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How do?

So just as I start reading The Walking Dead, it ends with issue 193. Which is typical.

But it did in a roundabout way get my brain ticking toward this thread.

See, one of things that has always irked me, despite being a massive Zombie fan, is just how things could go so completely and utterly south. And it’s all the more irked because Fear The Walking Dead totally bailed on its promise to show the collapse.

I mean....sure, there’s existential dread to be taken into account, and a pretty fast initial spread as people cotton on that you need to nail them in the Bonce.

But we have armed forces. Well trained men and women with firepower, and importantly, discipline. Their foe are typically swarmy and slow. They don’t strike me as a particular logistical nightmare to combat. Indeed, I’d argue that Shaun of the Dead is likely the most realistic display of a Romeroesque outbreak. Because all Zombies would be Romero’s. Of course they would.

Mind you, I’m a dirty little pacifist, so have no appreciation for actual military logistics and limitations. So that’s where I’m leaning on you, Dakka. I want to hear hypotheticals, and experience (unless you don’t want to share your military experiences. I get that). And if you’ve got Nerd Culture stuff to cite, let’s hear them

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
How do?

So just as I start reading The Walking Dead, it ends with issue 193. Which is typical.

But it did in a roundabout way get my brain ticking toward this thread.

See, one of things that has always irked me, despite being a massive Zombie fan, is just how things could go so completely and utterly south. And it’s all the more irked because Fear The Walking Dead totally bailed on its promise to show the collapse.

I mean....sure, there’s existential dread to be taken into account, and a pretty fast initial spread as people cotton on that you need to nail them in the Bonce.

But we have armed forces. Well trained men and women with firepower, and importantly, discipline. Their foe are typically swarmy and slow. They don’t strike me as a particular logistical nightmare to combat. Indeed, I’d argue that Shaun of the Dead is likely the most realistic display of a Romeroesque outbreak. Because all Zombies would be Romero’s. Of course they would.

Mind you, I’m a dirty little pacifist, so have no appreciation for actual military logistics and limitations. So that’s where I’m leaning on you, Dakka. I want to hear hypotheticals, and experience (unless you don’t want to share your military experiences. I get that). And if you’ve got Nerd Culture stuff to cite, let’s hear them

read World War Z

Zombies make little sense - esp the non souped up ones - its really not easy for a healthy person to bite through clothes or skin - never mind both. And thats before degredation of muscles, teeth etc. If you add in T-Virus style Zobies or supernatural enhancements -then its nastier. Black Summer was not bad as the change was near instant.

Part of the point of Walking dead is that the Humans are more dangerous than the zombies - society is fragile, esp in big cities - they will fall apart quite quickly and then really bad stuff starts..

For the purposes of this, we’re assuming Walking Dead style Romero Zombies

The premise that once society falls apart, then things get nasty/mad max-esque with every small group of jackwads form themselves is itself a huge fallacy of the genre, IMHO.

But yeah, unless coupled with some other major disaster (Plague, Nuclear War, Mass Famine, Enviro Disaster) then Zombies make no sense as an actual society destroying threat.

As said, zombies are really only the large threat during the initial outbreak. Especially if they decompose, as opposed to the ones in the Walking Dead which continue to keep going, it's the tribal nature of humans vs. anarchy that is the main threat.

I liked High School of the Dead, where many of the characters acknowledged that yes the zombies are rotting, and if we just survive long enough, they'll all be too rotten to pose any threat to anyone and the goal became surviving winter and the following summer.

This is one of the reasons why I've never really enjoyed the "slow" zombie genre. Particularly if you only get infected from dying or being bitten, etc.

As you stated, logistically there's little way for zombies to do anything. In addition it's easy to destroy them (burning would be super effective). A trained civilian in a decent position could dispatch dozens if not hundreds of zombies. A trained police SWAT unit...even more. A military base put on lock-down and armed? Impossible to disrupt with slow zombies.

And, if for some reason we did suddenly lose 50-70% of the population, the remaining stock of food, ammunition, oil, fuel, supplies, etc. would be overwhelming that the survivors would have almost zero issue finding a safe location and PLENTY of supplies/transportation, etc. This would also mean that rival groups of humans wouldn't realistically be battling over supplies. You'd have some violent groups of thugs who just want to hurt people, but none of this "Oh they have six cans of spam, let's go to war with them!".

A zombie apocalypse would simply mean adapting to a different way of life. You'd have time, equipment etc. to build zombie-proof structures etc. It wouldn't be anything like the films.

Now...28 Days Later rage zombies..and being infected by a drop of blood....that's something worth discussing.

If it's summer they rot, if it's winter they freeze.

