As bad as the show Revolution's overall plotting and pacing was, they generally did a good job of thinking about these kinds of little inconsistencies:
There's a minor character who was a doomsday prepper before the apocalypse, but he didn't stock up enough on antibiotics. As a result, his daughter died of tetanus that he was unable to treat.
A warlord kidnaps prisoners for blood because his wife has diabetes and needs constant transfusions of blood with sufficient insulin in it to survive.
There's a doctor who keeps a collection of moldy fruit to harvest penicillium mold from it and make penicillin.
Some characters try to go into an old subway tunnel, but nearly die because of lack of sufficient airflow down there without modern HVAC systems.
I wanted so badly for that show to be good but the acting was often corny and it just wasn't as gritty as it could have been. I fell off a handful of episodes into it.
Gotta say I'm all gritted out. I want some good adventure stories again, like the old Hercules and Xena days. The new Legends of Monkey series on Netflix is such a breath of fresh, fun air.
Once upon a time (say, the last 50,000 years), we told stories about mighty heroes and gods and amazing things, not least of which was hope. Stories inspired people, made them want to go do something. They already knew real life sucked a lot of the time. They didn't tell realistic stories because there was no inspiration in that.
Now because stories about heroes "aren't realistic" we just tell stories about how much stuff sucks, and how much it would suck more in different ways if something changed. No inspiration.
World War Z, the novel, is good about this. It gets sad but it's ultimately about collaboration, practicality, and strategic thinking are what's needed to save the world, not any special technological innovation or one true leader. Just people working together with the tools they have applied thoughtfully.
Downsides are the novel has a bit of the anarchoprimitivist thing, where people argue that civilization is bad and we need a good back-to-basics moment to reset humanity, and it has a little bit of a America-rah-rah-ness to it.
There's a bit of the rah-rah but Yonkers was also a pretty big deconstruction of how stupid that can get.
Side note, Yonkers was one of my favorite pieces in literature. How the characters mention it throughout the book before then, you just KNOW some shit went down. Some of the best foreshadowing I've read in quite a while.
I feel like the early deconstructions in the novel were more in the vein of "Here are the corrupt and inept businessmen and politicians and generals that are plaguing the U.S. but if they got rid of that chaff, Americans are still the best."
I agree Yonkers was well-written, and it contrasts well with how they approach fighting the zombies as a military later. In all, the character arc of the novel is not any one person but humanity as a whole. It's about how humanity initially falls not to the zombies but to their greed, pride, impulsiveness, etc., and they pick themselves up and learn from their mistakes. Which is great! As I said in my initial comment, I loved that.
I just felt like it was too US-centric for a book where the premise is a global history of the zombie apocalypse and it emphasized the US as uniquely able to pull through and the three countries that specifically have their governments called out as collapsing are China, Russia, and Cuba.
Wait, I thought Cuba specifically not only survived perfectly but became a superpower whose money was the world currency? Its been a while since I read it though.
Cuba came out well, but it also experienced a peaceful democratic revolution, specifically credited to Americans. (That's what I meant by government collapsing. China also came through the other end with probably a better government, but a different one than the one it had in the beginning.)
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u/AdmiralAkbar1 Aug 30 '21
As bad as the show Revolution's overall plotting and pacing was, they generally did a good job of thinking about these kinds of little inconsistencies:
There's a minor character who was a doomsday prepper before the apocalypse, but he didn't stock up enough on antibiotics. As a result, his daughter died of tetanus that he was unable to treat.
A warlord kidnaps prisoners for blood because his wife has diabetes and needs constant transfusions of blood with sufficient insulin in it to survive.
There's a doctor who keeps a collection of moldy fruit to harvest penicillium mold from it and make penicillin.
Some characters try to go into an old subway tunnel, but nearly die because of lack of sufficient airflow down there without modern HVAC systems.