16 KiB
[D][RT] Seriously, screw zombies. (and also, links to some stuff)
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Author: u/None *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/6jpvkw/drt_seriously_screw_zombies_and_also_links_to/
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Score: 33
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Created: 2017-06-27T02:41:06
Post:
If you don't want to read through why I think zombies are bad, you can skip straight to my recommendations down below. However, I can't promise you'll fare well in the discussion without reading the points I raise.
So one of my siblings recently sat me down and forced me to watch Train to Busan, a korean zombie film. For the most part I ignored it, but throughout the whole experience I was often reminded of why I despise zombie stories. The biggest problems are simple: it is easy to create cheap tension by having the characters act like total idiots; even if each film explores the premise to the bone (which they don't) they are still all exploring the same premise; inevitably, each one leans to hard on the apocalypse part of zombie apocalypse and descends into this dreary, depressing, completely serious tone (at odds with the stupidity of the premise, but if you asked a normal person, they would call this "realistic"). In Train to Busan, one scene stuck out to me - the characters, on the titular train, are trying to escape from the zombies through an empty cabin into one populated by uninfected humans. Half the party is holding the door they entered through shut, the other half is trying to open the door to the populated cabin (the one filled with innocent civilians, who locked the door because zombies are scary and that is the sane thing to do). The man holding the door to the zombie compartment has his hand bitten in a moment of stupidity, and he boldly stays behind to keep the door shut while the others escape.
Except when he shouts at them to get out, they refuse, and spend about three minutes of the viewers time angsting over whether or not they should leave their (infected) friend behind, even when he volunteered, and also did I mention they were being chased by deadly zombies that can kill people? This is considered top-tier zombie fiction.
When an author tries to create a life or death scenario, my suspension of disbelief instantly goes to zero. I guess it comes as a corollary to Sanderson's First Law - the author's ability to create conflict with magic is directly proportional to the reader's understanding of that magic. Zombies are a type of magic: the reader can't really predict their behavior based on the cultural "zombie" pattern in their brain, because that is inconsistent across every zombie movie. Most authors know this, so they keep the zombie involvement to a minimum, and try to create human conflict. Except you haven't removed the magic - you've just changed the magic words. Now "zombie" has turned into "paranoia" or "anger" or "passion", and the author can explain away anything with this because audiences are generally stupid. They can say to themselves: "In a life or death scenario, I would never give up on my friends!" without having ever been in a life or death scenario, and happily empathize with the inhuman being the author has depicted on screen. It's still just as contrived, it's just hidden in disguise.
Sure, other genres of fiction are bad with this too. But I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would ever watch an emotionally dreary movie, if the premise is so contrived. If a work wants to be taken seriously the way gritty zombie movies want to be taken seriously, they need to elevate their game to the level of rational fiction. You simply can't transplant the emotional drama of a soap opera into a deadly struggle for survival and expect it actually applies to human behavior. It's hard to say that the idiot ball is acceptable in a work where I am forced to watch every character holding the idiot ball get violently gored.
Part two of my complaint comes from how little most stories explore the premise. They promise these dramatic stories about character interaction and development, but generally zombie stories cover a very thin time frame with only a couple of survivors - this, I suspect, is the product of laziness - how can any normal author be expected to come up with realistic survival and scavenging techniques to live long term in an apocalypse, or a society that has adapted to a deadly plague? The closest any work comes to fulfilling the promises of the premise is The Walking Dead, but any time the characters are close to any modicum of success, the idiot ball comes rolling in, because anything else would mean the authors would have to write something unique. Or the author is constrained by the premise of a zombie apocalypse - mechanically, the author knows how zombies and people work, but they can't show that because in order for a story to exist at that point, zombies that are either too powerful for the world to push back (and thus too powerful for the characters to survive in the narrative) or too weak to ever take over in the first place. That still doesn't explain why zombie stories never stick around long enough to show any success - the insistence on gritty action rather than an uplifting plot about rebuilding and regrowing. They concoct the perfect mixture for Darkness Induced Apathy, and then they never bother trying to avert it.
