What happens to political leaders in a zombie apocalypse? [Archive]

Keltest

2018-11-25, 11:28 PM

I won't believe for a second that political elites (such heads of state, senators, members of parliament, etc.) will just get killed like common people in the zombie apocalypse. They have bodyguards, helicopters, bunkers with months' worth of supplies, ships or submarines capable of remaining out to sea until things blow over, etc.

There is no way that, say, the President of the United States would get killed by zombies. Granted, there could be some kind of coup by a political or military figure who thinks they'll be better at managing the zombie apocalypse. But if so, that person will still be able to get to safety, while retaining a lot of manpower at their disposal.

Surely there is some zombie fiction where the remnants of the government are still trying to get things back under control?

I think the idea of existing centralized leadership is at odds with the fundamental premise of a zombie apocalypse, or most other kinds of apocalypses. Lets say the president of the US has a bunker hidden in Mount Rushmore in case of impending plot device. Lets also assume he can get there safely with much of his inner circle, important staff, and a healthy dose of security officials. What does he do then? The world is in shambles, most lines of communication are cut off, and the army and military resources nominally under his command cant be directed because the internet and phone lines are down, theres no mail service, and theyre on the other side of the continent. So unless the entire east coast of the US manages to stave off the zombies (I guess they got stuck chewing on California for a while) long enough for people to organize, the title and position quickly lose any meaning as they become one group of refugees among hundreds or thousands.

The fact of the matter is, so much of what enables one person to effectively lead a continent spanning state is reliant on an organized and efficient system that simply would not be able to exist in a post-apocalyptic scenario.

Anteros

2018-11-26, 02:01 AM

I think the idea of existing centralized leadership is at odds with the fundamental premise of a zombie apocalypse, or most other kinds of apocalypses. Lets say the president of the US has a bunker hidden in Mount Rushmore in case of impending plot device. Lets also assume he can get there safely with much of his inner circle, important staff, and a healthy dose of security officials. What does he do then? The world is in shambles, most lines of communication are cut off, and the army and military resources nominally under his command cant be directed because the internet and phone lines are down, theres no mail service, and theyre on the other side of the continent. So unless the entire east coast of the US manages to stave off the zombies (I guess they got stuck chewing on California for a while) long enough for people to organize, the title and position quickly lose any meaning as they become one group of refugees among hundreds or thousands.

The fact of the matter is, so much of what enables one person to effectively lead a continent spanning state is reliant on an organized and efficient system that simply would not be able to exist in a post-apocalyptic scenario.

I don't think your assumption that the President would have to rely on cell towers and mail service to contact other leaders in a state of emergency is very sound.

BeerMug Paladin

2018-11-26, 02:28 AM

I think the typical story in this kind of setting involves either the event having taken place before the story begins or involves a time skip for good reason. And that is to not have to explain a transitory period which would be inherently chaotic and not very easy to present in a believable fashion. Such as where certain groups are and what various fields of expertise are doing about the event.

As for why political leaders don't show up in these settings, they do. They're just strictly small-scale leaders of small, independent factions of survivors. They're also usually jerks.

Khedrac

2018-11-26, 05:47 AM

One big problem for heads of state and their equivalent is "what happens if their bodyguards turn?"

That said, John Ringo's "Black Tide Rising" zombie apocalypse series does address this. Initially the protagonists make contact with the US National Command Continuity Co-ordinator in "the Hole" Nebraska (I think) - the chap with the civilian authority (and military as there are a few officers with him) are stuck in their underground bunker with no contact with the surface except for military communications (and there is very little active).

Later on in the books the surviving guard force of the facility break out of where they holed up and contact the bunker. The protagonists in the mean time have been continually clearing the rescuing more troops (and more senior officers) and eventually manage to rescue some elected officials (secretary for X etc.)

One of the big problems with most of the bunkers is that they are very over-populated. E.g. a bunker designed for 20 senior staff gets 20 senior staff, their families plus anyone who managed to tag along when they bunkered up. In one that features in the novels they have to "hot sit" - there isn't enough room for everyone to sit at once. Thankfully it was stocked with food for years, but they are worries about their food supplies since they are way over planned capacity. One can see this sort of problem arising in most non-military bunkers (and probably some military ones).

Ibrinar

2018-11-26, 06:21 AM

Eldan

2018-11-26, 06:36 AM

Fyraltari

2018-11-26, 07:12 AM

I won't believe for a second that political elites (such heads of state, senators, members of parliament, etc.) will just get killed like common people in the zombie apocalypse. They have bodyguards, helicopters, bunkers with months' worth of supplies, ships or submarines capable of remaining out to sea until things blow over, etc.

There is no way that, say, the President of the United States would get killed by zombies. Granted, there could be some kind of coup by a political or military figure who thinks they'll be better at managing the zombie apocalypse. But if so, that person will still be able to get to safety, while retaining a lot of manpower at their disposal.

Surely there is some zombie fiction where the remnants of the government are still trying to get things back under control?

World War Z and Newsflesh are bot series that use the zombie threat as a backdrop but where civilisation adapted to the new paradigm without cracking down and with a political class mostly unharmed.

And really, the reason the world of World War Z got as bad as it did is because the zombies are stupidly resistant to everything that isn't a headshot and every military on the globe got reaaaaaaaaaaally dumb for a while.
If I remember correctly in Newsflesh, they mostly installed a threat-level system to classify various areas with increasingly strict control of who and what goes in and out and called it a day.

Mechalich

2018-11-26, 07:18 AM

Brother Oni

2018-11-26, 07:40 AM

How are zombies a threat to anyone? Tvtyrant is right, outside of super zombies, Zombies really just aren't all that dangerous (even with increased strength and being harder to kill, a slow moving rather stupid human without weapons and intent on biting isn't much of a threat unless you are cornered or outnumbered (or zombies are new and you get close to check on them)) so a plague is the only way and hard to protect against. You can flee to somewhere airtight but if it spreads fast enough or starts without severe symptoms but still contagious it is quite conceivable they reacted to late.

Depends on the type of zombie and the zombie 'disease' vector.

With direct bodily fluids contact only transmission (ie bite) style vectors, slow zombies are not a threat, while fast zombies are more dangerous but easily contained after the initial outbreak.

With an aerosolised vector, zombies are far more dangerous but then it's dependent on the incubation time and symptoms.
A fast incubation time with people turning into zombies on completion means you're fighting the disease more than the zombies, and we have infectious disease quarantine protocols in place for that.
I'm ignoring High School of the Dead style zombies here as the scenario is fairly ridiculous since the focus is more on the female characters' physical attributes rather than any social commentary.

If infected people are asymptomatic until point of death (ie they only become zombies after they've died ala The Walking Dead and biting only accelerates the process), then provided society survives this learning process, it's easily controlled.
If any dead body can resurrect as a zombie (eg Night of the Living Dead), then its a much more apocalyptic situation.

Keltest

2018-11-26, 08:08 AM

I don't think your assumption that the President would have to rely on cell towers and mail service to contact other leaders in a state of emergency is very sound.

Ok, sure, lets assume that all the world leaders had super secure indestructible phone lines strung between all their various bunkers. Now they can all talk to one group of people in each country.

Admittedly, Europe would probably be better equipped to take advantage of their leadership surviving, just by virtue of there being so many more countries, and therefore bunkers, across the continent. However, the fact remains that without any sort of logistical tools to organize and actually lead people, their titles are largely meaningless. What the heck does somebody in California care about what a survivor in South Dakota thinks? Its not like he has any idea whats going on in California.

Anteros

2018-11-26, 08:58 AM

Ok, sure, lets assume that all the world leaders had super secure indestructible phone lines strung between all their various bunkers. Now they can all talk to one group of people in each country.

Admittedly, Europe would probably be better equipped to take advantage of their leadership surviving, just by virtue of there being so many more countries, and therefore bunkers, across the continent. However, the fact remains that without any sort of logistical tools to organize and actually lead people, their titles are largely meaningless. What the heck does somebody in California care about what a survivor in South Dakota thinks? Its not like he has any idea whats going on in California.

Satellite? Radio? These aren't super-secret government technologies. They're widely available, and already in use by every single major military organization in the world. As well as all over the civilian sector.

JeenLeen

2018-11-26, 09:12 AM

Surely there is some zombie fiction where the remnants of the government are still trying to get things back under control?

Didn't the video game Last of Us do this?

It wasn't really pertinent to the ethos or adventure, so I didn't pay a ton of attention to it, but it seems the government maintained control of at least some major cities. It became fairly totalitarian, but it seems like it was a persistent government from before- and after-zombies. I forget if they were (at least nominally) trying to expand the 'safe zones' or if they were just maintaining the status quo.

That seems pretty believable. A lot of areas become 'badlands' where civilians don't go, but major areas are protected by quarantine protocols and zombie-killing guards. Rebels and independent survivors control some areas.

There's also a webcomic... Zombie Hunters, maybe... where this sorta happens in the sense that there's an island-nation where survivors fled to. Government leaders from before the fall became the leaders post-fall, though it's a multi-national coalition instead of one government. But they more maintain their own island and just send folk on salvage runs to the mainland. (Also, to note, it has Super Zombies in addition to mostly slow zombies, so it's more reasonable society collapsed. And it's the 'you seem normal until you die, then you rise as a zombie (really quickly)', though they can detect infection pretty easily, at least by the time the comic starts. It might have been undetectable during early outbreaks.)

Traab

2018-11-26, 09:22 AM

Ive seen a few where the political leaders do go down. All it takes is say, an early zombie attack in congress before they know whats going on. "crazy man attacks guards at state of the union, bites at least 4 before being taken down and cuffed" 5 minutes later, "Guards go crazy and start attacking everyone, bedlam ensues." 5 minutes later "Braaaaainnsssss!" This is obviously reliant on the fast acting zombie transmission thing. But in general, yes, a zombie apocalypse is stupid and can only work if you ignore literally everything that proves it wouldnt. If the dead everywhere rose at the exact same time, and everyone bitten changed really really fast, the death toll would be atrocious. But society wouldnt collapse. At least not everywhere. If it was a patient zero thing where a single zombie wakes up in a hospital and starts biting, its doubtful it would even make it outside the building.

