| 1 | [[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/yonkers_8769.jpg]] |
| 2 | [[caption-width-right:300:"Yonkers" by John Petersen]] |
| 3 | |
| 4 | ->''"We lost a hell of a lot more than just people when we abandoned them to the dead."'' |
| 5 | |
| 6 | ''World War Z'' is a 2006 companion piece to the ''Literature/TheZombieSurvivalGuide'' by Creator/MaxBrooks, the son of Creator/MelBrooks and Creator/AnneBancroft. |
| 7 | |
| 8 | The book is designated satire, as it has a combination of horror, drama, and sociopolitical commentary. It is written as a collection of interviews with survivors and important figures telling the story of a [[ZombieApocalypse Zombie war]] that nearly causes the extinction of mankind. In this world, zombies come about through [[TheVirus a virus called Solanum]], which is spread via bites from a zombie or fluid-to-fluid contact. The zombies themselves are non-living beings, and can only be stopped by direct injury to the brain. |
| 9 | |
| 10 | Brooks has also released the short story "Closure, Ltd." in the zombie anthology ''The New Dead'', set in the same style and universe as ''World War Z''. In it, Max interviews the head of a company dedicated to finding closure for survivors of the zombie war--namely, by killing their zombified loved ones. This has now also been published in a (very short) short story collection ''Closure Limited and Other Zombie Tales'' which includes another story explicitly set in the World War Z 'verse (''The Wall''), one which may be and [[Literature/TheExtinctionParade another]] which is completely disconnected featuring [[NinjaZombiePirateRobot zombies versus vampires]]. It also received a SpiritualSuccessor in Brooks' 2020 novel, ''Literature/{{Devolution}}'', which is also a ScrapbookStory about [[BigfootSasquatchAndYeti Bigfoot.]] |
| 11 | |
| 12 | This page refers to tropes '''found in the novel only'''. For tropes relating to the film, '''go to [[Film/WorldWarZ this page]].''' |
| 13 | ---- |
| 14 | !!The book contains the following tropes: |
| 15 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 16 | |
| 17 | [[folder:A-B]] |
| 18 | * AccidentalAimingSkills: Fernando Oliveira credits his killing of zombie Herr Mueller to this. He bought a large and showy Desert Eagle purely for intimidation and never practiced with it; he was aiming for the chest but was unprepared for the recoil. Luckily for him and everybody else present, his shot went wild and by pure chance hit Mueller in the head. |
| 19 | * ActorAllusion: More or less. The German version of the Redekker plan is the "Prochnow Plan". In the audiobook version Jurgen Prochnow provides the voice of Philip Adler who tells about abandoning civilians as part of the plan. |
| 20 | * AfterTheEnd: The framing interviews take place approximately 20 years after the ZombieApocalypse began, roughly 10 years after humanity retakes the planet. The stories themselves take place during it. |
| 21 | * AlienBlood: Zombie blood is black. One of the ways to tell a Quisling from a regular Z is that Qs bleed red. |
| 22 | * TheAlliance: When [[spoiler:the Chinese Politburo]] is completely obliterated by a rogue sub's nuclear strike on their compound, the Rebels and Loyalists unite against the zombie threat, with much more success than before. |
| 23 | * AllThereInTheManual: Though it's not exactly necessary to read ''Literature/TheZombieSurvivalGuide'', the book does expound on the history of the solanum virus and the ways to combat it. The book itself is given several passing references and is implied to have been made during the initial stages of the outbreak. |
| 24 | ** While references are made to the previous book, both are set in different universes due to conflicting information. The biggest example would be how [[spoiler:in the Survival Guide, zombies have existed for millennia and, while relatively obscure, they are at least known to different world governments, including coverups by different government agencies and attempts of military establishments to weaponize the virus in secret. Meanwhile, in WWZ, the zombies appear seemingly out of nowhere in China, and all governments and armed forces, explicitly including intelligence agencies, are caught completely unaware by them.]] |
| 25 | * AlternateHistory: Recent events, such as the death of Nelson Mandela and the Russian annexation of the Crimea, have converted this from NextSundayAD to AlternateHistory. |
| 26 | ** There are some indications the outbreak possibly begins in 2011, judging from clues given in the book: Nelson Mandela is still alive, there's a Rugby World Cup going on at the start of the outbreak (2011 was the last one held before Mandela's death), the U.S. recently had an election the year prior to the outbreak starting (probably the 2010 midterms), the USS ''Saratoga'' is still afloat, a war the U.S. was fighting had recently ended (probably OIF when it ended in 2010 and became OND), and Crimea is still under Ukrainian control (having been occupied by Russia since 2014). |
| 27 | *** However, other indications that the outbreak began around 2007-2008 include the pre-war President's Chief of Staff being a thinly-veiled Karl Rove-expy, the wartime President and Vice-President are implied to be Colin Powell and Howard Dean, with hints that Senator Barack Obama was considered for the VP position instead before Dean was chosen. |
| 28 | * AmericaSavesTheDay: Built up, but ultimately subverted. The American president decides to go on the offensive against the zombies to "restore humanity's self-confidence" rather than waiting for the ghouls to rot away. They also go on to lead the UN mission to wipe out zombies in other countries, as well as provide most of the troops and supplies. His successor, the former Vice President, mentions he could have "Made it an American crusade" but chose not to. However, while the US is the first nation to go on the offensive in the war, they can't do it without Cuban supplies, a hideously amoral but effective South African war plan, Indian battle tactics and an Australian on the ISS. It is Israel that is the first country to alert itself of the zombie threat, and Cuba that emerges from the war as the dominant economic superpower. The world's most populous postwar city is not Los Angeles or New York City, but Lhasa, Tibet. |
| 29 | * AmoralAfrikaner: Played with in the form of Paul Redeker, whose tactics, including the use of eugenics to determine who is allowed to be evacuated to safety and the use of survivors as human bait, are truly immoral, but is implied to be a caring man who [[spoiler: goes completely and permanently insane as a result of the guilt of his actions and a bear hug from Nelson Mandela.]] |
| 30 | * ApocalypseHow: |
| 31 | ** Societal Disruption: most of the world. |
| 32 | ** Societal Collapse: [[spoiler:China]] is the hardest-hit country in the war, followed closely by [[spoiler:Russia]]; it would be more accurate to categorize these as "extreme Class 1" because they manage to reform stable governments after a few years, but population centers that once numbered in the millions are now counted in the ''tens of thousands''. [[spoiler:North Korea]] probably fits into Class 2, given the theories about what happened there. [[spoiler:Iceland]] is the only remaining country to be infected long after the war, because it's stated that the extreme winters bury a lot of zombies, and the summer thaws them out, forcing the UN to slog out an assault. |
| 33 | ** Species Extinction: Much of [[spoiler:sub-arctic Canada]], [[spoiler:Siberian Russia]], and [[spoiler:Scandinavia]] (possibly worse if the animals went too), with [[spoiler:Iceland]] still horribly infested and [[spoiler:Finland]] only being cleared out now. [[spoiler:Iran and Pakistan]] are also in this category thanks to their [[spoiler:nuclear war]]. Also, Choi laments the extinction of all whales and most maritime mammals, as they were hunted for food by the thousand of survivors-filled ships, and because the waters are polluted and devoid of fish. |
| 34 | * ArcWords: Various forms of "you weren't there" are used throughout the book; sometimes to explain hysterical actions, sometimes to point out just how mundane simple descriptions of insane events actually are. |
| 35 | * ArtisticLicenseBiology: |
| 36 | ** The organ-smuggler claims that a transplanted heart from an infected donor would convey infection faster than an infected liver or kidney, because it has "direct access" to the cardiovascular system. While the heart does propel blood, it doesn't ''interact'' with the vast majority of blood that moves through its chambers; the liver and kidneys, which constantly add and remove substances from the bloodstream, would probably spread a viral infection much quicker than the largely-impermeable lining of the heart's chambers. |
| 37 | ** The robustness of zombies is portrayed inconsistently. In some parts of the story zombies' limbs detach quite easily. In others zombies walk along the ocean floor at crush depth with impunity. High explosives which should liquefy corpses are ineffective because "they don't cause headshots," but there's more to using a body than just having a working brain. Forget pain tolerance; a shredded muscle or broken bone ''will not'' function. It physically cannot support a body's weight or movements. Characters either lampshade this by [[LampshadeHanging pointing out how none of this makes sense]], or handwave it by saying zombies don't follow the laws of nature, and Brooks has said he purposefully took artistic license with these tropes. |
| 38 | ** One survivor wonders why freezing doesn’t cause a zombies cell walls to burst. Human cells don’t have cell walls. In fairness, this survivor was not a biologist, and was likely referring to the cell ''membranes''. |
| 39 | * ArtisticLicenseChemistry: One scene has zombies reviving after they were killed with nerve gas. Nerve toxins work by destroying the nerves in some fashion (hence the name), so there would be no way for signals to get from the brain to the muscles (if it wasn't heavily damaged in the first place, either from the gas itself or from [[DeathByFallingOver smashing their heads on the ground]]). |
| 40 | * ArtisticLicenseHistory: UsefulNotes/ClementAttlee was not, as one character suggests, a "third-rate mediocrity" whose only claim to fame was unseating UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill, but one of the most efficient and effective British politicians of the 20th Century and a key figure in peace and war. However, the character is not necessarily supposed to be correct. |
| 41 | * ArtisticLicenseGeography: Arthur Sinclair - director of [=DeStRes=] - describes his justification for agricultural land seizures in a way that does not reflect the actual capabilities of the area. Sinclair calls the land used by cattle ranchers in the west as "prime potential farmland" - however, in the West, cattle are run on dry rangeland that has insufficient irrigation to raise crops. In a fuel-starved area (which the western strip of the US was described as) it would only be harder, not easier, to irrigate those areas. Using cattle to convert grass into protein is actually the ''efficient'' use of the land. |
| 42 | * ArtisticLicenseMilitary: |
| 43 | ** At one point, a British character claims that the town council of Beaumaris should be given a VC (Victoria Cross) for turning the local castle ruins into a functioning fortification. In reality, the Victoria Cross is reserved solely for acts of exceptional bravery amongst the ''military'' - for similar acts of civilian gallantry, the George Cross would be awarded instead. |
| 44 | ** The development of the "Standard Infantry Rifle" is completely unnecessary from a realism standpoint; if the Army in the post-apocalypse needed a new rifle for their new anti-Zombie military doctrine based on semi-auto fire, they could've just modified their massive stockpiles of M16s and lock them into semi-auto only, rather than spend a load of time and resources on designing and ''producing'' a new rifle. The choice to create this new rifle seems to stem from Max Brooks’ disdain for the AR-15, as seen in his depiction of the rifle in ''Literature/TheZombieSurvivalGuide''.[[note]]Not to mention [[EpicFail the millions upon millions of civilian AR-15s that are ''already'' semi-auto only.]][[/note]] |
| 45 | ** Disregarding even the HollywoodTactics, the actual ''effects'' of 155mm artillery shells and 270mm rockets is almost comically misunderstood, to the point where a volley from entire batteries of MLRS launchers is somehow only truly effective because it sets off the ''gas tanks'' in the cars nearby. The actual effect of hundreds of thousands of explosives being rained down on a zombie horde apparently don't matter. There's a good reason MLRS systems are nicknamed "grid square erasers". |
| 46 | * AuthorAppeal: |
| 47 | ** Israel's status as the most successful nation against the zombie threat is obviously peppered by a little Jewish pride on the part of Brooks. |
| 48 | ** The most effective ranged weapons against zombies are semi-automatic weapons, rendering Brooks's much-hated gun, the AR-15, obsolete. |
| 49 | * AuthorAvatar: The unnamed narrator is implied to be Max Brooks himself, who also performed the role in the audio book and is hinted to have written ''The Zombie Survival Guide'' within the context of the story. |
| 50 | * AutobotsRockOut: [[DiscussedTrope Discussed]] and [[JustifiedTrope justified]] at the Battle of Hope. Every nation going on the offensive would play loud, energetic music to simultaneously draw zombies into range and motivate their own soldiers. |
| 51 | * AwesomeButImpractical: |
| 52 | ** One man early in the outbreak fights the zombies by strapping on some rollerblades and attempts to mow down zombies with a meat cleaver attached to a hockey stick. [[spoiler: He doesn't make it home, as he gets tripped by a zombie, is dragged into a sewer by his ponytail, and then gets mocked by Creator/ParisHilton after a news camera catches it.]] |
| 53 | ** Most of the weapons the US Army uses at Yonkers. They use "Shock and Awe" weaponry against the zombies, which is ineffective against them, in addition to a combat system for infantry that allows you to hear and see everything your buddies are seeing. This does nothing for morale when it is stated that the aerial recon showed a horde of zombies millions strong marching out of New York when they were already having a lot of trouble against the front ranks. Also, a soldier is ambushed and torn apart outside a house, and his camera gets all of the action. This stuff, along with a plan that ignores much of the good terrain, written by armchair generals who had spent decades preparing for WorldWarIII with the Soviets and trying to show off the US's technological might (and thus, severely underestimating the zombie threat) allows the army to be slaughtered. This happens all over the world, apparently--South Korea had a similar incident at Inchon. |
| 54 | ** MTHELS (Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser) and Zeus, laser-based anti-missile and anti-mine technology, respectively, are good at their intended functions but terribly inefficient for anti-zombie work. However, the US Government keeps them in operation because they are perfect for propaganda work; they make ''heads boil apart'' and convince the public that miraculous technology will help save the day. Since morale is so low that a hundred people every day are literally dying from Resignation Syndrome, they became critical in propping up the remaining society. |
| 55 | * AxCrazy: |
| 56 | ** Deconstructed. T. Sean Collins is an introspective slasher who is fully aware of his mental state, and is apparently regretful about it. He has a strong need to kill, preferably with melee weapons (firearms don't satisfy any more), and it got to the point where anyone he met face-to-face, he'd start considering the more efficient way to kill them - no matter who they were. He sates his lust by joining a mercenary unit and slaughtering as many zombies as possible. He states he will probably kill himself if the zombies run out, rather than slaughtering other humans. |
| 57 | ** [[TheQuisling Quislings]] land closer to the "crazy" side of the equation, being living people who have cracked so utterly in the face of the ZombieApocalypse that they have degenerated into the feral mindset of a zombie, up to and including killing and eating other people. |
| 58 | * BabyFactory: The Holy Russian Empire ends up resorting to these after the war ends, since there are so few young, fertile people left. The Russian woman the author interviews is currently pregnant with her ''eighth'' child; all her previous children are by different fathers, and they're taken away from her almost at once, presumably so she can get pregnant again as quickly as possible. |
| 59 | * BadassIsraeli: The State of Israel is literally the ''only'' country to take the initial reports of the zombie threat seriously and respond to them competently. This is attributed to a deliberate policy of considering every potential threat to Israel after the Yom Kippur War, no matter how ridiculous it might sound. The sheer level-headed planning and logic which Israel employs puts the botched reactions of all the world's major superpowers to shame. |
| 60 | ** [[spoiler:Somewhat subverted, as the withdrawal of an Israeli presence in Jerusalem to consolidate a more defensible national perimeter proves to be too much for many ultra-orthodox Israelis to accept, leading to the Israeli Civil War.]] |
| 61 | * BadassNative: Quite a few examples: |
| 62 | ** 500 Māori warriors armed with traditional weapons took on half of zombified Auckland: it is implied that the Māori ''won''. |
| 63 | ** Todd Wainio recounts that the Zulu were able to take back South Africa with traditional weapons like ''assegai'' and ''iklwa''. |
| 64 | * BadassUnintentional: Both the Japanese protagonists: |
| 65 | ** Kondo Tatsumi was an {{imageboard|s}} {{otaku}} who spent the outbreak hacking into computers to glean more information about the zombies and hoarding any and all data he could find about the outbreak itself--which came in handy when the invasion finally hit home, and, by both his research and pure dumb luck, manages to escape his infected apartment complex ''and'' get a World War 2 veteran's katana. At which he point he meets... |
| 66 | ** Tomonaga Ijiro, a blind Pre-war gardener. Deeply self-conscious of the combination of physical handicap, old age, and social stigma of being a survivor of the Nagasaki nuclear bombing (which blinded him in the first place), he wandered off into the mountains to die so as not to be "a burden" upon his people. When a chance meeting with an indigenous bear both denies him the death he seeks and alerts him of an approaching zombie, Tomonaga gets it in his head that the gods sent that bear to warn him, and he appoints himself to the task of eradicating the undead pestilence as a gardener would pull weeds from a flower bed. |
| 67 | * BadassBoast: "We might be facing 50 million monsters, but those monsters would be facing the gods!" |
| 68 | * BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor: After spending three hours trying to find the right village, Kwang Jingshu thinks to himself that the the medical call he's responding to better be goddamn important. He mentions that the second he got out of his car and saw the villagers' faces, he realized that yes - it was very important. |
