Zombie Apocalypse Deconstruction-HELP!!

Ok, so I want to write/illustrate a Deconstructive Parody of the Zombie Apocalypse genre. Firstly, as far as I can figure a Deconstruction means to play it realistically. Am I correct or is that wrong (I'm new to TV Tropes)? I was also wondering if anyone had any ideas on how I could deconstruct Zombie Apocalypse tropes. Lastly, would this count as a deconstruction: everyone listens to the genre savvy guy cos he seems to know the "rules" of zombie films. But everyone fails to realise that some of the rules don't apply to real life, so some tips actually hurt there survival chances. Thanks, and sorry if I'm a bit dim, I'm just struggling to understand what is and isn't deconstruction.

Read the page.

It's not really about playing it realistically. It's about have realistic/logical consequences. To use an example: zombies are basically walking corpses. What if they're not immune to the things that affect a corpse in real life? Then you can have the degraded, rotting muscles of the zombie actually impair its movement.

As for your last inquiry, it seems more like a simple Wrong Genre Savvy deal. What exactly are these "rules" that don't apply to real life, and how come they don't apply?

edited 20th Apr '12 5:08:26 AM by fillerdude

A proper deconstruction of the zombie apocalypse would result in the winning of the Battle of Yonkers and follow up with the whole thing burning out after four weeks.

Yeah, a deconstruction allows you to accept the premise; zombies can exist. However, what makes it a deconstruction would be that after the premise is accepted, all else is not warped around in order to uphold the premise into some extreme situation.

As the above poster said, a real zombie plague which are like most movies would be burned out by the military in a matter of weeks to months (depending on how long it takes to figure out it requires headshots).

So, that may or may not make a good story overall.

A "reconstruction" is that you take the deconstruction and then you patch up the flaws to then have a zombie apocalypse again more realistically. For instance, why would the zombie plague spread like crazy? Why doesn't the WHO implement quarantine protocols properly? Why can't it be cured? Why doesn't the governments of the world, and their respective military forces not stomp out the zombie problem properly?

WWZ for instance, is just straight up zombie apocalypse fiction because every nation acted 30000% more stupid than they normally would in some ridiculous caricature of themselves and all their flaws taken to the nth degree (and some of the flaws in WWZ were based on American-made stereotypes of the countries, making it even more hilarious to me).

I've never seen a Zombie Apocalypse that was remotely realistic - they generally run more on the Rule of Scary than normal logic. So this doesn't sound like it would be that hard to do.

Yeah but if you make it work properly then I'd say it is reconstruction. That sort of discussion might delve into the heights of esoteric talk though.

Actually, WWZ was ridiculous because the MLRS/artillery didn't kill the zombies at Yonkers, and instead it was presupposed they were completely immune to fragmentation weapons. I'm sorry, that's not how it works. Magic headshot bullet isn't necessary when they don't have any arms or a torso, you just send some guys around with pistols to clean up after if anybody has an intact head. And if that fails you run the bastards over with a tank and they more or less liquify. It's not like they can stop you, they're zombies.

The four weeks reference, however, is a statement of how long it takes the human body, in the open, to decay to a point it could no longer pose a threat because it can't move well if at all. Zombies are dead people. Decaying, dead people. This means they have a limited shelf life.

edited 21st Apr '12 2:29:07 AM by Night

I neither know nor care whether it's possible to do a realistic Zombie Apocalypse - the point is that if it's usually done in an unrealistic way, it should be easy enough to deconstruct.

@fillerdude: thanks for clearing that up. One of the rules I was thinking of was destroying the brain. The genre savvy guy tells everyone to destroy the head and everyone does what he says. But later they realise that his advice was wrong: destroying the brain works but skulls are tough. Busting there knees and running once they're down would have made more sense and cost less time and energy. Is that a realistic consequence of everyone listening to the genre savvy guy (keeping in mind that I want this set in real life and not in a zombie movie).

I do believe that could count as deconstruction.

@ Odins

Actually, if you want to, you could make a list of the zombie tropes you want to bash and just say a one-liner for how you want to bash them.

@ Night

I would expect MLRS to just f-ing vaporize people at that range :P I mean, really? Brain doesn't get hit by that? Yeah maybe SOME survive but they'd be totally crippled and cause a massive road block for the zombies behind them.

But like I said, all Mel Brooks was trying to do was talk about national flaws. He wanted to talk about collusion between corporations-government, the idiocy of unintelligent and sensationalist journalism, the government ignoring technocrats (in this case the military experts) etc. From any realism standpoint, the Battle of Yonkers should have went perfectly fine. The US had the guns, personnel and knowledge necessary for killing everything. I mean like, the MG guy who didn't do headshots... big deal. Taking bullets all over the place in the body would just pin you to the ground.