Eldan

2018-11-26, 09:27 AM

The problems with zombie apocalypses are deeper than just the fact that they are easily to kill off, if you want to go with "realistic". If they aren't actually undead, in a plague scenario, they still need to eat. A lot. A few pounds of meat a day, at least. And any body that has a few pounds of meat missing will, in turn, not be a very effective zombie itself.

Grey_Wolf_c

2018-11-26, 09:36 AM

It's difficult to manufacture a scenario where this actually works.

As a mental exercise once when I was rocking my child to sleep, I came up with a zombie apocalypse scenario that, as far as I can tell, should work a little more plausibly than the usual stuff.

Base: world has progressed in nanobots significantly - they are the neovaccines. You get them for everything from the common flu to ALS. The military requires certain ones to be implanted - communication, combat readiness, muscular and skeletal strengthening, the lot. These things are of course controlled by software.

You see where this is going. Depending on "the message" intended by the story, the neovaccine either is deliberately sabotaged, or has a flaw, or something along those lines, that causes one of its most commonly deployed variants (say, the common flu neovaccine) to become aggressively invasive, and modifies its host to become the standard zombie at a moment in time (Y2K reference!). But because you can't be in the military (and likely in most major city police departments) without having your dose, everyone in those organisations is a zombie at the same time. President, cabinet, etc. almost certainly are too, and any that are not are quickly munched on by their bodyguards.

Your protagonists, therefore, are anyone that either refused the neovaccine on some principle, rejected it because of some biological reason, or something along those lines. You could easily posit that we'd be talking about 1% or fewer of total population to start with.

I would not develop this story beyond this, though, because "the message" would seem to be "vaccines are bad, yo", and I feel strongly enough against such sentiment that the last thing I'd want to do is give them any further moral support.

ETA: as to the usual issues with zombies, as per Eldan's comment above, well, that's where the nanotech can come in. The bots keep the bodies alive by scavenging. They munch on human brains when they can find them because, I don't know, they have a protein that's hard to get otherwise, but in absence of that they'll eat anything from canned food to dirt for the material needed to keep going. And if you shoot them, they go donw for a while, but they regen and come back the next day. Anything short of reducing them to fine pulp over a large area will only delay them coming back for longer or shorter periods. And since you are dealing with thousands at once, you can't take the time to chunky salsa them all.

Grey Wolf

-Sentinel-

2018-11-26, 09:36 AM

Most zombie stories at this point have a zombie plague that crushes the population, and the zombies come after the majority die.
That makes a lot of sense. I imagine there's a phase of the disease where it's asymptomatic and transmitted by touch, allowing it to infect millions, and a second phase where it turns people into zombies and is transmitted by bite.

It also helps explain how there's SO MANY zombies. Zombies are usually depicted as trying to eat people, instead of merely biting them. Therefore, in a conventional zombie story, the existence of millions of zombies implies that millions of people had run-ins with zombies yet managed to escape with their lives long enough to turn. Unless... there was a more conventional plague that affected the first 80-90% of humankind.

But that's probably not the way you should look at this. Zombie apocalypse stories want to be about the collapse of society and how ordinary people make their way and survive (or don't.) They are either allegories, or simple gory wish fulfillment fodder. Neither case has much need for realism. And for the stories to work, the government can't be there to just flatten all the zombies with a tank. So they aren't.
Mind, zombies are not always necessary. Stephen King's The Stand depicts the collapse of society under a (conventional, non-zombie) plague, including how the government becomes more and more oppressive in the last stages of the collapse, and how survivors try to rebuild but soon find themselves at war.

In most stories that do feature zombies, it turns out that the living are more of a threat than the dead.

Grey_Wolf_c

2018-11-26, 09:43 AM

In most stories that do feature zombies, it turns out that the living are more of a threat than the dead.

I'd say all. The zombies in a zombie plague story are the background detail that sets the reason why a bunch of people who don't get along try to do so and then (usually) fail. Now, I am not well read, so there might be the occasional exception, but by and large, zombie apocalypse stories are about the human condition under stress, not about the zombies themselves. That's why it's fine that they are implausible. That's not the point.

Grey Wolf

Traab

2018-11-26, 10:49 AM

And the unviability of zombie apocalypses are why most movies tend to skip over the part where society collapses. You get the initial outbreak, the panic and disorder, then there is usually either a timeskip to "everything but us are zombies now" or they just utterly ignore it and work under the assumption that everything is now zombies but us and keep the focus on one small section of the world like the shopping mall everyone is trapped in or whatever. Until you stop and think about it its a really decent job of ignoring how it cant work by just hand waving it away.

Eldan

2018-11-26, 11:00 AM

Mind, zombies are not always necessary. Stephen King's The Stand depicts the collapse of society under a (conventional, non-zombie) plague, including how the government becomes more and more oppressive in the last stages of the collapse, and how survivors try to rebuild but soon find themselves at war.

In most stories that do feature zombies, it turns out that the living are more of a threat than the dead.

Oh, absolutely.- I'm just saying that most attempts at making zombies more realistic seem to open up more problems than they solve.

Sapphire Guard

2018-11-26, 11:33 AM

There's always a timeskip at the start of these stories, because no one can think of a way for the zombie hordes to get big enough to be a threat. How this would really happen:

Patient Zero bites guard.

Guard: Ow. Stop that. (restrains patient, goes home , feels sick, goes to hospital, turns,bites, is restrained.)

Hospital: Okay, something is up here. Everyone he bit, you're under observation.

Zombie outbreak ends with 6 to 8 victims tops.

It spreads a tiny bit further if Security guard dies at home, but not that far.

For it to happen in any numbers, there has to be a non bite based means of transmission.

Vaccinations, brain worms, fungus, etc, don't spread quickly or universally enough. At worst, you lose (part of) one city.

Even if the world doesn't understand zombies, you don't have to in order to not let people bite you.

The only time I''ve ever found this story plausible is the Resident Evil games Series.

This is also the reason I don't like this kind of story, they have to hate people so much, usually to implausible degrees.

Grey_Wolf_c

2018-11-26, 11:45 AM

Vaccinations, brain worms, fungus, etc, don't spread quickly or universally enough. At worst, you lose (part of) one city.

This is why I went with software - it is the one thing that can be found the world over and if there is a bug, it has the potential to affect everyone, everywhere, all at once. It doesn't happen in reality because competing software companies, people not updating at the same time, etc, but a Y2K scenario is plausible, at least. Heck, you could have it happen on January 19, 2038 03:14:07 GMT (end of Unix time).

Grey Wolf

Sapphire Guard

2018-11-26, 12:03 PM

Grey_Wolf_c

2018-11-26, 12:13 PM

Even so, it still wouldn't be universal. Maybe the laws in the US would make it mandatory for officials, other nations would use different systems, have less strict rules, etc, not be able to afford it, etc.

No, but it can be pretty much close to universal. Sure, maybe Afghanistan because [politics] has a penetration of the neovaccine for a mere 50%, but if the US, Europe, China and India all have it widely available (because Reasons), that's pretty much the entire world population and practically the entire economic system gone to hell. Sure, you could set your story in, say, Botswana where they simply notice the satellites aren't working anymore and wondering what the hell went on, but if you want to set up the story in the US, and your question -as it originally was for the OP- is "what happened to the president" or the usual "why didn't the US military stop this before it spread", then "because they all converted into zombies on the same second, as did everyone but small town in middleofnowhere empty state" is probably a more solid handwave than usual.

On the other hand, as we've said, if you are reading a zombie story, you probably shouldn't be looking for a solid sci-fi experience anyway, and more into a subtle or not-so-subtle commentary on the human condition.

Grey Wolf

Tvtyrant

2018-11-26, 12:59 PM

There are two ways I have played with before:

1. There is a change in the sun's radiation. Everyone who is exposed ti sunlight develops a rapid form of brain cancer that causes uncontrolled murderous rages when exposed to said daylight, but otherwise are normal. Since nearly everyone is exposed billions die before the secret is discovered and people now have to live in the dark, hoping what scientists are left will find a cure in the next few generations.

2. A major religion draws parallels between zombiefication and immortality and encourages its members to embrace immortality and spread it to everyone. Zombie apoc being deliberately spread by a major organization, leading to open civil wars and civilian massacres.

Keltest

2018-11-26, 01:07 PM

No, but it can be pretty much close to universal. Sure, maybe Afghanistan because [politics] has a penetration of the neovaccine for a mere 50%, but if the US, Europe, China and India all have it widely available (because Reasons), that's pretty much the entire world population and practically the entire economic system gone to hell. Sure, you could set your story in, say, Botswana where they simply notice the satellites aren't working anymore and wondering what the hell went on, but if you want to set up the story in the US, and your question -as it originally was for the OP- is "what happened to the president" or the usual "why didn't the US military stop this before it spread", then "because they all converted into zombies on the same second, as did everyone but small town in middleofnowhere empty state" is probably a more solid handwave than usual.

On the other hand, as we've said, if you are reading a zombie story, you probably shouldn't be looking for a solid sci-fi experience anyway, and more into a subtle or not-so-subtle commentary on the human condition.

Grey Wolf

I believe that SapphireGuard's point is more that each nation would probably have their own flavor of such technology rather than just relying on one supplier. theres no way that, for example, Russia would implant their military with a super soldier serum they bought from America. You might get some crossover between close countries like the US and the UK, but pretty much any country that would want access to this stuff is going to want their own version of it to use.

Grey_Wolf_c

2018-11-26, 01:31 PM

I believe that SapphireGuard's point is more that each nation would probably have their own flavor of such technology rather than just relying on one supplier. theres no way that, for example, Russia would implant their military with a super soldier serum they bought from America. You might get some crossover between close countries like the US and the UK, but pretty much any country that would want access to this stuff is going to want their own version of it to use.