So there are a few specks of light at the end of this tunnel. There's a classic article on Cracked (before they dropped in quality) about reasons a zombie apocalypse wouldn't fare well, and it provides a good springboard for authors to cure the blight of the genre. If I remember the ending of World War Z correctly, they push back the zombie incursion and reestablish civilization. And one of my favorite flash games of all time is called Rebuild, and it's centered around retaking a city and setting up a republican government. The Decision series of flash games also scratches that itch. And last, but not least, there's our own A Rationalist in the Zombie Apocalypse, which shows what happens when you extend the ridiculous premise to it's logical conclusion.
So what do you think? What improvements could be made to the basic "Zombie Movie" formula to make it more bearable? Do you have any flaws of your own that I didn't mention? Or more rational zombie recommendations?
(mods: I hope this doesn't break some discussion rule. You mentioned in the sidebar to keep discussion strictly to rational fiction, and I hope recommending a few things will abide by that. Or that the quality of my rant is good enough that this doesn't count as low effort.)
Comments:
u/InfernoVulpix [+21] (an hour later)
While I agree with you in broad strokes, there's one part of the rant that I disagree with.
If a work wants to be taken seriously the way gritty zombie movies want to be taken seriously, they need to elevate their game to the level of rational fiction.
The fact of the matter, and you said it yourself, these movies are taken seriously. Train to Busan is considered top-tier zombie fiction, so it's clear that it and movies like it can appeal to a large amount of people without appealing to us.
Perhaps that's a bad thing, and the multitudes of people out there should put more thought into their viewing habits so they can appreciate internal consistency and the same things we enjoy, but even if so we aren't there yet. The plotholes, the irrational behaviour, the lack of proper scope, they're things that first and foremost bother us. That the characters behave in life-and-death situations the way we'd imagine we'd behave in life-and-death situations instead of how we'd actually behave isn't a big problem for most people, and you set yourself up for disappointment if you make that mistake.
Certainly, they need to elevate their game in order to be taken seriously by us, but that doesn't mean they lose out significantly by not elevating their game. The cliche 'zombie apocalypse, emphasis on apocalypse' story is something that works (even if by our standards it doesn't) and I hold respect for the makers of successful zombie apocalypse movies for creating a story that so many people enjoy, even if I can't enjoy it along with them.
u/None [+3] (2 hours later)
Well, zombie movies do receive critical acclaim at times, but think that the difference between an unsuccessful zombie movie and a successful zombie movie is a fine line. Most of the best of the genre, critically acclaimed or no, break out of the confines of serious "zombie fiction" somewhat - The Walking Dead is popular but generally not well received by serious critics. (And even its popularity has died down in recent years) The only zombie content I've really think is memorable or will outlive the old zombie trend is stuff like Zombieland or Left 4 Dead, where the content is focused more on comedy or gameplay than serious drama. I don't think that "serious" zombie fiction like Train to Busan will be remembered in decade the way most classics are. This isn't to say that serious zombie fiction can't be memorable or enduring, just that the Darkness Induced Apathy requires a lot of goodwill to overturn. That's more what I mean by step up their game - they don't need to be rationalist level consistent, they just need to stop relying entirely on an inconsistent premise to create their conflict.
I mean, think of something like Star Wars. It might be riddled with plot holes, but because it had other merits, it succeeded and became a classic. The traditional zombie premise also has a lot of plot holes, and it also generally is depressing - in order to balance those flaws out, it needs to have some other merit to be memorable. One way to do this is to be consistent, another is to be hopeful, and another is to add enough variety to the apocalypse to maintain the audience's interest. Works like Attack on Titan or RWBY clearly feature a post-apocalypse in a monster saturared world that brings more mystery to the table without losing themselves in gritty survivalism.
u/None [+2] (11 days later)
Did your sibling like Train to Busan? What did he or she like about it?
u/None [+2] (11 days later)
As a casual reader of "rational fic", who isn't bothered by irrationalities as some others, I agree. I like the "ratfic", but I, and many people I know, value character dynamics, emotional consistency and well-done drama over extremely rational characters. Not that rational fic can't have emotional impact--they certainly can--but for me, moderate irrationalities don't sink a story.
I don't necessarily see rational fiction as better. It often can be, and it definitely creates better world-building, but one can have a perfectly good story that has irrationalities. The author wasn't saying you couldn't...actually, what would be more interesting is what qualities make up a well-done irrational fic. I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask it, though.
