Cracked Cracks the Zombie Apocalypse

[Stravo]

As Simon said, there are many who do not believe that against the foes of WWZ a pyrrhic victory should've happened. For the sake of the narrative, it works. There needs to be tension and a need to press the story forward. For others, the suspension doesn't hold and they expected a curbstomp.

When the US Army folds after a single pitched battle and retreats across the Rockies it more than stretches credibility and the amount of circumstances that went wrong in order to get to the loss suffered at the Battle of Yonkers was again another massive stretch for anyone who has a remote idea of how modern warfare is fought. Hell the way weapons worked against naked human bodies was just wrong - no arty shells won't just sever heads and limbs, it will fucking vaporize you and no MOABs won't just suck out your lungs it will cook you into ash. I loved the book, I recommend it to anyone interested in a good read but to call it anything less than fantasy is pure silliness and fanboyism. You have to buy into the very notion that modern militaries will fail in any confrontation with a naked human horde with teeth for weapons. I'm willing to make that buy in for this book but unwilling to defend it against it against reasonable justified critiques.

[Gunhead]

So, we get great drama when one side in a conflict is reduced to pants on head retards? It's like someone is writing a fictional version of operation desert storm and suddenly the coalition leadership have the skills of an average Command & Conquer player. Yeah, a thrilling read indeed. If the two opposing sides are totally uneven in a straigh up confrontation, then you should think of a way to even the odds in way that doesn't people to turn off their higher brain functions for it to make sense.
Fuck. I can come up with zombie scenario where massive use of BOOM! is not the ultimate answer.

-Gunhead

[Bakustra]

That's still a brain-damaged approach to fiction. It's like complaining that the Fellowship didn't just ride Eagles all the way to Mordor and drop the Ring in from the air. While it's a plot hole that they didn't consider it, having them do so would have ruined Lord of the Rings entirely.

A point. Though it's mainly milgeeks who do this, mind: the same sort of people who say "just nuke Pandora," often enough.

When it comes to zombies and the military, I think their frustration is somewhat understandable, because it often requires a higher degree of plot-inspired stupidity in the zombie story.

The analogy to an Olympic wrestler (nearly) losing to a ten year old child may be good: there are entertaining stories where that happens, but it's so unlikely that it requires an explicit suspension of disbelief for the audience, and a good movie maker will know that and plan the story accordingly.

I think that zombies are overplayed, personally. I liked WWZ, but mainly because Brooks understood zombies and zombie movies far better than most of the second- or third-rate followers in his footsteps. Just as an example, once you have read the title of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, you don't need to read the book at all, because you just read the funniest joke in the whole thing.

So, we get great drama when one side in a conflict is reduced to pants on head retards? It's like someone is writing a fictional version of operation desert storm and suddenly the coalition leadership have the skills of an average Command & Conquer player. Yeah, a thrilling read indeed. If the two opposing sides are totally uneven in a straigh up confrontation, then you should think of a way to even the odds in way that doesn't people to turn off their higher brain functions for it to make sense.
Fuck. I can come up with zombie scenario where massive use of BOOM! is not the ultimate answer.

-Gunhead

Why do people ignore the points about satire, exactly? I mean, I wasn't being quite serious when I said that people put their hands over their ears and hum loudly whenever challenged about the book, but it's becoming closer and closer to reality.

[Vendetta]

Why do people ignore the points about satire, exactly? I mean, I wasn't being quite serious when I said that people put their hands over their ears and hum loudly whenever challenged about the book, but it's becoming closer and closer to reality.

Because satire requires a grain of believability. WWZ does not have that, it's not an effective satire of the coalition forces' actions in Iraq and Afghanistan because the actual military activities there were the kind of overwhelming curbstomp that a realistic representation of modern military versus zombies would be.

The failure was all in the subsequent management of the nations.

[Bakustra]

Why do people ignore the points about satire, exactly? I mean, I wasn't being quite serious when I said that people put their hands over their ears and hum loudly whenever challenged about the book, but it's becoming closer and closer to reality.

