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Two hundred million zombies. Who can even visualize that type of number, let alone combat it?... For the first time in history, we faced an enemy that was actively waging total war. They had no limits of endurance. They would never negotiate, never surrender. They would fight until the very end because, unlike us, every single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to consuming all life on Earth. That's the enemy that waited for us beyond the Rockies. That's the kind of war we had to fight.
-General Travis D'Ambrosia, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe
World War Z is a companion piece to the The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. (Who is the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft. Seriously.)
The book is designated satire, as it has a combination of horror, drama, and sociopolitical commentary. It's written as a collection of interviews with survivors and important figures telling the story of a Zombie war that nearly causes the extinction of mankind. In the Z war 'verse, Zombies come about through a virus called Solanum and it spreads in the usual way per the John Russo rules about zombies. The zombies themselves seem to operate following a bit of the Russo rules and a bit of the Romero rules.
It is also in production as a motion picture.
The book contains the following tropes:
- Affably Evil: The pharmaceutical executive.
- After The End: Takes place approximately twenty years after the Zombie Apocalypse.
- All There In The Manual: Though it's not exactly necessary to read The Zombie Survival Guide by Brooks, the book does expound on the history of the solanum virus and the ways to combat it.
- Apocalypse How: Class 1, though arguably Class 2 if you want to judge by some locations, e.g., Russia and probably North Korea.
- Arab Israeli Conflict: Settled by the zombie invasion. Israel invites all Palestinians into Israeli boarders, then starts a voluntary quarantine. It saves them from the brunt of the zombies, but a faction of Orthodox Jews starts a civil war in reaction to the Arabs.
- Because they don't really know how to fight, however, the Israeli army crushes them fairly easily.
- Author Avatar: Brooks himself, although he never mentions himself by name (he did play himself as the interviewer in the audiobook).
- Autobots Rock Out: Lampshaded at the Battle of Hope
- America Saves The Day: 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. The usual slow-clapping trope is mocked heartily by the narrator; the 85 other UN members just stare at him until a recess is called, not voting until the next day.
- Ascended Fanboy - the Hikkikomori in Japan, who later learns Zatoichi skills from a blind man in Hokkaido. They kill hundreds of thousands (if not more) of zombies, and post war, they're forming up a civilian defense and preparedness organization.
- Author Appeal / Shout Out: Iron Maiden. Some of the music blared to improve troop morale and lure Zack into prepared killzones is reminisced about with a certain fondness by the veteran interviewee, who also quotes lyrics.
- Awesome But Impractical- 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 around (armchair general strategy is completely torn to shreds by the veteran that narrates the story.) allows the army to be slaughtered. This happens all over the world, apparently.
- This is played during the movie producer's interview as well. He points out how Awesome But Impractical weapons like anti-missile lasers (that are, nonetheless, capable of vaporizing a zombie) can still be useful, because they raise the morale of people at home.
- Bad Ass: The Otaku becomes a Bad Ass after his Bedsheet Ladder escape and finding a rare high-quality Imperial Japan-era katana. Besides this, anyone who survived to dictate their story post-war has to exhibit some level of badass. Especially the Yonkers vet, who carries about a fifth of the entire plot with his stories (and was voiced by Luke Skywalker in the audiobook!).
- Bedsheet Ladder: The Otaku in Japan escapes from his high-rise this way, and nearly kills himself doing it, after slipping due to high winds and losing his grip. Averted, as he only goes the length of one sheet at a time, and has to loot every good sheet he can find to compensate for the apartments that are locked, infested, or both.
- Belief Makes You Stupid: Toyed with, and justified; some African communities react to The Virus the same way they reacted to AIDS in Real Life.
- Big Applesauce: Hero City.
- Bittersweet Ending: 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.
- Boom Headshot: 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 centre mass, not the head.
- Somewhat subverted, as the soldiers at Yonkers figured out fairly early that they had to shoot for the head, but years of training to shoot for the center of mass doesn't go away easily. This isn't helped by one soldier screaming across the radio that he shot a zombie in the head and it didn't drop (he'd grazed the skull without hitting the brain), causing the others to freak out by thinking the zombies are invincible.
