# Are the undead overused?



## LOCOFOOL (Aug 3, 2012)

So I’m doing research for my story and I come across an article that has a list of the 10 most “overused things in fantasy writing”. I figure I might as well take a look to see if any of my ideas are considered overused. I figured it would be the usual use of elves, orcs, dwarves “dark lords” all that. I was surprised to find that the undead were on that list. 

In my story I wanted to give the villains an army they could control and use to instill fear into people, something with little to no intelligence or free will already. Undead was the PERFECT choice!

I want my story to be something that’s creative and fresh. Hearing that it may be considered overused and uncreative made me question using them.  

Personally I don’t think undead are overused. Do you think they’re overused? If so, is it in a bad way?


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## ThinkerX (Aug 3, 2012)

I have been seeing a *lot* of (urban) zombie books in the stores lately.  

Not to mention the continuing surge in (urban) vampire books.


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## shangrila (Aug 3, 2012)

It depends on your definition of undead. Vampires are, technically, part of this group, so if they were included then it's certainly overused at the moment. Zombies as well, in a way, but then I think they've been kind of cliched ever since the first "of the Dead" movie.

If you're worried about it, automatons could be a good replacement. Whether they're something like stone golems, homunculi or some kind of robot, they would all be intimidating to fight against.


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## Feo Takahari (Aug 3, 2012)

The basic concept of something that's dead but refuses to stay down is too variable to be overused. Granted, vampires are a little overdone at the moment, but there are plenty of less well-known undead like rusalki. (Or you could create your own variety.)


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## LOCOFOOL (Aug 3, 2012)

I did mean skeletons and zombies in more of a swords and shields fantasy era. ThinkerX, you’re right, urban zombies are pretty much everywhere now. 

Shangrilla, those are great alternatives, I’ve been concerning using something else myself and came up with a few other replacements for something no free will, easily controlled, and intimidating.


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## LOCOFOOL (Aug 3, 2012)

Feo Takahari said:


> The basic concept of something that's dead but refuses to stay down is too variable to be overused.


I thought this too. Creating my own undead would be a fun challenge for sure!


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## shangrila (Aug 3, 2012)

Glad I could help. Also, if you do decide you want to do zombies and skeletons, maybe you could have them as Frankenstien type monster. Bits of flesh and skeletons mushed together to create something vaguely human looking or, hell, something worse.


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## JCFarnham (Aug 3, 2012)

The undead have even been raising themselves in Science fiction stories I've read this year. Maybe that says something.

Never the less, it is wrong to say you shouldn't or can't use an undead army. You probably should in fact. You need to do something definitive and unique with them however. If they exist simply because they're mindless? Well I can think of plenty other mindless things you could use (Shangrila had it right). The old advice is: If you can switch out an element of your book for something else and it makes no difference to the plot _whatsoever_, then you need to have a rethink.

I take that this way: If you want an undead army you need to make it the only army that could possibly make sense in context. Otherwise, why aren't they homunculi, or golem, or whatever?

Maybe they're cliche, maybe they're not quite, but the simple fact is, if you ground them well, then no one is going to care much. There's a reason zombie media is so damn popular


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## It's a Squirrel...Moose? (Aug 3, 2012)

The problem with undead as i see is not the undead per-say, but the often bizarre and contradictory rules that govern them - that and every single necromancer in every bit of fantasy might as be the same character.

Actually, yes... i would say that the undead are overused. It seems that people take a gander at DnD and immediately decide that all necromancers are tall men with shaven heads wearing dark robes (with a classy inline of purple) with a wight in a spiked helm wielding a comically glowing sword standing behind him. The story is nearly always precisely the same - the evil, evil necromancer unleashes a vast horde of the undead  - he starts to win the war, then a guy with a robe finds an equally evil book in some castle and defeats the undead horde by speaking the obvious words of unbinding - often with the aid of a immensely cute and strong-of-will teenage, street wise and wise-cracking female thief with a bust the size of Lake Victoria. 

