I think part of the issue is also that we have other examples of what rebuilding in the ruins of a more advanced society might be like. Both in real life, to some degree, and also in other fiction. Sure, the Fallout universe is often a crapsack world made worse by deliberate decisions in the 21st century (the FEV and creation of supermutants, creation of animals as weapons like cazadores and deathclaws, the whole Vault system, and so on) but depending on where you are in the game series civilizations and groups still exist. Sure, the NCR may be ineffective, the Legion likely to fail, the Enclave a dangerous descendant of the American government, the Brotherhood a bunch of technology controlling xenophobes, and so on, but they all exist and are capable of controlling territory.
The thing is, you can take it from a right-wing point of view and still have it work, even if lots of problems remain. John Ringo has his issues as an author (tendency to author filibuster, for one) and his zombie series has its issues, especially the last book, but it has a sense of hope. People coming together to work to recapture what they can and stand civilization back up. Now, the cause of that one is more like a 28 Days Later type engineered flu virus that eventually mutates to be a non-issue, so the series really is mostly about getting started on rebuilding.
And even if they don’t rot they certainly don’t heal, and everything we do damages the body. They should all be basically immobile by now.
They don’t need to. Estimates are that there are 8 to 12 BILLION rounds sold in the US every year. To private citizens. Add in the 100s of millions of rounds sold to the military and it looks like even with most of them being fired during the year in practice there would be 30 - 50 BILLION rounds out there. Even if 250 million Americans got zombified, there is more than enough ammo to deal with the situation.
Very little time, in fact. Humans can only stand up thanks to a complex and very delicate system of organs in their inner ears - exactly the sort of thing that would break down first. There’s no way zombies would still be walking after a week.
As I said, it’s silly to fight the existence of zombies for all the reasons listed. Which means that the content has to be about how the survivors live. The problem is that this constant, unrelenting nihilistic grind is boring TV. Plus all the other issues the show has regarding pacing, acting, directing, writing, and other production-related shows.
I feel like those who defend the people and depiction of society or lack thereof are the same people who are going to spend four hours watching the Snyder version of Justice League and then go defending it everywhere on the Internet.
A particularly annoying thing is that all the zombies at this point have long stringy hair. What, has their hair been growing for the past 10 years?
I recall one scene where a zombie was stuck in a tree and was rotting. A robin flew down and plucked a maggot from its shoulder and fed it to a nestling. If they are vulnerable to maggots, then they should all be just a writhing mass of bugs by now.
You can basically put vegetable oil in a diesel engine. There’s tweaks to be made so that it doesn’t damage things. I don’t usually see this used in post-apocalyptic petro-scarce stories.
Mythbusters bit:
That’s how modern movie fiction has always worked. Literally since The Night of the Living Dead, the ur-zombie movie.
I agree with everyone that the writing on TWD is bad, and I gave up after about 2 seasons.
I see a promo every now and then featuring the show runner. It’s a female empowerment promo.
From this thread, I’m not sure she should be bragging up her show-runner-ness skills,.
That was interesting for the first few seasons. But then it became predictable that at least one major beloved character would be killed off each half-season. You just didn’t know who.
But after Glenn was killed at the start of season 7 I largely stopped caring. Most characters ended up being killed out of sheer carelessness or stupidity, in particular Carl and Henry.
Yeah, I agree that the zombies should rot to virtual harmlessness in fairly short order – especially in the hot, humid environment where TWD is set. Between magical zombies and Snowpiercer, I was thinking of starting a ‘Suspension of Disbelief’ thread. (ISTR starting a zombie thread a few years ago that goes over a lot of what’s in this one.)
I’m sure guns are readily available. But the way everyone was shooting like drunken rednecks at a bonfire, I think most of the available ammunition was expended. I suspect that government or quasi-government groups (as in The Walking Dead: World Beyond) may have swooped in to take any large stocks of ammunition from warehouses and manufacturing facilities.
While live cartridges may be scarce, I’m sure there are literally tons of brass lying about. And there are a bunch of reloading presses and dies. Re-sizing the brass would not be a problem. Bullets could be unjacketed lead. I think smokeless powder is made from cotton and nitric acid. Primers? The cups should be very simple to make out of sheet brass, a die, and a punch. The explosive could be fulminated mercury. Given someone like Eugene for the chemistry and engineering, and a bit of training for workers, I could see semi-reliable fixed ammunition.
