YMMV / Newsflesh

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• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Several reviewers have said Georgia is an Unreliable Narrator because despite her relentless pursuit of the truth, she never elaborated on her sexual relationship with Shaun because she never considered it the reader's business, and that's intellectual dishonesty.
  • She points out in Blackout that they knew that was the one thing that wasn't safe for them to write down.
  • Also, she never exactly lied about the subject, she simply avoided it. If a subject simply doesn't come up, is it really dishonest to not bring it up when dealing with someone who really doesn't need that information?
• Complete Monster: In this series set after the Kellis-Amberlee zombie virus devastates the world, these individuals show that it is not just the zombies you need to fear:
  • Feed: Governor David Tate is a slimy, hyper-religious politician who helps fund the corrupt CDC in their endeavors to rule the world, and kill people who develop natural immunities to Kellis-Amberlee in order to do this. Releasing weaponized Kellis-Amberlee in order to kill off or zombify any opponents to secure his nomination as Republican presidential candidate, Tate callously kills dozens and endangers hundreds of people. After the kindly Ryman wins the nomination and Tate becomes his running mate as vice president, Tate callously tries to murder Ryman's young children to shore up support for the campaign, intending to eventually off Ryman himself in an "accident" and become president. Later murdering some of his men after they go against him, Tate assassinates heroine Georgia Mason when she comes close to the truth. Tate, upon being discovered, unleashes live Kellis-Amberlee in his party camp, killing dozens of innocents and unleashing a wave of zombies that put hundreds in danger, even taking Ryman's wife hostage as a way out.
  • Deadline: Dr. Joseph Wynne is one of the head scientists of the CDC and helps them kill those who have developed reservoir immunities to Kellis-Amberlee, as well as helping them develop more deadly strains of the zombie virus in order to keep the world under their grip. Wynne kills off any scientists who discover the existence of these more dangerous strains and set them up as "accidents" or "suicides" to cover up the truth. When Shaun Mason and rest of his investigative team close onto the truth, Wynne unleashes an outbreak of Kellis-Amberlee in their home building which allows him to firebomb their building and the entire of downtown Oakland, California which kills thousands of innocents. Wynne's final act before being mortally wounded is to inject a vial of the live zombie virus which kills one of the heroes, gloating beforehand about all the money and power that he will receive due to his misdeeds.
• Fridge Brilliance: There's a reason why references to Joss Whedon, and in particular, to Serenity pepper the series: like Mr Universe, Georgia Mason lives her life by the words You can't stop the signal.
• Fridge Logic: Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King, Hardee's and all other burger or beef based fast food restaurants had to change or go out of business after the Rising, since cows can amplify and convert. Even eating them as veal is not safe.
  • And on a sadder note, the adoption and foster care systems are also hit very hard. You think it's hard to get someone to take a non-Caucasian child, or one with a birth defect? People are not trusting of blood not their own in the Newsflesh-verse. It's likely orphans or the children of unwanted pregnancies grow up in orphanages. Shaun and George were adopted, but their parents had ulterior motives.
    • Confirmed as of All The Pretty Little Horses. Many adults when offered the opportunity to reunite with their own children would deny that their child even survived the Rising out of trauma and fear. The government had to suspend the adoption rules to make it easier for people to adopt who wanted children.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The influence on the story by Seanan's friendship with fellow author Sunil Patel, including naming the scientist who saved the world from a total zombie apocalypse after his younger brother, when he was revealed in 2016 to have a long history of harassing and gaslighting women that instantly destroyed his reputation.
  • The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic makes many details of the book uncomfortably realistic, such as the US government initially failing to respond to a deadly pandemic before it gets out of hand, people being afraid to gather in large groups and doing most social events over video chat, and confusion between genuinely helpful measures and security theater to make people feel safer about inherently unsafe scenarios.
• Memetic Mutation: Buffy apparently owned and wore a "Joss Whedon is My Master Now" T-shirt◊.
• Narm: Each chapter is presaged by an "article" from a blog. In reality, those articles are (often and at worst) melodramatic proclamations that try a little too hard to be profound. A reader might find his faith in the main characters' integrity as journalists rather shaken.
  • If there are any standalone quotes, the shorter ones tend to be dramatic and/or profound as well as being generic (What the fuck is going on here?, When did the world stop making sense?). The problem is, they are attributed to one of the main characters, instead of, say, any of the thousands of people who had expressed the exact same vague but important sounding sentiments in the exact same wording, in multitudes of different contexts, for decades before hand.
  • In Deadline, Dr. Wynne talks about how the previous book's main villain Tate was deliberately an over the top Card-Carrying Villain with an absurd Motive Rant, to draw all the attention of the ATET crew away from the people truly running the conspiracy. He proceeds to give a Motive Rant of his own that's just as bad.
  • At the end of Feed George's final blog post starts deteriorating not with random wrong letters like you'd expect, but instead reads like we're hearing someone having trouble speaking, giving the impression that she's doing it deliberately. She also somehow manages to type a hyphen at the moment that Shaun kills her. (Would make sense if she was using a voice-to-text app.)
• Nightmare Fuel: Plenty. Starting with the fact that every single mammal on the planet has Kellis-Amberlee. And when they die, no matter what the cause, they will reanimate as a zombie. There's no escaping it. And if that's not bad enough, every single mammal on the planet includes giraffes and killer whales.
  • To say nothing of multiple needle based blood tests happening on a daily basis.
    • In Deadline, it's revealed that having so many of them isn't actually necessary unless you've been in the field, but it's used to keep people afraid and as security theater.
  • The virus affects any animal over 40 pounds. Horse-riding is now considered an extreme sport for this reason. So just imagine any animal over that weight as a zombie. McGuire herself loves to bring up the idea of zombie whales.
• Paranoia Fuel: If you aren't already making plans for what to do when the Rising occurs, the trilogy may very well get you sitting up nights thinking about it.
  • Spontaneous amplification while very rare is possible. Which means almost anyone could just become a zombie at anytime with very little warning.