My flippancy aside, it’s fun. Thinking about the purely theoretical, even nonsensical, is kind of important for mental flexibility. It’s not that different than people discussing whether one sports dude or another would have scored differently if variables were different, except the fictional stakes are bigger.
Though I will say that zombie “preppers” maybe take it too far. I mean, okay, as an art project or a wink-wink nudge-nudge isn’t it pleasing to weld spikes on my car, fine, but genuine preparations for a wholly fictional apocalypse are troubling.
Once word got out that the dead were rising to feast upon the flesh of the living, figuring out who is and isn’t a shambling corpse is pretty easy. They’re movements are odd, they can’t communicate, and they relentlessly chase after prey with a single minded devotion that you can’t help but admire.
Has nobody considered that ruthlessly slaughtering the slow stupid zombies for redneck entertainment might be like overusing antibiotics? With the slow stupid zombies out of the picture, the fast smart ones will proliferate.
I’m not following you here. If there were a zombie apocalypse, you’d have tens of millions of people itching to gun down a zombie, fast or slow, smart or dumb. It doesn’t matter what kind of zombie, it would get mowed down in short order. It’s not like anyone would overlook the fast ones: “Nah, let that jogger go by, I want a slow foot-dragger.”
One thing that’s always bothered me: how do the desiccated or rotting zombies even stay upright? The inner ear, which provides balance, is a complex system of tubes and liquids. Any damage to that and you won’t be able to stand - period. Are you saying that all those dried-up, half-rotten walking corpses all have perfectly functional vestibular systems?
I find it’s generally easier, and funner, to hand-wave away the technicalities of whether zombies have the necessary organs and physics to function and rather just treat them simply as walking targets for target practice that will continue to walk towards you until you blow away large chunks of their body. That makes the scenario stress relief rather than stress gain.
It’s an evolutionary arms race. The slow stupid ones are easy to kill, so it’s human-driven artificial selection for the type that are hard to kill. Assuming it’s a virus that gets transmitted to their victims (it always is) that phenotype can proliferate.
Yeah, that’s why I don’t particularly like zombie stories. They’re usually just misanthrope power fantasies: “I’ve always hated everyone, and now I get to kill them! Yay!”
Goodness, defeating zombies would be ridiculously easy in real life, all you would have to do is convince everybody to hunker down and stay inside for a period of time for the common good, and oh never mind.
I liked it and it got an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. So I don’t think we’re in the minority.
I wish there was a zombie strategy videogame (maybe there is) that let you play out a zombie apocalypse as the military, police, and government services trying to halt the spread. I don’t mean something like They Are Billions which is more like a tower defense game.
The speed of a zombie apocalypse would depend on several factors:
How does the infection spread (bite only, viral, chemical, magical ‘anything dead reanimates’, combination)?
How quickly does the infection turn its host?
How fast / aggressive are the zombies (slow lumber Romero zombies or fast World War Z zombies)?
How resilient are the zombies (Nearly unkillable Train to Busan zombies, head shots only standard, or just sick crazy people 28 Days Later zombies)
How intelligent are the zombies (mindless, basic Bub the friendly Day of the Dead zombie problem solving and pattern repetition, retains some or all human intellect)
Integration within the human population (None - you are either an aggressive monster or human, asymptomatic spreader, Santa Clara Diet / iZombie the undead hold down jobs and live like we do…just with different dietary needs).
How aware is society of zombie lore (ranging from “holy shit, those are zombies just like in the movies about zombies!” to “what’s the z word?”)
How widespread is the outbreak (local farmhouse, regional, global)
But, generally speaking, the reason a zombie apocalypse tends to be not super-easy to defeat is that dealing with the dead coming back to life puts such a strain on law enforcement, health care, infrastructure, and other institutions that they are soon unable to respond to it. The City of New York had trouble figuring out what to do with all those regular COVID dead bodies. Imagine if they all popped back to life and started attacking everyone they saw.
The worse part of a zombie apocalypse is the effects of the collapse of society. Governments and business would probably cease being able to function long before the zombies themselves became overwhelming. But the lack of governments and commerce would lead to starvation, violence, more death, more zombies, so on and so forth.
I think the point is that it depends on how quickly a society recognizes “shit…this is an actual zombie outbreak” and whether they can respond before reaching a “tipping point”.
This is the main key here. One of the main characteristics of a true zombie apocalypses is that no one has heard about zombies before. The ones that have like in “Shawn of the dead” get put down easily. If no one knows about zombies it would be too late before we accepted that we had to shoot our loved ones in the face.
Comedian Ivan Decker has a funny bit about defeating zombies by wearing a leather jacket. “They’re human teeth. I’ve had sandwiches they couldn’t handle…”
This was a big issue in the early seasons of The Walking Dead. Many people couldn’t accept that their loved ones were really dead or couldn’t be “cured,” and wouldn’t destroy them. Needless to say, it always worked out badly.
By now, if you’re bitten on the body everybody knows you’re a goner. If you’re lucky you’ll be left with a pistol to do the job yourself. And if you’re a zombie already, then “blammo!”
I think this trope is so old it almost in the same category as shooting Big Bad a couple of times, seeing him fall down behind the couch, then putting your weapons down and hugging.