While not as common as they used to be, except as niche items, there are still a lot of black powder firearms in this country. The formula for black powder is well-known, and experimentation should produce a reliable propellant. The firearms were designed for un-jacketed, easy-to-make projectiles. Most BP firearms seem to use percussion caps. Caps could be made as described earlier.
Eugene’s SaviorGas. They gave up too quickly. Yes, food is more important than fuel, and the failure of the corn crop was bad. But you don’t have to use corn. You may recall Bush the Younger suggesting switchgrass. You can make alcohol out of lots of things. I believe a car could run on straight methanol, though I think it may be harmful to the aluminum.
As I suggested a few years ago, what about ZombieGas? Render the dead, and use the fat to make bio-Diesel. Zombies decompose? Get 'em when they’re fresh! And ‘recycling’ the dead would present some interesting ethical dilemmas in the storyline, what with Hitler’s Germany (personal effects can’t be turned into fuel, but gold and silver and such have uses) and Brave New World’s crematoria.
Another fuel solution might be wood gas. I’m surprised Eugene hasn’t thought of it.
Logical problems aside, I thought the Whisperers were at least a novel idea. The writers had pretty much exhausted the alpha-male dictator model with Negan, so if the show needed a Big Bad, a group that lived amongst zombies could have been fertile ground for some interesting storylines. They tried, but the scripts ultimately fell way short.
Maybe someone should revive that old thread.
But, what if it makes your car a zombie?? Then what, smart guy?!
Zombie cars, roaming the highways and the deserts. Now we know where Cars came from!
Really? Because I dropped out of zombie movies during the cartoon times (mid 80s-00s), so no expert, but the Dawn of the dead (Romero), Sean of the Dead, 28 Days later, Train to Busan and Zombieland (the ones spring to mind in the short term) were all bite to pass on, and people did die and not turn in all of those.movies. I never saw the Dawn/Day reboots. I think one, Return of the living dead, was infected water though, still isn’t pass on and infect everyone to turn.
Perhaps some specific examples of a zombie movie where you always turn when you die would be nice. Because it was very novel to me, and still is, I can’t recall any since. Perhaps ZNation might have done it, that one was just a blur of “I don’t care about anyone in this movie”.
Secret government nerve agent. Anyone exposed to the agent died and became undead. (No ‘laying there dead’ interval, which was a punchline early in the film.)
Yeah, but it wasn’t airborne, it lay on the soil got washed through the water into the graves by rain (which created the old zombies) and a couple of teenage drinkers/stoners also got it infected in some way I can’t remember and turned without being dead, right? I own it on dvd but I’ve not watched it since the mid 80s, but not everybody had it and there certainly wasn’t a chance that everybody would turn when they died unless bitten or exposed to the nerve agent.
You are correct that it’s not universal. When I said “how it always worked” that was a poor choice of words. I meant “that rule has been around as long as zombie movies”, not “every zombie movie plays by that rule”. It’s not a new twist for TWD, it’s a common factor in many but not all zombie movies.
It’s definitely the rule for all Romero zombie movies. Night of the Living Dead explicitly begins with people climbing out of graves and they weren’t bitten. I don’t believe that anyone dies without being bitten in some of them, so we wouldn’t see it as explicitly, but the rule holds in all of them.
Train to Busan and the Return of the Living Dead movies are both related to some kind of chemical contamination that causes the dead to rise which is at least somewhat localized, but still doesn’t require being bitten.
It’s been a while since I saw Sean of the Dead and Zombieland, but are you sure that someone dies in it (not due to head trauma), and doesn’t zombify?
Looks like the remake of Dawn of the Dead does explicitly require a bite, as did World War Z.
28 Days Later is different in many ways because the zombies aren’t dead. They’re living people infected with a virus that makes them violent and crazy.
It was airborne. The rain washed it out of the air, and then it went into the graves. Of course, it’s REALLY airborne later! The initial exposure was to an old man and a 20-something kid. The group of kids (who in reality would never associate with one another) was attacked later.