| 69 | * BedsheetLadder: The {{otaku}} in Japan escapes from his high-rise this way (he lampshades it, and says it was the only way to leave his flat without having to fight a bunch of zombies with no useable weapons), and nearly kills himself doing it, after slipping due to high winds and losing his grip--and ironically, saving his life by throwing him into the room of an old UsefulNotes/WorldWarII veteran who still had his military-issue (but perfectly deadly) shin-gunto sword in the room, plus his IJA uniform. |
| 70 | * BeliefMakesYouStupid: |
| 71 | ** Some Christian sects believing that the Rapture was happening, and engaging in such behavior as deliberately exposing themselves to the zombies. |
| 72 | ** Ultra-orthodox Israelis, angry at their government's retraction of their national territory, including the withdrawal from Jerusalem, and offering asylum to anyone who could claim ancestry from that territory, Jew OR Palestinian, started the Israeli Civil War. Luckily, being ultra-orthodox, they lacked the military training of the Israeli Defense Force. |
| 73 | ** Some Third World countries, especially India and some African nations. The Ganges River was choked with pilgrims who believed the river would cure them, and was quickly swarming with zombies.[[note]]In real life, the river is purported to have healing effects.[[/note]] Some African communities react to TheVirus the same way they reacted to AIDS in RealLife; raping virgins, and bloodletting amongst other counterproductive rituals. |
| 74 | ** On the more secular side, there were some overzealous environmentalists (implied to be pagans, though) who believed the zombies were GaiasVengeance, attacking small towns (booby trapping trees and poisoning water supplies). |
| 75 | ** The Russian chaplain who came up with the idea of chaplains taking responsibility for {{Mercy Kill}}ing infected personnel accidentally gave Putin the excuse to kill dissidents and undesirables under the guise of infection, and believes Putin did nothing wrong in making himself [[spoiler:theocratic dictator.]] |
| 76 | ** The Saudi royal family apparently ordered the burning of their country's oil fields during the crisis. A footnote mentions that the reason for this is still unknown, probably due to Saudi falling completely to the zombies due to having no fuel left for their military. Religious fervour is one plausible explanation for this move. |
| 77 | * BeautyIsNeverTarnished: Sharon is described as "beautiful by almost any standard—with long red hair, sparkling green eyes, and the body of a dancer or a prewar supermodel". This is despite living feral for much of her life, meaning she should've grown up malnourished and should have no desire or skill to maintain such an appearance. |
| 78 | * BewareTheNiceOnes: |
| 79 | ** A quiet Palestinian father goes PapaWolf on his son in order get him to go with the rest of the family to the Israeli quarantine zone, instead of throwing his life away by becoming a terrorist. |
| 80 | --> "He knew that fear was the only weapon he had left to save my life--and if I didn’t fear the threat of the plague, then dammit, I was going to fear ''him''!" |
| 81 | ** A [[MamaBear suburban housewife]] allegedly tearing a zombie's head off to protect her children, and an old nun described as 5 foot, 100lbs defending her Sunday school class from a horde with an iron candlestick taller than she was (she later joins the Army!). |
| 82 | * BerserkButton: Never hurt a dog in front of Darnell Hackworth. Hackworth comments on it, saying that he hated dogs until he was forced to listen to puppies starve to death in a nearby pet shop. |
| 83 | * BigApplesauce: |
| 84 | ** The Battle of Yonkers was originally intended as a simultaneous propaganda coup (by showing the public that the military could stop the zombie threat) and also as a vital stopgap against the zombie horde coming out of the densely populated city. |
| 85 | ** After the war, New York is referred to as the "Hero City". After UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, the Soviets gave the title of "Hero City" to twelve cities that had displayed outstanding heroism during the war, many of which either held out against the Germans ([[UsefulNotes/TheCityFormerlyKnownAs Leningrad]], UsefulNotes/{{Moscow}}, Stalingrad) or only went down after a heavy fight (Kiev, Smolensk, Minsk). From that, it can be inferred that a sizable group of especially badass New Yorkers managed to hold out in the city against the zombies. |
| 86 | * BittersweetEnding: Humanity's eventual triumph over the zombies comes at great cost -- two-thirds of the human race dead, vast swaths of the ecosystem devastated due both to the zombies and human carelessness, the seas and the Arctic zones remaining perpetual battlefields. |
| 87 | * BloodKnight: T. Sean Collins, the mercenary. He realizes that he is "addicted to murder" and will eventually either kill himself when he runs out of zombies to kill or face losing control and slaughtering actual people. |
| 88 | * BodyHorror: Kinda hard to pull off a zombie story without generous helpings of this. Special mention goes to the child Christina finds after her plane crashes, who is little more than a head attached to an empty ribcage. |
| 89 | * BookEnds: "Don't worry, everything's going to be all right." Initially used by Dr. Kwang Jingshu's friend in an [[OOCIsSeriousBusiness out-of-character-moment]] to show just how bad the situation has become, it is used again un-ironically by the doctor himself near the end, since he believes everything really will turn out all right. |
| 90 | * BoomHeadshot: A necessity in this case, and part of the initial failure by human militaries--most notably, the US Army at Yonkers--to repel the initial waves of undead is that human soldiers are trained to hit the center mass with repeated shots, not the head with one hit. |
| 91 | * BoringButPractical: |
| 92 | ** The "Lobotomizer", a versatile and efficient zombie disposal device developed during the war, is made from scrap metal from all the abandoned cars, and is little more than a sharpened, flattened entrenching tool. |
| 93 | ** The Sandlers: a MOS in the reorganized American Army, whose whole job is to reload empty magazines for the guys on the firing line. Without them, the 18+ hour firefights during the march East would be impossible. |
| 94 | ** The Resource-to-Kill Ratio: BoringButPractical as strategic doctrine. Leads to the mothballing of most of the USAF, the demechanization of the Army, and the abandonment of polymer for rifle stocks. |
| 95 | ** One of the easiest ways to clear a multilevel building is to simply stand on a neighbouring rooftop and make a lot of noise. The zombies will take the more direct route to get to you, and walk off the roof to their deaths. Boring, certainly, but there's no denying it works. Incidentally, this technique was invented by a barking dog. |
| 96 | * BottomlessMagazines: Averted. A major contributing factor to the devastating defeat at the apocalyptic Battle of Yonkers is because the generals in charge never even bothered to consider how much ammunition their forces would need for sustained fire. A major plot point of the novel after this is the "Resource-to-Kill Ratio", how the survivor enclaves have to make the maximum use of their limited ammo production capacity. By the Battle of Hope, vehicles are only used to bring in cases of ammunition by the truckload for the infantry. See "Hollywood Tactics" below. |
| 97 | * BrainDrain: In the backstory, the CIA were essentially forced to take the fall for the Second Gulf War, being unable to defend themselves without breaching national security. Consequentially, numerous employees left for the private sector to avoid what the CIA Director Bob Archer refers to as a "political witch hunt," taking their skills, experience, and initiative with them. The result was their inability to see the rising threat of the zombies until it was essentially too late. |
| 98 | * BreadEggsBreadedEggs: Among the things that Colonel Christina Eliopolis says are being dropped into the blue zones holding out are, "tools, spare parts, and tools to make spare parts." |
| 99 | * BreakOutTheMuseumPiece: A number of British people who were holed up in castles did just that, sitting on large stashes of combat-tested and proven efficient beheaders and skull-smashers. In a case of break out the ''museum'', the USS ''Saratoga'', the HMS ''Victory'', and the Russian Cruiser ''Aurora'' are all seen at sea by a Chinese submarine crew. |
| 100 | * BringMyBrownPants: |
| 101 | ** Fernando Oliviera, the black-market transplant surgeon, wets himself as he shoots a zombie. |
| 102 | ** Todd Waino describes this happening to him and his fellow soldiers (both literally ''and'' metaphorically... maybe) in every section he's interviewed in except the final one. |
| 103 | * BritainIsOnlyLondon: Averted. British supreme command is relocated to Scotland. Conwy, Wales served as the base of the reclamation of Great Britain. The defense of Caerphilly Castle in South Wales is also mentioned. |
| 104 | * BuryingASubstitute: The ''Closure, Ltd.'' story revolves around this. After humanity takes back the planet from the zombies, the company Closure popped up, offering to find, kill, and then bury people's zombified loved ones. Everyone involved in the process understands that Closure is just finding a zombie that looks vaguely like the person they were hired to find, but in the end it's the symbolism behind the act that's important. |
| 105 | * ButWhatAboutTheAstronauts: They all were exposed to deadly levels of cosmic radiation due to their voluntary prolonged stay in space and [[spoiler:the sole survivor died days after giving his interview]]. They did it so they could maintain the satellites in Earth orbit and allow the surviving people and nations of Earth to stay in contact, share information, and fight back. |
| 106 | [[/folder]] |
| 107 | |
| 108 | [[folder:C-D]] |
| 109 | * CallBack: |
| 110 | ** A diver who specializes in underwater zombie combat mentions the Chinese sub that was sunk in an earlier story told by a Chinese submariner. |
| 111 | ** Todd Wainio and his squadron come across the church that Sharon the feral child had been trapped in during the Great Panic. Wainio also serves with the girl who sang "Avalon" at the Battle of the Five Colleges. |
| 112 | ** Arthur Sinclair still hopes to arrest Breckinridge Scott. |
| 113 | ** Jurgen Warmbrunn mentions having come across both the psychological evaluation of Stanley [=MacDonald=] and the blog of Fernando Oliveira's nurse in his research. |
| 114 | ** Collins mentions [=MacDonald=] trying to find his peace among the monasteries in Meteora when discussing war veterans trying to deal with their trauma from the war. |
| 115 | ** Jesika Hendricks, who fled to the wilds of Canada with her parents during the Great Panic, mentions meeting an Iranian former pilot who was looking for somewhere to settle down; this is Ahmed Farahnakian. |
| 116 | ** It is strongly hinted--but never explicitly confirmed--that the old man Kondo Tatsumi gets his shin-gunto sword from is the older brother of his master, Sensei Ijiro. A photograph of the old man as a young officer shows he had a little brother that would have been about Itiro's age. |
| 117 | ** Mary Jo Miller comments on one of her co-workers, Ms. Inez, leaving for the Canadian Arctic before the Great Panic hits. Later, Ms. Inez is mentioned as the medic in Todd Waino's unit during the reclaiming of America. |
| 118 | * TheCaptain: Captain Chen, and his son, Commander Chen. |
| 119 | * CarryABigStick: Maori warriors are mentioned using their indigenous weapons, bladed clubs and paddles, to great effect against the zombie hordes. |
| 120 | * CassandraTruth: The Warbrunn-Knight report. Features detailed information on the first zombie attacks and forming patterns, and nobody in a position to affect meaningful change even reads it, save, perhaps, for Israel. |
| 121 | * CatsAreMean: The F-lions, descendants of domestic cats that were abandoned during the Great Panic, are deadly ambush predators that pounce on their victims without warning. Todd Wainio, who encountered several of them during the clean-up operations after the main offensive against the zombies, describes them as: |
| 122 | -->Cats like part mountain lion, part Ice Age saberfuck . . . about twice the size of a prewar puffball, teeth, claws and a real, real jonesing for warm blood. |
| 123 | * CelebrityCasualty: |
| 124 | ** Ruben Studdard is killed (alongside his agent) when a grenade detonates in his hand at the celebrity house. |
| 125 | ** Geraldo Rivera is swarmed and killed by zombies at Yonkers. |
| 126 | ** It's heavily implied that Creator/BillMaher, Ann Coulter, and Creator/ParisHilton were all killed in the Long Island celebrity house, though how is not mentioned. |
| 127 | * CelebrityParadox: As mentioned below, Roy Eliot talks about his friend 'Marty', implied to be Martin Scorsese; Scorsese himself voices Breckenridge Scott in the audiobook. |
| 128 | * CelebritySurvivor: Lots of fun is had with this. |
| 129 | ** One of the soldiers that Todd Wainio served with was a former pro wrestler, and another one may or may not have been [[Music/{{REM}} Michael Stipe]] (Wainio was sure it was him, but could never get him to admit it). |
| 130 | ** A pre-war film director is heavily implied to be Creator/StevenSpielberg, with his mentions of being a "wonderkid" who couldn't fail during his early career and making Super 8 films as a child. He also mentions that a friend of his, '[[Creator/MartinScorsese Marty]]', is also still making movies. |
| 131 | ** One of the chapters details the "Celebrity Fortress" on Long Island, where actors, musicians and socialites had set up to survive the war in the style to which they had grown accustomed. [[NoCelebritiesWereHarmed None of them were explicitly identified]], but there are hints to match several of them to real-life celebrities, including Creator/LarryTheCableGuy, Creator/ParisHilton, Creator/BillMaher and Creator/AnnCoulter. |
| 132 | * CheeseEatingSurrenderMonkeys: Subverted: the French, carrying the weight of their surrender-monkey reputation, fight a daring, arguably even stupid and reckless campaign against the zombies, trying to overturn a century's worth of bad history. |
| 133 | * ChinaTakesOverTheWorld: Averted, and examined. The Chinese doctor's story notes that, for all of China's pretensions of being the up-and-coming superpower before the Zombie War, there remained vast swaths of the country that were still essentially Third World. China winds up taking a brutal pasting as both the origin of the zombie outbreak and as one of the hardest-hit countries in the world, suffering a HumiliationConga that culminates in a civil war. Even ten years after the war, only the coastal areas are recovering, with inland cities like Chongqing still mostly uninhabited and laying in ruins and Tibet having successfully broken away. |
| 134 | * CivilWar: |
| 135 | ** Towards the beginning of the outbreak Israel has a civil war, driven by hardliners who are against the decisions to abandon Jerusalem and allow non-Jews (namely Palestinians) into the safety zone. The war is over relatively quickly due to the fact that most of the rebels were ultra-orthodox Judaism who were exempted from the country's mandatory military service, and thus didn't have the training or equipment to be a real threat. |
| 136 | ** As the Chinese government mismanagement of the war becomes more apparent, a portion of the military breaks off, beginning a civil war with the loyalists. After a rebel submarine nukes the remaining government, the factions re-unite and are much more effective. |
| 137 | ** In the United States, armed secessionists within the safe zone west of the Rockies are noted as a serious threat in the early days of the war. |
| 138 | * ColdEquation: The Redeker Plan was based on the idea that it would be impossible to save everyone. Governments who followed the plan would tell the majority of their population to go to areas which were more secure than the cities they left but ultimately not expected to survive. The undead would converge on these locations and eventually overrun them. This diverted the hordes away from the smaller very well-protected populations of skilled workers who would be needed to rebuild civilization that the plan was really designed to preserve. Most of the nations that survived the war adopted some version of this plan. |
| 139 | * ColonelBadass: Lt. Colonel Christina Elipolous. |
| 140 | * CoolButInefficient: Both played straight and subverted--the Battle of Yonkers used Shock and Awe techniques, but zombies cannot be shocked or awed. Later in the book, they filmed laser weapons and their effects because, although they didn't do much against the zombies, they were ''excellent'' for survivor morale. |
| 141 | * CoolOldLady: Please rise for [[UsefulNotes/ElizabethII Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.]]: |
| 142 | -->"She... she wouldn't leave, you see. She insisted, over the objections of Parliament, to remain at Windsor, as she put it, 'for the duration.'" |
| 143 | ** ContinuityNod: To real life, as her father made the same decision during World War II. When ministers insisted on evacuating the princesses to Canada, the Queen stepped in with a similar quotable line "The girls will not leave without me. I will not leave without the King, and the King will never leave". |
| 144 | * CorruptChurch: During the war, the Russian Orthodox Church took over the job of executing infected, as the officers, especially those who had gone through the decimations, often found themselves pushed over the edge by having to kill their men--or got decimated themselves. Eventually, either the church started abusing its power or the government took control of it; either way, there are reports that "execution squads" delivered "mercy kills" to dissidents, undesirables, and whoever the government decided not to like, and Russia ends up as a totalitarian theocracy lead by [[spoiler: a god-emperor implied to be Putin]]. |
| 145 | * CorruptCorporateExecutive: Breckenridge Scott, who openly gloats about fooling most of the population into believing his rabies vaccine was effective against the zombie virus. |
| 146 | * CozyCatastrophe: A handful of countries managed to get by almost unscathed: Israel was pretty much the ''only'' nation that took the initial zombie threat seriously, while Ireland and Cuba were isolated enough to be zombie-free. On the other hand, the Israelis had to contend with a brief civil war against ultra-Orthodox dissidents over abandoning Jerusalem and letting in goyim, and Cuba faced democratic upheaval. North Korea meanwhile ''attempted'' pulling this off through having its entire population go underground to wait out the zombie apocalypse. [[spoiler: Decades later, no one's in a rush to figure out whatever became of them.]] |
| 147 | * CreatorsShowWithinAShow: A number of characters refer to ''Literature/TheZombieSurvivalGuide'' in less than complimentary terms. |
| 148 | * CurbStompBattle: |
| 149 | ** The Battle of Yonkers: The US Army sets up a "shock and awe" type battle to win both a propaganda and tactical victory against the zombies; however, they vastly misjudge the type and amount of equipment needed, and the army is quickly overrun. |
| 150 | ** Once the American campaign to retake the country got underway, environmental hazards, rogue survivors, abandoned traps, feral children, and sickness were statistically much more likely to kill their soldiers than the zombies. Individual soldiers with kill counts in the thousands aren't even considered notable except as an indicator of length of service. |