Or, a paladin swears to defeat the evil host and instead becomes the general of it after foolishly unleashing a weapon to defeat them (Arthas being the perhaps the best... and actually the only really good, example of this).

The undead are nearly always shown to the same - i.e. mindless. Of course, tropes have appeared to make the undead intelligent, often in the case of Liches. But i'm fairly certain every single type of undead has been done to death (pun intended) - and now I visibly curse whenever I find them in novels.

But... I do play vampire counts in warhammer - so I suppose I can't complain too much.


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## Steerpike (Aug 3, 2012)

I wouldn't concern myself too much with thoughts of what has been overused or underused. Just write a great story. If you do that, you can have as many undead as you want in it. If your story is no good, no one is going to read it and say "on a positive note: no undead!"


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## LOCOFOOL (Aug 3, 2012)

Thank you all very much; I can honestly say this help more than I thought! This definitely got the gears grinding in my head to work on this. I'm going to figure out something that will make a difference to the plot like JCFarnham said.

If I did use undead there are no necromancers or paladins or even busty females. That's just not my style!

Those are true words of wisdom Steerpike. I can tell everyone here knows what their talking about.


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## T.Allen.Smith (Aug 3, 2012)

I'm fully behind Steerpike & JC on this.

I just doesn't matter if people think something is overused. It only matters if you have a good story, good characters, and what you choose to do with the elements of a story.

If someone honestly believes that undead, elves, dwarves, etc. are cliche then they're probably writing & reading in the wrong genre. Yes, you can write fantasy without them but someone that spits out the term "trope" or "cliche" concerning every well accepted monster or race clearly does not understand that the story is what counts. 

Is magic trope? Most fantasy stories I've read have some magical elements. Magic is a cornerstone of the genre but it's twisted and told in many different ways by many different authors. Whatever you're writing, make it your own.

If Steerpike, JC, and I all wrote a story about zombie orc wizards, I can guarantee you that there would be glaring differences on how they were portrayed. 

Sorry about giving the zombie wizard idea away Steerpike.... Lol.


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## danr62 (Aug 3, 2012)

Forget about being original. Just tell the story that you want to tell, one that you would want to read as well. There is nothing that hasn't been done before, in some form or other.


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## Zero Angel (Aug 3, 2012)

I love undead and would hate to see them not used because of some lame article. 

I also love creating new undead! It's a blast. I have over 100 different types of undead for my world (so far)--most of them unnamed unfortunately.


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## LOCOFOOL (Aug 3, 2012)

Thanks again for all the input!
Over 100? That's impressive Zero Angel.


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## Zero Angel (Aug 5, 2012)

I use mathematics to help. Here's my creative process in respect to creating undead.

What makes a race unique? How can it be perverted? Is there anything that the race is very good at/very bad at/known for? What magicks power the race? How can those magicks be perverted? What is the inverse of those magicks? Do they have holy rituals that can be made unholy? Special traditions or customs? Special subraces that can be perverted in their own way? Loss of body part (head, heart, finger, foot, genitalia, intestines, organs, etc)? Special ways to die? Sins? Special sins with respect to that race or religion? Racial religions? Dark gods? Gods of death? Cults? A good trait taken too far? Betrayal? Betrayal with respect to their race/religion/special bonds?

The hard part is naming them.


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## LOCOFOOL (Aug 5, 2012)

That's a pretty great system!

I feel you with the naming struggle; I have it with both naming races and characters. For races I usually take their most unique trait and look it up in a different language. Works pretty well for me so far. I just need to work on character names!


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## psychotick (Aug 6, 2012)

Hi,

I agree with the others, undead may be cliche, but it's how you write them that counts. In my current WIP I haven't even called them undead. I just called them abomnations, souless shells of people, their souls consumed by a great demon, and they wander the world eternally hungry (and shambling).