Sure, but that's not the scenario I described. Yes, the soldiers have soldier-boosts on top of the universal flu one, but it's not the soldier boots, it's the seemingly-innocuous one that is the issue. Russia doesn't have their own Rubella vaccine, just local manufacturing of a known substance. In software terms, this would be a bug (or deliberate sabotage) or a basic library used by a basic nanobot, not an issue with proprietary secret soldier boosting ones specific to each country.

The whole point about soldiers was that there wouldn't be any that didn't have nanobots (because conscientious objection) since having bots is required, so people who object to nanobots would be effectively barred from active service, explaining why virtually the entire military is gone (it doesn't take a lot of military to stop a zombie apocalypse, so really the scenario is built backwards from that: how do you have the military not stop the zombies? They are the zombies. Why? Because whatever went wrong is required of all the military. How so? Etc.)

Grey Wolf

Fyraltari

2018-11-26, 02:12 PM

As a mental exercise once when I was rocking my child to sleep, I came up with a zombie apocalypse scenario that, as far as I can tell, should work a little more plausibly than the usual stuff.
You have an interesting train of thought when taking care of your little ones.
:smalleek:
I'm joking of course.

Base: world has progressed in nanobots significantly - they are the neovaccines. You get them for everything from the common flu to ALS. The military requires certain ones to be implanted - communication, combat readiness, muscular and skeletal strengthening, the lot. These things are of course controlled by software.

You see where this is going. Depending on "the message" intended by the story, the neovaccine either is deliberately sabotaged, or has a flaw, or something along those lines, that causes one of its most commonly deployed variants (say, the common flu neovaccine) to become aggressively invasive, and modifies its host to become the standard zombie at a moment in time (Y2K reference!). But because you can't be in the military (and likely in most major city police departments) without having your dose, everyone in those organisations is a zombie at the same time. President, cabinet, etc. almost certainly are too, and any that are not are quickly munched on by their bodyguards.

Your protagonists, therefore, are anyone that either refused the neovaccine on some principle, rejected it because of some biological reason, or something along those lines. You could easily posit that we'd be talking about 1% or fewer of total population to start with.

I would not develop this story beyond this, though, because "the message" would seem to be "vaccines are bad, yo", and I feel strongly enough against such sentiment that the last thing I'd want to do is give them any further moral support.
This sounds more like a "transhumanism is bad" message than "vaccines are bad" to my hears (I mean if we were injecting nanobots in our bodies we'd go way further than just vaccines), which, while controversial is not actively dangerous.

The idea is sound, there is probably some good stuff to be made from that. You do lose the whole "infection" angle since to survive the first day, your protagonist would need not to carry the malware/nanobot. Unless the infected bots are trying to spread for some reason I guess.

ETA: as to the usual issues with zombies, as per Eldan's comment above, well, that's where the nanotech can come in. The bots keep the bodies alive by scavenging. They munch on human brains when they can find them because, I don't know, they have a protein that's hard to get otherwise, but in absence of that they'll eat anything from canned food to dirt for the material needed to keep going. And if you shoot them, they go donw for a while, but they regen and come back the next day. Anything short of reducing them to fine pulp over a large area will only delay them coming back for longer or shorter periods. And since you are dealing with thousands at once, you can't take the time to chunky salsa them all.

Biomechanical psycho zombies, yo!

Grey_Wolf_c

2018-11-26, 02:22 PM

You have an interesting train of thought when taking care of your little ones.
:smalleek:
I'm joking of course.

It wasn't the only thing I thought about. You just run out of things that can be done while quietly rocking a baby to sleep in a dark room. I couldn't even listen to music with headphones, because it threw off my rocking rhythm. So I went through a whole lot of similar mental exercises related to both my profession and my interests. For example, I developed a whole new fantasy setting around solar-powered magic channeled through gemstones of appropriate colours. That one I remember particularly well, because I kept going back to it.

Grey Wolf

Traab

2018-11-26, 02:40 PM

It wasn't the only thing I thought about. You just run out of things that can be done while quietly rocking a baby to sleep in a dark room. I couldn't even listen to music with headphones, because it threw off my rocking rhythm. So I went through a whole lot of similar mental exercises related to both my profession and my interests. For example, I developed a whole new fantasy setting around solar-powered magic channeled through gemstones of appropriate colours. That one I remember particularly well, because I kept going back to it.

Grey Wolf

I do the same thing when working a boring job. I mentally write fanfiction, setup what if scenarios like planning for lotto wining at various amounts, or of course, my zombie survival plan, things like that. My body on auto pilot, my mind keeping itself busy. The magic system I went with works off of spending experience, which in this context means, you get younger. Cast too much magic and you could be stuck as a baby till you age back up again (there would be ways to age faster, you just cant do it casually is all) Or even worse, overcast and deage till you vanish.

pendell

2018-11-26, 02:59 PM

It wasn't the only thing I thought about. You just run out of things that can be done while quietly rocking a baby to sleep in a dark room. I couldn't even listen to music with headphones, because it threw off my rocking rhythm. So I went through a whole lot of similar mental exercises related to both my profession and my interests. For example, I developed a whole new fantasy setting around solar-powered magic channeled through gemstones of appropriate colours. That one I remember particularly well, because I kept going back to it.

Grey Wolf

Here's an oddity. Vaccines have existed for hundreds of years. Biological warfare is something well-known. Yet I don't recall a single instance where a nation attempted to sabotage another nation's vaccine supply. Is it because the military value of such an attack too long term to be useful except for terror purposes? And also that doing such a thing would definitely invite a truly awful retaliation? As in, if a country is weak, you don't need to resort to such things, and if they are strong, they will probably respond to your biological terror with a nuclear strike?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Lvl 2 Expert

2018-11-26, 03:34 PM

I won't believe for a second that political elites (such heads of state, senators, members of parliament, etc.) will just get killed like common people in the zombie apocalypse. They have bodyguards, helicopters, bunkers with months' worth of supplies, ships or submarines capable of remaining out to sea until things blow over, etc.

There is no way that, say, the President of the United States would get killed by zombies. Granted, there could be some kind of coup by a political or military figure who thinks they'll be better at managing the zombie apocalypse. But if so, that person will still be able to get to safety, while retaining a lot of manpower at their disposal.

Surely there is some zombie fiction where the remnants of the government are still trying to get things back under control?

Zombie fiction is wish fulfillment. It's a world in which you, the person watching this movie, would be a hero, bravely slaying the scary monsters! That's why zombies suck so bad. It must be believable that I would slay dozens of them in a good night. The flip side to that fantasy is that everyone else must have been completely incompetent to have been overrun by this lowest bar of monsterdom. The government didn't survive because that would spoil the fantasy. If the government was fighting back effectively there either wouldn't be a story because the zombies were all rounded up pretty quickly or there wouldn't be a story because the monsters were made significantly scarier and I the lone former couch potato hero couldn't be the important savior.

Rodin

2018-11-26, 03:44 PM

The zombie apocalypse is a very 'soft' fantastical scenario, and most versions presented in popular culture have extremely low verisimilitude - with most commonly ignoring the fact that dead bodies decay and that once most of humanity is dead the zombies should starve.

In harder zombie scenario, the zombies are simply humans infected with a virus or fungus that overrides the brain and turns them into biting machines that manage to ignore each other post-infection. The scenario becomes a mass threat if the infected manage to break out of containment measures, overrunning potential response. It's difficult to manufacture a scenario where this actually works - if the incubation period is short, outbreaks will be localized and effectively contained. If the incubation period is long, widespread exposure is possible, but most people will end up turning in hospitals, enabling a highly effective quarantine once everyone figures out what is going on (and yes, governments have standing 'zombie apocalypse' action plans, just like they have plans for alien invasions, the rapture, and all sorts of other craziness).

In order for a zombie apocalypse to work you need the infected number to reach critical mass and then breakout in all directions along transport corridors, preventing containment. This takes some work to setup, you need you infection to incubate and acquire large numbers some place outside of official observation - such as a refuge camp or massive slum - and then you need an inciting incident to cause a spread. Even then, global exposure is highly unlikely, but a nation or region could be consumed. Particularly vulnerable are nations with weaker governments, high population density, and limited natural barriers. So, the most vulnerable location is probably Bangladesh (https://cdn.freshplaza.com/2017/0110/maptodaylink.jpg), with an outbreak there potentially impacting India, Pakistan, and mainland Southeast Asia - geographically that's not a huge region, but it's a massive chunk of the planet's population.

I'll point at Black Tide Rising again for this. Basically, the zombie virus was genetically engineered and deliberately spread. It was made to initially be basically "Spanish Flu on steroids" - airborne, highly contagious, and symptoms that are not bad enough to put most people down for the count until they'd had it for several days, enabling it to go undetected initially. Once the victim has thoroughly spread it, the virus enters a second stage that "zombifies" them. This virus is then deliberately spread, being introduced into busy airports around the world simultaneously to catch as many people as possible. By the time the world governments are able to react there's already a global pandemic.

Here's an oddity. Vaccines have existed for hundreds of years. Biological warfare is something well-known. Yet I don't recall a single instance where a nation attempted to sabotage another nation's vaccine supply. Is it because the military value of such an attack too long term to be useful except for terror purposes? And also that doing such a thing would definitely invite a truly awful retaliation? As in, if a country is weak, you don't need to resort to such things, and if they are strong, they will probably respond to your biological terror with a nuclear strike?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I would assume that this is down to technology and how wars are fought. Firstly, I'll note that vaccines have only existed since 1796, and 222 years is not really a very long time all things considered.