| 151 | * CrapsackWorld: Hooboy. Most governments at best ignored and at worst actively covered up the impending disaster, while unscrupulous people misrepresent the pandemic and sell bogus cures. Once the problem became too big to ignore, the militaries chose ineffective strategies to try to defeat the zombies, allowing the epidemic to become uncontrollable. In the chaos, Iran and Pakistan exchange nuclear strikes; the Canadian wilderness is devastated by millions of North American refugees fleeing in panic; the Chinese government run their country into the ground until being eliminated by a nuclear strike from one of their own naval officers; billions die either from infection, illness, exposure, food shortages, or hostile actions from other humans (including their own governments). Even though things are largely hopeful 10 years after the end of the war, it's still bad: population centers that used to number in the millions are now in the tens of thousands, the oceans are hopelessly polluted and lifeless as well as many other ecosystems, and despite countries coming together to fight the zombie menace, the global situation is deteriorating (Russia, for example, is a corrupt theocracy that is using women as baby factories to rebuild their population and exploit the current state of affairs). |
| 152 | * CrazyPrepared: |
| 153 | ** The Apartheid South African government had a contingency plan worked out in case of a revolt of the native African population, one version of which went so far as to detail which locations and people would be declared lost causes, and included the nuclear option. This plan, Paul Redeker's "Orange 84", would be retooled into the "Redeker Plan" and was adapted into a Zombie Survival Plan by South Africa's black government, and later copied by other countries. |
| 154 | ** While researching for the novel, Max Brooks interviewed representatives from various police departments, emergency responders, and Homeland Security regarding the best way to defend against a zombie attack. According to Brooks, almost ''all'' the people he talked to had put at least some amount of thought into the subject, as it is a common scenario used to train people to think about disasters. |
| 155 | * CreatorsCultureCarryover: This is an in-universe criticism of the creator's previous work, ''Literature/TheZombieSurvivalGuide''. The guide's assumption of readily available [=SUV=]s and firearms make it clear that it was written from a US-centric point of view and a lot of the advice is useless anywhere else. |
| 156 | * CrypticBackgroundReference: |
| 157 | ** Nury Televaldi's interview ends somewhat abruptly with a name drop of Kazakhstan. While it's not exactly stated what happened there, the fact that there was a full family of Chinese infected heading there implies it wasn't pretty even by the Great Panic's standards. |
| 158 | ** The Whacko briefly alludes to having nightmares about the Secessionist Zones in Bolivar and the Black Hills, but doesn't explain what happened at either; the only clue about the latter is Todd Waino referring to "Special units" responsible for dealing with rebels and seeing tanks headed toward the Black Hills. |
| 159 | ** Todd also implies that something happened at Rock Island which made his army group's march northward look like a picnic by comparison, but doesn't go into further detail. |
| 160 | ** Hyungchol Choi briefly name-drops several issues South Korea faced during its Great Panic, including the evacuation of Mokpo, the isolation of Kangnung, and "our version of Yonkers" at Inchon. However, they're never explained any further than these brief remarks. |
| 161 | ** China Lake was apparently host to some kind of [[NothingIsScarier extremely horrifying but undescribed events]] overseen by a branch of the wartime US military. What exactly happened there is unclear, beyond references to "those sick fucks at China Lake" and [[DrivenToSuicide suicide rates among the personnel there being second only to K-9 handlers who lost their partner]]. |
| 162 | * DeathByMaterialism: The celebrity mansion/fortress on Long Island. They're overrun not by zombies, but by desperate survivors who had seen all of the supplies that they had flaunted through their live Internet and television feeds. It honestly ''never occurred to them'' that this was informing thousands of other people who wanted to save their families that they had this fortress. Directly commented on by the mercenary recounting what happened, who says he frequently wonders why the heck they didn't just stay where they were, without broadcasting it on ''live TV and Internet''. His theory is that maybe they really ''could not'' keep quiet about it, that "celebrity" was an inner switch they just couldn't turn off. |
| 163 | -->"If you've got it, flaunt it." |
| 164 | * DeathOfAChild: The deaths and abandonment of children is a frequently-encountered issue all throughout the series. Not to mention that four of the interviewees describe encounters with zombie children. Especially notable is Sharon's chapter, which reveals that [[spoiler: the parents of her hometown killed their own children when the church they were hiding in was overrun, to spare them from being eaten alive or zombified. Some were shot, others had their heads bashed in against the walls, and Sharon only survived because her neighbor shot her mother before she could kill her, and got her outside. Sharon managed to escape into the wilderness, and became one of the so-called "ferals", making her the only survivor of her entire town.]] |
| 165 | * DelayedDiagnosis: PlayedForDrama. [[TheQuisling "Quisling"]] becomes viewed as a [[FictionalDisability mental health condition]], where a person has a mental break and begins imitating zombies despite being alive. Unfortunately they were viewed as "real" zombies by the population at large for months, which caused the mistaken belief that a drug used to "treat" and cure zombies worked. It didn't, but it took all that time to understand that small but significant numbers of people were suffering from a mental health condition and not zombification. |
| 166 | * {{Determinator}}: By far, the deadliest aspect of the Undead. They don't need food, they don't need rest, they don't need leadership of any kind. Hell, they don't even need an intact body. As long as they have a little bit of mobility and enough of their brain to aim it at a living target, they will do so until they are destroyed. The only mention of a zombie ever ceasing going after anything was when a character watched a zombie via satellite presumably lose the scent of some sort of burrowing animal it had been going for and shamble casually off. ''After'' they had watched this same zombie dig ''nonstop'' for ''several days on end'' trying to get at it. Lucky critter. |
| 167 | * DevilsAdvocate: The standard operating procedure of Israeli Intelligence. After being caught by surprise in the [[UsefulNotes/ArabIsraeliConflict Yom Kippur War]], they developed a policy that if 9 intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to take the opposite viewpoint so that all options were being explored. This policy allows them to recognize and act against the zombie threat much earlier than other nations. |
| 168 | * DiabolusExMachina: The Battle of Yonkers is like reading about the entirety of Hell descending into the machine just to give [[NotUsingTheZWord Zack]] a win. |
| 169 | * DidNotThinkThisThrough: The Russian army doesn't tell its soldiers about the zombie outbreak, then orders a soldier to shoot a little girl that they have no way of knowing isn't a zombie, then are surprised when the soldiers refuse to obey orders and mutiny. |
| 170 | * DirtyCommunists: |
| 171 | ** A ''lot'' of the blame for the Z-War is directed at the [[YellowPeril ChiComs]]; from [[OrganTheft exporting black market organs that actually came from either zombies or infectees]] and smuggling infected persons out of China, to disguising the zombie hunts as crackdowns, to swelling the zombie herds with {{Zerg Rush}}es, to bungling evacuation efforts, to ''attempting to destroy the global satellite network with a debris storm'', the Chinese do a fairly good job of screwing things up. Of course, {{Eagleland}} wasn't at its best either but at least got their heads out of their ass after Yonkers and retreating behind the Rocky Mountains. |
| 172 | ** Russia and North Korea aren't much better. The former starts off with purges and {{Zerg Rush}}es and finishes the war as a totalitarian theocracy, and the latter mysteriously tunneled underground and may currently be a time bomb of millions of zombies. |
| 173 | * DisabilitySuperpower: |
| 174 | ** One wheelchair-bound man joins the volunteer zombie defense patrols that are set up in neighborhoods once the initial panic wears down— a crawling zombie trying to attack him from behind gets his (perfectly mundane) wheelchair instead of his legs. In addition, he was considered perfect for patrol duty, as whenever they needed to check a house, procedure stated that at least two people had to be left on the streets to make sure zombies weren't coming down the road. It's a lot easier to pick the people if one of them ''can't enter the house.'' |
| 175 | ** One unusually {{troperrific}} chapter features an old, blind Japanese gardener surviving alone in the woods. He was blind as a result of being a Nagasaki survivor (he'd accidentally stared into the nuclear flash that leveled the city), and directly attributes his ability to combat zombies to said blindness; he was already "always watching [his] step, so to speak" for so many other hazards that zombies were little more than one more obstacle, and he attributes sighted folk being surprised or caught off-guard by things they should have seen to being "spoiled by a lifetime of optic-nerve dependency". Using a spade to kill the zombies and politely thanking them for making so much noise before he did so just makes it better. |
| 176 | * TheDissenterIsAlwaysRight: Invoked by the Israeli intelligence community. After being caught by surprise in the [[UsefulNotes/ArabIsraeliConflict Yom Kippur War]], they developed a policy that if 9 intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. While the dissenter wasn't always necessarily ''right'', the policy ensured that they were at least seriously considering any potential threat no matter how unlikely. |
| 177 | * TheDogBitesBack: The assistant of [[NoCelebritiesWereHarmed a woman strongly implied to be Paris Hilton]] [[KarmicDeath stabs her boss in the mouth with a letter opener]] [[KickTheDog because she ordered her to fight the horde of survivors attacking the Celebrity Bunker.]] |
| 178 | * DontAskJustRun: When a survivor is recounting being in a South African slum during one of the first mass zombie attacks. He remembered seeing people running and screaming "They're coming! They're coming!" People with not-so-sharp survival instincts stood there confused and asked "Who is coming?", while those with better survival instincts knew that you never needed to know who "they" were: if "they" were coming, you ran. It also makes sense that many of the older people were the ones who started running immediately; they were all survivors of Apartheid, and could remember the days when "they" were the Apartheid government's dreaded police force and soldiers coming to round people up. |
| 179 | * DrivenToSuicide: Many examples: |
| 180 | ** General Lang after giving the order to abandon civilians in Hamburg under the Prochnow Plan. |
| 181 | ** The Radio Free Earth IR staff after listening to too many tragedies coming in over the airwaves. |
| 182 | ** Many other civilians and soldiers who broke from emotional shock, the sheer horror of the zombie hordes or simply losing the will to live. |
| 183 | ** Other civilians do this after being bitten or to avoid being bitten before being overrun. |
| 184 | [[/folder]] |
| 185 | |
| 186 | [[folder:E-H]] |
| 187 | * EatTheRich: In one story, a bunch of celebrities lock themselves in a well-armed and -supplied compound during the outbreak. It falls not to zombies but to the starving masses who are looking for a place to survive. |
| 188 | * EliteZombie: |
| 189 | ** [[ConversedTrope Discussed]] by the soldiers on-board a nuclear submarine. They fear that, if a nuclear war were to break out, the zombies (who can't be killed by anything other than the destruction of the brain) could mutate and become more dangerous. |
| 190 | ** In an [[InvertedTrope inversion]], however, several mentions are made of zombies being more dangerous not because they have some ability their fellows lack, but because they themselves are damaged in some way: zombies crawling around in tall grass because they can't walk are directly compared to landmines, and in another instance a young soldier is mortally wounded because a zombie whose hands had been torn off by tank treads stabbed its dagger-sharp arm-bones into the boy's gut where whole hands would've simply grabbed his uniform. |
| 191 | * EmpathyDollShot: Subverted. The discarded ''WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarePants'' sleeping bag (not intended for outdoor use) which Jesika points out to the Interviewer is a symbol not of the children who died in the Zombie War, but of how ignorant many of the refugees who fled north were when it came to wilderness survival. However, she concedes that whoever brought it may simply have been unable to obtain anything better since camping stores were quickly stripped of their stock during the Great Panic. |
| 192 | * TheEmperor: The new Tsar of the Holy Russian Empire. It is implied he's [[spoiler:Vladimir Putin.]] |
| 193 | * EnemyCivilWar: |
| 194 | ** There are reports of zombies fighting each other. It's really zombies going to town on Quislings, snapped survivors who began acting like zombies out of sheer desperation, despair, and terror, but are still living. |
| 195 | ** To the viewpoint of a wannabe jihadist: the Israeli forces fighting ultranationalist, ultraorthodox rebels. |
| 196 | * ExtinctInTheFuture: The ecosystem was badly damaged during the war and marine species were subject to exploitation. All species of sub-arctic baleen whales were wiped out before the end of the war. Additionally, slow-moving land species like turtles are now a rare sight. |
| 197 | * EvilDetectingDog: Dogs could detect [[TheVirus Solanum]] and would freak out when any zombie or person who had been bitten by a zombie was nearby. In the early days of the outbreak, Israel used dogs to screen out infected people trying to take refuge in the country. Certain dog breeds were used to hunt zombies, and to attack and kill them where humans could not easily get in/out. |
| 198 | * TheExtremistWasRight: Paul Redeker's Orange '84, an evacuation/battle plan drafted for the notorious South African Apartheid government, was successfully modified to operate against zombies instead of the black majority it was originally intended to counteract. And while it could ''generously'' be called "heartless", the Redeker Plan and other plans like it are directly attributed to saving the human race from extinction. |
| 199 | * TheEeyore: Dr. Gu Wen Kuei, one of Dr. Kwang Jingshu's friends. According to Dr. Jingshu's interview, he always took the most fatalistic outlook possible as a way of controlling situations and ensuring he could come out ahead, only being positive when things were ''monumentally'' bad. Dr. Kuei remarking "Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right," after hearing about PatientZero is an immediate [[OOCIsSeriousBusiness red flag]] for Kwang Jingshu that [[ZombieApocalypse shit's about to go south in a hurry]]. |
| 200 | --> "Gu was a worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If he had a headache, it was a brain tumor; if it looked like rain, this year’s harvest was ruined... This was his way of controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always coming out ahead." |
| 201 | * FaceDeathWithDignity: Baburin during the Russian decimations. |
| 202 | * FalloutShelterFail: |
| 203 | ** During the Zombie Apocalypse, the people of North Korea retreated to a vast UndergroundCity beneath the country; here, Kim Jong Il could rule over a population dependent on him to provide food, water, air and even light. After years without a single sign of life in the entire country, the interviewee for this segment speculates that something might have gone horribly wrong: after all, all it would take to destabilize the entire complex would be one Zombie Infectee among the inducted populace... and perhaps the underground settlement is now populated entirely by undead horrors just waiting to be released. |
| 204 | ** Another chapter of the book discusses how a coalition of various American celebrities built a zombie-proof luxury compound on Long Island where they could live out the apocalypse in safety and comfort. Well-stocked with provisions and protected by armed guards, it looked to be perfect... up until the celebrities broadcast their activities and location on national TV as a "reality show". Not long after they start broadcasting, the compound was attacked and overrun - not by zombies, but by other survivors looking for food and shelter. |
| 205 | * FalseReassurance: Breckinridge Scott made millions selling a rabies vaccine during the outbreak of a disease that he, himself, knew damn well wasn't actually rabies. |
| 206 | * FanDisservice: In-universe, the Japanese otaku mentions that he fantasized about seeing a pretty neighbor naked. When he finally does, [[spoiler: it's in the middle of the ZombieApocalypse and she's just committed a BathSuicide, and is bloated from decomposing gas]]. |
| 207 | * FilmOfTheBook: Released in mid-2013, to mixed reviews. |
| 208 | * FixFic: Brooks acknowledges that ''The Zombie Survival Guide'' had some tactical flaws by making various characters point out some of its practical shortcomings. |
| 209 | * ForeignLookingFont: "On ne passe pas" is French for "None shall pass", more or less, and was famously used at the Battle of Verdun in WWI. However, Brooks writes it as "On ne passé pas". Which is more or less French for "None shall passed". |
| 210 | * FourStarBadass: General Raj-Singh. |
| 211 | * FrenchJerk: While nowhere as bad as most examples, the French soldier who was part of the campaign to clear the catacombs of France underneath Paris is dismissive of non-French cities (especially their architecture) and is condescending toward most of the other anti-zombie campaigns in the wake of the Great Panic, but for good reason: the operation in France's catacombs was one of the most dangerous, absolutely hellish anti-zombie campaigns, thanks to the incredibly cramped quarters that made firearms extremely dangerous (any propellant would have caused a spark that can cause cave-ins or immolate any soldier, thank to the gases in the catacombs, and the air-powered guns were unreliable) and most melee weapons useless, with not enough room to swing properly. This, on top of flooded portions that required divers to dive in pitch-black water with no oxygen tanks. Needless to say, his dismissiveness of other soldiers bragging about their campaigns is warranted. |
| 212 | * FunWithAcronyms: Noted in-universe with "Data Oriented Asset" dogs and [=DeStRes=], the [=DEpartment=] of [=STrategic=] [=RESourses=] (pronounced as "distress"). Its head, Arthur Sinclair, wishes he knew who came up with it, because it sure as hell was appropriate, the department having been formed after the absolute failure at Yonkers. |
| 213 | * GaiasLament: The ecosystem is badly damaged by the war. Ash and pollutants from the unprecedented number of fires worldwide has caused the planet to cool rapidly, many water sources are polluted, places such as the Canadian Subarctic have yet to recover from severe deforestation and garbage dumping, and several species on land and especially in the oceans have either had their populations devastated or have gone extinct. Not to mention, nuclear fallout plays a role in destabilizing the condition of the atmosphere. |
