Really pissed off at the Irish stereotypes

[deleted]

Lighten up Francis..... Who the hell cares it's a movie. I'm 100% Irish and could give a *beep* It wasn't believable and stereotyped and the characters were a joke but I sure as hell wasn't offended. Get a little self esteem and worry about bigger things. The world suffers enough with all of this liberal PC crap as it is...

We non-Irish know they're as over-the-top as the Lucky Charms leprechaun. I believe the Irish immigrant is a stand-in for the pilgrim, pioneer and sojourner, who left the Old World behind to make a new life in the New World. He started with nothing, worked hard to get where he is, and resents others who didn't have to struggle the way he did to carve a living out of the wilderness.

Plus, the accents are so compelling that they make the characters more powerful.

The rancher/miner/oilman with a brogue is a recurring archetype in Westerns - and this movie is clearly a Western. Ranches, horses, stables, lassoes, campfire ambushes, lever-action rifles, hats, scarves, wooden fences, feuds, all the elements are here. Usually, a person goes into a pen with a horse to teach it to accept a rider; here, the person is the one who has to learn...to eat the horse.

The characters start off with trucks, jeeps, laptops and smartphones, but once the ferry reaches the shallow water of the island, they're on a dinghy, then on foot. As the Boy says, "this isn't low-tech; it's no-tech." Strip away the fancy gadgets, and people are the same as they've always been.

I think Romero is playing off of Westerns where two Irish immigrants continue their lifelong feud on the plains of America. Even after deciding to abandon their homeland and travel thousands of miles to the New World, they couldn't help but to stay close to their enemy, to continue the fight. They had the choice to forget the feud and the past, and start a fresh life, but their hatred and death-motive was more powerful than their love of life and happiness.

Two intelligent, industrious, productive men squander their abilities and potential, and drag others down with them, and spite themselves to destroy each other.

This fits the theme of the whole series, that the living are already zombies, living their lives without thought, driven and controlled by base motives.

The thick Irish accents may be out of place on a non-existent island off of Delaware in 2011, but then again, so are dead people walking around eating the living.

I disagree. A bit of sterotyping would do you some good. Helps keep the PC *beep* off you. [I stand for sterotyping against my race too]

As someone of Irish descent I would have been offended if they'd made everybody raging alcoholics and used that as the excuse for them feuding and shooting all the time. THAT would be every imaginable ignorant stereotype. This is a long-feuding pair of families, and that's not strictly an Irish thing (remember the Hatfields & McCoys? One family was Irish but the other wasn't, and at any rate they were both American when they got up to that nonsense). Didn't bother me on that basis. Honestly, it didn't even occur to me to consider it a slight against the Irish.

As for the accents, I didn't find them very plausible—in real life, TV has a way of making everyone in the country sound like they're from Southern California by way of Canada—but they're not inexplicable. The "Deep South good-ol boy cornpone" guys weren't born there but came for work; the Irish-accented folk had always been there. They're on an isolated island and nobody on there seems like the type to watch a lot of "Modern Family" or anything, so the accent survived. In real life I'd be doubtful, in a movie it's a fair enough excuse.

I don't understand. Every single Irish person I've ever met acted exactly like the ones in this movie, up to and including the fact that they had violent disagreements about the proper way to handle zombies. Why my friend Paddy O'Rourke, as stalwart and drunk an Irishman as anyone could hope to have as a friend, regularly went around shootin' people if they so much as looked funny at his dead cannibalistic pals. And if somebody stood up to him, he'd cry out, "Ye won't lay a hand on me Lucky Charms!" and race away while throwing pints of Guinness at his pursuers.

Sadly, he's dead now himself. I tried to warn him, but he insisted on attacking those bloody Black and Tans and they finally shot him while he was sleeping off a three day bender in the gutter. It was very sad. At least the wake was filled with proper boozing and fighting, just like he specified in his will.