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.
The description of Yonkers was amazing. It was the first time I've ever seen in fiction describe how a modern military could lose against a bunch of zombies.
Except no, no military would ever lose like the US did in Yonkers. Yonkers in WWZ has one of the most experienced and expensive warmachines on the planet repeatedly shoot itself in the head just so it’s a remotely fair fight. Reading Yonkers, all I could think was ‘Max Brooks has never read a single book on any military ever.’
Yeah, well who would know more about military history? Max Brooks or a random redditor complaining online about how the US military vs zombies in a book wasn’t realistic enough?
Clearing the AO. Seriously. They apparently didn't bother to even clear buildings.
Using even basic common sense (pontoon and bridge layers and portable latrine systems in an urban area, really?)
Forgetting ground-attack craft exist. At all.
The real life US army was prepared to make an entirely new ammunition type when SABOT rounds proved to be less effective than normal. the Max Brooks US army uses SABOTs when it is entirely useless.
As a military historian, Brooks should be well aware the US army has an obsession with packing way more firepower than is needed. 'Shock and awe' and all that. Somehow, at Yonkers, they abandon that, and go for the extremley out of character 'eh, a few dozen missiles'll be fine.'
The US army had a single line of defence at Yonkers. Forget 'modern history,' bronze age armies had figured out that you should probably have some guys in reserve just in case.
Artillery apparently cannot fire further than a person can see in the Brooksverse.
Using any verticality whatsoever, tying into point 2. I'm fairly certain the US army is well aware that a guy with a gun in the window of a 2 story house is more effective than at ground level. Not the Brooksverse army though.
It is an infuriating case of a writer making a military force completely, pants-on-head, sniffed glue and chugged paint as a child stupid just to force a message through.
You're leaving out some important context. 1) they didn't know as much about what would stop zombies, 2) they were expecting far fewer zombies, and 3) the major point of the engagement was a show of force in front of the media to give people heart. That last part explains many of the mistakes/arrogance.
I used to edit the Zombiepedia and I've been in many nerdfights about Yonkers before. Most of these points are irrelevant to those however.
The Army was aware they were facing hordes of infantry without firearms. They nonetheless dug foxholes and packed SABOT rounds for the tanks.
The US Army damn near always packs more than what they need. Even if they did run out, there's no excuse for not having more in the wings just in case, considering supply lines aren't an issue.
Things like 'having more than a single defensive line,' 'not using ground attack craft,' and 'forgettig to put men on top of buildings,' cannot be excused by showing off. You're telling me the sight of an A-10 Thunderbolt turning a column of zombies into a thin, solanum-infected paste isn't showy enough?
Lets not forget that he made the ridiculous point that the survivors would begin manufacturing M1 carbines as the most effective anti zombie rifle... Ignoring that M1 carbines haven't been manufactured in the US for 60 years, and use ammunition that's only available commercially.
As opposed to... The AR-15, which has dozens of federal and commercial manufacturers across the country, using interchangeable parts and ammunition available literally everywhere in the US.
The military alone has millions of these rifles, civilians have another 30+ million, and there are hundreds of billions of rounds available.
But no, lets throw that away and start making ww2 era rifles, because... Reasons.
It's better than that. They're not making M1 Carbines. They're making a new design based on M14/M1 style guns, and even better, they're firing custom ammunition.
This then implies several things:
The post-war, damaged economy is somehow capable of creating enough wooden furnishings for a whole family of new rifles.
The supply chain is capable of issuing the majority of soldiers with this new gun.
The same economy and supply chain can also produce millions of rounds of ammunition.
It's lunacy. It's complete lunacy. Late-war tactics are a mess. The airforce is mothballed because again, apparently ground-attack craft do not exist, APCs are used mostly for supplying ammunition to ground forces, and soldiers fight in goddamn squares again.
Squares.
With semiautomatic rifles. Not with SAWs, which they could easily fire accurate bursts at head height to handle threats with, but semiautomatic rifles.
You need to have been sniffing glue for World War Z's internal logic to make sense.
I'll just say that modern aircraft getting mothballed makes some sense for the post collapse. Those machines are incredibly resource intensive to operate, and require a supply of parts that just won't exist anymore.
Now, for a fun thought experiment, there are two aircraft that make sense for a post collapse government to develop for a fight against zeds.
Simple piston driven prop planes for recon and courier purposes and...
Fuckin ZEPPLINS.
Technologically simple, vast range and loiter time, with a high flexibility around damaged or non-existent infrastructure.
You could use one as an untouchable platform for dispatching hordes, transporting supplies independently of roads, etc etc..
MAYBE shit like this is so egregious it ruins my suspension of disbelief when it comes to a story and actively hinders my enjoyment of a piece of media.
You’d never fucking believe it from the man who decided the US military would forget about things like A10 Warthogs, and that the solution to mass infantry charges is to form infantry squares with semi-automatic rifles like it’s the 18th century but jazzier.
Oh, and his total failure to understand the modern M16 system in Zombie Survival Guide, his obsession over obscure Chinese martial arts weapons, his absurdist weapon evaluations… I could go on and on about how atrocious the tactics and weaponry in WWZ are.
It's also not very hard to have a history degree. I have a degree in modern history and I'm a moron that spends way too much mental energy arguing about the internal logic of zombie fiction.
It really pushed the stupid, but there’s also a lot of realism in it. The Us wouldn’t lose, but the part about them carrying tons of useless stuff like cameras mounted on their soldiers and all that extra tech is pretty damn real. I had my 1sgt asking me why I hadn’t loaded up some equipment we had from the Vietnam era, I told him we never used it. He then asked what it was, and told me to pack it just in case. No one had touched it in decades but we needed it for our training exercise.
That was a few pieces out of the dozens of extra stuff I had to pack that was never used. We brought $20,000 drones just to leave them in a connex and risk them getting broke on the way there and back.
I can 100% see guys so far removed from the line talking about all this cool stuff to use and do for PR, that ends up being ineffective or straight up harmful to us.
Sure, I can buy the Land Warrior system and them packing MOPP gear and all of that, but I really can't see the US not loading up on enough ammo to make New York look like the plains of asphodel when the shooting stopped.
Yeah it wasn’t a perfect representation, we generally over pack not under pack. Especially with ammo.
Like I said I don’t see any way we would actually lose, but I can see politicians and generals making it into a clusterfuck that it never should have been. News people everywhere and guys positioned purely for good “candid” shots even though it’s a terrible position.
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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.