| 214 | * GasMaskMooks: Ever wonder what it felt like to be the mook? Ask Todd Wainio. The US Army brass made MOPP-4 chemical warfare gear the infantry uniform of the day at Yonkers, hoping to create the appearance of a uniform horde of military killing machines, ready and able to mow down the shambling horrors. Of course, to the actual troops on the ground, the result was "The boss is making me wear all this hot, heavy, movement-restricting junk. Clearly they've never tried aiming a rifle wearing this mask, or changing a magazine wearing these gloves, because this makes my job twice as hard", ''while allowing officers and civilian reporters to freely wear non-protective clothing''. |
| 215 | * GenreBlind: |
| 216 | ** This is why there's a self-consciousness when the author and others in the story use the word "zombie." They never believed them to be real until it happened. |
| 217 | ** The American general officers in command at the Battle of Yonkers take this to an extreme; they attempt to use intimidation tactics on ''zombies'', leading to what could charitably be called a rout. |
| 218 | * GetAHoldOfYourselfMan: |
| 219 | ** Fernando Oliveira gives Rosi, one of the nurses at the hospital he works at, "a good one across the cheek" after she sees the patient Herr Mueller flatline, reanimate and kill the heart surgeon Doctor Silva. He's on the receiving end shortly afterwards courtesy of Graziela, another nurse, after he goes to see for himself and manages to blow off Mueller's head mostly by sheer dumb luck. |
| 220 | ** Todd Wainio describes how, at the end of the disastrous Battle of Yonkers, he panicked when some of his fellow soldiers tried to drag him to safety - thanks to a recently-thrown flashbang, he couldn't see who it was and assumed it was zombies until one of them punched him in the face. That calmed him down, since "Zack don't punch." |
| 221 | * GlobalCurrency: Due to the way things go, Cuban pesos become the most accepted currency in the world. |
| 222 | * GoMadFromTheApocalypse: |
| 223 | ** There are several accounts of people being so broken by the horrors of the ZombieApocalypse that they start acting like zombies themselves (to the point of actually trying to bite other people). |
| 224 | ** Jessika Hendrix implies that this happened to most people (if not everybody) who fled to the Canadian wilderness as part of the Reidecker plan. They were abandoned to a freezing winter, where a complete lack of survival skills, food, and hope caused them to fall into violent tribalism (even killing and eating each other) as well as sickness and starvation. |
| 225 | ** Discussed by Roy Elliot, a film director, though he makes the despair sound much more corrosive and less dramatic than other examples. He explains that many zombie war survivors simply died of no apparent cause because they had lost all hope and felt they couldn't go on living. He explains that this is why he and other film directors (one heavily implied to be Creator/MartinScorsese) made inaccurate "propaganda" films -- because they knew that people needed to believe in human goodness in order to go on living. |
| 226 | * GrandeDame: The Queen of the United Kingdom is an example of the more heroic version of this trope. |
| 227 | * TheGreatestStoryNeverTold: |
| 228 | ** The 'Alpha Teams' deployed by the United States to the initial outbreak sites to 'deal' with the problem. In this case though, the reader is just as clueless as everyone else to their stories, since the records were sealed for 140 years. One general describes them as the bravest, most heroic American action teams in history. |
| 229 | ** To a lesser extend, the book is littered with implied stories all over, that sometimes are connected in two or more interviews. |
| 230 | ** Perhaps most notable of these is the case of [[BigApplesauce New York City]]. We never get any chapters within the city itself, only the suburb of Yonkers and the celebrity mansion on Long Island, but its post-war epithet of the Hero City heavily implies it was actually held by inhabitants for the duration. |
| 231 | * GrievousHarmWithABody: One survivor, formerly a professional wrestler, is noted to have done this with a zombie. |
| 232 | * GuiltFreeExterminationWar: Discussed, and subverted at points. Roy Elliot notes that, if they had been fighting human forces, a great majority of what the coalition forces did - such as using "prisoners of war" in propaganda films about hi-tech lasers vaporizing zombie heads - would be war crimes. But a lot of soldiers had to get past the fact that these zombies used to be someone's loved ones. |
| 233 | * HandicappedBadass: Tomonaga Ijiro, a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibakusha hibakusha]], a survivor of the Nagasaki bombing who was blinded by the blast. Shunned by Japanese society due to his disability, he became a humble gardener. His knowledge of gardens and Japanese terrain allowed him to survive in the wilderness despite not being able to see. His combination of knowing the terrain like the back of his hand and having heightened senses (based on the zombies' moans, he's able to accurately sense the location of their heads for instant kill strokes) allowing him to dispose of thousands of undead, and he manages to use what was left of Japan's natural features to dispose of the bodies... and that's ''before'' he encounters a scrawny nerd whom he takes under his wing. It's implied they lasted through the entire war by themselves, long after most survivors had been evacuated or killed. |
| 234 | * HeelRealization: The guy narrating the celebrity mansion story realizes that the people attacking are human, not zombies. |
| 235 | * HelicopterBlender: A helicopter pilot ''tries'' this at the Battle of Yonkers. The pilot is spoken of with praise, and did at least manage to kill quite a few zombies, but the damage his rotors sustained caused him to quickly crash. |
| 236 | * HellIsThatNoise: During her interview, when she gives her description of the zombies overrunning the church where she and others from her town were sheltering, Sharon imitates a zombie's moan. It sends chills down the interviewer's and her handlers' spines. |
| 237 | ** The everpresent moans of the zombies became a serious issue as the war dragged on, because even in relative safety behind walls with food, water and weapons, survivors still had to deal with the constant moaning from outside, day and night, as zombies will keep making the same noise as long as they have lungs. Many survivors developed even worse psychological problems from never being able to have a second of silence, the only reprieve being in colder climates when the zombies would freeze during the winter. |
| 238 | * HeroicBSOD: |
| 239 | ** Paul Redeker, who spent his whole career reviled for engineering a plan to save [[MightyWhitey the elite]] [[UsefulNotes/TheApartheidEra white population of South Africa]] from a [[TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized populist black uprising]] through sacrificing "unnecessary" citizens in a patently [[KnightTemplar amoral]], [[StrawVulcan emotionlessly logical]], and [[CrazyPrepared detailed]] survival plan. Then the [[FromBadToWorse zombies show up]]. When he's hauled before the South African government, and embraced by Nelson Mandela, he... cracks. [[spoiler:He [[SplitPersonalityTakeover goes crazy, develops a split personality because he could not understand how someone could hold sympathy for someone like him,]] and assumes the name Xolelwa Azania, believing he was a close 'associate' of Redeker.]] |
| 240 | ** Lots of soldiers in the US Army, post-Yonkers and recruiting civilians, suffer from this. One was a professional wrestler who broke down after smelling perfume that reminded him of someone he knew. Another man reached his abandoned home outside of Chicago and shot himself in his living room. The heroine of the Battle of Five Colleges--Sergeant "Avalon"--survived a battle against 10,000 zombies and stoically led a squad during the offensive to reclaim the American heartland, only to finally break down after seeing, of all things, a ''turtle''. By this point in the war, seeing a turtle was like "seeing a unicorn" due to how few survived. |
| 241 | * HeroicSacrifice: |
| 242 | ** Subverted with [[spoiler:General Raj-Singh]]. He tries to do as such... only to be bashed over the head by his men to force his retreat. Later double-subverted [[spoiler: when the Indian Army attempts to blow up the mountain passes to the Himalayas Safe Zone, but the explosives fail to go off. Raj-Singh goes back, on his own, and detonates the charges manually.]] |
| 243 | ** In Sharon's recollection of how she ended up a WildChild, it's at least heavily implied that her friend's mother, Mrs. Randolph, shot Sharon's own mother while she was trying to MercyKill her, took her to the parking lot and told her to run as the infected grab a hold of her. |
| 244 | ** Played straight with [[spoiler:the ISS crew, who all suffer severe radiation sickness and cancer (and probably muscle wastage) as a result of staying on the ISS ''way'' beyond any other space flight in order to keep satellite communication running.]] |
| 245 | ** The German "Rapid Reaction" Force that was ordered to "hold to the last". |
| 246 | ** The US Special Forces that were para-dropped into zombie-infested areas to help beef up the "Blue Zones". |
| 247 | ----> ''Most of them knew they were in it for the duration. Not all of the Blue Zones remained safe. Some were eventually overrun. A lot of heart. All of them.'' |
| 248 | ** The French soldiers who cleared the Catacombs of Paris (a very deadly and horrific campaign that saw more people killed by cave-ins, friendly fire, drownings by flooded catacombs, and weapon misfires than zombies themselves), particularly the soldiers who died at the battle for "The Hospital". |
| 249 | ----> ''One squad against three hundred zombies. One squad led by my baby brother. The last thing we heard before the radio went silent was his voice on the radio: "[[YouShallNotPass On ne passé]] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun pas!]]"'' |
| 250 | ** The US President, probably an expy of Colin Powell. As his Vice President would later recall: |
| 251 | ---> ''"Do you know he never tried to find out what happened to his relatives in Jamaica? Never even asked. He was so fiercely focused on the fate of our nation... I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them."'' |
| 252 | * HiddenElfVillage: In the beginning of the zombie outbreak the entire population of North Korea was forcibly evacuated underground, and nothing was ever heard from them ever again. Maybe they survived the zombie apocalypse unscathed, and continue to toil for their leaders with no knowledge of goings-on in the outside world? Maybe zombies made it into their underground bunkers and infected the entire population, and there are 23 million zombies waiting to spill out onto the surface the first time some feckless explorer opens the wrong bunker door? Nobody knows. |
| 253 | * HiddenInPlainSight: How the Chinese cover up their early attempts to deal with their zombie outbreak. Since they couldn't hide their sweeps, they simply created a false crisis in the Taiwan Strait to cover up ''what'' they were sweeping for. |
| 254 | * HollywoodTactics: |
| 255 | ** The earlier battles against the zombies, notably the Battle of Yonkers, contain many examples of this. While various in-universe explanations are given (such as generals expecting a quick, easy victory to show off to the media), ultimately the zombies only inflict as much damage as they do because the human armies are prevented from using proper tactics. The major reasons enumerated are: |
| 256 | *** Bringing, and using, anti-vehicle weapons against a massed human-wave attack.[[note]]This is particularly egregious because in recent history the Army was ready to design an entirely new ammunition type for the Abrams main gun for use in Iraq (optimized for use against obstacles and improvised fortifications), rather than choose to use sabot for a job it was not good at.[[/note]] |
| 257 | *** Not only failing to bring enough ammo, but being ''honestly surprised'' that they ran out of ammo for even the anti-tank weapons after half an hour of continuous fire.[[note]]This is handwaved as the military being overconfident, but it goes against the normal US military doctrine which says that ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill, which is used as a PR strategy ("Shock And Awe") as well as for serious warfighting.[[/note]] |
| 258 | *** Everything that had to do with the defensive line. They not only had just one line of defense,[[note]]The military state of the art had advanced beyond this kind of tactical layout before the end of the Bronze Age. The ''Assyrians'' understood the concept of holding back at least some elements in reserve in order to have them available to reinforce vs. enemy breakthrough or exploit sudden opportunities.[[/note]] but no soldiers were put in overwatch positions on buildings, they'd failed to secure the combat zone behind them (say, checking to make sure that homes were empty of zombies),[[note]]Failing to provide for flank guard and/or rear guard when laying out fighting positions is an error as fundamental as holding onto the grenade and throwing the pin instead of the other way around. The military has standard procedures for maintaining at least some kind of watch on flanks and rear for units all the way down to a single fire team (four men). Sweeping an area for concealed enemy units before setting up camp on it is even more basic than that. And yet the military at Yonkers, despite being present in at least brigade strength, fails to do either effectively.[[/note]] and valuable time, resources, and energy were wasted building cover (blasting tank bunkers out of parking lots, even!) against a force without ranged weapons. |
| 259 | *** Reserving artillery until the enemy was in sight of the infantry line, then firing all the artillery at the initial small groups of zombies instead of letting the lighter guns handle them.[[note]]MLRS has a maximum range of approximately 30 miles, and a ''minimum'' range of several miles.[[/note]] |
| 260 | *** Deploying all soldiers in MOPP gear, even though they had not been trained to move and fire in that gear, and even though it was in a completely unnecessary environment, as reporters and officers were not wearing protective gear. Furthermore, they failed to even use the graduated stages of MOPP gear, by having infantry don the whole set of protective equipment instead of doing it in phases based on weather & threat.[[note]]It's possible the MOPP gear ''did'' save lives, but only after things fell apart and bits of exploded zombie were flying everywhere.[[/note]] |
| 261 | *** The Land Warrior combat integration system, designed to allow soldiers to communicate with each other and with their commanders while giving ready access to GPS data, maps, and satellite reconnaissance. Its main accomplishment was demoralizing the soldiers equipped with it, as it personally showed each of them just how large the horde was (Wainio notes the satellite and aerial data showed the horde reaching from New York City - an unbroken, miles-wide snake 17 miles long, and countless soldiers just freaking out upon seeing it), and allowed them to watch their comrades all across the battlefield get overrun and horribly eaten in real time. [[note]]The Land Warrior system in truth never allowed for this ability in the first place, for this exact reason, and because allowing infantry to see what every other soldier is seeing causes massive information overload.[[/note]] |
| 262 | *** Despite having complete aerial superiority and aerial spotters, there's no mention of ''airstrikes'' until things fall apart. |
| 263 | *** The military explicitly had highly-effective (at least, until the virus became too big to contain) black ops teams destroying infestations and intel from these teams and the Israelis; Wanio bitterly notes they ignored the fact the zombies are immune to anything but a headshot to try and look cool for the civilians, resulting in demoralising footage of tanks firing into an unstoppable horde to nil effect. |
| 264 | ** In the Battle Of Hope, the infantry form a Napoleonic square, inspired by an Indian general. A square is for defending against ''cavalry'', to keep them from breaking through the flanks. Even if zombies somehow managed to break through a line of infantry, they're not exactly difficult to outrun and deal with. In fact, ''speed-walking'' is explicitly considered viable. |
| 265 | * {{Homage}}: When discussing how OurZombiesAreDifferent, various character note a number of misconceptions about zombies that happen to be characteristics of zombies from famous movies. Misconceptions include that zombies were fast (the ''[[Film/TwentyEightDaysLater 28 ... Later]]'' series, the remake of ''Film/DawnOfTheDead2004''), supernatural/demonic (''Franchise/EvilDead'', ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'', et cetera) mutating (''Franchise/ResidentEvil''), intelligent (Romero's later movies and Russo's versions of the Dead series), trainable (ditto), and invulnerable (Russo's rules ''again''), and there were many attempts to quell these rumors. At one point during T. Sean Collins' story, he initially thinks the horde of survivors running at the compound were fast zombies, but near-immediately dismisses it - real zombies can't run, because they can't think. |
| 266 | * HotSubOnSubAction: A rogue Chinese sub faces off against a Loyalist sub and destroys it. |
| 267 | * HumansAreSpecial: We're the only species that reanimates when infected with Solanum. Everything else just dies. |
| 268 | * HumansAreTheRealMonsters: Thoroughly explored. The spread of the virus is facilitated by the illegal organ trade. Governments cover up the spread to preserve their reputation. Opportunists create and sell phony remedies. A group of celebrities gather in a fortified location to watch the world burn. People exploit natural resources and turn on each other when they run out. When rule of law breaks down, people loot and rape with impunity. However, ultimately the book celebrates the resiliency of humans. |
| 269 | * HumansAreWarriors: The zombies really weren't ready for us. Even civilians on many occasions display feats of incredible valour and surprising prowess, ranging from a ranch hand who single-handedly defends his cattle from a horde in true cowboy fashion, to a Californian soccer mom [[UnstoppableRage who rips a zombie's head clean off after it grabs her daughter]]. |
| 270 | ** New York City was surrounded by tens of millions of zombies and written off as a completely lost cause by the military. Even though the death count was enormous, the citizens actually ''held the line'' for the duration of the war. The city is repeatedly referred to as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_City "Hero City"]]. |
| 271 | ** Half of infected Auckland vs. five hundred Maori. It's strongly implied that the Maori won. [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy That is all.]] |
| 272 | [[/folder]] |
| 273 | |
| 274 | [[folder:I-K]] |
| 275 | * IAmAHumanitarian: It's all but stated that Jesika's parents fed her stew made from human flesh during the first winter in Canada. She was close to death from starvation, and only remembers that the stew tasted incredibly good at the time. [[spoiler: Later on, she heartily embraces cannibalism when the refugees begin openly eating their dead]] |