In terms of sabotaging a vaccine, the first question is "How?" Up until the advent of the Internet, sabotaging the vaccine supply pretty much means taking control of the labs that generate said vaccine. If you can do that, you already have control of the country, so why are you bothering? In theory, you could try and blow up the labs, but that means not blowing up something else. Taking out a vaccine is a long-term plan at best, and likely would primarily wipe out those most at risk - children and old people. Neither of whom are going to be fighting in the war.

Post-Internet, we haven't really had a war big enough between two countries with sufficient initial infrastructure to make it worthwhile. And yes, your original suggestion stands - weak countries it isn't necessary, big countries have nukes.

Overall, I'd say from a strictly biological warfare standpoint it's simply easier to make a new nasty virus that there is no vaccine for and then keep doing that. Destroying the existing vaccine infrastructure simply isn't worth the effort.

Grey_Wolf_c

2018-11-26, 03:45 PM

Yet I don't recall a single instance where a nation attempted to sabotage another nation's vaccine supply.

Yours did (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27388336), endangering a vaccination program across an entire country to get to a single man. It has been credited (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/14/cia-fake-vaccination-medecins-frontieres) with delaying the eradication of polio (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28764582).

Grey Wolf

pendell

2018-11-26, 04:08 PM

Yours did (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27388336), endangering a vaccination program across an entire country to get to a single man. It has been credited (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/14/cia-fake-vaccination-medecins-frontieres) with delaying the eradication of polio (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28764582).

Grey Wolf

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about setting up a fake vaccination program for the purpose of gathering intelligence, which as a side effect makes the locals mistrustful of vaccination with the result that polio vaccines are delayed. I'm talking about willfully altering a vaccine to spread a disease or worse. This figured heavily in the plot of Tom Clancy's original Rainbow Six (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Six_(novel))

An environmentalist movement which thinks the world would be better off than a lot less people developed three things in an advanced biological laboratory:

1) The disease itself. Which was pretty horrifying, but it was expected that the vector would result in demand for
2) Vaccine "A" . This was a live virus vaccine in the most literal sense; it gave the actual disease. The idea was that their bio company would spread a few cases of the disease which would make some progress, but the vaccinations themselves would generate the overwhelming majority of cases. Mass vaccination across the entire world resulting in mass death.
3) Vaccine "B", which actually worked. All project personnel would receive this vaccine, and it is the one that would be shown in scientific studies to demonstrate the efficacy of the A vaccine.

Happily, men with guns save the day.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Traab

2018-11-26, 04:10 PM

Fyraltari

2018-11-26, 04:13 PM

Grey_Wolf_c

2018-11-26, 04:15 PM

That's not what I'm talking about.

Actually, yes, yes it is. To quote you: "a nation attempted to sabotage another nation's vaccine supply.".

The US sabotaged another nation's vaccine supply by making the local warlords mistrustful of any future campaign's workers. They might not have intended it, but that's the result of their actions. You can now wax lyrical about what they were attempting, certainly, but the CIA isn't really so stupid as to not have foreseen this, so they must have considered it a valid cost of the overall operation.

ETA: and this is all I will say on the matter, because politics are just around the corner.

Grey Wolf

pendell

2018-11-26, 04:32 PM

Actually, yes, yes it is. To quote you: "a nation attempted to sabotage another nation's vaccine supply.".

The US sabotaged another nation's vaccine supply by making the local warlords mistrustful of any future campaign's workers. They might not have intended it, but that's the result of their actions. You can now wax lyrical about what they were attempting, certainly, but the CIA isn't really so stupid as to not have foreseen this, so they must have considered it a valid cost of the overall operation.

ETA: and this is all I will say on the matter, because politics are just around the corner.

Grey Wolf

Okay, we'll walk away from it. I just want to re-iterate that what I was speaking of was a biological attack by deliberately sabotoging a vaccine at a biological/medical level, not a psyops/disinformation attack.

...

Actually, that kind of makes me wonder: Could the anti-vaccine movement be a deliberate disinformation campaign? I imagine not; I can't imagine who would benefit from encouraging humans worldwide to die from horrible diseases. Who said that human stupidity is a lot more common than a competent conspiracy? Still, I wonder.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Leewei

2018-11-26, 05:07 PM

Mainly because it would be a war crime of the most disgusting levels. Intentionally poisoning an entire generation of babies? Congrats you just made absolutely certain that you would have to kill every single man and woman of that nation before they stop trying to slaughter you in return. Possibly the rest of the freaking PLANET once word gets out what you did.This pretty much nails it.

Also, consider the Chicago Tylenol poisonings from 35 years ago. Since then, packaging on pretty much every medication sold is designed in a way that makes tampering obvious to the recipient.

Vaccines are used in global influence peddling, mainly as a form of foreign aid.

Leewei

2018-11-26, 05:12 PM

Okay, we'll walk away from it. I just want to re-iterate that what I was speaking of was a biological attack by deliberately sabotoging a vaccine at a biological/medical level, not a psyops/disinformation attack.

...

Actually, that kind of makes me wonder: Could the anti-vaccine movement be a deliberate disinformation campaign? I imagine not; I can't imagine who would benefit from encouraging humans worldwide to die from horrible diseases. Who said that human stupidity is a lot more common than a competent conspiracy? Still, I wonder.

Respectfully,

Brian P.I see anti-vax as a disinformation campaign, somewhat like that of the smoking industry during and prior to the 1970s. There is a lot of money to be made by convincing people of the health benefits of something that is harmful to them. The difference lies mainly in the "disinformers" actually believing their own message.

Traab

2018-11-26, 06:17 PM

... Genocide has happened before, you know.

Yes it has, and its generally frowned upon. Or so I hear.

Fyraltari

2018-11-26, 06:18 PM

Yes it has, and its generally frowned upon. Or so I hear.

Which means that "it would be frown upon" is not reason enough for it not to have happened.

pendell

2018-11-26, 06:31 PM

If there's one thing the 20th century taught us, it's that humans can always find some means of rationalizing even the most cruel, vicious mass murders. Deliberate starvation. Race-based genocide. Killing fields. Cultural revolutions. When they didn't have machine guns and death camps they made do with machetes. It seems as if the 20th century was the period where all kinds of different ideas about making a better world came together around the common idea of killing lots of people.
Which is to say, it seems that if humans can do something, sooner or later someone will find a reason to do it. Insert whatever flavor-of-the-month slogan representing the greater good you like; The labels change but the atrocities never do.

Somewhat depressed,

Brian P.

Traab

2018-11-26, 06:33 PM

Which means that "it would be frown upon" is not reason enough for it not to have happened.

Yes, and in that case "frowned upon" would mean world wide outrage, likely complete and total embargoes of the scum sucking nation that did it, and create an endless hatred and desire to obliterate said nation formed by the one targeted. It would be a terrible idea that would do NOTHING to win you a war, just create more enemies to fight and turn everyone outside of mengele against you.

pendell

2018-11-26, 06:53 PM

Yes, and in that case "frowned upon" would mean world wide outrage, likely complete and total embargoes of the scum sucking nation that did it, and create an endless hatred and desire to obliterate said nation formed by the one targeted. It would be a terrible idea that would do NOTHING to win you a war, just create more enemies to fight and turn everyone outside of mengele against you.

I think you may have hit on it. I would be surprised if world leaders allowed any moral consideration to dissuade them from such a course of action; there are some pretty awful people out there. More likely it's simply impractical. It's not easy to tamper with medical supplies on any large scale, and if you did, it wouldn't happen instantly. Militaries would adapt, quarantines would be established. There would be minimal impact, aside from a lot of people dying, just as there was in the great flu epidemic at the turn of last century. There's also the fact that such an action would prompt a vicious retaliation. For that matter, the action might carry it's own retaliation; thanks to global air travel the original actor might find the disease striking their own citizens as well.

Thinking on it that way, a biological attack would be militarily useless, but it might be something a terror outfit would try. Happily , few of them have anything like the resources to pull something like that off.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Darth Ultron

2018-11-26, 08:00 PM

I won't believe for a second that political elites (such heads of state, senators, members of parliament, etc.) will just get killed like common people in the zombie apocalypse.

I don't see them as different then anyone else.

The real twist to the Zombie Apocalypse is that it happens suddenly and just about everywhere. By the time anyone even knows it's a Zombie Apocalypse...it's too late.

And quite often having a plan and a bunker and lots of troops does not work. The TV show The Last Ship is a Plague Apocalypse, but it's close enough. In the show, the US President and such did make it into the bunker under the White House.......and were not heard from again. Maybe the plague got them? Maybe just the person with the door unlock code died? It's unknown.

Traab

2018-11-26, 08:13 PM

I think you may have hit on it. I would be surprised if world leaders allowed any moral consideration to dissuade them from such a course of action; there are some pretty awful people out there. More likely it's simply impractical. It's not easy to tamper with medical supplies on any large scale, and if you did, it wouldn't happen instantly. Militaries would adapt, quarantines would be established. There would be minimal impact, aside from a lot of people dying, just as there was in the great flu epidemic at the turn of last century. There's also the fact that such an action would prompt a vicious retaliation. For that matter, the action might carry it's own retaliation; thanks to global air travel the original actor might find the disease striking their own citizens as well.

Thinking on it that way, a biological attack would be militarily useless, but it might be something a terror outfit would try. Happily , few of them have anything like the resources to pull something like that off.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I wouldnt say it would be useless, just that its a really stupid idea to target innocent babies. If you really want to murder people and win a war, by all means, unleash super poliobolabonicaids over all the enemy troops you can find, at least you managed to actually damage the military of the enemy.

Rodin

2018-11-26, 08:43 PM

I don't see them as different then anyone else.

The real twist to the Zombie Apocalypse is that it happens suddenly and just about everywhere. By the time anyone even knows it's a Zombie Apocalypse...it's too late.

And quite often having a plan and a bunker and lots of troops does not work. The TV show The Last Ship is a Plague Apocalypse, but it's close enough. In the show, the US President and such did make it into the bunker under the White House.......and were not heard from again. Maybe the plague got them? Maybe just the person with the door unlock code died? It's unknown.