Because satire requires a grain of believability. WWZ does not have that, it's not an effective satire of the coalition forces' actions in Iraq and Afghanistan because the actual military activities there were the kind of overwhelming curbstomp that a realistic representation of modern military versus zombies would be.

The failure was all in the subsequent management of the nations.

Oh, for Christ's sakes, should there have been a Zombiestan for the US to invade, occupy, and fuck up? Is that what it would take to make you fuckers happy? The subtlety removed from what is not a particularly subtle book? Perhaps Brooks should have incorporated footnoted annotations with each bit of satire, in capital letters. "NORTH KOREA'S FATE IS A MYSTERY TO EMPHASIZE THE ISOLATION OF NORTH KOREA FROM THE OUTSIDE WORLD." "THERE'S NO REAL SATIRE HERE, I THOUGHT THAT IT WAS JUST CREEPY." Jesus, Mithras, and Horus.

[MKSheppard]

To put modern firepower into some perspective; a single B-1B can deliver thirty CBU-87s.

Those are 1,000 lb cluster bombs; which have been retrofitted with GPS guidance -- Wind Corrected Munitions Dispenser (WCMD).

Each bomb carries 202 combined effects bomblets; which provide armor piercing, inciendary, and fragmentation effects all in one neat package.

Each CBU-87 covers if everything goes right an area of about 400 x 800 feet. That would basically amount to 320,000 ft2 of destruction and death per bomb.

Here are some rough numbers for crowd densities:

Tightly Packed Crowd: 5ft2
Mosh Pits: 2.5 ft2

We'll be generous as hell to the Zomboid hoard; and give them 50ft2 per zombie. That still means a single CBU will kill/maim/destroy about 6,000 zombies; for a total of 180,000 taken out in a single B-1B bombing run.

Oh, did I mention we have 66 B-1Bs on active duty? We could theoretically kill 11.8 million zombies if the entire B-1B fleet did a combat sortie.

Then there's the 20 ship B-2 fleet; they can carry 34 x CBU-87s per plane; that's another 4~ million zombies possibly killed.

A-10s can carry seven CBU-87s, with our current inventory of 249 Active duty A-10s; that means we can possibly kill another 10.45 million zombies....

etc etc.

Now of course, one big problem is that we wouldn't be able to use these optimal zombie killing weapons right away; since there are only so many CBU-87s in the inventory, so you'd have to use other munitions like 500 lb bombs etc. But it's worth noting that in Operation Desert Storm, we dropped about 10,000 CBU-87s; that's 60~ million possible zombie kills there.

So yeah, huge zombie hoards...not a problem, except in the minds of retarded idiots who want to write the world's militaries failing to defeat said hoards.

[Simon_Jester]

Of course, what this really counters is the zombie horde as an iconic threat. Dispersed zombies would be so much more of a problem- realistically, by the time zombie hordes start pouring out of urban areas, they should be pouring out of all urban areas, or nearly all. The military would have to spread itself thin to cover refugee convoys and making it difficult to find safe areas to evacuate them to. So yes bombardment would eliminate a lot of zombies numerically, but the stragglers who weren't part of the main hordes would still be a huge battlefield cleanup problem, and the sheer scale of the dislocation of residents would be an issue too.

I mean, if zombie-ism spread like any other disease, you wouldn't see massive outbreaks in one place before it was already widespread in others. The military would be worrying about cities all over the country, and clusterbombing big zombie waves pouring out of one city wouldn't prevent them from being a problem elsewhere.

[MKSheppard]

Of course, what this really counters is the zombie horde as an iconic threat. Dispersed zombies would be so much more of a problem.

Hey, that's what PSYOPS vehicles are for.



Play loud rock music and lure the zomboids into the open areas where they can be annihilated. As a bonus, the loudspeakers are somewhat hardened.