| 276 | * IDidWhatIHadToDo: Various cases of people doing what they needed to do to survive...including some pretty grisly stuff. |
| 277 | ** The Redeker Plan, which is this on a national scale. In order to keep the country alive, the "important" people would be gathered and secured in a single place to ensure the country can be rebuilt... and the rest of the population would be herded into enclaves which are armed and supported for the express purpose of giving the zombies more appealing targets that last as long as possible, so that the primary group has the least amount of danger. The enclaves are sent supplies and whatever other support is possible only as long as they are strong enough to remain a viable distraction. [[NecessarilyEvil Most countries adopt their own variations of the Redeker Plan.]] |
| 278 | * IdiotBall: The Battle of Yonkers, InUniverse. From letting the news reporters get mixed up with the troops, to deploying a bunch of useless military hardware, to [[spoiler:not having enough ammo to actually fight the zombies]]... |
| 279 | * IgnoredExpert: The authors of the Warmbrunn-Knight report were one example. At the very least, it's pointed out no one would take zombies as a threat seriously, especially when China seemed to be the bigger, more credible threat. |
| 280 | ** The US had highly effective black-ops anti-zombie teams. The Battle of Yonkers indicates that no one planning the operation listened to them. At all. |
| 281 | * IHaveManyNames: |
| 282 | ** The Redeker Plan, the overall human survival strategy that came out of South Africa, later gained nation specific monikers, such as the Chang Doctrine in South Korea or the Prochnow Plan in Germany. |
| 283 | ** The zombies themselves are also referred to by numerous nicknames, sometimes varying by state of damage or regional variant: Zombies, ghouls, Gs, Zeds, Zack, draggers, grabbers, biters, siafu, etc. |
| 284 | * ImmuneToBullets: Unless you get the zombie with a good headshot, it isn't gonna work. It'll keep coming. |
| 285 | * ImpromptuFortress: "The Battle of five colleges" saw students from different college campuses in Los Angeles using the university buildings as forts, and a handful of rifles from their ROTC offices as weapons to succesfully delay the zombie horde from spreading further in the city. |
| 286 | * ImprovisedWeapon: The genesis of the Lobotomizer, which was a [[{{Pun}} lifesaver for the headache]] the government had to go through in terms of budget since it could be made from the plentiful and useless automobiles sitting around. Several other creative methods are also mentioned. |
| 287 | * InnocentInaccurate: Sharon's story about how her local church was attacked by zombies while several people, including herself and her mother, were sheltering inside. As the zombies broke through the makeshift barricade, the adults started to MercyKill the children. Sharon's mother tried to throttle her daughter, but Sharon was saved by a woman who had earlier lost her own child to zombies. However, because Sharon had little (if any) human contact while she was growing up, and it's also likely that she suffered some form of psychological trauma, she has mentally never progressed beyond the level of a young child. As a result, her account of what happened is very simplistic and she is unable to fully grasp the horror of the events she is describing. It's worth noting, however, that many ferals (youngsters who grew up wild after losing, or being abandoned by, their parents during the Zombie War) lack even Sharon's limited language skills. |
| 288 | * ItCanThink: |
| 289 | ** What T.Sean Collins fears when he hears the inbound siege on the celebrity mansion is running for the gates. |
| 290 | --> ''If they could run, they could climb. If they could climb, maybe they could think, and if they could think... now I was scared.'' |
| 291 | *** [[spoiler: Ultimately [[SubvertedTrope subverted]], as it's not zombies running to the gates to get in and eat, but ''uninfected humans'', trying to get in to survive.]] It appears to be a [[TakeThat potshot at the prevalence of fast zombies in media]], too. |
| 292 | ** This is one of the many myths the operators of Radio Free Earth make sure to debunk with their information broadcasts, as some of the biggest threats when dealing with the zombies are misinformation and ignorance. Disturbed by the utterly alien threat of the undead, many people tried to humanize them by claiming they showed signs of intelligence or memory of their past lives, all of which were either delusions or outright lies; zombies really are just walking bags of meat and teeth, drawn only by sound. |
| 293 | * ItsTheOnlyWayToBeSure: When the Battle of Yonkers goes disastrously awry, the city is flattened with a thermobaric bomb. [[spoiler:It doesn't work.]] |
| 294 | * {{Irony}}: As usual with a satirical zombie story, it's heavy on this: |
| 295 | ** Cuba, being relatively shielded by its remote location (and, more importantly, ''armed'', unlike the even more isolated Iceland which became a near-total death zone) saw a flood of North American refugees who quickly found themselves relegated to prison camps and menial labor, just as they had done to Cuban refugees fleeing Castro during the Cold War. However, to add an extra layer of irony, the Cuban government took careful steps to integrate the Americans into society with huge success, resulting in a liberalization of Cuba and eventually complete democratic reform. Castro, seeing the way the political winds were blowing, didn't fight the change but instead paved the way for free elections, and while he lost his candidacy, he ended up remembered as a hero rather than a dictator. |
| 296 | ** As a result of military chaplains being the ones with the task of giving a MercyKill to the infected in Russia, the formerly secular-except-when-convenient country reforms as a theocratic dictatorship after the end of the war. |
| 297 | * {{Jerkass}}: Breckinridge Scott, the developer of the Phalanx vaccine. He proudly boasts about scamming millions off of scared people by perpetuating the myth that the zombie virus was rabies, developing half-assed products that claimed to ward off rabies (and bragging that he didn't care if it even did that), blames people's "stupidity" for buying "into the myth" when there was no information but his actively deceitful claims of rabies, and laughs when most of them wound up infected. |
| 298 | * JerkassHasAPoint: |
| 299 | ** Paul Redeker. An emotionless possible sociopath whose plan for dealing with zombies was originally designed for the Apartheid system - but he recognizes that it's impossible to save everyone, and Nelson Mandela himself accepts that the 'Redeker Plan' will save South Africa. Practically every other country adopts this plan as well. [[spoiler: However, it's implied that Redeker's infamous sociopathy was actually a deeply entrenched defence mechanism he had developed to survive during Apartheid, and the fact that his plan not only was accepted by Mandela but also led to him being hugged by the man completely shattered his mind.]] |
| 300 | ** A celebrity (who is all but named as Paris Hilton) calls a guy who tried to fight the zombies on roller skates and gets dragged by his ponytail into the sewers 'a dumbass'. The mercenary who's retelling this event can't really condemn her when compared to the fake tears of the other celebrities watching: "Hey, at least she was being honest." |
| 301 | ** Breckinridge Scott points out that while he didn't care if his products worked, he did make the effort to make a ''real'' vaccine for rabies and market it as such. He also points out that he couldn't have done this so well if not for the government pushing it through to calm the masses. A press secretary even confirms Scott's claim, albeit unintentionally. |
| 302 | ** Both the Whacko and Todd Wainio agree that the secessionists that the U.S. military very violently suppressed did have a solid reason for refusing to rejoin the United States. They correctly pointed out that America left them, not the other way around. Taken further, they weren't just forgotten during the withdrawal west, they were deliberately left behind ''as bait'' to keep the dead distracted. The Whacko does stipulate that this sympathy only applies to the secessionist enclaves east of the Rockies. Those groups that tried to secede inside the Pacific safe zones are regarded as traitors who tried to destroy America. |
| 303 | * JustFollowingOrders: |
| 304 | ** {{Defied}} by the mercenaries at the Celebrity Bunker, who refuse to shoot the survivors besieging the compound because they'd been hired to shoot Z's, not people. |
| 305 | ** {{Enforced}} by the Russians and the Germans. |
| 306 | *** The Russians quell rebellion among their troops by enacting [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army) decimations]] in the classical Roman sense of the term. This (along with a ''thoroughly'' CorruptChurch) actually results in the reformation of Russia as a theocratic empire. |
| 307 | ---> Brilliance. Sheer fucking brilliance. Conventional executions might have reinforced discipline, might have restored order from the top down, but by making us all accomplices, they held us together not just by fear, but by guilt as well. We could have said no, could have refused and been shot ourselves, but we didn’t. We went right along with it. We all made a conscious choice and because that choice carried such a high price, I don’t think anyone ever wanted to make another one again. We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say “They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.” The freedom, God help us, to say “I was only following orders.” |
| 308 | *** German soldier Philip Adler refuses to abandon the refugees he's guarding; he explains that, as a West German, he had grown up being taught that "just following orders" did not excuse your actions and that, after the horrors of Nazism, West German soldiers' first duty was to their conscience. Then his East German commander-who'd been educated that as good communists, all East Germans were not responsible for Hitler's atrocities-told him his unit would be "punished with Russian efficiency" if he didn't, and Adler complied, but planned to assassinate his CO the next time he saw him. [[spoiler:The commander beat him to it, which Adler called [[SuicideIsShameful an act of ultimate cowardice]].]] |
| 309 | --->Remember what I said about being beholden to your conscience? You can’t blame anyone else, not the plan’s architect, not your commanding officer, no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices. He knew this. That’s why he deserted us like we deserted those civilians. He saw the road ahead, a steep, treacherous mountain road. We’d all have to hike that road, each of us dragging the boulder of what we’d done behind us. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t shoulder the weight. |
| 310 | * KarmaHoudiniWarranty: For Breckinridge Scott, the CorruptCorporateExecutive mentioned in the {{Jerkass}} entry. When we meet him, he's hiding out in a Russian Antarctic research station that takes a month to get to. Overland. Near the book's end it's revealed the American government is negotiating with the Russians to kick him back to US soil, where the [[IntimidatingRevenueService IRS]] will be waiting. |
| 311 | ** And if the IRS doesn’t get him, several survivors expressed an interest in dealing with him personally. |
| 312 | * KillItWithFire: |
| 313 | ** Not the best way to kill zombies (due to them stumbling around and [[InfernalRetaliation lighting other stuff on fire]], plus long lag time), but definitely the best method for disposal. |
| 314 | ** The American "Cherry [=PIE=]" round incinerates zombie brains to keep infected tissue from becoming aerosolized. Every so often, there's too much incendiary in the round, which gives the stricken Zack GlowingEyesOfDoom. |
| 315 | ** The British citizens who holed up in Windsor Castle were over an oil deposit that went untapped for historical preservation reasons, and they suddenly found themselves in a position to pump up much more oil than they needed for their own internal use and with nowhere to take it. They adopted an old besieged force's tactic and made crude incendiary bombs they would thrown on the Zeds that gathered below. While they acknowledged that this was a slow way to take them out, the nature of their castle gave them plenty of time to hold out, the tight packing of the Zeds as they funneled in meant they were easy to hit with a HerdHittingAttack, and, in this context, the fire had an incredibly good Resource-to-Kill ratio. |
| 316 | * KillItWithWater: Twofold with the Three Gorges Dam. The entire ZombieApocalypse began when a young boy swimming in the dam's reservoir, which contains over eleven hundred drowned towns and cities, is bitten by a sunken zombie. Later on, the dam itself collapses due to an earthquake, causing a flood so large that it could be seen from space. Everyone downstream of the dam, trapped by the zombies, had no chance of escape. The Chinese government's poor handling of the event, coupled with outright lies about how the dam was safe and well-defended, directly lead to the revolution that turned China into a democracy. |
| 317 | * LaserGuidedKarma: The White House Chief of Staff at the time ignored the report on zombies, inadvertently condemning millions to death. When the writer finds him, he's working at a "Biofuel Conversion Plant". Specifically, he shovels shit for a living. Less terrible a fate when you realize that he, unlike the millions he helped doom to death, is still alive. |
| 318 | * LastOfHisKind: Averted--the military encounters ''hundreds'' of self-proclaimed "Last Humans Alive" during the reclamation of the infected zones. The military referred to the crazed survivalist sorts who didn't want to go back to society as "Last Men on Earth" (or [=LaMOE=], pronounced "lame-o") and the people who just survived and didn't fight their reintegration were "Crusoes". |
| 319 | * LaughingMad: Breckenridge Scott, the CorruptCorporateExecutive who sold the placebo vaccine Phalanx starts giggling about halfway through his interview and doesn't stop. |
| 320 | * LoudOfWar: Of a sort. The "enticement mechanisms" each country uses to draw zombies into their designated killboxes are typically some sort of music; Africans use drums, Scots use bagpipes, Americans blare heavy metal like Iron Maiden's "The Trooper". It serves double-duty not only to draw zombies into a prearranged killing ground but also to boost the morale of the troops before battle. |
| 321 | [[/folder]] |
| 322 | |
| 323 | [[folder:M-N]] |
| 324 | * MakeTheBearAngryAgain: Post-War, one of the biggest non-zombie threats is the Holy Russian Empire, what remains of the Russian Federation and ''still'' interested in regaining its status before the Cold War. Its program for turning women into [[BabyFactory baby factories]] to restore its population is heavily implied to really be for restoring its numbers for war, just as Russia had done in the past. |
| 325 | * MamaBear: When Mary Jo Miller's daughter was nearly eaten by a attacking zombie, she ran up and literally tore its head from its shoulders ''with her bare hands.'' |
| 326 | * ManOnFire: There's a few examples of zombies being set on fire by survivors, or catching fire from burning buildings. It does eventually "kill" them once the fire destroys the brain, but that takes a little while, and until that point, you now have to deal with a zombie that's also a fire hazard, as they'll keep wandering around or trying to get to living humans, spreading the fire as they go. |
| 327 | * MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: [[spoiler: Mets Fan: an ordinary skywatcher, the hallucinated product of a desperate mind's subconscious survival instinct, or the goddess Metis herself?]] |
| 328 | * MercyKill: Deconstructed in Sharon's narration about her last experiences in the church. From her story, and Todd's mention of breaking in much later on, it's clear that the churchgoers murdered their own children to stop the approaching zombie horde from attacking them, only to possibly get killed by the zombies themselves. Sharon's mother is one of those people, although another (heavily implied to be Mrs. Randolph) in the congregation blows her brains out. She then [[HeroicSacrifice carries Sharon to the parking lot and tells her to run as the zombies grab hold of her.]] |
| 329 | * MilitariesAreUseless: The book goes in-depth into all of the ways that every military on the planet was--in its own way--completely unprepared for the zombie plague and unable to cope with the situation. Some could not adjust their tactics to combat the undead, some could not handle the societal and national pressures of the situation, and some were just flat-out incompetent. Until the beginning of the offensive to end the war, most of the personal stories are about people struggling to survive when the military had collapsed and left them behind. Eventually, some start to get better and liberate their countries, but others don't. |
| 330 | * MilitaryAlphabet: Designation of some weapons and tactics against the undead. |
| 331 | * MissionControl: Christina Eliopolis, the former fighter pilot-turned-C130-pilot whose plane goes down in zombie-infested swampland, is talked through the experience via radio by a "Skywatcher" (military personnel and civilian volunteers who are airdropped to help direct the military's supplies to stranded bases and cities) to safety. But, as it turns out... |
| 332 | * MonsterInTheIce: Zombies can be frozen without killing them, so, even though almost all of them are killed, people living in arctic places still face the risk of thawed-out zombies attacking during spring. |
| 333 | * MoodWhiplash: The account of Sardar Khan from India is a sombre story of an Indian FourStarBadass' HeroicSacrifice to cut off the zombie horde's approach by manually blowing up a mountain pass with demolition charges... that ends with [[BlackComedy a cheerfully unperturbed monkey peeing in Khan's face]]. |
| 334 | * MoreDakka: |
| 335 | ** The Army takes this approach at Yonkers, throwing every kind of weapon they had into the setup. This includes weapons meant for use against hard targets such as bunkers and tanks, and weapons that are great for inducing fear or debilitating wounds over large numbers of soft targets. Unfortunately, with zombies there's only two ways to make a kill: [[BoomHeadShot destroying the brain]] or [[LudicrousGibs completely obliterating the body]]. The latter was achieved in bulk--Todd explains that "It was a meat grinder, a wood chipper..." until the guns ran out of ammo (also to Todd's disgust: the brass apparently believed in BottomlessMagazines, and had spent logistical time and effort on bringing in useless junk such as field latrines and bridgelayers to this urban battlefield instead of bringing in ammo) and most zombies simply stepped over the liquefied remains of the first rank. Not enuff dakka. |
| 336 | ** Ultimately averted when US forces retake the country -- their main weapon is a simple, semi-automatic, small caliber rifle that values accuracy and reliability above all else. |
| 337 | * MotivationalLie: Roy Elliot admits that his wartime films were this. Morale was so low among Americans that significant numbers of people were apparently dying of pure despair. So he made propaganda movies showing inefficient, expensive weapons vaporizing zombies so that people would believe and pull themselves through the crisis. It worked. He also strongly hints that many other filmmakers were doing this, specifically mentioning how his friend "Marty" (almost certainly Creator/MartinScorsese) made two versions of a film called ''The Hero City'' showing people under siege from zombies. The one released during the war is a portrait of bravery, kindness, and determination under pressure from those heroes under siege. The postwar version shows the truth, including that many of those "heroes" were in fact cruel, evil bastards. |