And that's really the thing with zombie apocalypse stories - we're generally not following anyone who had a significant amount of power prior to the apocalypse. So yeah, the president and congress and the bankers and such probably are living the high life on some zombie-free island somewhere. How would our band of survivors know about it? There's no infrastructure left for them to know about it. The TV and radio stations are abandoned, there's no reliable electricity for them to receive a broadcast even if one was made, and cell phones and such similarly depend on infrastructure that would quickly collapse in your typical zombie apocalypse scenario.

If 99% of humanity were suddenly to be wiped out and the remaining lands rendered uninhabitable (be it nukes, zombies, whatever), the last thing the rich people would want to do is broadcast their location. Having a government in exile only works if there is a people to return to.

Darth Ultron

2018-11-26, 10:37 PM

So yeah, the president and congress and the bankers and such probably are living the high life on some zombie-free island somewhere. How would our band of survivors know about it?

Still, I don't think it's likely.

The problem is, minimum for just the famines of only government and bankers types is still a couple hundred people. So, already your looking at taking care of a lot of people. Plus you'd need all the people to take care of the above people...and really more then likely bring their families too. And if you don't bring all the families...well, you likely won't have very many people. The average person won't want to say guard Bob the Banker (or you know worse, wash his socks) while their family is in dire trouble.

And on top of that, the first thing to fall in such times is the social order. Sure, Mr. Moneybags was big news...back when there was an economy....but now he is just a guy. And even if he had a billion dollars in cash, it would be worthless...other then maybe to burn to keep warm.

BeerMug Paladin

2018-11-27, 01:01 AM

You know, zombies could very well be easily explained as magic.

Not strictly magic, but something more akin to cosmic horror. It's unnatural. It violates our understanding of the universe. Yet it doesn't care. It exists as a mockery of everything we know about the natural world, and it's going to use you as a resource if it catches you.

I'll grant you it's not the common approach to zombies in fiction. But taken that way it would simply be a depiction of humanity encountering A Monstrous Thing humans have never run into that operates by unexpected rules. The scientists in this world would eventually figure out those deeper interactions in how this Thing operates behind the scenes, but that's not where the story lies. In any case, the main characters may never know that deeper interactivity.

Anyway, to elucidate further on my original post, I posit that political leaders and powerful organizations don't typically get much focus in these kinds of stories because they're a distraction.

At its core, the setting is for survival stories. People unprepared for fighting against nature and supplying their personal needs form a group, often against other people trying to do the same thing. It's not really any different at its core than a bunch of people washing up onto an uncharted island after their cruise ship is lost in a storm. It's just got an easy baked-in excuse to have action sequences inserted into it.

As for political leaders and organizations that exist primarily to handle lots of power or project power, they would kind of be a distraction when the challenge the main characters face are finding food, water and shelter.

Misereor

2018-11-27, 07:27 AM

I won't believe for a second that political elites (such heads of state, senators, members of parliament, etc.) will just get killed like common people in the zombie apocalypse.

I got an old friend who has written a couple books about disaster scenario stuff (apparently it's a whole academic field), and he once told me about the time he researched something similar.

This is actually a real question that rich people ask when contemplating doomsday scenarios and the establishment of safe locations for themselves and their families. And the answer was that if they simply hide out somewhere and do nothing, they eventually get killed off by their own guards. Even in scenarios where devices such as explosive collars, drugs, social controls, etc, are used to compel obedience. If people have no use for a leader, sooner or later they find a way to get rid of him.

He eventually figured out that the way to survive is to take responsibility and be a leader (my friend also likes old Tom Clancy novels).
Convince the people to follow your lead rather than forcing them to. Provide for them and they will provide for you.
People who put their hopes in you and believe in you don't betray you. Pretty simple really.

Bohandas

2018-11-27, 10:14 AM

In a standard zombie apocalypse film of TV show the leaders are probably in the obligatory military controllec safe zone that the protagonists are generally trying to get to

Bohandas

2018-11-27, 10:24 AM

Basic zombies aren't a threat.
First of all, they'd be easily contained, if they move slowly and predictably.
Second, humans just aren't that strong, especially if they aren't smart enough to properly leverage what they have, use tools or cooperate. Fences should keep most zombies out.
Third, they mainly use their mass, wild swings and their teeth as weapons. Even biker leathers should protect you adequately against bites, never mind, say, a dog training suit, some plastic sheets, police riot armour, etc.

They're more of a threat in the classic supernatural zombie apocalypses. Particularly if EVERYONE becomes a zombie when they die (as in Night of the Living Dead), or the zombies have some kind of necromancer or evil intelligence giving them orders, or they just won't stay down because they're not dependent of biology anymore and so it doesn't matter if their chests are emptied out and their heads are caved in

EDIT:
And those last two things are also characteristics of sci-fi robot-zombies like the Borg and the Cybermen

Still, I don't think it's likely.

The problem is, minimum for just the famines of only government and bankers types is still a couple hundred people. So, already your looking at taking care of a lot of people. Plus you'd need all the people to take care of the above people...and really more then likely bring their families too. And if you don't bring all the families...well, you likely won't have very many people. The average person won't want to say guard Bob the Banker (or you know worse, wash his socks) while their family is in dire trouble.

And on top of that, the first thing to fall in such times is the social order. Sure, Mr. Moneybags was big news...back when there was an economy....but now he is just a guy. And even if he had a billion dollars in cash, it would be worthless...other then maybe to burn to keep warm.

And even worse if his money was in gold. He wouldn't be able to do anything with that at all.

EDIT:
Actually now that I think of it I suppose he could make a brickbat out of it

Keltest

2018-11-27, 10:39 AM

They're more of a threat in the classic supernatural zombie apocalypses. Particularly if EVERYONE becomes a zombie when they die (as in Night of the Living Dead), or the zombies have some kind of necromancer or evil intelligence giving them orders, or they just won't stay down because they're not dependent of biology anymore and so it doesn't matter if their chests are emptied out and their heads are caved in

And even worse if his money was in gold. He wouldn't be able to do anything with that at all.

EDIT:
Actually now that I think of it I suppose he could make a brickbat out of it

Gold is too soft to weaponize or build something out of it. You just cant make anything sturdy out of it.

Ibrinar

2018-11-27, 10:59 AM

You forget blackjacks/saps, why use lead if you can use gold!

Bohandas

2018-11-27, 10:59 AM

Gold is too soft to weaponize or build something out of it. You just cant make anything sturdy out of it.

The only important thing for a brickbat is that whatever you're using as a weight is dense

Talakeal

2018-11-27, 11:17 AM

The only time I''ve ever found this story plausible is the Resident Evil games Series.

I think that may be the first time I have heard those two terms in the same sentance.

I'm ignoring High School of the Dead style zombies here as the scenario is fairly ridiculous since the focus is more on the female characters' physical attributes rather than any social commentary.

I am not familiar with High School of the Dead. Would you mind elaborating on what makes those zombies special please? I am genuinly curious and a wiki search turns up nothing.

Keltest

2018-11-27, 12:03 PM

The only important thing for a brickbat is that whatever you're using as a weight is dense

Granted, in the short term you could probably hurt somebody with it, but its still going to fall apart after repeated use, or otherwise be rendered less useful.

Themrys

2018-11-27, 12:36 PM

I see anti-vax as a disinformation campaign, somewhat like that of the smoking industry during and prior to the 1970s. There is a lot of money to be made by convincing people of the health benefits of something that is harmful to them. The difference lies mainly in the "disinformers" actually believing their own message.

I don't see any money in the anti-vaccination movement.

Cigarettes, you have to buy. Vaccines, you have to buy. No vaccines, you don't have to buy.

Unless perhaps the misinformation campaign is driven by manufacturers of antiviral medication or coffins.

Of course it could have been started by eugenicists (is that what you call it?) who want to kill all stupid people, or rather, the children of stupid people.
Other than that, I don't see who would profit.

Regarding the zombie apocalypse: Obviously, the political leaders of democratic countries would be voted out of office and people would vote for extremists, dictators who want to limit their rights and freedoms, but promise to protect them from the zombies.

Those countries who already have dictators, I suppose the dictators would survive, sitting in their bunkers or flying away in their helicopters.

Tyndmyr

2018-11-27, 12:45 PM

The same thing that happens to everyone else.

It's not a realistic conceit, any more than anything else about zombies, but rather a necessary conceit of the genre. It isn't a proper apocalypse if things are mostly proceeding as usual, so you've got to have some sort of leadership breakdown for story reasons. Maybe they're incommunicado in a bunker, maybe dead, or whatever...but you've got to remove the usual authorities from the picture somehow so the protagonists are forced into action.

Bohandas

2018-11-27, 01:24 PM

Even if the world doesn't understand zombies, you don't have to in order to not let people bite you.

That's why it works better in settings where they don't need to bite you (ie. Night of the Living Dead, Army of Darkness, Star Trek: First Contact, etc.)

JeenLeen

2018-11-27, 01:33 PM

I am not familiar with High School of the Dead. Would you mind elaborating on what makes those zombies special please? I am genuinly curious and a wiki search turns up nothing.

I am also curious about what was meant, but I'll give a quick summary of what I recall about the zombies in that anime.

The zombies are fast and (I guess) can fight, at least more than just shamblers, but they don't seem supernaturally strong (beyond pain resistance and minor increased strength from not caring about injured/torn muscles.) Turning is pretty quick.

If you want to try a couple episodes: It at least was on Netflix. I watched it and enjoyed it. While there is a LOT of fanservice and a fair bit of gore, there's no actual nudity shown (though a lot implied in some scenes). And I thought there was enough zombie action and group drama to enjoy the movie even if you don't care for the fanservice.

Bohandas

2018-11-27, 01:36 PM

I don't see any money in the anti-vaccination movement.

Cigarettes, you have to buy. Vaccines, you have to buy. No vaccines, you don't have to buy.

