History Headscratchers / TheStand

* I just finished reading the book a couple of days ago, and just now (upon reading the Wiki/TVTropes article) found that the virus was supposed to wipe out 99.4% of humanity. Where are people getting that number from? It isn't mentioned anywhere in the book that I saw. Is that WordOfGod? Am I missing something?

** If Harold had been promoted to the council, Flagg would be reminded every day that this little twerp put his hands on his woman, regardless of his supposed intellect or other qualifications. Even if he didn't outwardly appear to be the jealous type, Flagg still considered Nadine his possession, the one 'promised to him'. Just because he 'loaned' her to Harold so that Harold could be convinced to go through with planting the explosives at Boulder doesn't mean Flagg liked the situation or was willing to forget about it. Harold needed to die for that alone, in the same way that he would if Harold had say needed to borrow Flagg's sports car for a special mission, and then left a scratch on it. Also Harold could always spill the beans or brag to Flagg's other followers that he was the only other man that got to sleep with the Big Man's 'queen,' and that would make Flagg look weak. Something that couldn't be allowed.

* If Harold had been promoted to the council, Flagg would be reminded every day that this little twerp put his hands on his woman, regardless of his supposed intellect or other qualifications. Even if he didn't outwardly appear to be the jealous type, Flagg still considered Nadine his possession, the one 'promised to him'. Just because he 'loaned' her to Harold so that Harold could be convinced to go through with planting the explosives at Boulder doesn't mean Flagg liked the situation or was willing to forget about it. Harold needed to die for that alone, in the same way that he would if Harold had say needed to borrow Flagg's sports car for a special mission, and then left a scratch on it. Also Harold could always spill the beans or brag to Flagg's other followers that he was the only other man that got to sleep with the Big Man's 'queen,' and that would make Flagg look weak. Something that couldn't be allowed.

** Even if he didn't outwardly appear to be the jealous type, Flagg still considered Nadine his possession, the one 'promised to him'. Also Harold could always spill the beans to Flagg's other followers that he was the only other one that got to sleep with the Big Man's 'queen,' and that would make Flagg look weak. Something that couldn't be allowed. Even if Harold had been promoted to the council, Flagg would be reminded every day that this little twerp put his hands on his woman, regardless of his supposed intellect or other qualifications. Just because he 'loaned' her to Harold so that Harold could be convinced to go through with planting the explosives at Boulder doesn't mean Flagg liked the situation or was willing to forget about it. Harold needed to die for that alone, in the same way that he would if Harold had say needed to borrow Flagg's sports car for a special mission, and then left a scratch on it.

** Even if he didn't outwardly appear to be the jealous type, Flagg still considered Nadine his possession, the one 'promised to him'. If Harold had been promoted to the council, Flagg would be reminded every day that this little twerp put his hands on his woman, regardless of his supposed intellect or other qualifications. Just because he 'loaned' her to Harold so that Harold could be convinced to go through with planting the explosives in Boulder doesn't mean Flagg liked the situation or was willing to forget about it. Harold needed to die for that alone, in the same way that he would if Harold had say needed to borrow Flagg's sports car for a special mission, and then left a scratch on it.

*** As a RealLife example, look at COVID-19: it has a ''barely'' two percent mortality rate and people are acting like it's the return of bubonic plague.

** The disease didn't wipe out 99.4% of the population of Manhattan Island, it wiped out 99.4% of the ''entire world''. That means only 420 million people exist ''anywhere on the planet'', and of that relatively small number (think the population of Tokyo alone times 1.7, spread out across the entire planet), an untold but presumably rather large number are killed in other ways. Perhaps no one but a tiny handful of Manhattan residents (Larry, Rita, the Monster Shouter, the man offering Larry money to sleep with Rita, the man sunbathing on a police car and maybe a dozen others) were actually immune, since immunity is unlikely to be evened out by population.