| 338 | * MustNotDieAVirgin: The former guard of the Long Island fortress manages to escape, but as he does he witnesses two people he thought were supposed to be political enemies (implied to be [[spoiler:Bill Maher]] and [[spoiler:Ann Coulter]]) "going at it" like there was no tomorrow. Which, for them, there wasn't. |
| 339 | * {{Mundangerous}}: Hunger, disease, and panic chaos cause a large number of deaths, possibly as many as the zombies. Years later, the military has learned effective strategies to eliminate zombies, so that the main dangers they face are - again - disease, extremely large and aggressive predatory animals, buildings on the verge of collapsing and traps left behind by the survivors. |
| 340 | * MyGreatestFailure: Despite Israel's unexpected success in withstanding the zombie apocalypse, the people whose names mark the report which warned them what was to come still consider the whole thing a failure; ''the whole plot'' could have been prevented had it been taken seriously, but they knew no one would - and they don't blame them. After all, who seriously thought something that only happened in books and movies and was only discussed by nerds would occur for real, on such a massive scale? |
| 341 | * MythologyGag: Several characters make reference to Max Brooks' previous book ''Literature/TheZombieSurvivalGuide'', which this book serves as a narrative sequel to. The characters always [[SelfDeprecation disparage it]]. |
| 342 | ** Barati Palshigar says it was obvious written by an American because it makes assumptions that the reader will have access to supplies that are more common in America, like guns and [=SUVs=]. |
| 343 | ** Todd Wainio dismisses for the same reasons, complete with a masturbation joke. |
| 344 | * TheNeedless: General D'Ambrosia gives a lecture horrifyingly detailing just how ''different'' of an enemy zombies are, because they have no logistical needs ''whatsoever''. As he puts it, every human army in history needs three things: to be bred (training and producing soldiers), fed (logistical support), and led (command structure). ''None'' of these limitations apply to the living dead: "each zombie is its own self-contained automated unit". ALL prior war strategies were obsolete, because normal wars target the enemy's production facilities, their supply lines, their command structure. No war in history has ever truly been a war of ''annihilation''. Zombies have no logistical or infrastructure targets, no command targets so you can't just precision bomb their leaders, and they turn ''your own'' forces into more zombies if you're not careful. The only option is a drawn-out campaign of ''extermination'', clearing literally every square foot of the country and every single last zombie. |
| 345 | * NewMediaAreEvil: Lampshaded. Traditional media marched in lock-step with the governments and militaries of the world to first ignore and then suppress what was happening with the zombie outbreak, but it is implied that social media and alternative news sites picked up at least some of what was going on. However, these disparate and fringe news sites [[CassandraTruth were dismissed as crackpots and paranoid conspiracy nuts]] by the populace at large, partly because of the way new media was viewed at the time, and partly because people did not want to believe what was happening. [[ImageBoards In Japan, 2ch and 2chan and its various spinoffs and sister sites]] gather as much information as they can, such as survival techniques and weaponry, down to hacking the leading Japanese biologist's computer to find his research on zombie behavior and the Japanese evacuation plans... and instead of disseminating the information, do ''absolutely nothing with it'', beyond bragging about it and stroking their e-prestige. Unsurprisingly, unprepared and unarmed nerds and the ill-equipped Japanese populace are no match for zombies. |
| 346 | * NicknamingTheEnemy: Americans refer to the undead as "Zack", and the Europeans refer to them as "Zed". The accepted and generic way to refer to an actual zombie is apparently "Ghoul", frequently shortened to "Gs". The reformed US military's new battle doctrine is described as trying to "out-G the G", which is a reference to a quote about US strategy against the Viet Cong. The Japanese call them "Siafu", which is another word for the African driver ant, due to their swarming and all-consuming nature. |
| 347 | * NightmareFuelStationAttendant: Sharon, whose terrifying, [[TearJerker heart-rending]] story is made even more so by her sheer lack of comprehension of what she's describing and her innocent glee at being allowed to do a (frighteningly accurate) impression of a zombie. |
| 348 | * NightmareFuel: In-universe: |
| 349 | ** The people listening to the frantic transmissions of thousands of people the world over at Radio Free Earth. [[spoiler: One Russian sailor hearing the last broadcast from Buenos Aires blew his brains out on the spot. All of them end up committing suicide by the time the book is written.]] |
| 350 | ** [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial "If I ever had a recurring nightmare, and I'm not saying I do, because I don't, but if I did,]] I'd be right back in there, only this time I'm completely naked... I mean I ''would'' be." |
| 351 | ** Sharon's story about how the church she was holed up in as a child was overrun and some of the adults started killing their own children in order to "save" them from the zombies. Her own mother tried to kill her, but another woman (who lost her daughter to zombies) shoots the mom and tells her to run. [[spoiler: She spends the rest of WWZ "feral," running from zombies and bereft of any other human contact.]] All this told by a ''very'' broken young woman with ''sound effects'' thrown in. |
| 352 | ---> "I won’t let them get you. I WON’T LET THEM GET YOU!” |
| 353 | *** One of the more disturbing parts is when she describes how one of her friends was picked up by their mother, then had their head dashed against a wall, described in childish terms. |
| 354 | ** The soldier interviewed on the effectiveness of Raj-Singh square formations mentions that a zombie given red GlowingEyelightsOfUndeath by an overcharged PIE round is a "[[BringMyBrownPants cure for constipation]]." |
| 355 | * NoCelebritiesWereHarmed: |
| 356 | ** T. Sean Collins explicitly refuses to name names during his account on the basis that some of them (or at least their estates) are still alive and active and threatening to sue, but [[Series/AmericanIdol Ruben Studdard]], Creator/ParisHilton, [[Series/RealTimeWithBillMaher Bill Maher]], and Ann Coulter were all at the ill-fated celebrity bunker. Maher tells anybody who will listen that the ZombieApocalypse is merely a sign of the breakdown of the capitalist/consumerist system (in between ranting about high-fructose corn syrup and the "feminization of America"), Hilton makes fun of a wannabe zombie hunter who [[TooDumbToLive gets himself killed]] on national TV, Ruben and his handler (who's wearing a [[Creator/LarryTheCableGuy "Get It Done!"]] cap) get blown up by a hand grenade, and Maher and Coulter [[OutWithABang have sex as everything goes to hell]]. The man who set up the celebrity bunker is implied to be UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump. |
| 357 | ** Creator/HowardStern survives the war, and even gets his [[Radio/TheHowardSternShow radio show]] back on the air after civilization is restored -- a fact which Jesika Hendricks finds massively unfair. |
| 358 | ** Geraldo Rivera goes down at Yonkers. He at least had the token dignity that he was trying to defend himself with a Beretta when he got swarmed by the zombie horde; a lot of the other reporters and celebrities died like cowards or had undignified deaths. |
| 359 | ** The wartime President and Vice-President are implied to be Colin Powell and Howard Dean, the former being an African-American war hero with family in Jamaica and the latter being a man from Vermont whose pre-war political aspirations were seemingly derailed by a public meltdown. The Attorney General is implied to be Rudy Giuliani, as a former New York City mayor who once sought an emergency term extension. The pre-war President's Chief of Staff appears to be an angrier Karl Rove (his name is given as 'Grover Karlson', just to make absolutely sure you realize who he is). Meanwhile, UsefulNotes/BarackObama is mentioned in passing as having been the first choice for Vice-President of the bipartisan wartime U.S. government, but he was passed up because the idea of both the President and Vice-President being black was too much for some people to bear. |
| 360 | ** Nelson Mandela has a brief cameo, though he is only referred to as Rolihlahla, his original given name. |
| 361 | ** Creator/MartinScorsese is implied to have made a masterpiece film about the Battle of Hope, but he's only referred to as "Marty." |
| 362 | ** "Roy Elliot" seems to be an {{expy}} of Creator/StevenSpielberg. He actually really helps the war effort by making morale-boosting propaganda movies, initially just using his own hand-held cameras to make documentaries funded out of pocket, similar to the kind that got us through the darkest days of World War II. |
| 363 | * NoodleIncident: There are many, since the book is written as if the reader survived the events, and these are assumed to be (in)famous events everyone knows about. |
| 364 | ** Particularly chilling references are given to battles like "Black Hills" (where the Americans first destroyed rebellion strongholds; it's implied these were the ones that split away due to the massive, and harsh, shifts in government the US had to undergo -- basically, normal Americans rather than the typical far-left/far-right strongholds). |
| 365 | ** [[MadScientist China Lake Weapons Research Facility]] is mentioned in passing several times. Aside from a high suicide rate and an unusual amount of Section 8s (psychological discharges), it's for the best we don't know what, in the words of Todd Wainio, "those sick fucks" were doing. |
| 366 | ** The fate of the Queen (well, not ''how'' she died, it's only implied that she is dead, but since Windsor Castle did not fall, her death was almost certainly of natural old age). |
| 367 | ** The final broadcast from Buenos Aires (which certainly did fall to the zombie hordes) also get several mentions in the book. It's mentioned that everyone who heard it eventually committed suicide. |
| 368 | ** Flight 575, which is implied to have crashed due to the presence of at least one zombie. It's mentioned as something that made it far more difficult to smuggle people across international borders. |
| 369 | ** In universe, the actions of the "Alpha Teams", squads of special forces soldiers that responded to individual outbreaks before the plague became widespread. It's mentioned as "one of the most outstanding moments in the history of America's elite warriors," but also that their battle record is sealed for the next 140 years. |
| 370 | * NoPartyLikeADonnerParty [[spoiler:The northern Canada wilderness refugees, after overfishing, exposure, and sedentary city life kills a majority of them, turn to using the now plentiful corpses as food]]. Yum. |
| 371 | -->By Christmas Day there was plenty of food. |
| 372 | * NotDistractedByTheSexy: One of the survivors tells a story about watching an old porn film at his friend's bachelor party post-war. The lead actress is having sex on the hood of a BMW Z4, and the survivor can only think about what a shame it was that no one builds cars like that anymore. |
| 373 | * NotUsingTheZWord: They used words like "Zack," "Zed," "Z," and "Zed Head." When the word "zombie" ''was'' used, it was with the sense of how awkward and weird it was to use it, because zombies are movie creatures, but the creatures encountered by the survivors of World War Z could not really be described by them in any other way. "G" is also used a lot in the more military portions of the novel, apparently being short for "Ghoul". |
| 374 | * NukeEm: |
| 375 | ** Deconstructed. Iran and Pakistan wipe each other off the map by launching their nukes at zombie-infested cities. The interviewee wonders how many uninfected were vaporized, and how many people died of radiation-induced illnesses the world over from the fallout. You can also apparently still find zombies who were there because they will set off a Geiger counter, meaning that not only does the most powerful weapon on earth ''not'' kill zombies efficiently, it leaves behind a ''radioactive'' zombie. Fun. |
| 376 | ** The Second Chinese Civil War is also ended by nuking the Politiburo's bunker. |
| 377 | [[/folder]] |
| 378 | |
| 379 | [[folder:O-S]] |
| 380 | * ObsoleteOccupation: After the ZombieApocalypse, the United States government classify several professions such as lawyers and entertainers as F-6, to be retrained. |
| 381 | -->''The first labor survey stated clearly that over 65 percent of the present civilian workforce were classified F-6, possessing no valued vocation. We required a massive job retraining program. In short, we needed to get a lot of white collars dirty.'' |
| 382 | * OldMediaAreEvil: A large part of the blame for the public's ignorance about the true nature of the "rabies" epidemic and the subsequent Great Panic goes to them. Either they were simply describing the outbreaks as "African rabies" and implied to ignore the fact ''they were causing the dead to rise'', or feeding lies and misinformation from bigwigs and the uninformed, leading to Phalanx spreading like wildfire (and doing nothing to stop infection) and indirectly causing the Canadian ecosystem to be utterly turned into a frozen cesspit from fleeing refugees heeding the media's call to "go north". Warmbrunn and the former head of the CIA indirectly defend the media, as, in the paraphrased words of the latter, absolutely ''no one'' is going to think of something out of a bad sci-fi film (the undead rising en masse) when there are other, far more realistic threats at hand. |
| 383 | * OldShame: In-universe, a decade after the official "end" of the war, the Department of Strategic Resources chief is still kicking himself over "Project Yellow Jacket", a pie-in-the-sky plan to use plane-launched, satellite-guided micromissiles to kill the zombies. It was a massive waste of cash and materials, and produced nothing in the end. |
| 384 | * OneDegreeOfSeparation: If you pay attention, the narrators of various sections often unknowingly reference one another. A good example would be T. Sean Collins, who mentions that a man in his zombie-killing unit eventually had enough and went home. That man, Stanley [=MacDonald=], had been interviewed earlier in the book. It's also implied that [[spoiler:the sword Kondo Tatsumi finds belonged to his sensei Tomonaga Ijiro's older brother, though Ijiro's narrative says he has no idea what became of him.]] |
| 385 | * OneManArmy: |
| 386 | ** One of Todd Waino's sections mentions a soldier who was a former pro wrestler. "He was a monster with a two grand body count, an ogre who'd once picked up a G and used it as a club for hand-to-hand combat." |
| 387 | ** The blind Japanese gardener, before the {{otaku}} comes along. |
| 388 | ** A nun, who protected her Sunday school class for nine days with nothing but a giant candlestick. |
| 389 | * OOCIsSeriousBusiness: A couple examples used to try and communicate to others that the zombie plague is a credible threat. |
| 390 | ** A Chinese doctor relates how he realized that the zombie invasion was serious when a colleague with the Institute of Infection Diseases told him "everything's going to be all right." The colleague was an extreme pessimist with a constantly negative outlook and the only time he had previously said that phrase was decades earlier when they were in mortal danger; when teased about it afterwards, he would always say that the situation would have to be a hell of a lot worse before he ever said it again. |
| 391 | ** Later, after cases of "African rabies" begin to pop up around the globe, shortly before the Great Panic, the government of Israel decides to suddenly and unexpectedly withdraw their occupations of Palestine and move back behind a new border that even gives up Jerusalem. They then offer free, unconditional asylum for anyone who might have heritage in the lands they call home, whether Jewish or Palestinian. Many Arabs think this is some sort of ploy, but can't figure out why.[[spoiler: However, giving up Jerusalem turns out to be a major line in the sand for more hardline Israelis, leading to the Israeli Civil War.]] |
| 392 | * OutsideContextProblem: The zombies, and the virus itself. Both the U.S military, as well as nearly every other military force on Earth, not to mention civilian survivors, find it nearly impossible to mount an effective defense early on, as zombies do not behave like a traditional enemy. They don't need to eat, rest, or resupply, you can't demoralize them, they can't be bargained with or forced to surrender, and standard combat tactics are nearly useless against them, as they will not die from anything other than a destroyed brain. Their infectious bites also means that any injury, no matter how minor, is essentially a death sentence. By far the biggest issue however, is that every soldier who died ran a good chance of joining the zombie ranks, meaning that every fallen soldier not only makes you weaker, but also makes the enemy stronger. |
| 393 | ** The nuclear-capable nations had relied on their nukes as the ultimate trump cards for decades, only to quickly discover that not only do zombies neither know nor care what a nuke is, even when the military DID use their arsenals, they still proved ineffective, as most of the death toll from nuclear attacks don't come from direct vaporization, but the after-effects. Since zombies are already dead, they were not only unaffected by the radiation, it ended up creating radioactive zombies that were even more dangerous. |
| 394 | * PapaWolf: A man recounts that his father did this to him. As a Palestinian kid, he was against their family going to Israel and went on a rant about how his parents could go and "be the yehud's whore" if they wanted and loudly declaring his intention to become an insurgent. His dad stares at him as he finishes his tirade, then pins him against the wall and yells at him until the next thing he knows, they're on their way to Israel and he's sobbing the whole way there. |
| 395 | * PinkMist: The Cherry [=PIE=] rounds are designed to avoid this, as too powerful of a headshot results in infected brain matter spraying everywhere. |
| 396 | * PolarMadness: Millions of people fled to Arctic-temperature zones like Canada in the hope that the dead would freeze before reaching them. It worked for a brief time, but eventually, due to dwindling resources, isolation, and freezing temperatures, there was SanitySlippage all around: theft, infighting, murder, and ultimately cannibalism became common - to the point that the "Grey Winters" across the world were caused in part by the mass-cooking of human remains. Jessika Hendricks, the interviewee for this segment, recalls the mood of the camp becoming more aggressive by the day, culminating in a massive argument between her previously-HappilyMarried parents that ended in DomesticAbuse and reluctant participation in cannibalism. And then the zombies thawed out, so these starved, hopeless, and unprepared people were left fighting the zombies anyway. |