But if you want to see undead from a truly weird perspective, there was a very poorly done, less than B grade movie called Aagh Zombie!, which I saw earlier this year, which shows the undead perspective on the living, thinking they've all gone mad with a virus and are trying to kill them. Bad but truly weird.

Cheers, Greg.


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## Godzilax99 (Aug 7, 2012)

A good alternative to undeads would be mind controlled humans. Almost the same, but humans who lose their ability to reason, or even understand pain could be a nice army. Totally mindless and fully controlled. 

I personally like undead. I mean Legions of Undead...


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## Ireth (Aug 7, 2012)

Godzilax99 said:


> A good alternative to undeads would be mind controlled humans. Almost the same, but humans who lose their ability to reason, or even understand pain could be a nice army. Totally mindless and fully controlled.



That sounds pretty much like the first idea of zombies, originating in Haitian voodoo. So, not so much an "alternative" as "going back to the classics." XD


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## Godzilax99 (Aug 7, 2012)

Ireth said:


> That sounds pretty much like the first idea of zombies, originating in Haitian voodoo. So, not so much an "alternative" as "going back to the classics." XD



True, but the idea of walking dead people that could not be killed, or take a lot to kill is quite boring.. Taking the usual headshot or beheading for example, the undead can only die from that.. Stabbing it through the stomach won't kill it.. 

But I think making it a bit more killable can be a fresh change. 

How about bugs? Insects in huge amounts? A good alternative?


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## Astner (Aug 20, 2012)

You shouldn't strive to be original just for the purpose of being original, especially if it restricts your writing. It's not the elements that are important, but rather how you use them and how they apply to your setting.


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## Zero Angel (Aug 20, 2012)

Astner said:


> You shouldn't strive to be original just for the purpose of being original, especially if it restricts your writing. It's not the elements that are important, but rather how you use them and how they apply to your setting.



I agree. I think _trying_ to be original is unoriginal so there is no way to win that game.


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## FatCat (Aug 21, 2012)

I think I've seen the list you're referring to before, and I have to say you shouldn't be worried if you use something mentioned on it. As long as your story doesn't contain every cliche of the fantasy genre I'd say you can slip a couple in there and still be original. I'm working on a story that has an undead right up front in the intro. On a side note, your villainous army could use a form of mind-manipulation to achieve the same effect, using prisoners and brain washing them into shells of existence, technically not undead if you're worried about using such a defined character archetype


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## ahhhitswells (Aug 28, 2012)

They are overdone in the sense that you will have a LOT of solid competition as far as the genre goes. Good writing, however, will still be good writing and a well thought story will still be a good read.

Why not create your own undead if that is a concern?

Example:

Moggles are souls that are at unrest because they were betrayed in their lifetime. These humanoids must cause the same despair upon the living or their flesh decays and eventually they crumble to dust.... etc....


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## Jabrosky (Aug 30, 2012)

I personally am sick not only of zombies but also vampires, werewolves, and almost all the other traditional Halloween monsters. Next to Tolkien, Halloween may be the most over-exploited source of fantasy tropes I know of.


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## Zero Angel (Aug 30, 2012)

Jabrosky said:


> I personally am sick...



I'm not  I'll consume anything, as long as it's good, even if it's been done before.


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## Steerpike (Aug 30, 2012)

Zero Angel said:


> I'm not  I'll consume anything, as long as it's good, even if it's been done before.



That's my criterion as well. Is it good? If so, I don't care about the genre or subject matter. I'm open.


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## Jabrosky (Aug 30, 2012)

OK, I'm not saying that no one should write any more about the undead. People can write whatever subject matter they want. I simply don't find the undead that interesting anymore, at least not by themselves. Come to think of it, they often gross me out anyway.


