In the world of The Walking Dead, basically a decade has passed since the start of the Zombie Apocalypse. Roughly the same amount of time IRL, although the vagaries of the show mean that it’s not necessarily “real time” season to season. Fun fact, the current group of survivors have actually known each other twice as long in show time than characters knew Rick Grimes before he disappeared.
But the question is this. Why ten years on, are people still walking around despondent like there’s no fucking hope? Why are there still communities of a-holes within walking distance of Alexandria and the other communities that haven’t been discovered yet? I would have thought that by this time people would either have figured out how to live in sustainable agricultural communities like Alexandria, Hilltop, etc, or basically just starved to death / murdered each other / eaten by zombies.
Hell, even Negan has chilled out by this point.
And zombies are basically just a sort of natural phenomenon that people should have learned to deal with. Like dangerous wildlife.
Like is there some point after any apocalypse where it’s not “ok” to keep acting like an a-hole?
There shouldnt even be zombies anymore aside from fresh dead…so basically it should be a The Stand situation. The only shortage should be doctors and such. And at no effing point should cannibalism be needed.
Seriously. Zombies obviously rot. I imagine it doesn’t take a whole lot of time for them to rot to the point where they are immobile and effectively harmless.
You have to suspend disbelief of how society got to that point in the first place (most zombie movies skip that part) but it’s even harder to suspend disbelief that society would stay a Hobbesian ruin forevermore. It’s a fantasy…some people find such a brutal reality appealing, even if just as a place we visit for 50 minutes every now and then.
In reality, since zombies are more stupid / predictable than most of the fauna that humans have had to compete with throughout our history, they’d be trivial cannon fodder. The only wrinkle is that they would be a bit like mines…any indoor areas need to be thoroughly swept for zombies, and that would be slightly risky (although I’m sure we’d figure out a way to reliably make all zombies in an area “activate” such that we can hear them long before they are in range to attack us).
We’d be back to rebuilding society before many people had even seen a zombie IMO.
My thoughts exactly. I’ve finished season 9. But the six year time-jump in the middle of that season really brought home how little progress there had been. There shouldn’t be so many zombies still roaming around, and they should have sorted out things like hydropower and alcohol-fueled vehicles. (There were some of the latter, but not many.) There should have been plenty of guns and ammo; enough people should have had the expertise to keep them operating or make new ammo.
All along they should have been sending out patrols to sweep for zombies and eliminate them in advance. If you find a herd, corral them or lead them into a quarry where you can pick them off with slingshots.
There is probably plenty of guns and ammo around given the sheer number of guns and ammo in this country and the relatively small number of people left. I don’t know about making more ammo or figuring out alcohol-fueled vehicles. I assume you can’t just stick ethanol into a regular car? In spite of Eugene’s setup with the Saviors, I would think mass-producing ammo requires a bit of an industrial supply chain to make the chemicals for the propellant, precision milling of the casings and whatnot. I wouldn’t think you could just get some raw chemicals, some brass and lead, go to a local machine shop and just start cranking out working 5.56mm ammo.
Because it’s a crap-ass show with lazy writers who are happy to wallow endlessly in the same static circumstances? I know, that’s not the intent of the thread; it’s an attempt to take what’s been established in the world-building and see if an in-universe justification can be rationalized. But the external circumstances also deserve consideration.
I tried to watch the show when it premiered. I didn’t get very far. Everything I’ve heard since then indicates I made the right choice.
The reality is there is no possible reality where a zombie apocalypse would last more than three months. The corpses would rot and be gone by then.
If you wanted to survive those three months, go to a desert and camp out near a water source. They’d dry out before getting to you. Or go north enough to freeze. The zombies might be alive longer, but break up the frozen ones.
TWD brought a new twist to the zombie genre with the “always turn on death” when it was previously passed by bite. It made this apocalypse last longer, but it wouldn’t take half a brain to manage this, hole up in a safe area and be rebuilding in six months.
If there’s a chance of death creating zombies then segmentation and easy solutions to management of this would be found quickly and implemented.
Find a prison. Clear it. At least TWD did this.
Implement a system where you are locked in where you sleep at night. Have guards, more than one, in case one dies.
Locked people in when they sleep, trivially. Locks on these doors would perhaps be bolts, accessible from inside, which someone alive could easily open, but a braindead zombie would not even attempt. You’d find office buildings in an apocalypse full of zombies which couldn’t work a “push to exit” button on a door.
And that’s it.
Also, TWD was really based on a set of circumstances around 3 months after an outbreak. It had no more ideas. That and “people are bad hmmkay”. Reality is snapshotted there. Also TWD is four episodes of actual content a season spread over sixteen episodes, so 12 episodes of spacefilling.
I checked out of TWD after season 6, I think. Reasons being:
The constant zombie jump-scares were fully played out after season 3. Hella boring after that.
How many times do we have to go through “oh we found some cool people, oh shit they’re really assholes?”
Why is the world so shitty? Apparently everyone is just dumb as dirt and never learn anything. It gets tiresome. IMO, every post-apocalyptic story needs to bend toward rebuilding and reorganizing, or anarchy and extinction. Not just twitching endlessly in the hunter-gather-zombie-food stage.