- Boring But Practical: The "Lobotomizer", the cheapest and most efficient zombie-killing device developed during the war, is a modified shovel.
- But What About The Astronauts?: They all were exposed to cosmic radiation due to their prolonged stay in space. The sole survivor died days after giving his interview.
- They don't spend their time waiting to be rescued; instead, they maintain the satellites in Earth orbit, allowing the surviving people and nations of Earth to stay in contact, share information, and fight back against Zack. THAT's what about the astronauts.
- Cool But Inefficient: Both played straight and subverted - the Battle of Yonkers used Shock and Awe technique, but Zombies cannot be shocked or awed. But later in the book, they used Shock and Awe weapons because, although they didn't do much against the zombies, they were excellent for survivor morale.
- Corrupt Church - During the war, the Russian Orthodox Church took over the job of executing infectees, as the officers, especially those who had gone through the decimations, often found themselves pushed over the edge by having to kill their men. Eventually, the church started abusing its power, using infection as an excuse to execute government officials and soldiers who opposed them. This led to Russia becoming a theocratic empire. Brooks interviews a chaplain who started the frenzy of executing infected personnel in Russia.
- The book is rather inconclusive as to whether it was the church that encouraged the corruption, or already corrupt politicians used the church's practice (which began as a mercy to the injured fighting men) in order to further their own means, due to a later comment where the Russian leader (implied to be Vladimir Putin) takes the title of Tsar.
- Crazy Prepared: 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.
- The otaku/hacker (otakuer?) was looking for information online about zombies for e-prestige, and when it came time to face reality, he found he had all the knowledge he needed.
- 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.
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome: Pretty much the entire second half of the book.
- Some highlights:
- The former pro wrestler who picked up and USED a zombie as a club. And broke down crying at the scent of perfume that reminded him of his mother.
- The nun who defended her Sunday school class for nine days with a six-foot iron candle holder.
- The rancher who defended his herd from a zombie attack in true cowboy style.
- The crew of the International Space Station, who stayed behind to keep as much important satellites up and running, getting a massive dose of radiation in the process. The one interviewed has the best room, with the best meds, in the best hospital in Australia. He died three days after the interview, having survived the longest out of the entire crew. He still insists they weren't heroes.
- The blind old gardener... who is more or less
Daredevil Zatoichi.
- Oh let's not forget his closing line "I told him that we might be facing fifty million monsters, but those monsters would be facing the gods."
- The Battle of the Five Colleges, where about 300 students held off a zombie horde with nothing but garden tools, wooden planks, songs, and practice rifles.
- "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.'" Windsor survived the war.
- 500 Maori warriors against half of zombified Auckland. It's strongly implied the Maori won.
- The people of New York fighting the zombies with basically anything they could get their hands on. Sure, they probably all die, but it's still cool.
- Death By Materialism: 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.
- Did Not Do The Research - Pretty intentional. The survivalist woman Brooks talks to in Canada has no clue that cells don't burst when frozen. Not everyone knows this.
- In the book itself, Brooks severely underestimates the effects of certain weapons (Or how the Land Warrior system worked).
- The book has a funny fictional example. One of the celebrities in the Long Island fortress, a big-name rapper, had an AK-47 with a grenade launcher, and he loved to go on about how it was an exact replica of the one from Scarface. The bodyguard narrating "didn't have the heart" to tell him Mr. Montana used an M16.
- Disability Superpower (One unusually Troperrific chapter features a samurai with Daredevil-type blindness surviving alone in the woods.)
- It's better than that, actually. He was blind as a result of being a Nagasaki survivor, and became a Bad Ass simply by running away into the woods so that nobody would have to think about the useless old gardener that nobody likes. Using a spade to kill the zombies and politely thanking them for making so much noise before he did so just makes it better.
- Also the man whose life was saved by the fact that he was in a wheelchair. A "dragger" (zombie with no legs) grabbed at his wheel from behind. Without the chair, it would have had him by the ankle and he wouldn't have had time to react.
