World War Z (the book) had to go to extreme lengths to dumb the world’s militaries down to make it’s zombie apocalypse seem plausible… everything from completely misrepresenting the way air-fuel munitions work to completely misunderstanding what assault rifles is all about.
And the book’s silliness doesn’t stop there…
Hah, and it was basically all for nothing. If he wrote the book past covid, he would know that he doesn’t has to dumb down anything
What are assault rifles all about?
They look scary
Actual assault rifles are fully automatic military hardware.
What most people call assault rifles are just hunting rifles in cosplay.
Most people call military styled rifles “assault rifles” whether they’re full auto or not.
They go bang-bang real fast
One thing they got 100% right is the idiots. I remember being really annoyed about the chapter with people pretending to be zombies, intentionally getting bitten and spreading etc…
…and then COVID happened and proved that the real world had people at least as bad if not more.
The Japanese blind anime monk was the peak for me. The book had some good parts but man, what the hell was some of that shit
If a zombie apocalypse ever happens
I won’t be worrying about the zombies … I’ll be in more danger from other healthy people who will all be going bat shit insane and want to kill me, the neighbor and everyone else around for food and supplies because they all want to live five minutes longer than me.
In the end the survivors will probably kill more survivors than the zombies will.
In actual disasters people spontaneously self organize to help each other. That’s far and away the most common observed behavior.
I’m indigenous from northern Ontario. My parents were born and raised in the wilderness and the first ten years of my life were partly spent on or near the wilderness.
Yes people do help one another in times of need … but only if the people helping have a surplus to share. But when people are on their own without outside resources, food quickly becomes scarce.
My parents and elders told me lots of stories of famine in the wilderness in the 40s and 50s. When everyone is hungry and everyone is facing death … people start doing some ugly things to one another … murder, sabotage, lying, cheating, stealing, abandoning children and just plain letting people die. Being an orphan back then was a death sentence for children. The elderly were on their own and just expected to die when they no longer could keep up.
And that is just a thousands of years old traditional culture living in their normal environment.
I can’t imagine what would happen to people living today if they suddenly had to face death, starvation and extreme poverty. The first hundred years would be a huge adjustment for humanity and after that I expect the survivors to be more like the hunter gatherers of North America like my ancestors … or those of ancient Europe.
Either that or they try to take advantage and loot.
Exactly, I’ve spent my entire existence doing the right thing, the second it hits the fan I plan on going the Dexter route and letting loose and taking down the crazies.
I’m going to start welding Cadillacs together and become a mad max warlord.
Sounds kinda fun, I do enjoy a welding torch.
Unless it’s like Left 4 Dead virus, that thing is airborne and insanely infectious.
Yeah, the bite version just doesn’t play out, but if there’s one thing COVID has done it’s prove we’re toast if zombies can just cough on you.
Side note: absolutely love when zombie survivors are covered in zombie blood and guts, scratched all to hell, wiping black corpse gunk out of their eyes, but it’s fine because they didn’t get bitten.
Zombies might be a threat for the first days or weeks. People aren’t used to killing, especially not things that look human, especially things that might look like a friend or family member. People would hesitate, or screw up, or think they were safe, or whatever.
But, after a short time people would either learn to fight zombies, or they’d become zombies.
Good zombie fiction isn’t really about the zombies, it’s about the breakdown of society. Bad zombie fiction has people still fighting zombies multiple years after the outbreak started.
The thing I wish you’d see sometimes in zombie fiction is no zombies. Like, a few months after the outbreak, a group of humans completely eliminates 100% of the zombies from a big island or peninsula so people within that area can live normally. It might require killing a million zombies, but that’s only 1000 zombies each by 1000 people. That’s only about 30 zombies a day for a month per person, which should be pretty easy for a dedicated, competent zombie killer. Instead, the most you get is a small walled town with countless zombies on the walls.
It just makes no sense that you typically see every survivor killing dozens of zombies per hour every day and they don’t seem to be making a dent in the local zombie population.
If you.hqvent read the stand, you should. It’s excellent.
It’s not zombies but a flu, but the “breakdown” and then the “after” are as you describe.
Yup, I love The Stand. It’s not realistic in a lot of ways, but it’s a great story.
It depends on how the zombies are made - if it’s one of those “everyone who dies always comes back as a zombie” deals, the fighting will never end until the last living person is gone.
I’ve never seen / heard / read any zombie fiction where they were completely unkillable. The standard zombie fiction has them gone for good if you kill the brain. Sure, everybody who dies comes back as a zombie, but that just means you kill the first wave over a few years, and then make sure that any time anybody dies their brains are perforated and then they’re cremated.
There’s decent evidence for how humans would handle that situation. Ebola used to be a real problem in Sudan / Congo. Part of the problem was that typical funeral rites involved washing the dead bodies by hand. That spread the disease and more people died. Once people realized that they couldn’t do that without spreading the disease, they adapted. At a certain point the survivors would just have standard death practices that ensured that nobody who died came back as a zombie.
There are some fictional villains that are unkillable. Some that can even eventually self-assemble if you do something like cremate or atomize them. But, they’re individual villains. I’ve never heard of anything like that for hordes of zombies.
Besides, even if zombies were completely unkillable, they’re dumb. Herd them into a mine and then seal it. There are mines that are currently (or were recently) used to store Helium. If they’re so enclosed that not even the second smallest element can escape, they’re going to keep Zombies enclosed too.