The important thing is less making sure you can appropriately label your story as a dereconstructiversion or whatever and more that you have something interesting to say in the first place. If you have an interesting commentary on the genre to share but it doesn't quite fit the definition of deconstruction, go for it anyhow; conversely, if you can write something that's technically a deconstruction but which doesn't really bring very much to the table (especially since zombie stories are already so common and in so many different tones), consider moving on to something else.

edited 21st Apr '12 12:57:45 PM by ALibrarianofBabel

That's pretty much my thoughts.

Cracked had a pretty fun article on this very subject. Just a word of caution, though: the fifth page opens with a somewhat graphic image, though nothing too out of the ordinary for the genre.

In that regard, the deconstruction could come from our protagonist being incredibly Genre Savvy, but said savvieness simply isn't necessary. Perhaps he's under the delusion that there's a far bigger threat then there really is?

If you want one silly suggestion, how about we go by the basic Romero rule of "all recently dead come back as a zombie", but remove the whole "one bite is always fatal" aspect?

A proper deconstruction would have nothing remotely similar to the Battle of Yonkers, and we wouldn't have to wait four weeks for all the zombies to be dead with all the guns that are in the US.

Now, everywhere else, without Second Amendment-protected trigger-happy NRA members to help a bloated, over-budgeted military utterly demolish the zombie threat might not do so well. I.e. Africa.

And in that case the zombies would just die of heatstroke/animal attacks, etc.

The only way to do a logical consequences-based zombie apocalypse scenario is to set it sometime in the past and have a really, really overpowered, Mary Sue method of zombification. I could see a zombie plague starting in mid-1800s London and traveling outwards with the Royal Navy and British merchant marine fucking everything up, but past that...

Funny thing, that - zombie fiction would make so much more sense if set in the past, yet it's always in the present.

To be honest, I think there's only a small window of history—maybe 300-odd years—where a zombie apocalypse scenario is really viable. If you set it too far back, armies with melee weapons and full-body armor shouldn't have trouble cutting a swath through a zombie horde. If you set it too far towards the present, increasingly accurate and faster-firing ballistic weaponry can achieve the same end sans armor. So, you've got to do it while they're still stuck with shitty old muskets, and the best they can do is one salvo followed by a bloody (and likely futile) melee using bayonets. Which... might not be all that interesting, honestly...

You know, for all its craziness, this is kind of why I like Resident Evil. For one, no zombie outbreak in the series has been for particularly long or incredibly widespread, the largest involving a city's water supply being infected, so at least that one's somewhat justified. Further still, the zombies' aggressive nature and general adherence to some of the classic tropes can be handwaved by the simple fact that they were meant as weapons in the first place.

Something for the modern day "infected" plot:

At the end of the story, a cure is found. The infected living are returned to normal. A grand portion of society has just murdered scores of sick people (who were, due to the disease, afflicted by delusions that caused them to simply act how they believed "zombies" would) in preparing for the "zombie apocalypse." Instead of realizing their guilt and standing trial, many of the same people go into survivalist mode and hide out in the woods, paranoid that the government is covering something up, and that the next outbreak will begin soon.

edited 21st Apr '12 11:49:00 PM by DoctorDiabolical

Franken Fran actually did something like that, though it was only one chapter. The zombies were curable, and the victims were fully conscious while their bodies went on a rampage. It kind of ended on a commentary about the whole "guilt-free killing" aspect of the genre.

Well see if they were just straight up zombies, it would be guilt-free killing. If it were a normal infection, then you're committing mass murder. That one is an interesting idea.

As for non-second amendment right countries... which is everybody but USA :P They would probably do fine because their police and military services take up the slack for the lack of self-protection in those societies. It's not like people get magic-robbed with no recourse in those places. More respect and tolerance for tough government systems ensures that quarantines are more easily put into place, which instantly kills the infection rate.

For a place like Africa, low population density would really hamper infection rates. They'd have trouble stomping out the infection but the infection would have trouble getting lots of victims.

I just always wanted a zombie story that involved a realistic infection vector.

edited 22nd Apr '12 1:54:07 PM by breadloaf

I dunno. Whether or not Africa and South America become massive clusterfuck hellholes in this kind of situation is whether or not the disease is human-specific or affects all living animals with a brain to take over.

Edit: Zombie giraffes!

edited 22nd Apr '12 2:30:52 PM by Flyboy

Obligatory Cracked Article Link.

That was linked farther up the thread, actually.

It also isn't terribly helpful to making a zombie apocalypse that takes the genre in a different direction, since most stories already end with either all the zombies or all the people dying. Whereas, if you had something much more off the wall (such as the one story described where the zombies weren't really dead, or another I've heard of [a movie] that has zombies as enslaved pets) it will make for a new and more interesting story concept.