The military would have to spread itself thin to cover refugee convoys and making it difficult to find safe areas to evacuate them to.

There are approximately 800,000 police in the US who are already trained in the use of firearms and ruidmentary tactics.

And there is the final stage of US mobilization: Activication of the Unorganized Milita.

Last used by the CSA in 1865. If you are male, and sufficiently healthy; you are now surprise surprise! A soldier in the U.S. Army.

[Shroom Man 777]

@SHEP:

Seriously. What a bunch of incompetent cartoonish villains. What the hell. Did they also let the Americans deploy VTOL bombers 40 feet above ground so the zombie dragonoids could attack them?

God, and if it weren't for the LIEBERALS who delayed the development of the B-1, we would've had the far superior B-1A which was faster and if it weren't for the COMMIES, the B-1 would not have that bulkhead inside its bomb bays (placed there so it couldn't carry certain nuclear ALCMs) and would've been able to carry more bombs. If it weren't for goddamn Jimmy Carter, or goddamn commie disarmament treaties, a B-1 could be able to go faster and have more nukes to kill more zombies with faster!

But really, the ultimate shit is Robert Satan McNamara who canceled the XBOX-70 VALKYLIE MINOGUE! The XBOX-70 would've flied thrice the speed of sound and would've carried more nukes than the B-1! It would've nuked the zombies until they glowed in the dark, then it would've shot them all in the dark, and stole their oil. Or brains!

[Zixinus]

How effectively a military, any military, would counter the zombie threat depends on lots of things, especially whether and how vulnerable are the soldiers themselves for infection, whether the military can organize in time, etc.

Shep: 4 million is a very frightening number... until you realize how many zombies total are we talking about. Consider that Hungary alone has 10 million people, dispersed. In the case of the USA, how many people are we talking about? Something like at least three hundred million, IIRC?

Really, the zombie threat is as powerful or weak as the author wants them to be. Militarizes are thrown out because they are in the way of a good zombie apocalypse story.

[MKSheppard]

But really, the ultimate shit is Robert Satan McNamara who canceled the XBOX-70 VALKYLIE MINOGUE! The XBOX-70 would've flied thrice the speed of sound and would've carried more nukes than the B-1! It would've nuked the zombies until they glowed in the dark, then it would've shot them all in the dark, and stole their oil. Or brains!

And it would have done it with 36 people in airliner comfort too!



AND THEY SAID YOU COULDN'T TURN A MILITARY BOMBER INTO AN AIRLINER!

Goddamn Robert SATAN McNamaraaaaaaaaa!

[Bakustra]

HORDES! The word is HORDES! H! O! R! D! E! S! Not "hoards"! You cannot call someone retarded when you misspell a basic English word in such a manner and so often!

[Gunhead]

Ok stop that, STOP that! This is far too silly. Now I like a good laugh as much as the next guy... maybe not as much as Shroom.. or Shep... Come to think of it everyone likes a good laugh more than I do but that's not the point.

-Gunhead

[Oni Koneko Damien]

<snip>

I'm not even looking at what you wrote. I don't care if you've got the cure for cancer hidden in that abomination of a post as well as the flawless debunking of my argument, just seeing that pile of quote boxes scroll up is making my eyes water. There should be a failsafe on the board that automatically logs someone out when they try and split a two-paragraph post into one-to-five word quote blocks.

This is really simple, and I can't believe I have to explain this concept, but apparently knee-jerk nitpicking takes priority over common sense.

The humans won.

It doesn't matter if it was a Pyrrhic victory, it doesn't matter if the whole setup was hilariously unrealistic, by any valid definition of 'win', they won. The concept of 'winning' is not necessarily tied to the concept of realism. Taking the baseball analogy again: It doesn't fucking matter if the Yankees, at the top of their game, barely scraped by with a one point lead at the bottom of the ninth against a group of paraplegic infants wearing cute little baby-mitts on their ears. The context doesn't matter at all, only the conditions for winning: Whichever team has the most points at the end of the ninth inning is the winner, therefore the Yankees are the winner, however blatantly unrealistic the scenario is.

