#World War Z had better plot points and concepts than this piece of zombie media

[yarpharp]

The world of the Walking Dead is honestly kinda... Ridiculous?

Like yeah, we live in America where you'd be surprised how many people own guns and knives and all sorts of collectible weaponry, but also we live in an America that has—by and large—long since gotten out of touch with any survival knowledge?

For instance, Daryl Dixon as a character is extremely interesting for most of the series not just because he's got a lot of layers and angst in terms of character personality, but also he's one of the few people we encounter who actually has applicable skills in straight-up survival. The man grew up in the mountains of Georgia, staying out of his abusive home and learning how to rough it in the wild unknown. The dude is shown as skilled in bolt crafting, some herbal knowledge, animal husbandry (specifically huntable creatures), and seasonal knowledge. He's also got plenty of mechanical knowledge to jerry-rig cars, motorized machinery, etc. He can, I assume (my memories of the show are not that clear) tan hides, make some basic leather, and probably make himself a replacement bowstring from animal sinew.

Meanwhile, what the fuck does Rick have for a good portion of the series? A gun? Many guns? A supposed killer instinct? It takes Hershel to teach him anything about farming, and even that is a skill for when you manage to maintain a long-term settlement. Maybe I'm too much of an anthropologist here, but establishing a farm culture is a societal evolution that happens after a band or group of people manage to find a safe place and devise a way to store food for longer than two weeks.

And yeah, I know in the later seasons there are moments of like, abrupt survivalist clarity, but they're very randomized and used as plot points to thrust the characters into yet another violent gun-shooting altercation. And even then, like... Electricity and such wouldn't be able to stick around for long without modern infrastructure. There's all these episodes of solar-powered homes and Negan's expansive warehouse network and all that shit, but they are depending on technologies with parts that cannot be easily replicated within the United States. So many of those industries have been outsourced to other countries. America does not produce a lot of it's own technology. Eventually a few more years down the line, all of that tech is gonna be scrap. And in the few instances where we come upon settlements that look and vaguely function like old pioneer towns, they still clearly suffer from the issue of barely any of these survivors seem to know how to survive without modern means.

I don't know, I feel like there could have been a shit ton of narrative potential if they had more episodes focusing on just learning survival or puzzling out ways of ensuring sustainability for their tiny settlements/communities. Yeah, sure, let's go get violent, but what about afterwards? Where will these people go? Are they perpetually doomed to failure because NONE OF THEM EXCEPT MAYBE DARYL KNOW HOW TO LIVE IN A WORLD WITHOUT MODERNITY?

Stop with that macho-centric highway drifter thinking. Daryl gets a pass because he kinda exists as a forest-mountain man who sometimes emerges from it to ride a motorcycle. What I want to know is what happened on the Native reservations and in Native communities. You cannot tell me they all got chewed up by the zombies, and you can't tell me they wouldn't be able to survive. We still have SO MANY TRADITIONS to fall back on. Herb lore that my grandmother passed down to me from her mom, my great-grandfather's knowledge of hunting and forestry he got from his father.

I also wanna know what happened to all the wierdos, because it's the arts-and-crafts kids and the Renaissance fair nerds and the goddamn furries that might very well end up surviving... And prove to be vital individuals in society.

The Walking Dead was a cool comic, but the show feels almost mocking. At the end of the day, it reads to me like a popular parody of the American gun-toting drifters and badasses with lost causes, intermixed with bizarre extremes that do little to explain themselves. It... Honestly is just a very pro-gun fantasy made entertaining with largely hetero drama.

It's exhausting.