| 397 | * PoorCommunicationKills: Both sides are explored when the account turns to the Iran-Pakistan nuclear exchanges. |
| 398 | ** It's specifically mentioned that this was totally averted with India and Pakistan, because the threat of a nuclear war between them was so real that both sides took the time to set up a framework of checks to prevent it, with ambassadors on first-name terms and a clear chain-of-control with everyone working to make sure tensions didn't accidentally escalate. |
| 399 | ** With Iran and Pakistan, '''none''' of that was in place, with the result that when the Iranians blew up bridges from Pakistan to stop the flood of refugees (and zombies), the fanatical Pakistani embassy had needlessly killed themselves to prevent (non-existent) capture, leaving the conciliatory Iranians no way to actually talk to their counterparts. The end result is things needlessly escalating into a series of nuclear strikes that destroy most of both countries' major cities. |
| 400 | * PostApocalypticTrafficJam: Occurs several times. One of the survivors' accounts is told from the perspective of a blimp pilot; he noted that from overhead, you could see highways filled with survivors evacuating cities and a horde of zombies following the vehicles. Another account is that of a pilot whose plane crashed, forcing her to parachute out over zombie-infested territory. At one point, she makes her way out on a highway for a helicopter to pick her up; she notes that the highway is packed with cars and in many of the cars are zombies reaching out of the windows for her. |
| 401 | * PosthumousCharacter: General Raj-Singh, whose rediscovery of 18th-century infantry tactics helped win the war years after his own death. |
| 402 | * PostSovietReunion: In the aftermath of the ZombieApocalypse, the Russian Federation transformed into the [[TheTheocracy Holy Russian Empire]], and not only pushed the undead menace, it proceeded with realizing its leaders' ambition to retake all of the USSR's former territories, starting with conquering Belarus. That being said, the theocratic rule is apparently just a facade being used to legitimize authoritarian rule, with the newly crowned tsar and head of the Russian Orthodox Church being implied to be none other than [[spoiler:[[HistoricalDomainCharacter Vladimir Putin]] himself]]. |
| 403 | * ThePowerOfRock: |
| 404 | ** The documentary of the Five Colleges featured a young woman who sang to pep up her fellow students for combat. She later shows up in the army under the nickname "Sergeant Avalon", after the movie. |
| 405 | ** The strategy for fighting back against the zombies is to form a defensive position, then draw them over open fields with loud music. Each country uses some variation of aggressive, energetic music--the Scottish use bagpipes, for example, and the South African Zulu chant and bang combat knives (The Sou'frican equivalent of the K-BAR is referred to as an assegai) against rifle butts. The Americans' use Music/IronMaiden, which is ironic as they use a zombie as a mascot. |
| 406 | * PrecautionaryCorpseDisposal: Even after a zombie has been dispatched, the body is still a threat, due to the Solanum in its system. Those tasked with disposing of the bodies often wear gloves and masks to avoid being infected. |
| 407 | * PretendWereDead: [[SubvertedTrope Doesn't work]]. {{The Quisling}}s (people who have been driven insane by the ZombieApocalypse and start to believe that they are zombies, and moan and shamble accordingly) are attacked along with everyone else, because zombies have a strange underlying instinct that knows when someone's alive. |
| 408 | * PrettyLittleHeadshots: Justified with the Cherry [=PIE=] rounds; they were designed to disintegrate upon impact in such a way that the bullet fragments would bounce around inside the skull, completely destroying the brain, but not over-penetrate and spread infected brain tissue through a giant exit wound. |
| 409 | * PrimalFear: [[spoiler:Some people were so completely disturbed by the horrors of seeing zombies in such massive numbers, not to mention the trauma of having to run from or kill loved ones, that they would lie down to sleep and just die, their will to live completely gone at the idea of having to survive in a world like that.]] |
| 410 | * ProperlyParanoid: |
| 411 | ** Israel. The Israeli agent interviewed even said a degree of paranoia was already the Israeli intelligence's unspoken policy, because, thanks to their enmity with their neighbors, it was a survival skill. They were the only ones who actually took the threat seriously and took steps to defend against it ''before'' their country was completely overrun. |
| 412 | ** The Israeli agent's American colleague, Knight. |
| 413 | * PushedAtTheMonster: Taken to a government policy level through the Redeker Plan / the South African Plan / The Chang Doctrine / The Prochnow Plan across most countries. The book focuses mainly on the US but it's noted as policy in Japan, Germany, South Africa, and South Korea, too. Since it's known that zombies are attracted to high-density clusters of people, the plan dictates that "important" people are evacuated to a relatively well-barricaded safe haven while government messaging - in the USA's case, through the media - tells the general population to go elsewhere or hunker down. In America, this is achieved by encouraging people to go to the Canadian wilderness, because low temperatures freeze zombies. The zombies will then be drawn to them and a large proportion of those people (if not all of them) will die, whether from exposure or from zombie attacks, but the core government will survive. |
| 414 | * TheQuisling: A psychological disorder here: it's another human psychological response to living in the UncannyValley and dealing with PrimalFear at all times. The human mind snaps and goes "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," and the still-living human begins to behave like a zombie him/herself. This offers no defense from actual undead, though. Many Quislings were so realistic that early news footage of zombies eating Quislings led to people believing that the zombies eat each other, and sometimes when a person was bitten by a Quisling they killed themselves before they learned that they had not become infected by a zombie. While the zombies can tell Quislings from real zombies by instinct, humans can only tell by a) shooting them and seeing red blood come out, and b) seeing if they blink. Quislings also have some advantages that mundane Zack lack- since they're warm-blooded and often wearing clothes, they can survive temperatures that would normally incapacitate zombies. And while their bites will not transfer the deadly Solanum Virus, their mouths are still filthy. One individual bitten by a quisling still nearly died from mundane bacteria that was in the quisling's mouth. |
| 415 | * ReasonableAuthorityFigure: |
| 416 | ** Arthur Sinclair, head of [=DeStRes=] ('''De'''partment of '''St'''rategic '''Res'''ources). |
| 417 | ** The US President in the safe zone. His tactics for maintaining peace and order (public, physical punishments and the like) seem barbaric, but were actually perfect for their situation and were very successful. |
| 418 | * RedshirtArmy: The numerous variants of the Redeker plan call for leaving "disposable" units behind to cover the retreat of more viable personnel. The Chinese Politburo sends armies of barely-trained and poorly-armed conscripts against the zombies, succeeding only in swelling the undead ranks. Similarly, the Russian Federation had many of its troops, implied to be reservists, armed with very poorly maintained [=WWII=]-era equipment left out in the open. It's a miracle they didn't suffer the same fate as the Chinese. |
| 419 | * TheRemnant: All of humanity to a degree, especially when the various versions of the Redeker Plan are in effect. |
| 420 | ** The United States, which is pretty much reduced to the Pacific bordering states and scattered enclaves. |
| 421 | ** The Chinese Politburo holed up in Xilinhot during the Second Chinese Civil War, which ends when [[spoiler: a rogue submarine nukes their bunker]], resulting in China becoming a federal republic. |
| 422 | ** Since no one is entirely sure if ''anyone'' within North Korea is alive, their government is considered this by default. |
| 423 | * RemovingTheHeadOrDestroyingTheBrain: Since the zombies mostly follow Romero rules, destroying the brain is the only way to actually "kill" a zombie. Even if the head is removed intact, it continues to snap at anything that gets close. |
| 424 | * {{Retraux}}: Following the CurbStompBattle at Yonkers, the US Army actually learns from its mistakes and adjusts its tactics to fight the zombies. As one veteran states, this involves going "back in time." Instead of high-tech digital displays and heavy artillery, there's a return to Napoleonic Wars combat doctrine, solid marching lines, one shot per second rifles, and a cross between an entrenching tool and a medieval battle axe. It works beautifully. |
| 425 | * RiddleForTheAges: Just what happened to the citizens of [[spoiler:North Korea]]? The characters seem to agree that when the infection started to get out of control, the citizens bunkered down underground to try to wait the infection out. However, years after the war is already over, no one has yet to discover any of them still alive. It's not clear if they just chose to live underground [[Literature/TheHungerGames District 13 style]] or if someone got infected and they all died - either way, most people agree that they're probably better off not knowing what happened, and if they're still alive they'll come out on their own. |
| 426 | * RoomFullOfZombies: Several instances mentioned by various interviewees, especially as one of the biggest dangers to the clean-up crews. The ''entire population of North Korea'' may be this after sealing themselves underground, and no one else is in any particular hurry to find out for certain. |
| 427 | * RoyalsWhoActuallyDoSomething: Rather than be evacuated to the British Safe Zone, Queen Elizabeth II remains in Windsor "for the duration", just as her father remained in London during the worst of the Blitz in World War Two. Although she apparently dies before the end of the conflict, her example inspires the British to keep fighting and the royal aide who is interviewed is visibly moved when discussing it. |
| 428 | * SceneryBasedSocietalBarometer: The narrator can't talk to everybody affected by the Zombie War (as it's essentially every person in the entire world), so he interviews certain exemplars who. As such, though Jessika Hendricks' experiences were limited to a national park in Canada, this segment serves as an overview of the refugee situation across the world and the environmental devastation that occurred as a result: she describes how both their camp and the pristine wilderness degenerated over a matter of months, featuring mass deforestation, environmental degradation, PolarMadness, fighting, murder, starvation and cannibalism. By the present day, the national park is a PollutedWasteland littered with frozen zombies, rubbish from the camps, and the remains of past "meals." Jessika implies that this breakdown was ''worse'' in other places such as Japan. |
| 429 | * ScrewTheMoneyIHaveRules: T. Sean Collins and some of the other mercenaries at the mansion abandon the celebrity "hideout" when it becomes clear that [[spoiler: the building is coming under attack not from zombies, but refugees, including women and children. He had signed up to fight zombies, not slaughter civilians who only wanted to find shelter themselves.]] |
| 430 | * ScrewThisImOuttaHere: As the celebrity mansion falls, T. Sean Collins grabs a surfboard and paddles out onto the ocean, hoping to be picked up by a ship just off shore. |
| 431 | * SealedEvilInACan: When the outbreak first began, the entire population of North Korea vanished into underground bunkers. All 24 million of them, and none of them have been heard from in the twenty years since. This presents two possibilities, and both are equally terrifying: |
| 432 | ## A ZombieInfectee found their way in and now there are 24 million ravenous zombies that were once North Koreans trapped underground, held back from the world only by rapidly-crumbling communist architecture |
| 433 | ## The North Koreans' plan ''worked perfectly'', and some day 24 million heavily-armed fascists are going to emerge from those bunkers to find a new world ripe for the taking, where their decadent western enemies have all been greatly weakened. Now, if they intend to ''stay'' down there, then the people of North Korea likely live in a society totalitarian to such an extreme that [[Literature/NineteenEightyFour Big Brother]] would either be proud of or ''[[HorrifyingTheHorror scared]]'' of, where a mad tyrant [[AGodAmI controls every last aspect of his subjects' lives down to their access to the air they breathe.]] |
| 434 | * SelectiveObliviousness: In "Closure, LTD.", it's not that people don't mind that [[spoiler: the supposed corpse of their loved one is someone else]]; they just don't ''care''. It's symbolic, and that's all that really matters. |
| 435 | * SelfDeprecation: ''The Zombie Survival Guide'' is spoken of by the interviewees as being imperfect, and so specific to survival in North America as to be nearly useless elsewhere. In the audiobook, Brooks delivers a slightly offended line reading to the narrator's reaction when Barati Palshigar criticizes the book. |
| 436 | * SergeantRock: There's Sergeant Avalon who participated in the victorious Battle of the Five Colleges and her replacement Todd Waino after she leaves the army. Also the French Sergeant, Renault, whose team happens upon an underground vault of at least 300 zombies, and, rather than simply report the chamber and seal them in, they elect to sacrifice themselves to the last man [[YouShallNotPass to ensure the zombies never reach the streets of Paris]]. [[HeroicSacrifice It worked]]. |
| 437 | * ShadowArchetype: The zombies swarm and devour every living creature they encounter. Guess what the waves of refugees fleeing to the North Canadian wilderness do with the available resources? |
| 438 | * ShoutOut: |
| 439 | ** One of the characters Brooks interviews in the book tosses out a line from one of [[Creator/MelBrooks his father's]] movies, ''Film/TheProducers''. |
| 440 | ** Near the end, two Marines play a skit from "Free to Be, You and Me", another of his father's works. |
| 441 | ** In "The Whacko"'s finale at the end he talks about Winston Churchill, and a page later uses a fragment from [[http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/timeline/410612bwp.html one of his most famous speeches]]. |
| 442 | ---> ''We're still at war, and until every trace is '''sponged, and purged, and, if need be, blasted from the surface of the earth''', everybody's still gotta pitch in and do their job.'' |
| 443 | ** Also doubles as an internal shoutout: the US Army's resuppliers and reloaders were called "Sandlers", after one of the reloaders mimicked Creator/AdamSandler's performance in ''Film/TheWaterboy'' during a training session. |
| 444 | ** Arthur Sinclair, Jr., refers to the idea of "tools and talent" as "a term my son had heard once in a movie." This is likely in reference to Winston Zeddemore from ''Film/{{Ghostbusters 1984}}'' saying, "We have the tools! We have the talent!" |
| 445 | ** The story about the Long Island celebrity fortress is highly reminiscent of Creator/EdgarAllanPoe's "Literature/TheMasqueOfTheRedDeath". |
| 446 | ** There's one part where the astronaut mentions that the zombies must have found a [[Literature/WatershipDown high concentration of rabbits in the south of England]] and dug a large hole. |
| 447 | ** Christina Eliopolis refers to her sidearm as her "Meg." A footnote mentions this a common name for the sidearm, and posits the name comes from how the [[http://www.transformers-universe.com/content/images/galerie/pics/44/4407_Megatron_Gun.JPG suppressor, scope, and stock attached to the pistol]] make it resemble [[Franchise/TransformersGeneration1 the original Megatron]], though it notes nobody has confirmed this as the source of the nickname. |
| 448 | ** Two K-9 unit escort dogs are named [[WesternAnimation/OneHundredAndOneDalmatians Pongo and Perdy]]. |
| 449 | ** The Israeli official who devised Israel's plans to seal itself off to protect itself comments that, as he read the early reports of zombie attacks, to quote a pre-war superhero his "[[ComicBook/SpiderMan spider-sense was tingling]]". |
| 450 | ** Todd Wainio's name is a combination of two passengers' names from [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93 United Airlines Flight 93]]. |
| 451 | * ShowWithinAShow: We see a documentary filmmaker who chronicles humanity's survival in the war and makes propaganda features to inspire those who are so demoralized they are dying in their sleep. ''Victory at Avalon: The Battle of the Five Colleges'' was his first, followed by ''Anacapa'', ''Mission District'', ''Dos Palmos'', and ''[[BigDamnMovie Fire of the Gods]]'', the latter pretty much BackedByThePentagon and the first of ''Wonder Weapons'', which were BasedOnAGreatBigLie, as the technology they depict is useless against zombies, but images of zombie skulls literally being vaporized in slow-mo worked wonders for morale. All directed by Roy Elliot, Steven Spielberg's CaptainErsatz. There's also ''Hero City'', directed by Creator/MartinScorsese, of which there were two versions: one, which was pure inspirational propaganda, and the other a more unbiased view including plenty of examples of [[WarIsHell humans being total jerks.]] |
| 452 | * TheSiege: |
| 453 | ** The Hero City, all those other little holdouts, and the defense of the Five Colleges in California. |
| 454 | ** This is a significant part of the Reddeker Plan- the government would be in a safe area, while civilians were kept in well-defended areas... besieged by the living dead. As the plan puts it, every zombie attacking the civilians is one more not attacking the important people. |
| 455 | * SignificantGreenEyedRedHead: Sharon, a "feral" kid who was rescued and partly rehabilitated, who describes the outbreak reaching her town and serves as exposition for "ferals," children who were abandoned or orphaned during the outbreak and grew up as {{Wild Child}}ren. She's described as exceedingly pretty--if it wasn't for the fact she has the mind of a four-year-old. |
| 456 | * TheSimpleLifeIsSimple: Averted; the US government official charged with reviving the economy notes that over 65% of the population has no skills that are useful in the post-apocalyptic world, and a massive re-training effort is needed. |
| 457 | * SinisterSpyAgency: Referenced and deconstructed by Bob Archer, the Director of the CIA. He derisively notes that the CIA is neither some kind of sinister, omniscient octopus with ears in every back room and fingers in every pie nor a "all-seeing, all-knowing, global illuminati" responsible for every coup, change, and conspiracy since Pearl Harbour, but an organisation with limited resources and a need to spend them focusing on the biggest known threats to the nation. |
| 458 | * SlowClap: Mocked. The Chilean diplomat narrating the UN meeting and America's decision to go on the offensive said that, after the US President's big speech to retake the world, in a movie it would be the sort of bullshit, cheesy speech that would be followed by slow clapping and maybe the camera focusing on a tear sliding down someone's cheek. Instead, the UN council stares at him in stunned silence before launching into discussion. |
