Unicorns as Food

Unicorns are essentially just goats or horses with a horn on its head. Both of these animals can be used as both a food source and a means to make other things (such as gelatin, glue, etc.). Why would someone think that an animal so low on the food chain is awesome and more powerful than a zombie? Humans may have started low on the food chain, but we have surpassed pretty much all animals with the use of technology and superior intelligence. Even animals with no natural predators are preyed upon by us. But zombies surpass humans in every way. They are tireless, vigilant, and absolutely unstoppable. And seriously, who would want to eat a zombie? They smell horrible and are WAY past their expiration date. Here is the food chain as it stands including zombies. (Note that unicorns are included in the animal section.)

The fine print reads:

"A food chain is a way of depicting the flow of energy from one organism to the next and to the next and so on. The specific diagram presented here shows the biomass transfer from the lowest tier of the chain (flora) to the highest (evil reanimated corpses from beyond the grave).

There was once a time when Man stood proudly at the top of the food chain. That time has passed. Now, fuelled by a black and terrible desire for brains, Zombiekind has consolidated its power and cemented its supremacy.

Surely, this is a bleak time for humanity. Our days are numbered. Fortunately, they are also charted and graphically presented for ease of reference."

Canned Unicorn Meat has also been made more readily available by ThinkGeek. The website features a fabulous recipe for Savory Unicorn and Heirloom Tomato Bruchetta. Mmmmm! Unicorn reportedly tastes like rotisserie chicken with a hint of marshmallow sweetness.

And lastly, pop singer Lady Gaga was immortalized in a painting partaking in unicorn meat.

And she features her love for zombies in this awesome song. Team Zombie FTW!!!

** This post is for Velvet's September Zombies. **

** The Lady Gaga painting was created by Rose Briccetti. **

My Take on Zombies vs. Unicorns Part II

I want to respond to the Team Unicorn captain's response to my PSA about Killer Unicorns. As with the last one, my response started out as a comment and just grew until I had to make a post about it. Here is Misty's original response:

"Good for warning those who think they are cute and cuddly and all, but you just did a great deal in educating all the naysayers who *insist* that unicorns are nothing but glitter and rainbows. If you're choosing the Team Z side simply because you think unicorns are for p*ssies, think again!!!"

Many of the people who have declared themselves Team Unicorn seem to have done so because they are cute, cuddly, and good. I wanted to educate them on the dark side of unicorns. For those people that think unicorns are totally dangerous and badass, I would like to point out a few things for them. In Diana Peterfreund's novel Rampant (the ONLY series featuring killer unicorns), unicorns re-emerge after hundreds of years after they were thought to be extinct. However, it's barely noticed by people. When zombies rise up, it's a full blown apocalypse with the complete breakdown of society and government, leaving people to fend for themselves. During a unicorn re-emergence, a couple of people die, but it's attributed to animal attacks and life goes on as normal. There are an extremely limited number of unicorns, so their impact on humans is minimal at best.
This new image of ferocious unicorns also makes them seem schizophrenic and confused. When they are good, they are super sugar sweet and you get cavities just looking at them. When they're evil, they aren't very successful. Zombies, for the most part in zombie stories, are of the flesh eating variety and are widely known for their determination and dedication to eating human flesh. Why choose the lesser evil? Zombies are the greater and more competent destructive force.Bottom line: Unicorns are confused and inept. Zombies will eat their faces.

** This post is for Velvet's September Zombies. **

Team Zombie FTW!!!!

The publication of the anthology Zombies vs. Unicorns has created two opposing teams that I never thought I would see against each other. Why are zombies better than unicorns? I would like to break it down for you.

1) There are hundreds and hundreds of zombie books, movies, games, television shows, and so much more. Zombies seem to have infiltrated the collective consciousness of our society and the phenomenon just keeps growing. It has struck a nerve with people, which leads people to explore them more, evolving them and making them slightly different along the way. Each person involved makes it their own, inspiring and influencing the next person.Unicorns, on the other hand, seem to be stagnant. The only recent unicorn novels I can think of is the series by Diana Peterfreund. Even though Rampant is really good (review to come), unicorns just don’t seem to inspire people. As Justine Larbelestier puts it, “Unicorns are as metaphorically dead as the dodo.” To put unicorns against zombies just seems to be sad and kind of unfair in regard to the sheer number of zombie stuff out there.

2) Zombie motivation and drive is way superior to the unicorns. Zombies may be slow, shuffley, and maybe in a few more pieces than is normal, but they never tire or give up. Even if you manage to kill a few or even a hundred, there will always be more to take their place. Simon Pegg put it the best: “If you’re careful, if you keep your wits about you, you can stave them off, even outstrip them—much as we strive to outstrip death. Drink less, cut out red meat, exercise, practice safe sex; these are our shotguns, our cricket bats, our farmhouses, our shopping malls. However, none of these things fully insulates us from the creeping dread that something so witless, so elemental may yet catch us unawares—the drunk driver, the cancer sleeping in the double helix, the legless ghoul dragging itself through the darkness towards our ankles.”

I’m not even sure what unicorns do or what their motivation is. They help people, they eat people, they purify water, they eat rainbows….I don’t really know.

3) Zombies are kind of like the Borg from Star Trek. They assimilate everyone that comes across their path, making their numbers larger and ensuring their future existence. There is never a shortage of zombies during a zombie apocalypse.