It's the same deal with WWZ: Whichever force dominates the earth at the end of the book is the winner, no matter how unrealistically contrived the scenario is. Humans are back in charge, thus they won.

Should it have been a curbstomp? Sure, but the concept of winning doesn't deal with what 'should' be, merely what 'is', and in WWZ, the story is about people barely scraping victory against the zombies and retaking the world, thus they won. If we go by 'should', then Bella 'should' have dumped Edward on the curb in Twilight. The Hobbits 'should' have taken an eagle to Mt. Doom and saved a lot of lives in the process in LotR. Lucifer and his legions of demons 'should' have been anything other than the incompetent, poorly-written mass of cardboard wusses they turned out to be in TSW. We're not dealing with 'should' and if you're that fucking adamant that things should have been a curbstomp, right your own damn zombie novel.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Ghetto edit: *write your own damn zombie novel.

[Freefall]

Wow, that generated some heat.

Short response:

Sheppard said that Brooks had the Romans figure out how to fight zombies, but 21st century man could not. I was pointing out that this was simply wrong; in WWZ, when 21st century man finally pulls its head out its ass and decides to actually deal with the zombies, it deals with the zombies. Rather easily too. I don't believe they suffer any casualties to their rifle formations.

Lengthy response:

Like others have pointed out, it's satire. Taking it too literally is missing the point. The book is definitely not written with the perspective of "RAR! ZOMBEES R TEH AWEZOME!11!!!" There are probably a number of fanboy idiots that try to portray it that way, but they are missing the point just as much, and really, it's hardly fair to criticize a book based on its stupidest admirers. Zombies are not humanity's downfall in the book, humanity is humanity's downfall. It is a dark and pessimistic commentary on the current state of global, military, and health care politics, and human nature to a certain extent (since, obviously, humans are the ones responsible for all these issues; not like politics just magically exist on their own). Brooks actually spends a great amount of time setting up the entire global situation that resulted in the zombie epidemic, which had to do with a combination of illegal human trafficking, poor health care and regulations, deliberate misinformation spread by at least one pharmaceutical company attempting to profit from the situation, and (relatively late into the epidemic), gross military incompetence.

That's the thing that gets me about how people treat the Battle of Yonkers. It's a small part of the book, and a smaller part of the point of the book. It would be like if all anyone ever mentioned about the Lord of the Rings was the Battle of Helm's Deep. A slightly different way to put this is: this book isn't actually military fiction. Yes, it has military stuff, and it's fiction, but that doesn't make it genuine military fiction anymore than Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, or any number of other things.

I mean, if I were to criticize the book about anything, it would be the blind swordsman in the wilderness. I don't know what the hell that was about. The Otaku Samurai was pretty bad too.

Back to the pessimism point; the basic message (that I get anyway), is that humanity is so self-absorbed, greedy, arrogant, and stupid, and we've got our heads stuck so far up our own asses, that even when an incredibly obvious, stupid, slow-moving catastrophe is building up, we don't notice (or choose to ignore it) until it bites us on the ass. And even then, you end up with a bunch of slimy weasels trying to figure out how they might be able to exploit a cannibalistic ass-biter to make a buck before they consider just chopping the thing's head off, or a bunch of egotistical blowhards who try to make some huge grandiose display of how big their dicks are instead of just killing the thing, or you end up with a bunch of people who just go, "hey, as long as it isn't my ass getting bit."

The analogy with the wrestler isn't bad, it's just incomplete. To make it more apt, we would be talking about a wrestler who was hopelessly addicted to cocaine and painkillers, and had spent more time in the past 3 months feeding his addiction and fucking cheap hookers than working out. And then had his legs broken by loan sharks the night before the match. And suffered a mild stroke due to all the steroid abuse in his past. Not quite so surprising if he loses now, is it?

