Zombie Cliche Lookout: Hindsight 20/20
Being able to make a quick decision in the middle of a crisis is a very important quality for leaders to have. After all, not making a decision is often worse than making the wrong decision. Of course, no one is perfect, and even the best leader is going to make a bad call sooner or later. Bad leaders? Well, you really don’t want to stick with bad leaders very long. You know, if you can avoid it.
One of the problems with bad decisions is that (provided they don’t get you eaten by zombies) you have to live with them. And if you have people in your group that maybe disagreed with that decision beforehand? Well, you’re going to hear about it. Possibly a lot.
And even if they agreed at the time, they might forget about that eventually.
About this Episode:
One of the more frustrating aspects of doing a LEGO comic is that I don’t have access to unlimited bricks, nor do I have the space to store all assembled models. Sometimes, that can be a pain. One of those times was for today’s episode. I needed the 1×4 tan bricks that make up the floor here for my Christmas episode, so I needed to partially disassemble this set. Because I’m just not very bright, I didn’t bother taking photos of the set before, which meant piecing bits together (including where everyone is standing) based on reviewing previous comics. Fun!
But then, I only have myself to blame.
Discussion Question: 2013 Predictions
The so-called “Mayan Doomsday” has come and gone, and nothing much happened. Most of us weren’t surprised. However, one positive thing that the 2012 craze brought was a whole lot of post-apocalyptic themed entertainment. I imagine the well is going to dry up a bit now. The school shooting is also a major contributing factor, since the media is – quite literally – gun-shy.
The question is, how are these two big events going to affect post-apocalyptic themed books, movies, comics, and games?
The post-apocalyptic theme is going to slowly fade away and only people like ourselves will really remember it for all it’s glory. Then some low-budget wanna-be film maker is going to make a second rate film with some kind of apocalypse in it and then some one is going to one up him and so on until it becomes popular again. There will be another end of the world prediction before this happens though. It will repeat until some one some how gets really lucky with coincidence and it happens exactly on the day they predict. Or who knows? Maybe the country will just fall apart in social and financial collapse and the end of the civilized world as we know it will become true.. That or something completely different. What do I know? No one can tell the future unless you’re some how in ownership of a Tardis.
I tend to think along the same lines, Calicade. I think we’re at the beginning of a waning genre, but it’ll get popular again in a few years.
Movie and Literature genres lend themselves to farming metaphors. Let’s, um, milk some.
Themes and plot lines have been around since we were telling shamanistic stories around the fire soon after we learned to do the putting-the-words-together thing. Stories of tumultuous transitions and apocalyptic turnover been around since Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Today, movies & books are the offspring of this epic shamanistic stories. For all it’s silliness, this was THE point of Joss Weadon’s Cabin in The Woods. Themes and genres then become seasonal and cyclical. They come, they go, they return. The Going Away is necessary for the long-term vitality of the subject. As with some types of crops (eg. cotton), themes become overused and exhaust not only the consumer but leaches out the creative fertile imaginations.
Consequently, general consumers just burn out and need a break; and the theme grows fallow. Eventually and inevitably, someone infuses new life onto an old theme and a new generation gets a new bumper crop.
Heck, even government uses these apocalyptic themes. For all the doom ‘n gloom of how bad the economy has been in the previous 7 years, the catastrophising term “Fiscal Cliff” is only about 7 weeks old. In 3 months, we will have another metaphor.
So, are zombies passé, given the, um, voracious consumption of the genre? No, not yet, but it is on decline. But, after it temporarily, er, dies off it’ll come back again. Come to think of it, zombies, not agriculture, should be the organizing metaphor for how cultural story telling unfolds.
This is beautifully phrased.
I love Post Apocalyptic stories, it’s why I have been easily able to branch over and watch some, if not many of the zombie stories.
Just because the Mayan End date has come and pass, doesn’t mean people obsessed with the End of Days and End Times aren’t going to find a new date to gloom onto.Give it time, someone will come up with a new date and time that gets everyone worked up.
And I have noticed that genres are cyclical, their popularity will wane and wax like a seasonal rotation. Especially as necessary to keep it fresh and rejuvenated.
