Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
This is Real Life. Everyone knows zombies are make-believe creatures, they're only "real" in the movies. If you see a "zombie", odds are it's one of your friends with poor taste who insist on scaring you, or someone who has been in an accident of some kind. So when a zombie outbreak starts, it's unsurprising that most people will chafe when confronted with something that should not be. Still, most have the presence of mind to back away from a smelly, shambling man who is missing limbs and moaning for brainssss!
That is rarely the case. There will always be one person who misidentifies the living-impaired as a regular, if badly hurt, human. There's two variants of this, with differing levels of idiocy involved.
- Someone is walking through the deserted area, when they see a moaning, pale-looking body lying face down on the floor. Said body may already be bleeding or even missing large, fairly visible chunks of flesh, and may already be ghost white or putrefying green, but the character in question will never notice (or ignore it). Instead, they will run right up to the body, put aside whatever weapon they're carrying, and promptly try to hoist up the apparently distressed individual (often accompanied by dialogue like, "Are you alright?" or "Don't worry, I'll get you out of here."). Hilarity Ensues when the putrefying face of the obviously-a-zombie is revealed, and promptly tries to eat the character's head. This is generally the first zombie that the character encounters, so they tend to survive.
- Someone (usually a law enforcement official), points a gun at a zombie and orders them to freeze, or threatens them with pepper spray or arrest or something if they come towards them. They usually fail to notice the fairly obvious fact that the shambling mess of entrails in front of them doesn't have anything like a rational mind left to respond to commands, and assume they're not threatened by the gun (technically true). In general, this is a situation somewhat peculiar to zombie movies involving both Genre Blindness and a lack of common sense, when a character simply doesn't notice extremely obvious signs of something being deeply amiss with the people they are dealing with, up to and including, shambling, moaning, cannibalism and rotten flesh.
- Depending on the officer/character's learning curve, he might fire a warning shot, notice no effect, shoot the zombie, notice no effect, then get suitably freaked out and do one of three things: hightail it out of there, use "lethal" force, or get eaten by refusing to believe it's a zombie. In real life, officers are rather constrained in this scenario by being trained to use "escalating force" when facing an "unarmed civilian."
- This is further complicated by the existence in real life of living people who dress up as and pretend to be zombies, often in sizable hordes. Expect this to start coming into play in fiction in the near future.
Generally, any character who thinks a zombie is Not a Zombie is also prone to having Zombie Infectee behaviour or becoming one. If he doesn't accept that the creatures outside are zombies, he can't very well become one after being bitten, now, can he?
Contrast: Most Definitely Not A Villain, Paper Thin Disguise. Not to be confused with " not called a zombie".
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime/Manga
Film
Literature
- In The Zombie Haiku Book, the writer notices one of his coworkers eating spaghetti in her car. The poem after that is him realizing A:) that's not spaghetti, and B:) There's something very, very, wrong with his coworker.
- In World War Z, "The Great Panic", in which the growing zombie pandemic overwhelms the ability of governments worldwide to cope with it and results in the deaths of two-thirds of the human race, occurs in part because few people were able to cope with the idea that the walking dead were just that.
- This was actually a major plot point in Obsidian Butterfly, the last Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novel: the apparently comatose kinning victims in the hospital were actually all inert zombies. Although in this case, it wasn't because people didn't believe in zombies, it was just that these zombies had been so well made that they still had all their vital signs.
- Pride And Prejudice And Zombies has this happen to Charlotte. Elizabeth is the only one who notices this, and that's only because she already knew. This is despite several fairly revolting scenes such as the dinner at Rosings, where Charlotte eats her own bloody pus.
Live Action TV
- In DeadSet, a group of people stop and pick up a person who is being attacked by a zombie. Of course, nobody seems to care that a human being was eating him and are totally shocked when he starts biting them.
Video Games
- It happens in the opening sequence of Left 4 Dead, with a Witch. Bill realizes what it is and try to leave quietly without antagonizing it but Louis freaks out due to an oncoming horde, rushes into the room to warn Bill and Zoey and accidentally triggers the Witch's Berserk Button.
- Resident Evil has played the second type throughout the series. However its averted in the first game when the Player Character realizes that the zombie isn't human (the fact its encountered killing and eating a former colleague helps, of course).
- Resident Evil 2 reproduces the first example word for word.
- It's a big subversion in Resident Evil 4 when Leon (who knows all about zombie outbreaks) takes down his first enemy and realizes "It's not a zombie!"
- Resident Evil 5, Chris Redfield, you IDIOT. Sheva presumably has an excuse, but Chris does the whole type-1 thing.
- Something like this happens when the player first runs into a Despoiled in Wolfenstein. BJ blows up the Nazis' Black Sun machine, causing it to release a shockwave that vapourises everyone in the room except himself and one particular Gestapo officer. The guy stands in place for a few moments, writhing in apparent pain, and BJ walks right up to him, presumably to force him to surrender. Imagine his (and the player's) surprise when the Nazi suddenly turns around and roars, revealing his skeletal face.
Web Comics
- When Mark first encounters the zombies in Real Life in Weregeek, he doesn't believe in them, assuming they are a follow-up RPG to the vampire coven to which he's been just introduced. He is partly right: these are not real zombies but they also have nothing to do with role-playing.
- During the Zombie Ninjas storyline in The Adventures Of Dr Mc Ninja, the Doc shoots an old man who he assumes to be a zombie, only to realize that he must've made a mistake when the old man's granddaughter shows up, and he realizes he must've just killed an old man because he looked dead. He was a zombie after all. He'd been dead for weeks, and the incident clues the Doc into the fact that the zombies aren't all zombie ninjas
Web Original
Western Animation
- A classic:
Doctor: Well, your temperature is only 55 degrees, you have no pulse, no heartbeat, and your eyes are all puffy and sticky... Mortician: Oh no! You mean...? Doctor: Yeah, I'm afraid the two of you have pinkeye.
- "Homer, you shot the zombie Flanders!" "Flanders was a zombie?"
- Fred Jones is probably the one dude nobody could call stupid, for falling prey to this trope. How many times have he and the other Scooby-Doo characters faced monsters that were fake? So it's not really his fault that he stubbornly tried to pull a real zombie's mask off in Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, muttering various potential suspects' names as he did so. When its head came off in his hands and he insisted it must be animatronic, however, even Daphne and Velma called him out on being in denial.
|
|