{"id":398,"date":"2019-06-22T12:55:44","date_gmt":"2019-06-22T18:55:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/penguinpetes.com\/wordpress\/?p=398"},"modified":"2020-03-24T15:46:44","modified_gmt":"2020-03-24T21:46:44","slug":"bad-assumptions-everyone-makes-about-a-zombie-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/penguinpetes.com\/wordpress\/2019\/06\/22\/bad-assumptions-everyone-makes-about-a-zombie-apocalypse\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Assumptions Everyone Makes About A Zombie Apocalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Iowa thunderstorm season always puts me in the mood for catching up on my horror reading. Call it Pavlovian conditioning from all the years watching mad scientists in castle laboratories working during a thunderstorm. So pawing through my bookshelf, it occurred to me that there’s one horror genre not born of literature, but film.<\/p>\n

Zombies, to wit. Vampires, werewolves, mummies, serial killers, ghosts, Jekyll and Hyde, and Cthulhu, they all came from the pages of literature first, then got adapted to film second under the loving guidance of Universal, Hammer, Amicus, and company. But zombies formed on the silver screen, and they took a few decades to catch on there. And only then did they start showing up in literature in the same form.<\/p>\n

\"\"Sure, technically speaking, the first zombie movie, 1932’s <\/u><\/span><\/span>White Zombie<\/i><\/u><\/span><\/span><\/a>, was based on William Seabrook’s 1929 novel The Magic Island<\/i>. But these were early prototypes, still steeped in voodoo medicine (inaccurate, by the way). What we mean when we say “zombie” now is owed to George Romero, full stop, and then the genre had to drift into literature.<\/p>\n

So, here’s a great reading list of zombie apocalypse novels<\/a><\/u><\/span><\/span> over at Suggested Reads<\/i>. Oh, yes, they’re all very modern. Quite a few of those have seen their own film adaptation, circulus vitae, including Patient Zero<\/i> and The Girl With All The Gifts<\/i>.<\/p>\n

But this subject got me to wondering: What is it about zombie apocalypses that make them such a self-contained stock scenario? Their popularity stems from what TVTropes calls the “Cozy Catastrophe<\/a><\/u><\/span><\/span>.” The apocalypse always just so happens to leave a few lucky middle-class folk who, in between fighting off the brain-hungry hordes, is having a smashing time having the world to loot to themselves.<\/p>\n

No more boring office job for me! I’m going Mad-Maxing!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That’s what the fan base is smugly confident of: Everybody assumes they’ll be one of the select survivors who get the world mostly to themselves, while having an excuse to blow away nine tenths of the population willy-nilly and claim all the harems for oneself. Was there ever a more neckbeard fantasy?<\/p>\n

You long-term readers see where this is going\u2026 I’m here to poke holes in your cozy post-zombie daydreams! Everybody makes wrong assumptions about zombie apocalypses, so here’s how I see it really going down. Here’s the things you think you know about a zombie apocalypse which are undead wrong:<\/p>\n

#1: Everybody would be on the same page regarding the emergency.<\/b><\/h3>\n

We live in a world with\u2026<\/p>\n

    \n
  • flat-Earthers<\/li>\n
  • Holocaust deniers<\/li>\n
  • vaccine deniers<\/li>\n
  • climate science deniers<\/li>\n
  • just plain deniers in general<\/a><\/u><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    …and you’re telling me that when news of a zombie plague breaks out, everybody will buy it at face value? Pull the other one! Here’s how the real world will react to the first news of a zombie breakout:<\/p>\n

      \n
    • Evangelical Christians will blame it on the gays.<\/li>\n
    • Bigots will blame it on anybody from any other country.<\/li>\n
    • Right-wing and left-wing will blame each other.<\/li>\n
    • Conspiracy theorists will point out “false flags.”<\/li>\n
    • A huge mass of zombie deniers will take to social media to mock the rest of us for spreading alarm.<\/li>\n
    • A smaller mass of Tumblr SJWs will demand equal rights for zombies. I’m sure they’ll make up a new name for human-centric anti-zombie prejudice.<\/li>\n
    • Corporations will try to figure out how to make a buck off exploiting both humans and zombies.<\/li>\n
    • FOX News will ignore the story until the zombies bash into the studio and eat the anchors right out of their chairs.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      \"\"Come to that, maybe a zombie apocalypse wouldn’t make that big an impact? The daily news is already a litany of global crisis and nation-shattering disasters right now. Zombies would run somewhere between heightened tensions in the middle east and the latest measles outbreak, with everybody ignoring it.<\/p>\n

      Mayhem in the streets, constant gunfire, looting and mob rule: In America that would be an apocalypse, but in Syria that’s just called “Tuesday.” How much would it suck if the zombie apocalypse happens, and you still<\/i> have to pay off your student loans and go to work anyway?<\/p>\n

      #2: The crazy survivalist prepper with the gun stockpile will be useful.<\/b><\/h3>\n

      I’m not about to ask you to watch the whole Doomsday Preppers<\/i><\/u><\/span><\/span> series – It’s out there<\/u><\/span><\/span><\/a> if you want to watch it. Here’s a quick video examining a few apocalyptic bunkers:<\/p>\n