** Ultimately, people fully in the know about the nature of the virus, such as General Starkey and Dr. Dietz, acknowledge how suicidally stupid developing such an uncontrollabe bio-weapon was in the first place. Starkey in particular is shown to be fatalistic about the situation once Campion has been located in Texas, realizing that with so many people exposed to the virus containment is all but impossible.

* What actually *happened* between the riots and the 99.4% of humanity dying off? What did it look like between a city in full blown anarchy and total desertion? That’s the biggest issue I have with “pre-apocalyptic” fiction like this, the kinds that show the apocalypse happening. Right after the point the world begins to go into anarchy and looting and rioting, everyone seems to just disappear after that.

** Stu explains it later. They were the sacrifice God required to help against Flagg.

** From a Doylist perspective it's pretty clear King was just making it up as he went along, hence the "giant inexplicable hand from nowhere" DeusExMachina.

** The baby isn't so much treated as unique, more so the first one born (and then survive) in boulder. Other children may have been born, but its heavily implied that he still needed a hell of a lot of medical care to survive, and a lot of those born would probably been birthed by amateurs in small groups, which makes it unlikely that they would get the proper care needed. Also this is more WMG but I always took it that the survivors weren't immune as such, but more that their immune systems were especially strong or suited to fight that particular kind of disease, and this was passed, in part, to Peter (or Abagail depending on your choice). Anyway, WMG over!

** I always thought that it's ridicolously irresponsible. Stu brings up that they could get sick, and Fran says that there are "books and good drugs, we can learn to use them". Um... no, you can't. You can't learn medicine just from books. And this is a woman who have seen a man die from ''appendicitis'', because there was no doctor around!

* It is heavily implied that the US military doomed the rest of the world to the same fate as America, and furthermore, they seemed to have done it (by the phrasing used) because they thought their Cold War enemies would do... something if they found out what happened in the US. There's a couple of things here that are just utterly baffling. For one thing, by the time they pull the trigger on the plan, simple arithmetics indicates that it's all but guaranteed fewer than a million Americans will be left alive in the next few weeks at most. At this moment, the Cold War is not really a thing anymore. Other than being insane to the point of being completely removed from reality or being a psychopath, why would someone decide "America is doomed, so let's kill the rest of the world while we're at it"? On top of that, even if the top military brass decided America could somehow remain as a country, the enemy would not exactly invade a country where anyone entering the Americas would pretty much be doomed to die. There's no reason to kill the rest of the world, because even if the world survives, it will stay WELL clear of anything left of the US, for their own protection. Furthermore, I don't care how blindly devoted you are to your country, I can't fathom the thought process that leads to "America is doomed, so let's kill a further six billion people or so." It's somewhere in the intersection between completely crazy and spiteful on the level that only fits a five-year-old. What's the point? There's nothing left to cover up, there's nothing to salvage. And on a meta level, King didn't even have to write the military like this. It stands to reason that at least one person would get on an outgoing international flight from the US, which has pretty much the same end result with a disease that's pretty much a magical, nearly universal kill switch. I understand King was probably not a big fan of the American power structures when he was writing the book, but I've seen Saturday morning cartoon villains that were less over-the-top evil and stupid than this. This is not short-sightedness, it's a seeming inability to connect the dots about what will, by this point, certainly and inevitably happen in a few weeks. Doesn't take a genius to think that far forward, especially for military officers, who I assume need to have the mental faculties to understand the consequences of their actions in the long term. What's the in-story logic? Complete denial about what's happening? Impaired thinking due to infection? Even from an extremely short-sighted, jingoistic perspective, killing the entire planet ensures that whoever survives the plague in the Americas has nowhere to go, while they might otherwise get outside help from other countries after scientists in Europe or Asia figure out how to counteract the disease.
** A lot of American foriegn policy descisions look utterly baffling to anyone with an ounce of common sense and morality. Granted, infecting other nations is probably pushing it a bit (especially since King portrays Starkey as some tragic villain as opposed to the most evil man who's ever lived) but their assumption is probably "we'll figure it out *somehow*" and then proceeding to infect other nations to keep them on even footing. You're right, it's unimaginably stupid, paranoid, short-sighted and selfish...but to be honest, I wouldn't put it past them.