- Dying Like Animals ...or not dying in some cases.
- Bats - It's widespread denial that allows the zombie plague to grow to epidemic proportions.
- Sheep - the people who buy into the rabies vaccine that a sleazy pharmaceutical manufacturer put out with FDA approval.
- Weasels - the aforementioned sleazy pharmaceutical manufacturer who puts out the vaccine for rabies. In his defense, he didn't know that Solanum wasn't rabies until it was too late.
- Chickens - The freeway full of stopped cars, in addition to other mass evacuations.
- Ostriches - those who can't handle the idea of family and friends turning into zombies and hold onto the undead things, hoping for a cure.
- Boars - Yonkers. Military strategy included equipping soldiers with flashbangs.
- Plague Rats - those who try to pass themselves off as healthy, even though they're infected and are going to turn into zombies.
- Wolves - the Crusoes and LaMOEs] -Last Men on Earth. The crazy/lucky/bad-ass survivors who are found years after being cut off from civilization.
- Jackals - The Quislings - unfortunately for them, zombies know that they're faking.
- Turtles-Many survivors take over castles in their home countries. Sometimes, due to ignorance or apparently insufficient willpower, these are overrun, but the vast majority manage to make it through. They even made a movie about one.
- Everythings Better With Monkeys - The Indian Engineer who is forced into guarding the mountain pass during the Indian evacuation notes the mass amount of monkeys also fleeing. He later gets pissed on after a general detonates the roadside bombs, blocking off the road.
- Evil Detecting Dog: Dogs could detect Solanum infected and would freak out. Certain dog breeds were used to hunt zombies, and to attack and kill them where humans could not easily get in/out.
- Expy: Several; see No Celebrities Were Harmed below.
- Genre Savvy: 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.
- Grande Dame: The Queen of England is an example of the more heroic version of this trope.
- Heel Realization — The guy narrating the celebrity mansion story realizes that the people attacking are human, not zombies.
- Heroic BSOD: Paul Redeker, who spent his whole career engineering how to save the elite white population of South Africa from a populist black uprising through sacrificing "unnecessary" citizens in a patently amoral, emotionlessly logical, and detailed survival plan. Then the zombies show up. But it's when he's embraced by Nelson Mandela that his emotional isolationism cracks and he embraces his own humanity. He also goes crazy.
- Lots of soldiers in the US Army 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. 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 breakdown after seeing, of all things, a turtle.
- Granted, the book says that by then, "turtles were like unicorns."
- Heroic Sacrifice: Averted with General Raj-Singh. He tries to do as such... only to be bashed over the head by his men to force his retreat. People would later claim that he "chickened out", but an Indian engineer and a crewman from the ISS interviewed for the book both refute this claim. Played straight with the ISS crew.
- Hey Its That Voice: Half the cast of the audiobook:
- Alan Alda as Aurthur Sinclair
- Mark Hamill as Todd Wainio
- Carl Reiner as Jurgen Warbrunn
- Rob Reiner as "The Whacko" (Howard Dean)
- Henry Rollins as T. Sean Collins
- John Turturro as Serosha Garcia Alvarez
- Eamonn Walker as David Allen Forbes and Paul Redeker
- Hilarious In Hindsight: Barack Obama is implied to be the "first choice" for Vice President of the bipartisan war-time U.S. government, but is passed over in favour of Howard Dean. Two years later in the real world, Obama is elected President of the United States.
- Hollywood Tactics: The Battle of Yonkers goes straight past this and into Plot Induced Stupidity. Only having one line of defense. Trying to take and build cover (blasting tank bunkers out of parking lots, even!) against a force without weapons. Not totally securing the combat zone. Reserving artillery until the enemy is in sight of said infantry line. Firing all your artilley at the initial small groups of zombies instead of letting the lighter guns handle them. Keeping the Air Force completely shut out until one emergency bombardment. Not following up on the airstrike after it wiped out a good portion of the horde.