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## Vinegar Tom (Sep 4, 2012)

I don't know how much backstory in the form of magical theory and so on you plan to include in your tale, but you could do worse than consider the concept of the "astral corpse". Just about all ancient peoples - in fact, everyone before the Christians invented Heaven - held that any spirits of the dead you could possibly contact or otherwise meet were (with very rare exceptions, because that person had been personally favoured by the gods, and was perhaps now a god pr demi-god) were pale shadows of the person they'd been when living. Sometimes the dead feebly resent the living, and hang around people they remember from life causing problems for them, and occasionally literally sucking their life-force out, unless either banished or, in less severe cases, placated with gifts, or just a bit of attention from time to time.

To get around this dismal state of affairs, many belief-systems posited the existence of more than one soul for each person (the Ancient Egyptians had seven!). When you die, your soul not only sloughs off your mortal body, but at least one other non-material "body" consisting of all your baser thoughts and feelings, which would weigh the purest part of you down in its progress to higher spheres. This astral corpse is basically you minus your vital spark. It has your memories, a crude approximation of your personality, and any obsessions you may have had. Over time, it gradually decays, becoming more and more mindless, until there's nothing left at all, but an exceptionally materialistic (though not necessarily evil) person with strong ties to this world will leave behind an exceptionally robust astral corpse which may live a surprisingly long time - theoretically forever - so kong as it can find some way to draw life from the living. Of course, it gradually becomes more and more bestial, eventually turning into a complete monster.

In Haitian Voudou, the actual "zombie" isn't, strictly speaking, the animated corpse itself, but the spirit of the deceased, which is captured before it can travel to the next world and magically enslaved. It can then be reinserted into its former nody, which will function as an obedient but rather slow and extremely stupid slave with a permanent air of sadness, because all it really wants to do is be dead like it's supposed to be. However, to this day, many of the nastier Haitian sorcerers (there are nice ones as well, who don't go in for this kind of thing at all) allegedly posses many "zombies" in the form of spirits which they keep in apparently empty bottles, and send out as agents to smite their enemies with curses and suchlike. These would presumably be astral corpses, not actual souls, which are the exclusive property of whatever God (or gods) runs things, and cannot be trapped in bottles by any mere mortal.

It should also be noted that the spirits of the Victorian sÃ©ance room were astral corpses - some psychical investigators said as much. They knew all manner of intimate details about their lives, yet their memories were oddly patchy, and they were almost always obsessed with trivia, and quite incapable of saying anything truly original, let alone profound. One writer gave them the rather splendid name "diakka".

So if the actual magic involved is 90% about trapping these diakka (or whatever you choose to call them), your bad guy (I presume it isn't the good guy who raised the zombie army!) has a number of options. FIrstly, and presumably this is his easiest and cheapest option, he can create classic Haitian zombies. All you need is a fresh human corpse in good condition, and a spirit in a bottle (not necessarily that of the body's former owner, though I dare say it helps). These are to all intents and purposes slow-moving, almost mindless, utterly obedient human slaves. Their organic processes still function, so they have to eat and so on, and although they don't feel pain, any would which would kill a living man would kill them too. They can also probably be exorcised, but if there are thousands of them, running them through with a sword is probably a lot quicker and easier.

What use would they be in battle? Well, if you just need your troops to march slowly in perfect formation, doing nothing beyond the skills of an untrained peasant conscript, and it helps if they only need very cheap equipment, what you have there, so long as you have a sufficiently large number of zombies, is a superb force of pikemen. For almost all other war-related tasks other than digging trenches and so on, they're useless. But since the backbone of a medieval army was its pikemen, they're still a huge asset. And if the formation is broken by a heavy cavalry charge or whatever, they will not react like normal troops, who, on finding themselves in a tight formation whose defenseless rear is now exposed, will of course break ranks and make a mad scramble for safety. No, the knights will have to methodically slaughter the whole lot of them or they'll just reform. So the enemy's elite troops may have to spend the whole battle disposing of endless hordes of cannon-fodder. Though since this is simple spell - it must be, or the baddie couldn't possibly have thousands upon thousands of the buggers! - there may be an easy way to dispel the magic. For instance, since the holy water used in baptism contains blessed salt, Haitian zombies could never be given food containing any salt at all. If they were, they'd instantly realise their condition, give a great howl of anguish, and run to the cemetery, where they'd expire permanently while trying to claw their way back into their rightful grave. Maybe something as simple as that could destroy an overwhelmingly huge army of zombie pikemen without a blow being struck, if the heroes could pull it off.