Zombies are literal magic, nothing about them makes any sense at all if you try to explain them without magic. So they win because the magic "zombie apocalypse" spell says so.

 Peregrine wrote:
Zombies are literal magic, nothing about them makes any sense at all if you try to explain them without magic. So they win because the magic "zombie apocalypse" spell says so.

Yeah, to be a credible threat, they'd have to be actually reanimated and guided through necromancy rather than a virus that happens to bring you back from the dead.

 Grimskul wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Zombies are literal magic, nothing about them makes any sense at all if you try to explain them without magic. So they win because the magic "zombie apocalypse" spell says so.

Yeah, to be a credible threat, they'd have to be actually reanimated and guided through necromancy rather than a virus that happens to bring you back from the dead.

And given magical food of some kind. Forget waiting for them to rot, just wait a day or two for the bodies to use up all of their stored energy and collapse into a useless heap.

Can a creature less dangerous then a grey wolf cause human instinction or civilisation collapse? No, this is completely absurd. Humans are really nasty critters. Even with a primitive technology, zombies represent very little threat. The vector of the zombie disease being through bites and with a ridiculously short incubation period is also extremely inefficient. Such an infection could hardly affect more then a few dozen person before its quarentined even in developping countries. If the virus was airborn and about as contagious as measle then it would catastrophically dangerous not because of zombies themselves, but because of the disease itself.

Zombies turn exothermic, so they would take considerably longer to "starve", especially since they can essentially hibernate when they have a lack of stimulation.


As someone who has actually survived a natural disaster, I can tell you this: It doesn't take much to totally screw up your life once you are cut off from resupply and utilities are down. After a flood when I was a child our town was basically cut off from society and without water or power for a few days. That was hell. Katrina was slightly worse, and New Orleans became a lawless, murderous, rape ridden cesspit with people fighting over supplies.

Now, these events were all localized. People outside the effected areas could send aid. Zombie outbreaks like the Walking Dead happened all over at once. No one place was any better than another. Also, starting slow makes it deadly in the long run. You don't think you have a problem until it's too big to handle. It's like the old saying about putting a frog in cool water and slowly heating it until the frog cooks. It won't jump out because it doesn't know it's in danger until it's too late.

Another thing to note is that in the Walking Dead universe no one knew about the concept of Zombies until it happened. It's not like reality where we have all debated it to death. They have to fly blind on every issue.

And technically, being freshly dead actually makes it easier to bite into someone. Our bodies have a natural strength limiter on them to prevent pain or damage from over exertion. Zombies wouldn't have this.

Technically a spoiler from season 2:


Also in The Walking Dead, the zombism(?!) is linked to a more conventional plague. You only have to look at the real world reactions to SARS, swine flu, Ebola outbreaks, etc. to see that that would cause real panic, which potentially causes more problems than the initial infection itself (vigilantes, hoarding, panic buying, etc.). Hell I remember about 15-years ago when the UK managed to cause a petrol and food shortage on itself from panic buying at the rumour of another petrol refinery strike; that’s right, the strike never happened, but enough people drained the stockpiles in the supply chain to cause a fuel shortage, that then stopped food deliveries!

So I think TWD has some extra elements that make the initial collapse more believable, but I still think the threat from the actual zombies is overblown in most media (a personal niggle is no-one thinks to use motorcycle leathers, except for fashion reasons. To all intents and purposes they’re bloody armour and no human is biting through them!)

the other thing 'natural' zombies don't take into account is maggots unless your outbreak is in the winter

all that dead flesh would bring in flies by the cloud and maggot masses would swiftly liquidise and consume them (and they'd drop sooner than that as the brain would be one of the parts eaten first and destroying the brain destroys the zombie) so you wouldn't even have to wait for them to rot

for things to work your zombies need to have a built in insect repellant

 cuda1179 wrote:
Zombies turn exothermic, so they would take considerably longer to "starve", especially since they can essentially hibernate when they have a lack of stimulation.


As someone who has actually survived a natural disaster, I can tell you this: It doesn't take much to totally screw up your life once you are cut off from resupply and utilities are down. After a flood when I was a child our town was basically cut off from society and without water or power for a few days. That was hell. Katrina was slightly worse, and New Orleans became a lawless, murderous, rape ridden cesspit with people fighting over supplies.

The crime rate in New Orleans immediately after Katrina is still highly debated, but any sharp increase was very brief and definitely dropped significantly over the subsequent year. Rape and murders dropped off massively and have never since reached 2004 levels (though the former have been approaching pre-Katrina numbers, sadly).

