Seasonreaper said:jeroz said:
slight off tangent here
people thinking the fanservice-orientated OVA are canon? waaaaat? when was a special filler OVA ever canon?
I just find it funny to see there are still people who don't recognise the parody to the trashy B-horror zombie movies the series is aiming for, and the series hit it right in the head. The over-the-top-ness was why it's so hilarious. The story is not suppose to be taken seriously anyway, not until the future arc hits.
Again, different genre.
Sankarea is romance/horror, while HotD is action/comedy
Indeed that is off tangent, as nobody even mentioned anything about the OVA being canon in any way. It obviously isn't in canon as it doesn't link to anything that happens in the series at all. That doesn't stop it from being one of the worst things I have ever seen. I only mentioned it because it is related in some way to the series via the cast.
Despite seeing a whole ton of B-movies in my time (most of them horror, for that matter, as my dad is a huge horror fan and we tended to watch movies pretty much every night throughout my high school years) I recall very few of them being even close to the level of action/fanservice ratio that HSotD achieves. Sure, there was a scene or two throughout an entire film in which the main female lead gets her clothes ripped by a zombie or something and of course the female characters in the cast will wear slutty outfits, but they manage to balance it out with scenes of zombies generally being heavily incompetent or being foiled by simple trickery which makes fun of their braindead nature.
Yes, I can agree that HSotD is a parody and as such aims to maximise upon these tropes and blow them out of proportion, but the problem is it seems to mostly focus on the 'slut's gonna slut' tropes of the trashy B-horror movies and spends 80% or so of it's screentime doing that, whilst pulling off a proper serious story in the background once every three episodes or so. If it expanded and over-the-top'd the horror side of things as well as the fanservice side, I'd be fine with it. The problem is the fact that it's parodying the trashy sexual side of things whilst trying to combine it with a well thought out serious horror story.
Think of it this way. Take Romero's Night of the Living Dead, a rather serious horror film with a heavy dose of social commentary, and then change 3/4 of the scenes and characters with a parody take on the genre such as oh, lets say, Wasting Away. Whilst both rather enjoyable in their own right, mixing them together just doesn't gel well. You end up with a mismatched clusterfuck which shows hints of genuine quality and intelligence here and there in amongst a barrage of jarring and conflicting scenes.
This sounds like a pretty bad idea, right? Well someone obviously decided it was a fantastic idea somewhere, and we ended up with Highschool of the Dead. What makes it even worse is that the anime adaptation managed to take such a piece of source material and put even more emphasis on the fanservice side of things than the original work did, further crippling any sense of intellectual satire that existed in the first place. Maybe the reason why so few people realise it's a parody is because of how far detached it became from what it aimed to be in the first place.
Also, since you mentioned it, Sankarea is indeed a romance/horror anime. That is a central reason as to why I don't particularly like the emphasis on fanservice and comedy between the end of episode 5 and the beginning segments of episode 6, especially after how well it pulled off the very romance/horror genre it succeeded at portraying throughout the majority of the first five episodes and the second half of episode 6.