- Which is duly-noted by a pissed off grunt, who noted that A) the officers treated this as a great way to increase PR, B) pointing out the shitty tactics, C) citing this as the reason why no one wanted to touch modern weaponry after that.
- Oddly enough, one of the things said grunt complained about was not only one of the few things they did right, but even saved his life by his own account.
- Hot Sub On Sub Action: A rogue Chinese sub faces off against a Loyalist sub.
- I Did What I Had To Do: Various cases of people doing what they needed to do to survive...including some pretty grisly stuff.
- Immune To Bullets: Unless you get the zombie with a good headshot, it isn't gonna work. It'll keep coming.
- Improvised Weapon: The genesis of the Lobotomizer, which was a lifesaver for the headache the government had to go through in terms of budget. Not to mention the other creative ways people found to kill Zack.
- Inferred Holocaust: While the book has a hopeful "humanity will survive!" tone, it leaves off in such a way that one misstep could start the whole thing all over again... but even that's hopeful because of how much humanity learned from the horrible experience.
- Not really. The virus was successful only because people were completely unprepared for it in terms of equipment and tactics. Pretty much everyone on the planet knows how the virus worked, how to kill zombies, and how to tell if someone was infected or not means that the chances of the Z-War happening again were effectively nil.
- Israelis With Infrared Missiles: The first official zombie warning and action plan come from Israel.
- As a consequence of the above, Israel also manages to deal with the zombie invasion much better than many other nations, despite having a short civil war.
- The Jor El: The authors of the Warmbrunn-Knight report were one example.
- Karma Houdini: The fake vaccine manufacturer.
- Turns out, the US convinced Russia not to renew his rent, and he will have to return home very soon. With the post-war punishments (which are no longer slaps on the wrist), he's in for a very, very bad time.
- Laser Guided Karma: 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
poop bullshit for a living. Which, in This Troper's opinion, means that he has the same job just with a pay reduction.
- Last Of His Kind: Averted - the military encounters hundreds of self-proclaimed Last Men on Earth (or LaMOE, pronounced "lame-o"), during the reclaimation of the eastern US.
- Several groups of semi-independence movements
- Mama Bear - 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!
- One might say with her...Bear hands?
- Military Alphabet - Designation of some weapons and tactics against the undead.
- New Media Are Evil: Lampshaded. The interviewer asks the pharmaceutical exec why people didn't hear from alternative media. The exec says that anyone from such media would be dismissed as crackpots. The book was published in late 2006, and even then, people would have posted the zombies on Youtube and Flickr the second they got an Internet connection. Thousands of people would definitely make CNN sit up and take notice. There's a grand total of one blog mentioned in the entire book, though it's implied alternate media was on fire with this stuff.
- Averted in the case of the otaku. 2ch/2chan had been busy.
- This troper wants to meet Max and ask "Did Jon Stewart and Stephan Colbert survive?"
- Nightmare Fuel: Depends on what wigs out the reader, but there's a wide selection.
- The people receiving infected organs via transplants and transforming into zombies days, weeks, even months later.
- The implication of all those women being infected after receiving donated eggs and/or sperm is even worse.
- North Korea. The entire population moves underground to escape the zombies. Either they're still alive and think everyone on the surface is dead, or they've all become zombies and are trying to dig their way back up to the surface. You choose your own nightmare.
- Nightmare Fuel Unleaded: All of Jessika Hendriks' story. From the trip north with the possibly infected female hitchhiker, to the absolute horror of the Canadian settlement turning on each other after the first few months. Especially when the camp started resorting to cannibalism to survive.
- Also, the sailors on a Russian signal interception ship listening to the last frantic transmissions from a dying world. All of them end up committing suicide.
- "If I had nightmares, which I don't."
- Sharon's story about how the church she was holed up in as a child was overrun and some of the adults KILLED some of 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. 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.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: None were named, although Reuben Studdard gets blown up by a hand grenade. Yup. Paris Hilton, Bill Maher (Mr. High Fructose Corn Syrup), and Ann Coulter were also at the ill-fated celebrity bunker. Howard Stern survives the war, and even gets his radio show back on the air after civilization is restored.
