But that's just what I'm saying -- in order to suit the needs of a TV series with a "zombie" protagonist, they've had to devise a cleaned-up, more human version of "zombie" that's really not all that different from the hero vampires and hero werewolves and hero succubi and such that we've gotten in other shows. It's another example of co-opting a formerly hideous, horrific monster and turning it into something more appealing and sanitized so it can function as a hero. It's a familiar trope, that's all. I'm not some purist trying to build walls between definitions; that's not a useful form of analysis, just petty negativity. Heck, I don't even like zombie movies as a rule, so it's not like I'm trying to defend some pure definition of the term and close my mind to anything outside it. I'm just trying to have a discussion about a media trope, the way that monsters are modified to function as heroes. And that often means downplaying or changing a lot of things about them. I'm not denouncing that as wrong, just pointing out that it's different.
In this case, so much is changed that these characters only bear a loose resemblance to previous film zombies. Just being sapient, undecaying, and able to pass as normal humans is a pretty radical change from most screen zombies. I can't really think of any earlier examples of that. Maybe the Pirates of the Caribbean from the movies, though I'm not sure if they were zombies or ghosts, and they only looked human in certain contexts. There are the Reapers from Dead Like Me, but they were never called zombies, didn't eat human flesh, weren't infectious, etc.; they really fell more into the "angel" category, at least the TV/movie version thereof.
Really, the transformation of the word "zombie" over the past half-century has been pretty extraordinary. It's been used to mean so many different things, and has evolved with surprising rapidity, compared to other categories of monster. Traditionally, in West African and Haitian belief, it meant a corpse revived through necromancy and controlled by a sorceror as a mindless slave. According to Wikipedia, the modern idea of zombies began in 1968 with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, though he drew on earlier stories that weren't identified as zombie fiction, including H.P. Lovecraft's Herbert West -- Reanimator stories and Richard Matheson's vampire novel I Am Legend. And he didn't even use the term "zombie" in his movie, preferring "ghouls." It's kind of mysterious how the "zombie" label ended up being associated so indelibly with his creatures. Then, as I said, the brain-eating trope debuted as recently as 1985 (okay, that's 30 years ago, but it feels recent to me). And in the 2000s, we've gotten innovations such as the fast-moving, intelligent zombie and the concept of the "zombie apocalypse," which has become oddly more pervasive in recent years than other categories of apocalypse. And now we have hero zombies.
Granted, other types of fictional monster have undergone evolution in folklore and fiction. Vampires have changed over the centuries. Bram Stoker introduced a fair amount of new vampire lore, like the shapeshifting and the lack of reflections. The silent film Nosferatu in 1922 introduced the idea of vampires vaporizing in sunlight, though many later versions have downplayed or eliminated that. And of course, these days we have vampires that sparkle. But those accretions have been more gradual, over the past 120 years, while the perception of zombies has changed radically within less than 50 years. Also, the fundamentals of vampires have stayed pretty consistent -- undead blood-drinkers, killed by stakes or decapitation, able to turn others into vampires, etc. Other monsters have stayed pretty consistent in their definitions as well. Werewolves turn from humans to wolves under a full moon, or sometimes at will. Mummies are preserved corpses resurrected by ancient curses. Succubi and incubi are demons that feed on sex. The details change, but the basics are consistent. But the term "zombie" has been applied to several radically different types of monster, from necromancer-controlled slave corpses to flesh-eating ghouls to technically-living victims of virulent bioweapons. The only things they all have in common are mindlessness and some degree of physical decay. And this show's zombies don't even have those qualities, marking a further change in the usage of the term. It's interesting that this one word has been applied so flexibly over such a short span of time, while other monster categories have been defined more consistently.