Unless perhaps the misinformation campaign is driven by manufacturers of antiviral medication or coffins.

I think it's generally driven by quacks and fraudulent lawsuits (the doctor who started the whole thing had his license revoked after it was discovered that he had been paid half a million british pounds by a lawfirm to publish a fake study

Talakeal

2018-11-27, 02:23 PM

I don't see any money in the anti-vaccination movement.

Americans spend over thirty billion dollars a year on "alternative medicine," and while this isnt direct profit from anti-vaxxing there is a lot of overlap.

Traab

2018-11-27, 03:25 PM

I am also curious about what was meant, but I'll give a quick summary of what I recall about the zombies in that anime.

The zombies are fast and (I guess) can fight, at least more than just shamblers, but they don't seem supernaturally strong (beyond pain resistance and minor increased strength from not caring about injured/torn muscles.) Turning is pretty quick.

If you want to try a couple episodes: It at least was on Netflix. I watched it and enjoyed it. While there is a LOT of fanservice and a fair bit of gore, there's no actual nudity shown (though a lot implied in some scenes). And I thought there was enough zombie action and group drama to enjoy the movie even if you don't care for the fanservice.

I dont think they are really that fast, the thing with hsotd is it basically gave us zombie pandemic as a fait accompli. Even though high school students are crushing them by the dozen SOMEHOW the outbreak is at the very least nationwide as japan has collapsed. The zombies have stupid good hearing somehow, but terrible eyesight and problem solving skills. Very little brains. And yes, turning is like a minute or less after death. I think its even just a matter of seconds. Also the bites seem to kill quick as we see a gym teacher get a chunk bitten off his forearm and he dies in like 30 seconds from that, turning into a zombie right after and biting the other two teachers there. The danger factor is mainly from sheer volume of zombies and also the fun of urban combat as there could be one (or more) behind every door. Its an interesting take on the whole idea though in that it doesnt focus on the stereotypical forting up scenario where they survive, egt somewhere safeish and hold out as long as they can. The main story is them trying to FIND somewhere safe. At best they tend to last a day or two in a spot before being forced to move on.

Also yes, the fan service is so high it creates a breeze from your monitor. They spent more effort animating boob "physics" than the zombies. Here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKBKLvI8F8A) is roughly 35 seconds that will give you an idea of how absurd it gets.

Bohandas

2018-11-27, 04:07 PM

Americans spend over thirty billion dollars a year on "alternative medicine," and while this isnt direct profit from anti-vaxxing there is a lot of overlap.

That is precisely what I was referring to when I mentioned "quacks"

Rodin

2018-11-27, 05:27 PM

I got an old friend who has written a couple books about disaster scenario stuff (apparently it's a whole academic field), and he once told me about the time he researched something similar.

This is actually a real question that rich people ask when contemplating doomsday scenarios and the establishment of safe locations for themselves and their families. And the answer was that if they simply hide out somewhere and do nothing, they eventually get killed off by their own guards. Even in scenarios where devices such as explosive collars, drugs, social controls, etc, are used to compel obedience. If people have no use for a leader, sooner or later they find a way to get rid of him.

He eventually figured out that the way to survive is to take responsibility and be a leader (my friend also likes old Tom Clancy novels).
Convince the people to follow your lead rather than forcing them to. Provide for them and they will provide for you.
People who put their hopes in you and believe in you don't betray you. Pretty simple really.

Even so, a competent leader that started with a bolthole is simply irrelevant in pretty much every zombie apocalypse scenario.

If you know that a zombie apocalypse is in progress (and with modern technology, the people in charge would know), where do you go to be safe? You go somewhere remote and difficult to reach - either mountainous terrain or an island. Island generally wins out since it is both harder to reach and more likely to have arable land. Your charismatic leader sets up a fortified settlement, gets his people farming and generally working together to survive.

...And then what?

There's no large group of people to rally to fight back against the zombies. If we look at zombie fiction, groups of survivors are normally in the dozens, and settlements are in the hundreds or maybe a couple thousand at best. Just going by the USA (where most zombie movies are), that's easily a death rate of 99.99% of the population. You've got maybe 30-50K survivors scattered across the country, faced with around 300 million zombies. So how are our Survivors going to get from Georgia to Cuba? Or to a mountain fortress in the Appalachians?

If we take the total success of the zombie apocalypse as a fait accompli (and lets face it, you pretty much have to for the many reasons listed in the thread) there simply isn't much that a small group of survivors can do besides survive. They may have the knowledge but the infrastructure to get above subsistence farming level is gone, and the natural resources are all buried under shambling hordes. Even a society that has worked out how to counter zombies would be at it for decades, simply due to how long it would take to reclaim zombie-infested land.

Heck, it would probably take decades even if we treat the zombies as "infected humans" and realistically assume that most of them die off after a few weeks from a combination of starvation and cannibalism. You still have .001% of the population trying to rebuild an area that was previously maintained by millions, a significant portion of which was destroyed either by rioting humans or hungry zombies.

Chromascope3D

2018-11-27, 05:33 PM

Lets say the president of the US has a bunker hidden in Mount Rushmore in case of impending plot device.

I'd just like to point out that that isn't entirely a hypothetical (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Rock_Mountain_Complex)

Olinser

2018-11-27, 06:49 PM

Americans spend over thirty billion dollars a year on "alternative medicine," and while this isn't direct profit from anti-vaxxing there is a lot of overlap.

There is also the answer that it's done with an end goal of releasing your own actual vaccine that claims it doesn't cause the effects and is just taking advantage of useful morons to take control of the market.

i.e. lets imagine Drug Corporation A produces a vaccine for Deadly Virus B, and has a complete lock on the market because their vaccine has proven to be effective and cheap and its the standard that every health provider uses without thinking about it, there is no reason to change.

Drug Corporation B produces bogus studies and uses gullible Hollywood morons with big mouths and tiny brains to convince people that the drug actually causes Bad Thing X to happen to children (it doesn't).

People don't want Bad Thing X to happen to their children so they panic and stop taking the vaccine, leading to a resurgence of Deadly Virus B.

Drug corporation B publicly releases their own vaccine that explicitly promises it does not cause X bad thing to happen (which happens to be true because the OTHER vaccine didn't cause it in the first place).

Drug Corporation B reaps massive profits.

Or, much more simply, the drug corporation that already has a lock on the market repackages the SAME vaccine as the 'new, non-Bad Thing X causing vaccine', and significantly raises the price for the same thing.

Sapphire Guard

2018-11-27, 07:57 PM

I think that may be the first time I have heard those two terms in the same sentance.

.

Well, relatively speaking for zombie apocalypse situations. The thing Resi does is not feel the need to make every non protagonist party useless or irrelevant

The T virus is far more threatening than the basic undead apocalypse, but it's possible to contain in one city. The ramifications feel thought out more than your average zombie story.

Mechalich

2018-11-27, 08:29 PM

If we take the total success of the zombie apocalypse as a fait accompli (and lets face it, you pretty much have to for the many reasons listed in the thread) there simply isn't much that a small group of survivors can do besides survive. They may have the knowledge but the infrastructure to get above subsistence farming level is gone, and the natural resources are all buried under shambling hordes. Even a society that has worked out how to counter zombies would be at it for decades, simply due to how long it would take to reclaim zombie-infested land.

Heck, it would probably take decades even if we treat the zombies as "infected humans" and realistically assume that most of them die off after a few weeks from a combination of starvation and cannibalism. You still have .001% of the population trying to rebuild an area that was previously maintained by millions, a significant portion of which was destroyed either by rioting humans or hungry zombies.

The thing is, these are two very different scenarios. The first one - with persistent magical zombies that don't have to eat - is an ongoing, perpetual apocalypse. The second one, where the zombies swiftly die off down to some low level where they basically replace ordinary apex predators (which might be quite a few on a nation-wide scale, if you have a zombie for every bear) is a post-apocalyptic scenario. The stories you tell are therefore quite different, as if the role of political (or other) leaders.

In the ongoing apocalypse the ability of political leaders to act is minimal, because there is nothing to command, and even military leaders are quickly reduced to base warlordism as resources expire (the average modern military unit can only operate on a war footing for a few weeks at best without resupply). In the post-apocalypse scenario surviving political leaders have a very large role indeed, because of their ability to coordinate operations and exercise oversight of essential resources. For example, in a scenario where the population fell by 99%, the population of the US would drop to only a few million, and people with the essential skills to maintain infrastructure for the territory you want to reclaim - prime agricultural regions mostly - would be scattered about. The use of authority, government databases, and military transport resources to track down people with the right skills to operate durable power plants (hydroelectric, wind), repair farming machinery, and other essential infrastructure would be very important. Likewise, having a figurehead to serve as a symbol to maintain order is an invaluable resource, even if the government has little direct power over local survivors.

Corvus

2018-11-27, 11:32 PM

I don't see any money in the anti-vaccination movement.

Actually, there is a lot of money in the anti-vax movement - those that push it get a lot of money from all the talk tours they go on, the books they sell, the donations they receive and of course their 'alternative' vaccine treatments they push, most of which cost far, far more than vaccines. (Vaccines themselves are generally very cheap - anti-weight loss drugs earn far more per year than all the vaccines in the world combined.)

Now, if the pharma companies were in it for the money (as anti-vaxxers claim, despite all evidence to the contrary), and you believed in conspiracies, then the pharma companies would be behind the anti-vax movement. After all, why cure a person for life with a cheap vaccine when you could let them catch a disease, get crippled for life and then sell them very expensive drugs for the rest of their life to assist in given them a decent 'quality of life.'

Rockphed

2018-11-28, 12:57 AM

This sounds more like a "transhumanism is bad" message than "vaccines are bad" to my hears (I mean if we were injecting nanobots in our bodies we'd go way further than just vaccines), which, while controversial is not actively dangerous.