| 459 | * AStormIsComing: Alluded to in the opening chapter. Boy, is it. |
| 460 | * StrawmanNewsMedia: A lot of people got infected or trapped by infected because the media didn't sit up and pay attention until it was too late. At the very least, it's repeatedly mentioned ''no one'' would believe zombies rose from the dead until they were knocking on their door, but it's still portrayed as inexcusable. |
| 461 | * StrawVulcan: Paul Redeker, who firmly believes that human emotion only inhibits human progress, and who drafted the amoral Orange '84 for Apartheid-era South Africa which would be adapted into The Redeker Plan [[spoiler: Xolelwa proposes that this mindset was the only way a moral, sensitive man could ''survive'' UsefulNotes/TheApartheidEra. When Nelson Mandela bearhugs him in a display of genuine human warmth, he snaps and develops a split personality, Xolelwa Azania himself, who is far more cheerful and compassionate than Redeker ever was.]] |
| 462 | * SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: |
| 463 | ** During their exile, the Chinese submarine crew discovers a number of vessels that are dead and abandoned because the people fleeing on them made no preparations for long-term survival at sea, the American zepplin pilot watched highways full of people fleeing the cities with no plan, and in some cases attempting to flee to cities that others are fleeing from, and an entire segment is dedicated to the panicked flight to Northern Canada that resulted in nearly all refugees being wiped out and Canada's ecosystem irreparably destroyed, thanks to the complete lack of logical planning on the part of the refugees, many of whom had time to prepare. The first two could be seen as a TakeThat at the Romero ''[[Film/DawnOfTheDead1978 Dawn]]''/''[[Film/DayOfTheDead1985 Day]]''/''Film/LandOfTheDead'' movies, which ended with the protagonists driving, flying, or sailing away from the zombies with no real plan. |
| 464 | ** Several of the stories revolve around this happening to people who didn't think things through. The Japanese Otaku had the realization that shimmying down so many floors on a set of bedsheets isn't as easy as the movies depicted. |
| 465 | ** A helicopter gunship pilot at Yonkers tries to cut through a zombie horde with his rotor-blades and promptly crashes. |
| 466 | ** The CIA director says that although ordinary people pre-war thought of the CIA as an omnipresent and omnipotent force, it was really an earthly organization with finite resources and very human limitations. |
| 467 | ** A bunch of celebrities hole up in a well-stocked, heavily-fortified mansion and broadcast it to the world. They soon get swarmed by survivors looking to take that fortress for themselves. |
| 468 | ** A long-haired guy on rollerblades tries to fight a horde of zombies in New York City. His long hair promptly gets grabbed by zombies and he gets eaten. |
| 469 | ** At Yonkers, the airspace is crowded with all sorts of aircraft, from news choppers to helicopter gunships. Two news helicopters end up colliding in mid-air amid the chaos. |
| 470 | ** The Chinese submarine gets an anti-ship missile fired at it while surfaced. The missile ends up going for a nearby tanker ship since it offered a bigger radar cross-section for the missile to lock on to. |
| 471 | ** At Yonkers, far from headshots being 100% effective, some zombies survive being shot in the head because the bullet did not penetrate the brain. |
| 472 | * SwordsToPlowshares: As the Chinese military collapses, the crew of the Admiral Zheng He nuclear submarine defect with their vessel. They end up docking on an island in French Polynesia, where they use the submarine's capabilities to provide power to the locals, winning popularity and improving the population's quality of life [[spoiler:until the remnants of the Chinese military strike the island in revenge, forcing them to flee]]. |
| 473 | [[/folder]] |
| 474 | |
| 475 | [[folder:T-Z]] |
| 476 | * TakeThat: There are also plenty of Take Thats toward real celebrities, usually highly-obvious copies of contemporary celebrities, including a a thinly-veiled Karl Rove, [[Series/RealTimeWithBillMaher Bill Maher]], Ann Coulter, Paris Hilton, Larry the Cable Guy and various movie stars and musicians. The Rove-surrogate is found literally shoveling manure. |
| 477 | * TechnicallyLivingZombie: Quislings, despite not being infected: [[AxCrazy Crazed survivors]] who have gone so far off the deep end that their minds are permanently warped into the feral mindset of a zombie in an instinctual, last- ditch attempt to survive by imitating them, up to and including attacking and attempting to consume any other survivors they come across. They’re alive physically, but mentally are no better than the dead. Sadly, it doesn't save them because even though to a human they're identical to the Undead, real zombies aren't fooled and will attack them same as any other living creature. |
| 478 | * TankGoodness: |
| 479 | ** Subverted and averted. At Yonkers, the tanks aren't carrying appropriate ammunition--anti-tank kinetic darts are worth fuck-all against the living dead. Later in the war (in America's case at least), tanks get mothballed because the resources required to use them (i.e. fuel and ammunition) don't equate to a higher number of dead zombies than, say, an infantry platoon would. Todd Waino notes that the only time they were fielded was when A) a threat was human and B) something bad was going down, such as fighting rebel strongholds or criminal gangs who had taken over cities. |
| 480 | ** Russia played this straight, though, as it was mentioned that running over zombies with old tanks was a tactic they embraced. |
| 481 | * ThisIsReality: |
| 482 | ** The CIA director points out that the agency doesn't and never did have anything close to the resources people think they do, but also admits that the illusion thereof was something the CIA actively encouraged; they ''wanted'' the world to suspect the CIA of [[ZeroApprovalGambit being responsible for all its woes]], to [[BrandishmentBluff fear its wrath]], and perhaps [[SwordOfDamocles think twice before trying to harm American citizens]]. He also admits the downside of this was a big reason the Z War harmed America so badly; ''Americans'' believed those same things about the CIA, and thus the agency became the FallGuy for UsefulNotes/TheWarOnTerror, was crippled by [[YouHaveFailedMe the resulting purges]], and his personal efforts to prepare for the Z War were [[NotMeThisTime dissected in search of ulterior motives]]. |
| 483 | ** Actively subverted by filmmaker Roy Elliott. He admits that his movie about the Battle of Hope was unrealistic, but also points out that when 'reality' is a zombie-infested nightmare of bleakness, misery and hopelessness where simply going to bed one night and subconsciously choosing never to wake up again becomes the ''best'' option, an unrealistic movie that gives people enough hope to build a better world is hardly the worst thing. |
| 484 | * TooDumbToLive: |
| 485 | ** Jessika Hendricks explains to the interviewer how people (including her own family) traveling north packed horribly and were generally woefully unprepared to carry out their plans for taking advantage of freezing temperatures to protect them from zombies. She shows him a trash heap filled with [=DVDs=], video game consoles, laptops, and other things that couldn't possibly be of any use to them, and describes people dynamite fishing and cutting down all of the trees in the area for firewood in the early stages of their camp. Hendricks blames all of this idiocy mostly on authorities and news broadcasts that advised people to travel north without providing any information about long-term cold-weather wilderness survival. |
| 486 | ** The enclave of celebrities who broadcast their "fortress" on TV and the Internet, flaunting their food and security to the panicked masses dying literally across the street. The people, in turn, storm the gates to help their own survival. |
| 487 | ** The guy on TV whose plan of attack was to rollerblade at the zombies with a meat cleaver attached to a hockey stick and cut off the zombies' heads. He gets dragged into a sewer by his ponytail and then ridiculed by Paris Hilton. |
| 488 | ** From a military standpoint, nearly everything the US military does at Yonkers. The soldiers wore [[HazmatSuit HAZMAT suits]] that hindered movement and aiming on a hot day, ignored terrain advantages, brought in equipment that wasn't needed like portable bridges, and, most crucially, didn't have a sufficient supply of ammo. The grunt being interviewed bitterly lampshades this--it was all part of an ill-advised propaganda campaign that quickly went south. |
| 489 | * TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture: Land Warrior, Chinese nuclear subs and Comanches are deployed, the Chinese have a space station ([[spoiler:though it turns out it's not much but an orbital denial system in case things heat up on the ground]]), and computers have voice-typing. One of the previous wars is heavily hinted as having been the Iraq War, fuel-cells are used on boats, though it's apparently a recent post-war invention, cell phones that can video-conference are widespread, and pre-apocalypse Russia has become a (albeit imperfect and corrupt) free and liberal democracy. |
| 490 | * TookALevelInBadass: Seems to be one of the book's central themes. In the face of a ZombieApocalypse, some people get killed and others get [[WorldOfBadass Awesome]]. |
| 491 | ** Tomonaga Ijiro and Kondo Tatsumi. A blind gardener and a {{hikikomori}}, respectively, before the war. Together, they singlehandedly survived in zombie-infested Japan and founded a zombie-killing society. |
| 492 | ** A nun who ended up using a candlestick to kill zombies for a week straight, and then joined the army. |
| 493 | ** A bunch of California college students turn zombie repelling force, outperforming the professional militaries of most countries. |
| 494 | ** The US Army itself. Utterly humiliated at the Battle of Yonkers, forced into tucking tail and running for the Rockies, they alter their entire doctrine, equipment, and tactics and become the first standing military force to initiate a counterattack against the hordes. It takes three years, but they literally scour the country and make the United States the first country to be liberated from zombies. |
| 495 | * UncannyValley: [[invoked]] The fact that zombies never blink (which causes the milky-white eyes in older corpses, due to built-up dust, filth, and eye damage) is enough to make Wainio and the New Army hesitate for a second during their first real engagement. It's also theorized that the sheer inhumanity of walking corpses is what drove several people into literally being depressed to death by having to share a world with freaks that shouldn't live. |
| 496 | * UnreliableNarrator: |
| 497 | ** Since the book is a compiled oral history made by various survivors ten to twenty years after the events occurred, not every piece of information should be taken at face-value. Occasionally the book has footnotes correcting or corroborating specific facts that people have relayed, but in most cases there is no "official" word as to accuracy. |
| 498 | ** The intro to the book even says that this is kind of the point- there are official reports in-universe, but they don't show the personal, human, incomplete touch. The horror of a four-year-old whose mom tried to kill her to MercyKill her, a woman who [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane might have hallucinated a voice that guided her to safety]], a refugee who didn't know the larger context of the war... |
| 499 | * UndeadChild: Children aren't exempt from infection. PatientZero was a child who went Moon fishing and got more than he bargained for, and several of the survivors' stories detail run-ins with infected children. |
| 500 | * TheVirus: Solanum, although never mentioned by name, is implied to be the reason for the living dead. |
| 501 | * VoiceOfTheResistance: Radio Free Earth, one of the only constants of the entire war. Given that a great deal of countries lacked access to the Internet or television, and that radio waves couldn't be cut off by zombies smashing in the nearest data/broadcast center, it was a vital resource for survivals, teaching them how to fight back and hole up. |
| 502 | * VoiceWithAnInternetConnection: "Metsfan," the [[spoiler: (possibly imagined or divine)]] Skywatcher who helped the downed pilot Christina Eliopolis get picked up in a white zone. |
| 503 | * WeAreStrugglingTogether: Rather than the "humanity forming a unified front against a global enemy" concept often seen in similar works, the U.N. Conference turns ''ugly'' once the suggestion is made to "go on the attack". In the end, several nations abjectly refuse to leave their established defenses and reportedly pay the price for it. |
| 504 | * WeHaveReserves: The Chinese leadership's behavior, until those reserves rebelled and dropped a nuke on them. The sheer bullheaded idiocy of employing this tactic when ''each of your casualties turns into an enemy'' is talked about and illustrated. |
| 505 | * WhatHappenedToMommy: One of the reasons the virus spread out of control; family members carry their infected loved ones across borders, even if they have to smuggle them past checkpoints, and even if the victim has gone full zombie. |
| 506 | * WhatHappenedToTheMouse: In-universe: North Korea. No one knows what happened, and no one ''wants'' to know, out of fear that they've been zombified if the theory that they're underground by now is true. |
| 507 | * WhiteMansBurden: '''Rich'' Man's Burden' in "Closure, LTD" is the reason Thomas Kiersted chose to take up his line of work. |
| 508 | * WildChild: The Ferals, who are young adults, teenagers, and children who were either abandoned or lost by their parents during The Great Panic as very young children, or had their parents killed by zombies, disease, suicide, or other humans. Todd Wainio compares them to very angry feral gorillas. There's a post-war effort to tame and reintroduce them into society; Sharon, the one who is interviewed, is described as one of the luckier cases since she has retained the capacity for language. Mind you, she's still psychologically broken and has the mind of a four-year-old. |
| 509 | * WinterOfStarvation: |
| 510 | ** While being interviewed by the author, Jesika Hendrix says her parents grabbed a good deal of instant food, and went north with her in a camper, figuring that during the winter the zombies would freeze and they would be free of the threat. Except that with a massive societal collapse, the instant food ran out quickly, and they couldn't grow new food quickly, especially in winter. She herself was sick in bed in the family camper when she heard raised voices in argument, a gunshot, and suddenly there was a stew with meat in it back on the menu. She didn't ask where the meat came from. She didn't want to know. |
| 511 | ** On top of the specific horrors that Jesika recalls happening in the Canadian wilderness (murder, fighting, social breakdown, starvation, cannibalism, brutal fighting), she mentions that so-called "Gray Winters" have happened since the zombie war. While eleven million people died in North America, she says that thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of refugees spilt into Siberia from urban areas of Japan, India, and China (not to mention other cold areas such as Iceland, Greenland, and Scandinavia). The ash from their fires literally turned the sky gray for years afterwards, and presumably a large amount of that was caused by the makeshift cremation of human bodies. Even a hardened refugee like Jesika says she can't bear thinking about what happened to people in other countries, with even less understanding of extreme cold. |
| 512 | * ZeppelinsFromAnotherWorld: Part of the US anti-zombie defenses after the war is airships. Zeppelins can theoretically fly low enough and slow enough that snipers on board can pick off zombies one by one; they're more fuel-efficient and can cover long distances, both of which matter when you're trying to recover vast swathes of contaminated areas; they're airborne and thus safe so long as they stay that way; they don't need fuel to stay airborne and mobile (they're "just" uncontrollable); your speed doesn't have to be very fast when the enemy's top speed is "shamble"; and the fragility of the airships is a moot point in general due to the fact that zombies have neither the intelligence nor the coordination to have any sort of anti-aircraft defense in the first place. |
| 513 | * ZergRush: |
| 514 | ** The zombies, particularly massive chain-swarm battles like Yonkers. A massive human-wave attack in which individual zombies are utterly expendable and, using superior numbers, soak up all of the humans' heavy ammunition, then just keep on coming. At the height of the war, the continental United States east of the Rocky Mountains is swarming with 200 million zombies, each of which is its own self-contained fighting unit. In contrast, the ~100 million or so surviving humans west of the Rockies are a support base for the small fraction of humans actually serving in the new military (it's not as if babies and the elderly can fight, not to mention those who are physically incapable, such as the infirm or crippled). So the actual odds are truly something like two hundred to one. |
| 515 | ** The Chinese military's entire strategy [[spoiler:up until [[TheRevolutionWillNotBeVilified the Revolution]]]]. Russia also attempted this... and was a tad more successful. The difference was that the Chinese attempted ''simultaneous'' zerg rushes against every city in the country, not establishing Safe Zones to use as a springboard for later offensives. The Russians actually did establish a Safe Zone east of the Ural Mountains, walled off all of their major cities, and then cleared each city one by one using zerg rushes. The Chinese Politburo used zerg rushes because they were stubborn fools who refused to change tactics, while the Russians used zerg rushes mostly because most of their military was so antiquated and poorly armed by the time of the war that they had little choice. |
| 516 | * ZombieApocalypse: The setting for much of the book. And while ultimately Humanity manages to reclaim their place as the dominant lifeform, it does so at great cost, and the fighting is still not over twenty years after the conflict officially started, and ''ten'' years after it officially ended. |
| 517 | * ZombieGait: As per the lore established in [[Literature/TheZombieSurvivalGuide the previous book,]] zombies can't manage much faster than a lurching, drunken shamble when it comes to motion, due to brain damage and decaying tendons. It's mentioned a handful of times that you're better off in the streets, where you can easily outrun Zack, than in a bottlenecked building. |
| 518 | * ZombieInfectee: Many stories included the infected trying to hide their infection, and the methods used to detect the infection. |
| 519 | ** An early story involves a discussion of China once again screwing over humanity by killing infected dissidents and selling their organs on the black market. This meant that the problem rapidly became global as millions of infected organs were shipped worldwide. |
| 520 | ** Averted, however, in many stories where people were accidentally infected and completely at terms with what this meant, including one story where a man believed he had been bitten by a zombie who turned out to be a quisling. Ironically, he almost died of a staph infection as a result. |
| 521 | [[/folder]] |
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