What the Katrina analogy actually seems to say is that you are likely to get a burst of crime in during an extreme crises whilst the panic and shock is still high and people are fleeing but that people very quickly band together em masse.

'This Book is Full of Spiders' by David Wong has an alternate take on the military response.

As in, maybe they wouldn't be bumbling morons standing five feet away from the infected with lots of biteable flesh all exposed.

 LordofHats wrote:
I liked High School of the Dead, where many of the characters acknowledged that yes the zombies are rotting, and if we just survive long enough, they'll all be too rotten to pose any threat to anyone and the goal became surviving winter and the following summer.

Heck, outlasting zombies in the winter is even easier than the summer. People do not understand just how fast freezing destroys tissues on a cellular level... and thus destroys zombies within hours, sometimes even as little as half an hour depending on how cold it is. Then all you have to do is pick up the pieces, stack them somewhere to freeze-dry, and burn them in the spring once they thaw.

Fast or slow, freezing cold kills them all in the same amount of time. They'd have to be smart enough to seek shelter... and if they're that smart they're not zombies. Ghouls, perhaps; not zombies.

 Vulcan wrote:
Heck, outlasting zombies in the winter is even easier than the summer.

I can see that. The story depicted a mild winter, so that wasn't really an option at the time XD

Not that we'll ever get the end of it. Daisuke Sato died in 2017 and Shoji Sato has mostly moved on to working on Triage X since HSotD went on hiatus in 2013/14. Shame. That series was brutally, hilariously, self-aware.

Just saw The Dead don't Die last week.. I really enjoyed how the town tried to deal with the zombies.. and the "in movie" rational of how the zombies came to be was totally funnier than anyting else I had heard

Plus the characters being "meta" about being in a zombie movie was a lot of fun..

-P

Why would freezing or decay stop zombies when being dead hasn't? They're obviously vastly and incomprehensibly unnatural. Which is something I liked about the white walkers in ASOIAF was that it was winter, and there they were staggering through icy storms. As Peregrine stated, zombies are magical.

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
How do?

So just as I start reading The Walking Dead, it ends with issue 193. Which is typical.

But it did in a roundabout way get my brain ticking toward this thread.

See, one of things that has always irked me, despite being a massive Zombie fan, is just how things could go so completely and utterly south. And it’s all the more irked because Fear The Walking Dead totally bailed on its promise to show the collapse.

I mean....sure, there’s existential dread to be taken into account, and a pretty fast initial spread as people cotton on that you need to nail them in the Bonce.

But we have armed forces. Well trained men and women with firepower, and importantly, discipline. Their foe are typically swarmy and slow. They don’t strike me as a particular logistical nightmare to combat. Indeed, I’d argue that Shaun of the Dead is likely the most realistic display of a Romeroesque outbreak. Because all Zombies would be Romero’s. Of course they would.

Mind you, I’m a dirty little pacifist, so have no appreciation for actual military logistics and limitations. So that’s where I’m leaning on you, Dakka. I want to hear hypotheticals, and experience (unless you don’t want to share your military experiences. I get that). And if you’ve got Nerd Culture stuff to cite, let’s hear them

read World War Z

Zombies make little sense - esp the non souped up ones - its really not easy for a healthy person to bite through clothes or skin - never mind both. And thats before degredation of muscles, teeth etc. If you add in T-Virus style Zobies or supernatural enhancements -then its nastier. Black Summer was not bad as the change was near instant.

Part of the point of Walking dead is that the Humans are more dangerous than the zombies - society is fragile, esp in big cities - they will fall apart quite quickly and then really bad stuff starts..

Indeed, outside of a 28 days kind of instant infection scenario its not a believable logical scenario. Most would end like Sean of the Dead. Local outbreak cleaned up by the local gendarmes / guard in about 24 hours.

Once initial outbreaks are dealt with the rest of the populace is effectively innoculated. They will know what to watch for for potential infected individuals. It becomes a normal hygiene thing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Katrina was slightly worse, and New Orleans became a lawless, murderous, rape ridden cesspit with people fighting over supplies.

So, your average Tuesday night in the Big Easy then...

Nurglitch wrote:Why would freezing or decay stop zombies when being dead hasn't? They're obviously vastly and incomprehensibly unnatural. Which is something I liked about the white walkers in ASOIAF was that it was winter, and there they were staggering through icy storms. As Peregrine stated, zombies are magical.

The great weakness of the argument being, of course, that it is total nonsense.

Zombies haven't been portrayed as 'magical' since the days of the Evil Dead. Every single zombie movie/show in the last twenty/thirty years has tried to come up with scientific-sounding hokum to justify their existence, while just ignoring the very real science that says their 'idea' is bad and that they should feel bad.