- This troper took the Political Comedian to be Jon Stewart or Stephan Colbert.
- And Geraldo Rivera goes down at Yonkers.
- Not to mention the President and Vice-President are implied to be Colin Powell and Howard Dean, and the pre-war president's Chief of Staff appears to be an angrier Karl Rove. Meanwhile, Barack Obama is mentioned in passing as the first choice for Vice-President of the bipartisan wartime U.S. government.
- Todd Wainio states at one point that he had a squadmate he swore to God was Michael Stipe, but was never able to get the man to admit it.
- Nelson Mandela has a brief cameo, though he is only referred to as Rolihlahla, his original given name.
- No Endor Holocaust: The zombie threat is gone, but a lot of regions of the world (such as the Canadian north) are deforested and hopelessly polluted. Other areas, such as Iceland, have too many Zombies for humans to risk living there, and Iran and Pakistan are covered in radiation from a nuclear war between the two countries. The world's beaches are off-limits due to the millions of uncounted zombies still staggering around on the sea floor, most whale species are extinct or facing imminent extinction (and probably most other aquatic species as well), and global climate is only just starting to normalize after billions of refugees start smog-causing bonfires.
- Actually the nuclear winter was aided by those campfires. It was caused by the nuclear exchange between Iran and Pakistan.
- Nope. The Australian astronaut mentions the ash and smog from the fires first, and the actual nuclear activity as an afterthought.
- Noodle Incident: 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. 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 - normal Americans, mind you) and "Zhitomir" (where the Ukrainian government apparently tried and failed to use nerve gas to stop the zombies).
- Also Noodled is the high suicide rate of "those sick fucks at China Lake" weapons research center.
- The fall of Hero city even when the citizens take the fight to the streets with baseball bats.
- A few survivors also mentioned the last broadcast out of Buenos Aires and one guy killing himself immediately after hearing it.
- Subverted: A number of incidents, such as the Three Gorges Dam, the evacuation of Japan, etc. are mentioned in passing by survivors, only to be explained in detail later on.
- Tibet and Ireland are very briefly mentioned in passing, the former being home to 'the worlds most populous city' (Lhasa) and the later as playing host to the Holy See in exile (Armagh) implying that both countries survived comparatively unscathed and have become refugee magnets.
- Not Using The Zed Word: Somewhat subverted. 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.
- One Man Army: One of Todd Waino's sections mentions a soldier who was a former prowrestler. "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."
- Paranoia Fuel: The entire premise of a zombie apocalypse and the all-too-realistic depictions of our governments failing to handle it is enough to keep you awake for a very long time.
- Posthumous Character: General Raj-Singh, whose rediscovery of 18th century infantry tactics helped win the war years after his own death.
- Pretend That Were Dead: Doesn't work. The Quislings (people who have been driven insane by the Zombie Apocalypse and start to believe that they are zombies, and moan and shamble accordingly) are attacked along with everyone else.
- Primal Fear: 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 live in a world like that.
- The Quisling: A psychological disorder in World War Z: It's another human psychological response to living in the Uncanny Valley and dealing with Primal Fear 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. While the zombies actually can tell apart Quislings from real zombies through various criteria, humans could only tell by a) shooting them and seeing warm blood come out, and b) seeing if they blink.
- Redshirt Army: Played straight, deconstructed, then subverted.
- Shout Out: One of the characters Brooks interviews in the book tosses out a line from one of his father's movies, The Producers.
- Near the end, two Marines play a skit from "Free to Be, You and Me", another of his father's works.
- Strawman News Media: Type 4. Their quest for ratings was partly responsible for the disaster in Yonkers, which started the Great Panic.
- It's implied those that did report as such were either dismissed as being hysterical (Apathetic Citizens, after all), or when it was too late.
- The Power Of Rock: 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 on their traditional war songs — 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' choice? Heavy Metal.
- The Siege: "The Hero City" on the and all those other little "holdouts" and the defense of the Five Colleges in California.
