Re: Zombies vs unicorns
@niall, believe it or not I've never either read or seen the last unicorn, but I have recently acquired the book from my lady's collection who is of course a fan and would be really interested to read it just because of it being a classic.
I will say in debating this with my lady, it often comes down to a question of personality. Unicorns appeal because they're mostly but not always on the side of good, and have healing and magic and nobility in all sences, plus various ties to virginity which can be interesting to explore. (i'm actually working on a very dark unicorn horror short story based on this concept).
Zombies as everyone knows are all about consumer society, conformity and death, and the fact that we currently have a hoard of often rather derivative zombie fiction (pu definitely intended), but far less by way of unicorn exploration probably says something about society.
For this reason though, I do feel the story telling potential o
f zombies is rather limited. Once you've played out hthe zombocalypse and gone through surival, there are fewer places to go, ---- not none of course, a good creative author can work with most anything, just fewer, since after all appocalyptic monster fiction without zombies has gone back a very long way, right back as far as H G Wells war of the worlds nd possibly further. I can't deny that there is a lot of very cruddy stuff that just rehashes the old zombie cliches, and accept for the unicorn's image use on products marketed to young girls, which just focus primarily on isual appeal rather than exploring the idea, unicorns seem far less tapped out than zombies do.
Btw, the anthology seems to have a wide range of stories and thus far I've not noticed any superior/inferior quality based on the creature involved, but then again the authors who contributed tended to be people who know what they're doing.
@Steve, the problem with unicorns is that they fundamentally reproduce far less quickly than zombies do, so even i a unicorn did do huge amounts of damage to a zombie hoard, the zombies would keep coming. Also, while unicorns would have the advantage of speed, that advantage would go fairly quicly in close quarters, and close quarter fighting would be fairly likely being as zombies have a liking to grapple and even the fastest unicorn can't deal with too many at once.
The unicorn's only recourse I think would be magic, in particular magic to cure the zombie infection, particularly since unicorn magic tends to be more of the clerric than the mage variety, so less of the fireballs and cones of cold and more of the healing and divine protection and calling light.
As regards dragons, while on the one hand in fionavar a dragon was killed by a unicorn, on the other hand said unicorn was pretty dam awesome being also winged and embued with divine power. Said unicorn also died in the process as w ell.
The dragon can fight at a distance far more effectively than a unicorn (why the one in fionavar was an idiot), and also if it gets to close quarters the dragon will win. if it came down to a battle of magic, remember dragonsare quite capable of wielding spells too, and dragon magic does! tend to be the more destructie sort, especially the sort that messes with the mind.
With zombies I don't think a dragon would have a problem owing to superior protection via scales, indeed in the x heroes series there is a super hero with the powers of a dragon, ie, superior strength, fire breath and scales who is utterly immune to zombie attacks, (the ex heroes series was actually pretty dire).
Dragons have far more effective area clearing magic as well as breath than unicorns, and in close they don't have the vulnerability.
So yes, DRagons rock!
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