Good zombie fiction isn’t really about the zombies, it’s about the breakdown of society. Bad zombie fiction has people still fighting zombies multiple years after the outbreak started.
A good zombie series can have both. The Last of Us was really about people in the post apocalypse, not about zombies, but they were still fighting zombies 20 years later.
Which, IMO, is ridiculous. 20 years is too long for zombies to still be an issue.
Think about a typical Zombie story. The survivors are often killing multiple zombies per hour. Sometimes it’s quiet and there are none, but sometimes it’s frantic and it’s tens of zombies per hour. Say it averages out to 1 zombie per hour, but only when you’re out scavenging, so 10 per day. That’s about 300 zombies per month, about 3500 per year, and that’s without any real effort to hunt them down and eradicate them.
That’s 35,000 per person over 10 years, 70,000 per person over 20 years – and again, that’s just casually encountering and killing 10 zombies per day, without making any real effort to eradicate them. At that rate, (casually killing any zombies they happen to encounter) it would take only about 23 people to clear the entire population of Manhattan (1.6 million) over 20 years. The population of Greater Tokyo is 37 million. At 10 zombies per day it would only take slightly more than 500 people to clear every zombie from the megacity over 20 years.
Now, just imagine you had a zombie-proof wall and someone whose job it was to go stab every zombie up against the wall. They could probably do 1-2 a minute, say 100 per hour, 1000 per day. Over 20 years that one person could personally handle 7 million zombies. Clearly, you’d also need to clear out and remove the bodies, but just in terms of culling the zombie population, it would be easy to do.
Even if zombies killed 99.9% of the population, they should be uncommon after a few months, and incredibly rare after a decade.
That’s pretty much the situation in The Last of Us. Humanity has retreated behind walls. Zombies are mostly not a threat, but they exist outside of the encampments. You can live a life without fighting zombies, but if you need to travel for any reason, you’re taking a risk. The biggest risk is from the tribes of people you’ll encounter along the way though.
What, you expect the military to do extensive zombie outbreak war games and not be prepared for a zombie outbreak? smh
@joyjoy @The_Picard_Maneuver lol but it’s true tho
A zombie outbreak would end in a few days by itself. In Africa, in a few hours.
In the winter, between the cold destroying nerves and incapacitating movement and corpses getting waterlogged by rain, which would accelerate rot, zombies wouldn’t last long.
In the heat, zombies would be quickly turned into maggot meals by every fly available. Add bloating from the heat and the entire situation would sort itself out quick and dirty.
And let me just add another thought: our main advantage is our brains. Zombie crave for it but are not particularly known for using it. Any zombie trying to attack a wild animal would end up made in pieces. Bears would have a field day. Imagine the carnage by pigs and cows. A single wild boar would be capable of plowing through a horde. At some point, even dogs would turn feral and attack on sight any two legged figure.
A walking dead version? Sure. 28 days later? Nah. If those fuckers run like that, we’d be done for.
Yes I realize 28 days later technically has no zombies but it’s a more probable scenario to have a virus infect people and make them mad than actual corpses walking around.
Confession: I do not like zombie movies or series. Too much eye candy, too much gore, too much too much.
I do enjoy zombie/apocalypse like books.
28 days later was where the infected acted like rabid mobs, running around in groups?
If that was the case, a virus capable of super charging the aggression mechanism of an organism, two infected individuals would charge each other. If it’s agression based, pure, blind, agression would end itself by being too successful. Even if a groups of individuals somehow managed to maintain some sort of group mentality, any prey would be rendered to pieces. End of the line, no spreading.
Yes that’s 28 days later. But they made them only act aggressively towards noninfected. So supercharged zombies in a way but they’d die after some time without food.
I won’t assert it as fact but I think rabid animals can’t distinguish between healthy and infected individuals. If not, the infected would just tear each other apart. It’s a desease; group instinct requires higher cognitive capability.
And our bodies can last for about 3 weeks without food, assuming we are doing our best to conserve energy. Again, last 28 days and your chances of surviving go up.
The threat of infection via parasite or latent virus would be scarier than a shambler
Now that would be something to consider.
A virus capable of extreme aggression to spread in brief but spectacular sprees but, if the host died, capable of preserving itself in a dormant state would pose a major threat.
Sounds a bit like Ebola.
Zombies have a unique problem where their only means of reproduction are also their top predator and only food source.
I’m in MN…I’m imagining what a herd of bison would do to a zombie horde lmao.
In America, it’d be a subscription service. Zombie Removal Platinum® provides a complete zombie-free experience!
Yeah because only America has subscription services
Good job assuming that this is what I meant. Task failed successfully!
Huh, you mean a creature that has to rely on the same source for food and procreation isn’t optimal? Weird.
Watch out for that Boomer!
PILLS!
i remember there’s one popular piece of zombie apocalypse media that portrays it more like it would actually go down: people just briskly walk away from the zombies and the only threat actually posed is that you can’t really stop for a long time nor truly relax.
Project Zomboid player will agree lol
Did we all collectively forget that far too many Americans were willing to spread a deadly illness, deny its existence, spread conspiracy shit about the vaccine, and host literal mask-not-allowed COVID parties, while people were dying as their lungs melted, just to oWn ThE LIbS?
Even the best military response can’t defeat the collective willful stupidity of citizens.