I think I made it about six seasons, too. The recurring plot seemed to be that the survivors would find the perfect place (a farm, a prison, a gated community) to rebuild a decent life only to have it ruined by human evil of some sort. If that’s all you got, then the world HAS to stay shitty. The only thing that kept it interesting was the very real possibility that a regular character could suddenly be killed off.
I think that bad, uncreative writing is the main issue. Let’s suspend disbelief enough that zombies exist and are somehow immune to the many, many things that should easily dispose of dead bodies, even ambulatory dead bodies. The way they are handled is still wildly inconsistent and driven solely by the needs of the plot. The capabilities and intelligence of the characters are too. I’m sure we could all come up with plenty of examples, but I’ll put smacking a zombie in the middle of an open road in your somehow brand-new, untouched, still working Hyundai and then crashing out there as mine.
Again, as others have said, zombies should be a minimal threat soon after it happens. The transmission vector is ridiculous, they’re not really any more dangerous than a crazed unarmed human normally is, and humans are very, very good at killing things. I’ll buy that it’ll be difficult to get anywhere close to where civilization currently is and that life for the survivors will never be as pleasant or easy again, though it could be in a couple generations depending on what’s intact and usable. Also that it’s unlikely for current national governments to reconstitute themselves as currently known, though the complete failure of succession planning from the Cold War is another reasonable question about the situation. But for this Hobbesian crap to go on and on? That’s bad, uncreative writing afraid of actually changing anything. All the reasons man forms societies and governments still exists since it has since the beginning of agriculture and permanent settlements.
Yeah, that made sense for the first six or so seasons where it was run from zombies / find a sanctuary / go to war / sanctuary gets overrun / run from zombies again.
But after Rick disappears and the Negan war ends, you have all the communities in the region - Alexandria, Hilltop, The Kingdom, Oceanside, and whatever is left of the Saviors basically living in stable, fortified communities growing crops and trading with each other like normal fucking pre-industrial civilization. And there are hints of other communities who are able to still maintain helicopters and plastic stormtrooper armor.
Like why were a band of homeless drifters like The Whispers such a threat to these established communities of battle hardened warriors? Because they were weird and disguised themselves like the very thing everyone avoids or kills on sight anyway?
While I’m thinking of it, how do these communities maintain their population anyway? Every episode it seems like a few of them get killed. Lots of them if they are at war. Yet a few episodes later, the towns full again. Like, hey we just finished fighting the Saviors and the Whisperers and the Wolves and the Jets and the Sharks and that new deadly gang of ex-circus clowns, but welcome strangers!
And what’s the deal with constantly finding all these loners after ten years? Like Princess, or Daryl’s girlfriend or Robert Patrick’s weird character? Just living in some shack or old warehouse eating canned food for a decade? Like you wouldn’t find some mansion or penthouse apartment to clear out? This is DC area right? You know someone has moved into the White House Zombieland style. And why would you act all suspicious and weird after being alone for years? I don’t even really like people and I’d be jazzed up just to see someone new after years of isolation, regardless of who they ate or murdered. (Which admittedly, Princess was). Like why did it take Daryl and Leah months to get together. Were they looking to play the field a bit longer? Waiting for someone better to come along? After wandering the zombie-filled woods for years, you’d pretty much have me at “hello”.
For me, the interesting part of post-apocalyptic stories is how you rebuild afterward. Constantly building something up only to have it knocked back makes a pointless story.
I haven’t watched much past the first couple of seasons, but my WAG is that the show’s writers aren’t particularly interested in world-building. They’re interested in the micro-level of characters and relatively small groups of people, not the macro level.
Social deprivation does weird things to people in the best of circumstances. And when you’re living in the aftermath of a collapsed society, where all your friends and loved ones have died, and violence has become a normal part of your life those are hardly the best of circumstances. Just coming into contact with living breathing people could be emotionally overwhelming and dealing with the sudden change difficult to process.
In my opinion, the premier episode of TWD was one of the best series premiers I’ve ever seen. There was always something happening, the special effects were good, and I looked forward to each new episode. I was genuinely surprised by what a snore fest the first half of season 2 was.
There would have been military bases around with tons of armament, far more than enough for the small number of people left. Yet we bare see any of it. Surely they would have been a major objective.
They really are ridiculous villains. There are plenty of real-life models for Negan and the Saviors, bully-boys who exploit others by force. But the Whisperers make no sense at all. I just can imagine a significant number of people being willing to live like that. The smell of the zombie skins alone would have been horrible. And they seemed to live largely by hunting. Any deer would have stayed far away from the stench,
I wonder if it’s due to ideology?
I really don’t want to hijack the thread, so I’ll phrase it delicately. It just seems to me that a sizable proportion of the American public basically believe that people are inherently bad and it’s only the thin blue line, and supernatural wrathings, that keep us in check.
If the writers are coming at it from that angle, then it’s not bad writing from their POV, it’s a realistic depiction of how craven humans ultimately are.
Looting an old military or police installation for weapons has come up from time to time as a plot point in TWD. I also suppose the world didn’t fall overnight. In ten years, I’m sure a lot of the ammo was used up killing zombies and other people. And they aren’t mass producing more of it.