The idea is sound, there is probably some good stuff to be made from that. You do lose the whole "infection" angle since to survive the first day, your protagonist would need not to carry the malware/nanobot. Unless the infected bots are trying to spread for some reason I guess.

Biomechanical psycho zombies, yo!

I think if you want to trigger the transhumanism rather than vaccine memes, you need to have implants that are more than just nanobots. You end up with something closer to the Borg, but I think that isn't all bad.

Lvl 2 Expert

2018-11-28, 02:18 AM

Americans spend over thirty billion dollars a year on "alternative medicine," and while this isnt direct profit from anti-vaxxing there is a lot of overlap.

Or the misinformation itself is the product.

Like dietbooks. Anyone can write about their new diet that totally works you guys, and people will pay for you to convince them because health is important.

So it could be a misinformation campaign set up purely by the people who sell anti-vaccination material or profits from the ads on online anti-vax articles.

I mean, that's most of the profit available in almost any conspiracy theory...

Lord Vukodlak

2018-11-28, 03:58 AM

Political leaders likely face the same fate as most people, killed by zombies, other humans or some are out there trying to lead some band of survivors. Deanna Monroe on the Walking Dead was a former congressman. As Society breaks down the people working for them have no obligation to keep working for them. So unless they have faith their leader can still be a leader in this crisis they'd abandon them... or kill them.

There's always a timeskip at the start of these stories, because no one can think of a way for the zombie hordes to get big enough to be a threat. How this would really happen:

Patient Zero bites guard.

Guard: Ow. Stop that. (restrains patient, goes home , feels sick, goes to hospital, turns,bites, is restrained.)

Hospital: Okay, something is up here. Everyone he bit, you're under observation.

Zombie outbreak ends with 6 to 8 victims tops.

It spreads a tiny bit further if Security guard dies at home, but not that far.

For it to happen in any numbers, there has to be a non bite based means of transmission.

Vaccinations, brain worms, fungus, etc, don't spread quickly or universally enough. At worst, you lose (part of) one city.

Even if the world doesn't understand zombies, you don't have to in order to not let people bite you.

The only time I''ve ever found this story plausible is the Resident Evil games Series.

Allow me to correct this for classic Romero rules.
Someone dies they come back as a zombie, doesn't matter if they got bit or not. And because their are zero symptoms until the subject dies, millions of people could be infected before you have a zombie actually appear. About 150 people in New York die everyday.(from natural causes , accidents to murder). So Imagine patient zero appearing a dozen times in the same night.Soldiers, Police, Security Guards anyone in the world is trained to shoot for the center of mass, in the hail of gunfire they get head shots just by chance. Then you have a panicking population that wants to know what the hell is going on and the Political Leaders have no idea what happened.

You have a few isolated incidents of these infected appearing, across the country and the globe. As the virus spreads unseen throughout the population more people who die from anything other then head trauma become zombies. The people start to panic and you have riots and civil unrest. Someone dies during a riot, attacks some people and suddenly you have a stampede and a lot of dead people who are now zombies. Its not just the zombies that bring down civilization but people lashing out blindly in fear.

One could also have the zombie virus coincide or combine with a bad flu outbreak.

Jeivar

2018-11-28, 04:48 AM

Honestly, there is no armed force on Earth that would lose to zombies. Nor would infection-by-bite spread enough to cause a horde millions strong. And even if it did, what are zombies going to do against tanks and air strikes?

So yes, political leaders would just be on camera, assuring the public.

Lemmy

2018-11-28, 05:16 AM

It could be something like in "Left 4 Dead", where the virus spreads through the air, and the survivors are just the tiny percentage of the population that happens to be immune to it and were lucky enough to survive the initial chaos from the outbreak... (Also, zombies aren't slow and can even mutate into some really dangerous creatures).

We can add to that scenario things like "everyone who dies, turns" to keep it Romero-style, make it "turning happens really fast" a la HSotD and, if you want to keep the risk of infection, also spice it up with "survivors are only immune to the airborne version of the virus".

In such a scenario, it would be far more likely for political and military leaders to be infected. And it would be much easier for the outbreak to reach the massive hordes typically seen in zombie-related media.

Nourjan

2018-11-28, 06:27 AM

So Imagine patient zero appearing a dozen times in the same night.Soldiers, Police, Security Guards anyone in the world is trained to shoot for the center of mass, in the hail of gunfire they get head shots just by chance. Then you have a panicking population that wants to know what the hell is going on and the Political Leaders have no idea what happened.

Police and the military are still trained and equipped to detain highly belligerent individual (or even small groups) into custody rather effectively, especially when those belligerents are unarmed like a zombie . I doubt a single zombi can do anything to a squad of policeman in full riot gear. Once you had the patient zero(or whatever you call this zombie specimen) captured and studied ,you would quickly discern the true nature of the zombies and the authorities would quickly take countermeasure to prevent panic and control the zombie spread.

pendell

2018-11-28, 07:10 AM

I think it's generally driven by quacks and fraudulent lawsuits (the doctor who started the whole thing had his license revoked after it was discovered that he had been paid half a million british pounds by a lawfirm to publish a fake study

Source please? This would be an interesting fact if true.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

snowblizz

2018-11-28, 07:13 AM

I think you may have hit on it. I would be surprised if world leaders allowed any moral consideration to dissuade them from such a course of action; there are some pretty awful people out there. More likely it's simply impractical. It's not easy to tamper with medical supplies on any large scale, and if you did, it wouldn't happen instantly. Militaries would adapt, quarantines would be established. There would be minimal impact, aside from a lot of people dying, just as there was in the great flu epidemic at the turn of last century. There's also the fact that such an action would prompt a vicious retaliation. For that matter, the action might carry it's own retaliation; thanks to global air travel the original actor might find the disease striking their own citizens as well.

Thinking on it that way, a biological attack would be militarily useless, but it might be something a terror outfit would try. Happily , few of them have anything like the resources to pull something like that off.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I believe you are quoting almost verbatim the explanation in V for Vendetta (the movie at least) for how the regime in power got there.

They found a great bio-weapon. Realised using it offensively agains't an outside power was not going to work at all. But using it to sow terror into their own citizens, that was a much more workable possibility.

Lord Vukodlak

2018-11-28, 07:34 AM

Source please? This would be an interesting fact if true.

Respectfully,

Brian P.
Here's the time's article.
http://healthland.time.com/2010/05/24/doctor-behind-vaccine-autism-link-loses-license/
You can also google Andrew Wakefield yourself.

Police and the military are still trained and equipped to detain highly belligerent individual (or even small groups) into custody rather effectively, especially when those belligerents are unarmed like a zombie . I doubt a single zombi can do anything to a squad of policeman in full riot gear. Once you had the patient zero(or whatever you call this zombie specimen) captured and studied ,you would quickly discern the true nature of the zombies and the authorities would quickly take countermeasure to prevent panic and control the zombie spread.

Before even getting to the riot gear stage they'd try more conventional methods of subduing them.

How would they quickly discern the true nature? Given the subject is walking around they will not assume he's dead and thus no longer a person entitled to human rights that's going to delay experimentation and the conclusion of you have to eliminate them immediately and without hesitation. They will not leap to the conclusion that they're incurable and beyond saving in a timely manner. Then once whomever is researching this does figure that stuff out they have to convince people that its true and that killing everyone of the infected is necessary.

One of the key tropes in most any zombie movie is no one has knowledge of zombies until they happen. So the zombies would be treated like they were still people for to long a period of time.

Brother Oni

2018-11-28, 07:35 AM

Source please? This would be an interesting fact if true.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

There's a whole Wikipedia page with appropriate references on the person: Andrew Wakefield (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield).

The gist is that he tried to discredit the combined MMR vaccine so that he could sell all three vaccines as separate shots, thus making more money (people would have to pay for 3 products instead of 1).

Science reporting being what it is, people have distorted that to 'vaccines cause autism'.

Lvl 2 Expert

2018-11-28, 07:58 AM

About 150 people in New York die everyday.

Most of them in a hospital or surrounded by other people. So we make head shotting corpses standard procedure. On top of this most people dying are in the weakest physical state they've been in since they were toddlers.

It's a lot more annoying to deal with, since it will require continuous suppression rather than a one time fix, but they're still zombies, the lamest monsters of them all.

Nourjan

2018-11-28, 07:59 AM

.

Before even getting to the riot gear stage they'd try more conventional methods of subduing them.

Even without the protection riot gear several policeman /serviceman can apprehend a zombie with almost no injury. Unless zombification gave them super strength, a zombie isn't really much of a threat when the human is trained in combat and have numerical superiority.

How would they quickly discern the true nature? Given the subject is walking around they will not assume he's dead and thus no longer a person entitled to human rights that's going to delay experimentation and the conclusion of you have to eliminate them immediately and without hesitation. They will not leap to the conclusion that they're incurable and beyond saving in a timely manner. Then once whomever is researching this does figure that stuff out they have to convince people that its true and that killing everyone of the infected is necessary.

How to discern it? Simple :strap them in (not unlike violent mental patients) and have a medical examiner check on them. They will quickly found that the person is indeed biologically dead. From there on the investigation would shift to finding out how this came to be and how to handle this (quarantine and containment if the threat is biological eg) .

One of the key tropes in most any zombie movie is no one has knowledge of zombies until they happen. So the zombies would be treated like they were still people for to long a period of time.

This is why zombie apocalypse are inherently stupid and unrealistic. In order for a zombie threat to spun into a civilization ending scenario require humanity as a whole to carry some very serious idiot ball.

Misereor

2018-11-28, 08:18 AM

Even so, a competent leader that started with a bolthole is simply irrelevant in pretty much every zombie apocalypse scenario.

Depends.
Do the zombies reproduce? If not, then they will eventually die off no matter what. If they do, then it becomes a matter of working to keep reproduction levels below the extermination rate. Even if it takes generations and the globe has to be retaken one square foot at a time, the problem has then already been reduced to the survivors being able to work together for a finite amount of time.