- Squick: A lot. Particularly the descriptions of "digested" human remains found inside the zombies. This troper was also deeply disturbed by the infection-by-organ-transplant vignette.
- This troper found the first zombie description, the one of the small boy, extremely Squick.
- Take That: Against himself - one interviewee (Barati Palshigar, starting from page 194 for the Three Rivers Press edition) comments on Brooks' survival guide being useless because it was written by an American, for Americans... and thus not a whole hell of a lot of good to people living in vastly different cultures and environments (Believe it or not, not every country will allow you to have an assortment of firearms and blades lying around the house just in case the dead rise). It's also dismissed (after a fashion) by Todd Wainio, complete with a masturbation joke.
- Also full of Take Thats toward obvious celebrities, usually Anvilicious copies of contemporary celebrities, including a a thinly-veiled Karl Rove, Bill Maher, Ann Coulter, Paris Hilton, and many other movie stars.
- Also against other zombie literature, in a metafiction manner — it's repeated several times that there were rampant rumors that the zombies were fast (the 28 ... Later series), supernatural (Evil Dead, DooM, et cetera) mutating (Resident Evil), intelligent (Romero's later movies), or trainable (ditto), and there were many attempts to quell these rumors.
- Tank Goodness: 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. On the other hand, you'd think that presumably tanks and armoured vehicles would be the safest way to neutralise large hordes of zombies...Notably, they are later used to put down would-be seperatists, particularly in the Deep South, with one soldier noting that's the only time post-Yonkers he saw tanks used in the war. Note that this is only in America; in other countries, tanks are mentioned as being in use, but only mentioned in accounts relatively early in the war (with the exception of Russia, which uses whatever it can get its hands on - rusting Soviet equipment, mostly). Indeed, being in a tank is the only thing that saves a Ukrainian armoured platoon as the air force drops chemical weapons to kill infected civilians before they can reanimate.
- Tear Jerker: Lots. Probably the worst example is of a Ukrainian soldier looking back at a statue of Mother Russia triumphant as his unit flees from the ruins of Kiev.
- A similar scene plays out with the German garrison at Hamburg, when they were ordered to leave the civilians behind in order to move to a more defensible position. Abandoning the civilians (and dealing with their horrified/enraged reactions) was bad enough, but on the way to safety the German commander encounters another army unit commanded by a friend who had saved his life in Bosnia. His friend's unit was already in tatters after constant fighting with the zombies, so it was being left behind "to hold to the last" in order to buy time for others to escape. Grimly, the two men simply exchange salutes, and never see each other again.
- What about the dog hater who holed up next to a pet shop, and had to spend days listening to dozens of terrified puppies starving to death?
- Though that certainly cures him of hating dogs—later on, he comes across two survivors mistreating a dog, goes berserk, and nearly kills them both with a baseball bat and his bare hands, despite being half-starved by that time.
- Then there are the multiple cases of insanity, like the pilot who saved herself with hallucinated radio transmissions or worst of all, Redeker, who gets a case of disassociative indentity disorder after Nelson Mandela shows him some kindness. Maybe less of a tearjerker than Karmic Retribution, but still.
- No. Redeker was (one of the) the greatest tearjerker of them all. A sensitive guy twisted into an unfeeling monster by an uncaring environment, only to be accepted as a good person by someone who had every right to despise him? I cried.
- Also, Russia's decimation's. The entire military was split into groups of ten and then voted on which among them would be stoned by the rest. It worked, but the memories later led to the formation of a theocratic dictatorship.
- "Tell it to the whales."
- "There's a reason why we're still the United Kingdom."
- "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.'"
- "They were viewed very much like castles, I suppose: as crumbling, obsolete relics, with no real modern function other than as tourist attractions. But when the skies darkened and the nation called, both reawoke to the meaning of their existence. One shielded our bodies, the other, our souls."
- "Hey, buddy. It's okay now. You can let go." Especially when it happens to heroine of the Battle of the Five Colleges and the wartime president of the United States on the same day.