Then you've got your more specialised troops. Reanimating a fresh corpse that still functions as an organic life-form is clearly easier than doing the same with a skeleton utterly devoid of muscles or anything else to make it somehow behave as if it still had such accessories. Assuming that roughly the same spell is used, the power of the undead spirit would have to much greater - a really old diakka, created from the residue of an extraordinarily evil or sensual person, which has clung to its unlife for so long that it's no longer remotely human, simply a ravening demon, possibly with disturbing echoes of the passions that motivated it in life, but probably with no mind whatsoever beyond raw appetite. Capturing, let alone controlling such a monstrosity would be fairly tricky to say the least!

On the other hand, here you have the screaming, frighteningly competent skeleton warriors from _Jason and the Argonauts_. And since they're animated and held together entirely by magic, or at any rate, energy from another plane of existence, they're probably a lot harder to smash than brittle old bones usually are. In fact, there's no upper limit on their strength, speed and toughness. Undead of this type would probably steal life-force from people (or any other animal) that died, or even just bled a bit, in their immediate vicinity, so they'd fight like totally out-of-control mindless berserkers, but conveniently ignore the undead soldiers on their own side because they've got no more life-force than a rock. Also, they probably get stronger the more people they kill, certainly in the short term, such as during a battle.

Observe that if a spell intended purely to animate the skeleton is cast on a complete corpse, no matter how fresh, its flesh is irrelevant, and will decay at the usual rate without hampering the creature at all. Here you have your classic Romero Zombie, which can get as putrid as it likes without slowing down - except that these zombies are pretty fast to begin with. And yes, they may very well eat your brain. Not that there's any profit for them in doing so, but they're driven by mindless insatiable greed, so why not?

And then you have to ask yourself this. If the undead spirit can animate something as bereft of life as a skeleton, maybe that skeleton could be heavily modified. Swords instead of forearms? Steel bars bolted to allits major bones? Freakish combinations of more than one skeleton or corpse, not necessarily human? A really supercharged skeleton or zombie wired with pulleys and pistons into the guts of a massive siege-engine? You name it!

Finally, still using exactly the same basic spell, what happens if you reanimate somebody at the exact moment of death - probably killing them at the exact instant that you resurrect them as part of the spell, with n o physical trauma at all? What you get is an apparently living man who, lacking the higher part of himself, is at best a shadow of his former self, but who may be under the total control of his creator. Even if he isn't, this pitiful creature will have reduced willpower and moral values, and the knowledge that the sorcerer can reverse the process at any time just by saying the magic word may turn him into a willing slave. Some fools might even volunteer for this dubious "immortality". And if the king was always a lazy, weak lecher or glutton, or had simply a bit senile, it would be years before his behaviour became so extreme that people caught on that he was the undead puppet of a necromancer.

Sorry, but since this kind of magic is by definition necromancy. there'll probably have to one of those chaps in your book after all. Still, if he doesn't wear black robes and live in a Dark Tower, you'll probably get away with it - if I say "famous pianist", I may be talking about Franz Liszt, Fats Waller, or Liberace. So why should magicians with one particular speciality all be even remotely similar to each other?


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## SeverinR (Sep 5, 2012)

Sorry, it has to be said,

They are so overused, they are dead tired.


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## Hulb2 (Sep 5, 2012)

I have two things to say on this:

1) if they're "overused" that may just mean that loads of people like stories about the undead, and so it will be a good thing to focus on, however, that also means you'll have a LOT of competition when it comes to publishing

2) why not just use your imagination to create your own new creature which hasn't been thought of before? (I tend to do that a lot in my stories)

hulb2 x


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