** Presumably Flagg's interest in using technology (including the sort that engineered the plague, presumably) to dominate and control society. To paraphrase [[MadeOfEvil Evil]] from ''Film/TimeBandits'', forget about committees, flowers and platypuses! Flagg would have started with [[FrickinLaserBeams lasers]], eight o'clock, day one!

*** And that's just considering how ''Americans'' would react. Given the overwhelming lethality of the disease, it's entirely plausible that admitting the truth would have led to every other nation cutting the U.S. off completely and then ''nuking it into glass'' in a desperate attempt to contain the infection. The novel was written in the middle of the Cold War and well before nuclear winter was a thing: if it's a choice between having the Soviets sterilize the continent and all of humanity smothering on its own mucus, even ''Britain'' would probably have no choice but to go along with the NukeEm option.

** If Flagg hadn't been distracted by them and insisted that all his followers watch the execution, Trashcan Man would've been killed as soon as he got close to Vegas. Also, the thing that actually set the bomb off was Flagg's own lightning, albeit ''possibly'' under God's control. Of course, that does lead to the question of whether and by what other means God could have prevented Flagg from winning, up to and including just making him drop dead years before the book opens, but that's a larger can of worms than I care to tackle here.

* What was the point of sending Stu, Ralph, Glen and Larry to confront Randall? Their presence was completely inconsequential to Flagg's downfall, as their only action during the climax is ''watching'' as the [[DeusExMachina Hand of God]] causes the nuke to go off.

* It is heavily implied that the US military doomed the rest of the world to the same fate as America, and furthermore, they seemed to have done it (by the phrasing used) because they thought their Cold War enemies would do... something if they found out what happened in the US. There's a couple of things here that are just utterly baffling. For one thing, by the time they pull the trigger on the plan, simple arithmetics indicates that it's all but guaranteed fewer than a million Americans will be left alive in the next few weeks at most. At this moment, the Cold War is not really a thing anymore. Other than being insane to the point of being completely removed from reality or being a psychopath, why would someone decide "America is doomed, so let's kill the rest of the world while we're at it"? On top of that, even if the top military brass decided America could somehow remain as a country, the enemy would not exactly invade a country where anyone entering the Americas would pretty much be doomed to die. There's no reason to kill the rest of the world, because even if the world survives, it will stay WELL clear of anything left of the US, for their own protection. Furthermore, I don't care how blindly devoted you are to your country, I can't fathom the thought process that leads to "America is doomed, so let's kill a further six billion people or so." It's somewhere in the intersection between completely crazy and spiteful on the level that only fits a five-year-old. What's the point? There's nothing left to cover up, there's nothing to salvage. And on a meta level, King didn't even have to write the military like this. It stands to reason that at least one person would get on an outgoing international flight from the US, which has pretty much the same end result with a disease that's pretty much a magical, nearly universal kill switch. I understand King was probably not a big fan of the American power structures when he was writing the book, but I've seen Saturday morning cartoon villains that were less over-the-top evil and stupid than this. This is not short-sightedness, it's a seeming inability to connect the dots about what will, by this point, certainly and inevitably happen in a few weeks. Doesn't take a genius to think that far forward, especially for military officers, who I assume need to have the mental faculties to understand the consequences of their actions in the long term. What's the in-story logic? Complete denial about what's happening? Impaired thinking due to infection? Even from an extremely short-sighted, jingoistic perspective, killing the entire planet ensures that whoever survives the plague in the Americas has nowhere to go, while they might otherwise get outside help from other countries after scientists in Europe or Asia figure out how to counteract the disease.