- "There's only one who could have predicted all this - and I don't believe in him anymore."
- The reception operators in Radio Free Earth who have to listen to transmissions from desperate and besieged people around the world. Every last one is eventually Driven To Suicide, one of them while on duty after hearing the final transmission from Buenos Aires (a rendition of a Spanish lullaby).
- The astronaut who stayed in space to keep the satellites in repair, died in a hospital three days after finishing his interview— and insisted that he wasn't a hero to the end. This troper just might be a space fangirl, but she cried like a baby.
- "Not bad for the son of an Andamooka opal miner."
- Sharon's story, perhaps all the more so since she can only tell it from the perspective of a four-year-old with no idea what was happening.
- This Is Reality: The CIA director points out that they didn't and never had anything close to the resources people think they do.
- Too Dumb To Live:
- Jessika Hendricks telling the interviewer how people (including her own family) had packed horribly. She showed him a trash heap filled with DVDs, video game consoles, laptops, and other useless stuff that they didn't need. Such sloppy preparedness led to a lot of people dying that first winter at the Canadian settlement.
- Also contributing was that many of the people didn't NEED to go, or go as far a they did, as the entire point was to get above the frost lines and many already were, such as Jessika's family (who lived in Wisconsin).
- This was partially the fault of the media, who made it out like going north would be a temporary situation until the zombies were cleared out. But people ended up having to essentially live there for several years.
- They were still woefully under supplied and under prepared for the few months they were intending to stay. By Hendricks' account, half the food her family had packed was gone by the time they reached their destination.
- Also, they didn't pack it to use, they packed it so it wouldn't get looted while they were away. Wasting important cargo space on it still qualifies as way-too-fucking-stupid, but at least it's not so off-the-radar-insane.
- Let's not forget the flagrant waste of wood in bonfires, gleeful destruction of the lake's fish population via dynamite fishing, and the ignorance of clothing layers.
- Another example includes the enclave of celebrities who broadcast their easily-overrun "fortress" to nearby urbanites who were either fleeing the zombies, infected or both. You do the math.
- Speaking of the celebrities, don't forget 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.
- The Japanese otaku who spends weeks on the net digging up info about the evacuation plans, completely oblivious to the fact that the evacuation has already occurred, his parents are gone, his city is in flames, and his apartment building is full of zombies who haven't eaten him only because he hasn't left his bedroom in weeks. He gets better.
- He was a Hikikomori, which is to say he effectively had a psychological aversion to the outside world. So, Justified?
- From a military standpoint, the utterly USELESS BITS OF CRAP that the US Army uses at Yonkers. The narrator outright states that most of that stuff was there to impress the media. They had the soldiers wearing bulky HAZMAT suits that made it difficult to reload, ignored terrain advantages, and didn't give the army the ammo that it needed to actually put up a decent fight.
- Twenty Minutes Into The Future: Land Warrior, Chinese nuclear subs and Comanche's are deployed, there are anti-missile and anti-IED lasers used (only in propaganda, though), and computers have voice-typing. One of the previous wars is heavily hinted as having been the Iraq War, and fuel-cells are used on boats.
- Uncanny Valley: People couldn't handle living there 24/7. See Primal Fear above.
- The Virus - Solanum.
- Voice Of The Resistance - Radio Free Earth.
- Voice With An Internet Connection: "Metsfan," the (possibly imagined or divine) Skywatcher that helped the downed pilot get picked up in a white zone.
- Wild Child - Sharon.
- You Don't Want To Die A Virgin, Do You?: 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 Bill Maher and Ann Coulter) "going at it" like there was no tomorrow. Which, for them, there wasn't.
- Ironically enough, the two celebrities mentioned are actually close personal friends in real life, with several tabloid stories saying they dated at one time. Truth In Fiction?
- Zeppelins From Another World: Part of the US anti-zombie defenses after the war is airships.
- Zombie Apocalypse: naturally.
- Zombie Gait
- Zombie Infectee: Many stories included the infected trying to hide their infection, and the methods used to detect the infection.
- 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.
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