Unicorns are just horses with horns. You may as well be more impressed with a rhino because they are bigger and badder. And it seems like there is almost always only one unicorn or very few. They are a dying species and if it ever came to an actual fight with zombies against unicorns, all the unicorns would eventually become zombies. And then we would have zombie unicorns, which would improve them greatly. ;)

Fellow zombie lovers and enthusiasts, grab this button and post it on your blogs if you are proud to be fans of the walking dead!

Visit Team Unicorn captain Misty at the Book Rat and Velvet at vvb32 Reads for more events and giveaways!

My Take on the Unicorn vs. Zombie Debate

There has been a Unicorn vs. Zombie fight between Sharon Loves Cats and Books (Team Zombie yay!) and Good Books and Good Wine (Team Unicorn...). I think it's pretty obvious what side I'm on. On Good Books and Good Wine, Mariah from A Reader's Adventure wrote a guest post about why Unicorns are more awesome. I respectfully disagree and I want to explain why. This started out as a comment and them became way too long.

Original post:

1) "[Unicorns] are unpredictable, they may pretend to love you and then go in for the kill, or they may just go through you. Or they might even not try to kill you at all."

My response:

Zombies, although the ravenous man-eating ones will ALWAYS bite you, are unpredictable to some people. If it is a loved one that has turned zombie, they seem to always hope that it's all ok and they can get close to it and perhaps hug it. Wrong. They get bitten or are eaten. Look at the new zombie film Survival of the Dead. Janet O'Flynn gazed at her twin sister who was a zombie and thought she saw a lucidity and intelligence there. She got too close and she was savagely bitten. It happens a lot in zombie movies for some odd reason.

Another way zombies are unpredictable is in their speed. There are the slow shuffley zombies that can barely move and there are the super fast ones from the remake of the Dawn of the Dead. Although I have some reservations about the fast zombies, they still exist. I know if I ever faced a zombie I would pray that it was slow so I could outrun it easily.

Original post:

2) "There is much more diversity in unicorn books. In some they are horrible killers, and in others they are sweet helpful creatures. Zombies are for the most part evil."

My response:

There is an incredible range of diversity in the zombie genre. There are the ravenous eating machine zombies of World War Z by Max Brooks, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, Dance of the Dead, Dead Snow, Soulless by Christopher Golden, etc. Then there are a whole slew of other types of zombies. In Stacey Jay's You Are So Undead to Me, normal zombies are just dead people who want something in their lives resolved before they lay to rest. They do not eat people and are able to speak. In Fido, zombies have been domesticated to be servants and take up very easy jobs. In Breathers by S.G. Browne, zombies are really no different from humans except that they decompose. In Grace, the only indication that the baby isn't normal is it's appetite for human flesh. Other than that, it's looks like a very healthy, normal human baby. In the game Plants Vs. Zombies, there are an incredible number of different types of zombies: fast dance zombies, miner zombies, floating balloon zombies, fast football zombies, very scary gargantuan zombies, and so on. Plus they are different in that they eat plants, but I'm sure they do that just to get to your house and eat your brains.

The I have only seen three different types of unicorns: the very stupid, beautiful ones that are attracted to virgins featured in Mercedes Lackey's series Tales of the 500 Kingdoms, the killer zombies of Rampant by Diana Peterfreund, and the robot unicorns of Robot Unicorn Attack from Adult Swim.

Original post:

3) "Rampant by Diana Peterfreund is a unicorn book and it rocks!"

My response:

I haven't read this book, but it seems pretty cool. I would have thought it would have been ammo for Team Zombie. Unicorns are portrayed in movies such as Legend and The Last Unicorn as cute, cuddly creatures that need to be saved. This book is about killer unicorns. I don't know if I'd rather be killed by a zombie or a unicorn, but zombies seem more obvious. I don't really understand if the killer unicorns in the book are just evil or are just savage wild animals. I guess I'll just have to read it to find out.

Original post:

4) "Unicorns are better looking by a long shot. I mean ripped clothing and pieces of flesh was so last year. Zombie lovers would you even ever like to see a zombie? I mean gross."

My response:

I guess you have a point there. Zombies do look pretty gross.

Original Post:

5) "Unicorns can symbolize so many different things like eternal life ect. but zombies only represent death and destruction."

My response:

This is the one I disagree with the most. Zombies can represent so much more than death and destruction (although they are pretty good at that). In Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth, zombies represent the constraints of the oppressive society the characters live in. In George A. Romero's films, they represent consumerism and people's sheep mentality. He is also critical as to the policies and politics of the US. In E. Van Lowe's Never Slow Dance with a Zombie, zombies represent the overwhelming power of peer pressure and the movement against teens being true to themselves that teens have to fight against. In Grace, the zombie baby represents the lengths that mothers will go to in order to protect and nurture their children. I could go on and on, but zombies represent so much more than death and destruction.

Original post:

6) "Zombies are so overdone. There are so many zombie books that it is hard to find a new idea."

My response:

It may be true that there are a great many zombie books at the moment, but authors are not to be underestimated. I have read so many different types of zombie books that there are rarely two that are alike. There are the Regency era, Jane Austen mashups, zombie comedies, zombie romances, regular horror zombies, zombie self help books, etc. I think my other responses also indicate that there are a lot of different types of zombies that represent different things.

Original post:

7) "Unicorns are just plain better."

My response:

No. Just no.