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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 5399166" data-attributes="member: 3887">"The devil you say, Chesterton. You mean you've discovered some rank implausibilities in a parlor-kinetoscope serial about a zombie apocalypse?"Ahem... I've got one episode to go and I'm pretty much loving it. re: military vs. zombie apocalypse. While it's --incredibly nerdy-- fun to talk about the efficacy of flamethrowers and fuel-air bombs versus the soft rotting flesh of the nearly mindless, shambling dead, focusing on the hardware kinda misses the point. The show is set nearly 200 days into the public declaration of the emergency (nice Andromeda strain shout-out). It's not hard to imagine even military discipline, and the broader chains of command and supply, breaking down in that period, as the dead are coming back to life and, presumably, tens of millions of your fellow citizens, and non-military relatives, are dying. Then coming back life. The military, even with their all their toys, loses because the people in the military, being people and all, break. I see it going down like this. First, the military doesn't hunker down. They try to maintain order and help folks. Which exposes them to danger, losses. This also points one of the major themes in the genre: do the same morals/ethics/'right actions'/advantageous survival behaviors from the pre-apocalypse still apply?At some point the military stops trying to aid the civilian population, but by this time the external supports systems have all broken down. Then morale collapses... etc.  I'm not convinced positing the breakdown of the military in light of the breakdown of, well, civilization, is really portraying them to be incompetent. I'm sure they had plenty of terrifically gory victories over the dead in the initial part of the conflict.Also, I doubt our country's level of preparedness for a serious flu pandemic... never mind a full-scale ZA. The trouble with nerd, particularly gamer-nerd criticism, is it treats fiction like it's a game. It's all about who has the guns, napalm, and/or +3 swords of wounding. Even characters are just playing pieces to be deployed, logically, on the board. Gamer crit is based around the characters not being people, not having any emotional attachments or reactions. or worse, fallibility, as well as around decisions being made and organizations acting with perfect intelligence and efficiency, ie completely unlike the way decision get made and organizations act in the real world. Instead, it's all about who uses the big guns with the --armor piercing/Teflon-coated/discarding-sabot/depleted uranium- ammo in the smartest way. Just like they would. You know, if it were happening to them./soapbox</blockquote>

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