Post apocalyptic stuff has been around a while. The causes vary, from nuclear war, to meteor impact, global warming, zombies, aliens, ancient prophecies, etc, etc. I doubt just because one cause failed to come through we’ll never see apocalyptic stuff again…
That’s what I was thinking too; every culture and religion since the dawn of man has had it’s own version of the end of the world, so that’s a very deep well to draw from. Add to that the very real apocalypses (apocalypi? No, spell check says it’s apocalypses…) experienced by past civilizations, and you have a near-endless supply of stories to choose from.
Plus, hundreds of people predict that the world is going to end sometime that year; if the well of apocalypses (sounds like something from WoW…) were to run a little drier everytime one of them failed to manifest, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.
I don’t mean to suggest that the genre is going to die. I’m just thinking that the combination of a big predicted apocalypse being nothing, and the gun backlash is going to cause its popularity to drop quite a bit for a while. Sort of like Y2K. There was a big apocalyptic craze then too. Nothing happened, and it went to the back burner for a bit.
Dave, now that the Holidays are over, why don’t you blog your thoughts on the Connecticut Shootings and provide a forum for dialogue? As I suggested elsewhere, blog it, reference it on this sight and let loose the dogs or words! The magnitude of the tragedy and it’s rippling effects need to continue to be addressed publicly. I can’t think of a better moderator to keep the convo going.
As for the shooting… They have post apocalyptic stuff over in the UK where the bad guys are the ones who usually have the guns and the main characters do not, so aside from a lack of flashy gunfights, I don’t see that school shootings will stop post apocalyptic stuff.
That brings up an interesting point. The British series Survivors (at least the newer version, I’ve yet to see the original) featured very few guns, and the ones that did show up tended to be in the hands of bad guys.
Don’t you guys think we shouldn’t talk about the shootings they’re kind of sad.
There’s still another year and a half until my ZA theory comes to plan!
It’s in full swing in Nairobi already!
Let’s hear about this theory!
I have said this before, on a previous post. This is a copy of the time frame of my theory.
Day 1: Kibera, Nairobi. A poor shantytown where people live off £1.20 a day, a man eats some infected mushroom. He shows signs of serious sickness and is taken to a charity-run hospital.
Day 2: The man dies in the early hours of the morning. He comes back as a zombie to attack some early arriving staff, who in turn come back shortly after. The LMZA is on a roll!
Day 3: Due to poor health conditions, the hospital is still up for service, with some infected staff who were scratched but not killed in the first attack.
Week 1: The largest slum in the world was overrun in less than a week. Nairobi police struggle to control the massive groups of zombies.
Week 2: British and US troops are brought in to help with the problems,the infection makes the news in the developed world.
Undetermined amount of time later: US and British citizens campaign to bring their soldiers home. They are eventually scheduled to be brought back in 2014.
2014: Soldiers taken home to US and UK. The infection spreads to the developed world, and several individuals across the world, who have prepared for the upcoming ZA on a LEGO fans’ webcomic, begin fighting what they have prepared against.
The idea that troops could spread the infection back to us after getting to know exactly what we’re dealing with is a little far-fetched. Hell, the idea of soldiers who have already mobilised getting infected is unlikely.
Dave in my own opinion I think the world will end , but not yet maybe Ina a couple years with a zombie apocolypse
Do you have a sense of when? I’m always curious when people can put a timeframe on things like this.
Something like the world ending could happen at any time,know what I’m saying
I guess these guys are lucky zombies don’t use the toilets, not that it would make much of a dent in the SHTF supply! 😀
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Hah, nice.
And the backslash character in my post isn’t an attempt to insert malicious script, rather it’s more of a fumbled attempt at hitting the enter key a little too hard! 😉
Someone recently died randomly on a bus in the US ( it think, or it might have been in toronto, I can’t remember) the area was quarantened (dec 29 2012) the begining of the end.
Finally someone agrees with me thanks for your support aaron
Stewart shouldn’t have shut off the tv.
welcome
What do you mean by “welcome” ?
your welcome (typo)
Ohh
Of a zombie infection started, I don’t really think civilization would be destroyed. It would be like in this comic, the big cities bolted down but the small towns pretty much doomed.
…right?
That might happen unless all of America falls first which will suck.
Hey guys, i found a new way that i heard by one of my friends, they said that a deseise can’t give you supernatural powers, but he said that a zombie is cold blodded, and they can feel the heat of warm bodies from far away. Does anyone agree that this could actually be true?
Not even remotely.
