's the Zed that's cut in half from, like something falling on it And it's pulling itself on the ground with its arms.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know if it was because I'd never seen it before versus watching World War Zed again last week or a couple of weeks ago, but I will say I enjoyed it more than World War Zed And I think it was because of the character. The depth of characters was a lot more interesting. Even though it wasn't like it wasn't unpredictable, the character arcs were predictable but they were still interesting. So yeah, i'm going to give it 3.6 Zeds. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there wasn't a whole lot of like really terrible mistakes that, like you just want to throw things at the TV for No, i think the thing that I like the most is that is that they didn't kill any zombies. As far as I know. They might have bashed a few of them when they went with it, went on, went in with their baseball bat massacre, but even then it was like very hard And, like you, at no point did you ever feel like, oh, they got this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it felt like total, terrifying chaos And I will say I had minimal phone snood time, which says a lot that I was able to pay attention.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Leah likes to game called snood.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great, highly recommend. This episode, brought to you by snood, Well, my dear zombie friends, some animals, i think we're going to close up for the day. Your zombie homework is pride and prejudice and zombies, which I am so hoping passes the Bechtel test. But I don't remember pride and prejudice, so we'll see by Jane Austen and Seth Graham Smith, and again it's interesting. Yeah, dan's reading it already.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, i think this is going to be a big conversation because I don't know what to think. Interesting, I gotta get reading it. You know, pride and prejudice by Jane Austen the original, not the one with the zombies in it Was written in the 1800s or early 1800s by Jane Austen, a female author, which was already very controversial in the early 1800s. People didn't think that anyone would buy it because it's written by a woman. It is a statement on feminism itself, but it is a statement on 1800s feminism, yeah.
Speaker 2:So there might be some problem like tape, problematic things, but you can't blame it. You know, like I said, it's the water that Jane Austen was swimming in, so I'm really excited That'll be episode 15. So if you haven't started reading it yet, time to start now. This is episode 11, right now. Yeah, and don't forget to subscribe. We realize we forgot to tell people to do that. So for like 10 episodes, yeah, subscribing helps us.
Speaker 1:Listening to our podcast helps us. Also, following us on Instagram helps us. Any type of engagement helps. Like if you're a female author.
Speaker 2:you can't do that. It helps Like, don't ask us to have a TikTok.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one day we're going to be like follow us on TikTok. We gave in, but I mean this this time of year it's really hard for me to engage on anything, so like I'm doing my best on Instagram when I got the time.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, and follow us on Instagram discord. If you review or rate our podcast, we'd appreciate that. Leave your best zombie survival tip and we'll read on air, if anyone wants to do that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Leave it in a review. Yeah, that would be great, and I've been really enjoying people's comments, so please, please, give us some survival tips or opinions about books.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i really enjoy hearing people's thoughts, and I will say that you are the reason we are doing this Cause when I tell you that neither of us wanted to do anything today but stare vacantly at the ceiling and be zombies ourselves. That's where we were at with our exhaustion living in a capitalist world.
Speaker 1:We were also supposed to record this last week and we also didn't feel like doing anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, now we under pressure, we got to. This is coming out a week later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, We got a link tree link in the description, that's. That has everything in it. So if you, if you don't know how to find us, you go to that link tree. Also, you can subscribe to the link tree. I've never done it before, but apparently I can. I can send some notifications. If you uh subscribe to the link tree, you'll know what's going on That would be very cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we are growing.
Speaker 1:We are Yeah, uh, we passed a milestone last week. Uh, 500 downloads.
Speaker 2:That's pretty awesome for only 10. I don't think we'd even published our 10th episode. So nine episodes for doing zero promotion. I'm proud of us. Thank you so much for listening folks. We love you. Yeah, thanks for listening, thanks for being a part of the horde And, uh, i hope that, from from my heart to yours, that your job is not crushing your soul. And if it is, go watch train to Busan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Yeah, have have a little zombie escape and uh yeah, have have have a good time everyone. And uh, don't get bit, don't get bit. If you do bite somebody else, i mean.
Speaker 2:I never get told Bye, everybody Bye.