In that case it becomes a matter of groups who can find individuals capable of leading and winning converts for the group.
Much like "The Walking Dead", that would lead to some form of Tribalism 101 scenario with a Zombie backdrop. Some groups would cooperate, others would compete. In TWD the reader is asked to assume that politicians and eccentric billionaires haven't been able to form such groups, but it is by no means unreasonable that at least some of those types of leaders would have groups that made it. Sure a different set of skills would be needed, but a failure rate of 100%? Not the most likely case IMO.

Tvtyrant

2018-11-28, 11:15 AM

TWD irritated me most because their zombies can be stopped by fences temporarily and permanently by a back hoe a few weeks time.

A thick berm either faced with a wall or with a wall on top of it is more then sufficient for their universe, and would also prevent their common methods of ramming each others bases with vehicles.

On the plus side everyone is infected so it would have been very hard to figure out at first, and fixing it would involve a culture shift to destroying your dead.

Bohandas

2018-11-28, 11:26 AM

Source please? This would be an interesting fact if true.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

The wikipedia articles for "Andrew Wakefield" and "MMR Vaccine controversy" as well as several articles written by the investigative journalist Brian Deer, who reported on the scandal

Bohandas

2018-11-28, 11:33 AM

Allow me to correct this for classic Romero rules.
Someone dies they come back as a zombie, doesn't matter if they got bit or not. And because their are zero symptoms until the subject dies, millions of people could be infected before you have a zombie actually appear. About 150 people in New York die everyday.(from natural causes , accidents to murder). So Imagine patient zero appearing a dozen times in the same night.Soldiers, Police, Security Guards anyone in the world is trained to shoot for the center of mass, in the hail of gunfire they get head shots just by chance. Then you have a panicking population that wants to know what the hell is going on and the Political Leaders have no idea what happened.

You have a few isolated incidents of these infected appearing, across the country and the globe. As the virus spreads unseen throughout the population more people who die from anything other then head trauma become zombies. The people start to panic and you have riots and civil unrest. Someone dies during a riot, attacks some people and suddenly you have a stampede and a lot of dead people who are now zombies. Its not just the zombies that bring down civilization but people lashing out blindly in fear.

One could also have the zombie virus coincide or combine with a bad flu outbreak.

Correction to your correction. There wasn't a virus in the Romero movies. The zombie apocalypse was either caused by a strange radioactive material brought back by a Venus probe or else was a symptom of there being no more room in Hell.

Sapphire Guard

2018-11-28, 12:43 PM

With no knowledge of zombies, the logical conclusion is ' They're drugged or sick, restrain them and get a doctor.' Ambulance crews and police are very familiar with having to restrain violent patients, they wouldn't need any special gear in most cases.

Even family and friends are likely to be able to manage it in reasonable safety.

It would certainly be a big problem, but not even close to a civilisation ending threat.

Tyndmyr

2018-11-28, 01:18 PM

One of the key tropes in most any zombie movie is no one has knowledge of zombies until they happen. So the zombies would be treated like they were still people for to long a period of time.

Humanity has a long history of being willing to engage in violence against people they feel are dangerous. Treating them as people is hardly a problem. Dude is trying to bite me? Pretty much nobody is going to be okay with that, and it's going to rapidly escalate to defensive violence, and if anyone's bit, they'll be hospitalized. Figuring out what's going on should be pretty quick from there.

End of the day, it's an unintelligent unarmed opponent who is vastly outnumbered by the living. The element of surprise maybe gets it one victim, and even that is doubtful.

TWD irritated me most because their zombies can be stopped by fences temporarily and permanently by a back hoe a few weeks time.

TWD irritated me most in that I had trouble believing that this group of incompetents was able to survive, but apparently just about nobody else was. Seriously, if a bunch of underarmed, infighting, unstealthy, poorly planning, untrained idiots manage to bumble through everything, how'd the military get wholly wiped out?

Tvtyrant

2018-11-28, 01:53 PM

Humanity has a long history of being willing to engage in violence against people they feel are dangerous. Treating them as people is hardly a problem. Dude is trying to bite me? Pretty much nobody is going to be okay with that, and it's going to rapidly escalate to defensive violence, and if anyone's bit, they'll be hospitalized. Figuring out what's going on should be pretty quick from there.

End of the day, it's an unintelligent unarmed opponent who is vastly outnumbered by the living. The element of surprise maybe gets it one victim, and even that is doubtful.

TWD irritated me most in that I had trouble believing that this group of incompetents was able to survive, but apparently just about nobody else was. Seriously, if a bunch of underarmed, infighting, unstealthy, poorly planning, untrained idiots manage to bumble through everything, how'd the military get wholly wiped out?

And of course the issue that if most of the people died early the zombies would quickly run out as they trip and fall off cliffs, rot, and get eaten by flies.

It has been years in series, there shouldn't even be many zombies left.

The other thing that really gets me about zombie apocs is people stay near large populations. Fleeing to Alaska or the Dakotas would basically fix the zombie problem, then you just build some crappy towns and slowly recolonize.

Wookieetank

2018-11-28, 02:37 PM

I've found that I enjoy Zombie outbreak stories, usually first couple of days of the outbreak, more than Zombie Apocalypse ones, long term outbreaks/post societal collapse. Zombie apocalypse ones are neat when done well, but get very samey after you've encountered a few of them, and are usually done better by fatal epidemic stories. I felt The Strain was one of the better depictions of a zombie style outbreak/apocalypse, and it's done with Vampires!

I find with a lot of zombie outbreak stories that the government is stepping in by the end of it to clean things up after a day or few: Shaun of the Dead, Life after Beth, Autumn series (although less effectively), and numerous other ones where the initial outbreak site gets nuked.

More on topic, if you want an actiony look at Zombies that deals a fair bit with politics, Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry is a fun read. If follows a special forces team dealing with a zombie outbreak scenario that is caused by a terrorist plot/attack.

Tyndmyr

2018-11-28, 03:02 PM

The other thing that really gets me about zombie apocs is people stay near large populations. Fleeing to Alaska or the Dakotas would basically fix the zombie problem, then you just build some crappy towns and slowly recolonize.

Oh yeah, any real rugged natural terrain ends up being a pretty solid solution. Island, cliffs, whatever. There's not much local population to zombify, so the threat is meaningless, and even if that were somehow screwed up, well...numbers don't really matter if an unintelligent, unequipped person cannot traverse the barriers.

thorgrim29

2018-11-28, 03:22 PM

Sapphire Guard

2018-11-28, 04:58 PM

TWD irritated me most in that I had trouble believing that this group of incompetents was able to survive, but apparently just about nobody else was. Seriously, if a bunch of underarmed, infighting, unstealthy, poorly planning, untrained idiots manage to bumble through everything, how'd the military get wholly wiped out?

This does become an issue in most stories of this kind.

They can't be truly effective, because then the show's over, so they have to be just skilled enough to keep going but not capable enough to be truly safe.

Ibrinar

2018-11-28, 05:06 PM

Tyndmyr

2018-11-28, 05:18 PM

This does become an issue in most stories of this kind.

They can't be truly effective, because then the show's over, so they have to be just skilled enough to keep going but not capable enough to be truly safe.

In my favorite stories, the sort of enemies they fight escalate to match their skill level.

Now, I realize that zombies are only ever so threatening, but it seems like the zombies are merely the backdrop for people being the real threats, so it *shouldn't* be impossible, eh?

Rodin

2018-11-28, 05:29 PM

One thing that bothered me about TWD is that they never (at least up to the point I stopped watching) tried to reproduce what was working about the Governor's faction. They had scouts, highly effective traps, good fortifications, etc... And it worked. The guy in charge was/went totally insane but that doesn't invalidate the fact that digging a pit and putting a noisemaker in it is a really good way to control the walker density. Also, you know, a moat filled with spikes around your base would be a good idea guys. The Group just isn't very smart.

Anyway, I would assume that leadership qualities are leadership qualities, so a lot of the people who are actual leaders in today's world (not just people with more money/influence to throw around) would emerge as leaders of the zombie apocalypse. Note that I include informal authority in this, it's not unusual for the person in a group that does the actual leading to not be the formal boss.

Where this bugged me the most was when they were staying in the prison. You have a double layer chain link fence as the only thing protecting you from the horde. You have the prison itself, a massive structure of concrete and brick.

And does anybody dig a moat while they have the protection of the fence? Does anyone use the bricks and concrete to construct a proper bailey to protect the farming area? Hershel manages to go into town and get drunk in the bar. Do they use that relatively safe town to run into the Home Depot to grab building materials to properly fortify the prison?

Worst of all, showing them taking such commonsense precautions would have cost nothing. The plot doesn't change - the Governor rams a tank through the wall, the horde comes in. So why not show The Group being smarter than a slightly dim terrier with a concussion?

BeerMug Paladin

2018-11-28, 06:42 PM

In my favorite stories, the sort of enemies they fight escalate to match their skill level.

Now, I realize that zombies are only ever so threatening, but it seems like the zombies are merely the backdrop for people being the real threats, so it *shouldn't* be impossible, eh?
Have you been watching the same show I have? Here's what I recall.
Season 1, looking for a safe haven.
Season 2, safe haven found, but not as safe as initially thought. Had to be abandoned.
Season 3, safe haven found and established as home, but there's a rival group of survivors.
Season 4, the two groups fight until neither one has a home.
Season 5, travel to new haven. Needs major work done in order to really be safe. IE, needs to be fortified.
Season 6, a dominating hostile force with military expertise is in the area. They control several safe havens in the area.
Season 7, turns out the hostiles were a small part of the rival forces, the group is crushed but develops a resistance movement against an empire.
Season 8, confrontation and fight with the hostile empire.
Not all of these things fall entirely within one season and there are other events and plotlines, but that is the general progression of the timeline for the group as a whole. Point being, I see progression.

properly fortify the prison?

Nothing to add, I just find this fragment funny.