Did anyone see the commercial for the new zombie movie coming out,Warm Bodies?
i did
It looks good doesn’t it?
Seems like a decent time to toss my input in here. So let’s see, a big part of the current crises are revolving around Israel. Israel has managed to piss off just about every other country surrounding it at one point or another. They now are currently having issues, in the past five or six years, with Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria. Rockets are still constantly blasted at each country regularly. Eventually, things will escalate in the middle east. I believe that in the next few years, as the US, a major power, is allied with Israel, we may another World War I problem. Not to mention the list of governments being overthrown in the Arab Spring. Power is changing hands quickly. That is not good. Remember, in World War I, we didn’t have nuclear weapons.
I have not watched much of the walking dead, so please don’t spoil anything if anyone responds but this is my theory on how the zombie apoc. would begin and how the zombies are in general:
day 1. january 2016, third world country. A man passes out in a field harvesting mushrooms ( as legomiles said ). The man is sent to a makeshift army hospital ( the country is suffering from a war that has lasted 2 years).
day 2. a few more of the workers pass out but are not noticed by other workers ( they were off on their own). the first man ( in the hospital) dies and returns, attacking the doctors examining him.
day 3. The missing workers die and return, the countries government decides to have the mushroom field burned. The people who go there to do this are attacked by the missing workers corpses.
day 4. the country is gripped by the apocalypse, the tainted mushrooms are shipped to grocery stores all over europe.
week 1. England, Germany, Russia, Africa, China,Japan, and all other populated areas fall within days, leaving only a few survivors.
week 3. A group of survivors within Japan stowaway on a ship carrying automotive parts to American dealers, one of the survivors dies.
week 4. the ship arrives in America, the crew have all turned and so the outbreak hits the US.
week 5. Despite the Canadian and American government’s efforts the outbreak quickly overtakes them both, the world has fallen leaving small pockets of survivors to try and re-establish society in the post-apocalyptic world.
I don’t like zombie apocalypse stories much, because they tend to go like that; totally glossing over the question of how it happened. You’re saying that most of the world “falls within days, leaving only a few survivors”, without explaining how on earth this happens! Or the idea that three weeks after Japan falls, a japanese ship that’s lost radio contact would be allowed to dock at America unmolested.
My vision of a zombie outbreak is a lot more like the Night of the Living Dead; the initial outbreak is shocking and confusing, but at the end of the film, humans are still in charge. Maybe the knock-on effects would cause a societal collapse, but that’s not what most ‘zombie apocalypse’ stories portray. They seem to think that the zombies would be the primary threat in such a situation.
As for the zombies:
As for the zombies:
They are blind and instead use their sense of smell and their hearing to locate the living.
They are of course dead so they are constently de-composing, eventually they will colapse but at the same rate it takes a human corpse to do so.
They eat all of a human being not just their flesh (or brains :P) to try and stay solid for an extended period of time.
That doesn’t really hold water; humans have a lousy sense of smell, and our hearing is only a secondary sense, we aren’t wired up to act effectively without sight. These zombies would be even less dangerous than ‘regular’ sighted ones.
Regarding their eating people to “stay solid”, that also doesn’t work. If they’re decaying, their immune systems must already be destroyed or otherwise compromised. Feeding shouldn’t make a difference after that point.
In response to legomasterwhatsyerface, that is a good point. Letting your citizens arm themselves (*cough*US*cough*) is crucial in an infection situation. So if your country falls, the other countries with less gun toleration are pretty much screwed. I think.
Plus, the US has SWAT teams, and doesn’t bring in SEALs until later.
I could be wrong about everything, though. Probably not. You know, whatever.
I think Dave might be starting to be a bad influence on me.
And Aaron… the main government would probably be holding out in DC in the US. So survivors could make their way there. And heavily infected areas might get nuked. Heck, the US government would nuke the city in which the first sign of infection showed up in. Or evacuate the whole state and then nuke it or send SWAT teams in.
At least, that’s what I’d do, and when zombies show up in one of your cities, there aren’t many other options.
Of course, if the infection did actually destroy civilization everywhere, I’d probably nuke the world out of spite (“Your foul kind shall never rule the earth, undead freaks! DIE!” *punches button*), so don’t take my leadership decisions too seriously.
Unless the FBI or something like that guards DC with weapons and whoever gets close will be shot zombies or humans.
And those would be some SUCKY mushrooms.