Lately, people have been talking a lot about zombies and zombie movies/books/shows because of The Walking Dead. I’m relatively unfamiliar with zombie-related tropes and things, but in hearing discussions of various works in the lexicon, I keep hearing of situations where a person’s spouse/kid/sibling/etc. gets zombified, and how that person must struggle to work up the nerve to off the new zombie.
But why must people destroy their own zombie family members when someone in else in the group who is not so emotionally invested could do it? Especially since the person invariably waits too long to actually do the deed, putting the rest of the group at additional risk?
If my hypothetical husband got chomped…hell, if my actual ex-husband got chomped, I’d really rather someone else do the honors, you know?
The scene that prompted this question was from S1E5 of The Walking Dead. Why was Andrea expected to shoot Amy in the head? Why was she allowed to wait until she actually started to reanimate to do it–at point-blank range no less? Someone else could have done it, removed the body, and been done with it.
But no, the assumption was that Andrea MUST be the one to do it.
No, there wasn’t. Daryl repeatedly said he’d do it and I’m pretty sure Rick and Shane did too. The problem was that Andrea refused to move away from the corpse and she since she had a firearm nobody was really willing to try and physically remove her against her will. Daryl even claimed he could make the shot from a distance without hitting Andrea, but nobody was prepared to let him.
Case in point, Carol. Daryl was about to destroy her husband when she showed up and volunteered to do it herself mush to his surprise.
It’s your duty and the person that knew and loved them to be the one to shoot them. Like putting down your own dog, you don’t let someone else do that.
Love means never having to say you’re sorry , and a bullet to the brain when zombified
“Yeah, we’re going to the farm Lennie… we’re going to live off the fat of the land… and you can tend the rabbits… and eat all the human brains you want…”
Resentment. I could see resenting the person that offed my loved ones without letting me come to grips with the reality of the situation and doing what needed to be done.
Closure. No, there’s not a lot of time between saying goodbye and then smashing their skull into tiny bits of grey jelly - but in the zombiepocalypse we need to make adjustments, and learn to quickly compartmentalize things and realize that once someone’s dead, they become a threat to me and everyone else. Letting someone else do the deed could make me continue to wonder.
Munch’s point #3 makes sense, but so often it seems that the possibility of resentment issues, while important, are less so than the the danger that putting off the head-shot might cause.