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+7] (3 hours later)
All of this seems to be criticism of bad writing. Do you have any problems with the actual premise of the zombie apocalypse genre? Like, do you think it's a bad idea for a genre, as opposed to just a genre that's attracted a lot of low-quality entries?
u/None [+5] (14 hours later)
The latter. That's why I do mention a few things I enjoy at the end of the post.
u/eroticas [+6] (2 hours later)
I have seen zombies used in non-apocolypse ways. The first one that comes to minds is zombies as cheap labor, in the webcomic Unsounded. More often they're used as not particularly threatening mooks. But in all these cases the zombies are really more of an afterthought to the plot, not the main event. (Although I do believe unsounded had a half undead main character)
u/CeruleanTresses [+2] (15 hours later)
Yes, the main character is indeed sort of a zombie--he has all of his cognitive faculties, but his body is decaying, and he has had to come up with various workarounds to keep himself functional. You should catch up on the story! Some more information has been revealed about what exactly he is and how his condition works. It seems to be pretty important to the plot.
u/buckykat [+6] (16 hours later)
any time the characters are close to any modicum of success, the idiot ball comes rolling in, because anything else would mean the authors would have to write something unique.
I think you're almost right here, and it suffices to explain pretty much the whole problem you're talking about. It's not that they'd have to write something unique, though it would be, but that they'd have to write something not-apocalypse, and then it wouldn't be zombie apocalypse any more.
They want the grim darkness. Fixing the world and behaving like reasonable people would make it not grim and dark anymore, and apparently grim darkness is what fucking sells this decade.
u/sir_pirriplin [+9] (a day later)
It's not exactly grim darkness that they want. The fantasy of a zombie apocalypse is that it erases all social institutions and obligations. I don't have to pay my mortgage anymore. Nobody will care that I don't have a college degree. I can loot the supermarket and not feel bad because it's abandoned. I can shoot people in the head and not feel bad because they are zombies.
If civilization is rebuilt, all those things that people like about a reset of the social order will come back. Rebuilding is hard work.
u/buckykat [+5] (a day later)
That's an excellent point. But there's another subset of zombie/apocalyptic fic that's exactly about rebuilding, and it's always approached with a similar level of grim darkness to the solo survival fics. The rebuilt town is always an autocracy, and always has a Dark Secret.
What I'm wondering is why the zombie apocalypse never seems to spawn a revolutionary liberation army. You don't have to pay your mortgage and can loot the supermarket, not because of the zombies, but because all is for all.
u/sir_pirriplin [+7] (a day later)
In every zombie apocalypse there is already a massive revolutionary movement that wants to destroy every old economic and cultural institution and just take whatever they want. It's the zombies.
The zombie apocalypse is most often an individualist's fantasy. Of course every human organization in that type of fiction will be autocratic and dysfunctional. For the kind of person who likes zombie apocalypses, joining a rebuilding effort that is actually functional will subsume their self-image as a rugged individualist survivor. They might as well let themselves get eaten by zombies, because it's the same thing for them.
u/buckykat [+5] (a day later)
Wait, so it's not grim darkness, it's just objectivism? That makes sense, I guess.
u/LordSwedish [+6] Q Continuum (a day later)
When you mentioned World War Z I hope you were talking about the book and not the movie. The movie is incredibly stupid and contrived whereas the book goes into great detail about how the zombie apocalypse started, progressed, how civilization started to grow back, and how it changed.
It's not completely realistic as the zombies are a bit physics defying (acknowledged in the book) but it is consistent.
u/PeridexisErrant [+3] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (an hour later)
Yeah, with the effort that clearly went into this and the links you're clear :)
u/LifeIsBizarre [+3] (8 hours later)
I think Shawn of the Dead nailed it. Have you watched it? If not, go do so.
u/IvorTheEngine [+2] (11 hours later)
Have you read Black Tide Rising by John Ringo?
While it's essentially military-loving-easy-reading-for-teens, the main characters are pretty rational. The zombies aren't magical, the good guys armor themselves so they can't be bitten, and clear boats and small islands as they rebuild society and work on a vaccine.