World War Z has a veneer of science, but when characters with a scientific background are asked about the cause and behaviour, it basically boils down to "I don't know".

Zombies there aren't affected by decomposition or parasites because other animals and even microbes are killed by the zombie virus (although only humans reanimate). They do freeze in winter, and over time disintegrate. However, they aren't affected by the pressure of oceanic depths. The solanum virus is essentially magic, and the book tacitly accepts that.

Excommunicatus, the other works may attempt to portray the undead as "natural" events, but looking at them rationally it's clear that they're magical; that's what Peregrine and Nurglitch are saying. You can't analyse them using rational methods, you just have to take everything presented at face value. You can't predict what they'll do in situations not depicted, because there's no underlying rules you can assume.

I think the thing is that once you admit to their being magic in the story suddenly it's not about the zombies but the magic, so if you're trying to use the zombies as metaphors for consumerism or whatever it gets over-shadowed.

I liked the Rec. rationale behind zombies; for those of you who didn’t see it, even though the sequels were pants-on-head stupid, it was essentially a more advanced strain of rabies cooked up in a lab. The scientist who created it even had an innoculation (that didn’t work), and the rabies took hold in about ten minutes or so. And even the Zombieland rationale was fine; Mad Cow Disease that mutated. Both are probably the closest we’d ever come to zombies in the real world.

I always felt something like the Resident Evil series got a good theme going with the Zombies in having a fast infection, but also two key other elements alongside:

1) Human agents promoting the infection/spread of infection and working at high government levels. You could make this very believable if you took a "germ warfare" angle. Infiltration, chaos of war all coupled to a massive zombie outbreak; thus meaning military response is muted and the population far more vulnerable.

2) Superbeasts alongside the zombies. Even "Rage" zombies out of 28days later have major issues. They are super scary in confined spaces and mass numbers, but by and large they are pretty easy to avoid and disable. Now a hulking mass of bone and muscle that moves at high speed and with a rhino's hide. A creature that won't go down to conventional small arms fire - now that is something which can break a defensive point and let the zombies flood in.



In general zombies work great in small tight and local situations, but even a lot of the time its not the zombies which are the actual threat. Many times its people getting bitten and not revealing it; or people with alternate agendas or just being utterly crazy - people within the "safe zones" who open the doors; who expose others to risk. People are the real threat rather than the zombies.

Nurglitch wrote:
Why would freezing or decay stop zombies when being dead hasn't? They're obviously vastly and incomprehensibly unnatural. Which is something I liked about the white walkers in ASOIAF was that it was winter, and there they were staggering through icy storms. As Peregrine stated, zombies are magical.

When zombies are literally magical in a world that has actual magic, then you would be correct.

In a world where there is NO magic, then there must be a biological cause. And just because something acts in a mindless zombielike manner doesn't mean it stops being technically alive.

Dehydration and freezing destroys tissue on a cellular level, rendering it non-functional. Doesn't matter how much 'zombie virus' there is if every cell has ruptured from freezing, or a limp microscopic sack with no water content. The muscle DOES NOT WORK under those conditions, and the body just lies there.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
2) Superbeasts alongside the zombies. Even "Rage" zombies out of 28days later have major issues. They are super scary in confined spaces and mass numbers, but by and large they are pretty easy to avoid and disable. Now a hulking mass of bone and muscle that moves at high speed and with a rhino's hide. A creature that won't go down to conventional small arms fire - now that is something which can break a defensive point and let the zombies flood in.

Two problems. One, rhinos and the like are pretty darn rare even in Africa; in America they are kept in zoos designed to keep them from escaping. Can it be done? Possibly, but it wouldn't be a common threat.

Two, the military has been dealing with armored threats for over a century now; a LAWS will do a rhino just as easily as a BRDM. A Bushmaster will take an elephant just as easily as a BMP. And a 105 will drop zombies by the score regardless of what it is.

 Vulcan wrote:


Two problems. One, rhinos and the like are pretty darn rare even in Africa; in America they are kept in zoos designed to keep them from escaping. Can it be done? Possibly, but it wouldn't be a common threat.

Two, the military has been dealing with armored threats for over a century now; a LAWS will do a rhino just as easily as a BRDM. A Bushmaster will take an elephant just as easily as a BMP. And a 105 will drop zombies by the score regardless of what it is.

I didn't mean undead rhinos I was referring more to monsters with super tough armour like skin layers. Even if the regular military can deal with heavy armour, your local police force likely can't do much at al and small arms wouldn't penetrate. The main point, though, was that whilst there were zombies, there were also other things far more dangerous even if they were rarer. Creating creatures that could thus tackle an actual real military response.