Now, if this sounds a little extreme, well, that's kind of the point of satire. However, I can think of a couple of examples off the top of my head that are at least along that kind of line of thinking. For instance, the evolution "debate." Why is it even a debate? Anyone who actually bothers to look into it with even a halfway open mind should see how obvious it is. And yet, here in America, we have whole States who are fighting actively, vehemently, against providing their children with a quality education. I mean, how friggin' backwards do you have to be to think like that? Actually, make that "act" like that. "Think" is giving them too much credit. They're practically trying to engineer a whole generation of Christian zombies themselves, on purpose.

Another example would be the fight to deny global warming. I mean, really? People think that hundreds of millions of cars, many horrendously feul-inefficient, operating for decades, plus however many poorly regulated factories all over the world, can't possibly have any net effect on the earth's atmosphere? None? No matter what educated scientists who are actually qualified to comment on the matter say about it?

Obviously, that's not what WWZ is about, but those are the kinds of attitudes it kind of deals with, just in relation to politics and social issues, rather than environmental or religious factors. Again, it's exaggerated, but that's the point of satire. And it's not even a hopeless kind of pessimism; again, once humanity finally pulls its head out its ass and decides to just sit down and deal with the problem, they deal with it.

Now, obviously SOD is different for everyone. I don't expect everybody to just accept everything. But at the same time, the zombie apocalypse scenario has been around for at least what, 40 years? I think at this point you should expect certain things about it. It would be kind of like coming out of a new Star Trek movie, and ranting about how stupid it is that there are aliens in it who look almost exactly like humans and can cross-breed with us.

And no, I didn't find the Battle of Yonkers particularly convincing, and I was skeptical of the ineffectiveness of military hardware in the fight (and I'm certainly no military enthusiast), but he at least put enough effort into it for me to suspend my disbelief to get on with the book, especially since, as I've said already, the book does NOT begin and end with the Battle of Yonkers. It's actually a pretty small part.

[D.Turtle]

snip cry baby shit

Look, I'll make this easy for you since you apparently are too fucking stupid: I'm saying a "victory" that is worse than a pyrrhic victory shouldn't be considered a victory at all.

If you think that losing most of the worlds population, infrastructure, knowledge, etc. constitutes a victory because humanity survived, then all power to you.

I don't.

And just to make it clear (again): For this argument, I don't care about how realistic it was for the Zombies to be as effective as they were. I care about the consequences of what was portrayed in the book.

[PainRack]

Is this seriously being argued here?

"Yeah, sure, the humans came out on top. They survived, maintained their civilization and most of their industrial capacity. They re-took their lands, beat back the zombies and now live in a world where they aren't spending each night desperately wondering how they're going to survive the next day. They overcame the threat that faced them and didn't go extinct, but that's not a victory!"

Did we read the same book? Isn't WWZ the novel that has the epilogue where it goes Humans are no longer as confident of the future as there may be ANOTHER zombie threat that emerges even though we won?

I guess Britain wasn't on the winning side of WW2 because London got bombed. Same for the US because Pearl Harbor got hit, it's obviously a Pyrrhic victory at the very best.

Exactly what standard are you setting for 'win' here? Do the winners have to be able to tea-bag the losers in victory? Here, silly me, I was thinking that when the threat facing you was extinction, then not going extinct would qualify as winning that battle. Destroying the thing threatening you with extinction, as opposed to simply escaping it, is just icing on that win cake.

Its a Pyrrhic victory because you lost most of your initial landmass and a huge proportion of the world population.
Are you simply going to ignore that humanity population is effectively halved after WWZ?

And the world ecosystem/environment is screwed after the war, meaning that we're effectively seeing a global meltdown of agriculture and the environment decades later?

How the fuck is this not a pyrhic victory?

[Stark]

Do you know what a pyrrhic victory even is? Its a victory ENOUGH OF WHICH WILL LOSE YOU THE WAR. Obviously if they win, and have won, and their enemies are defeated and they're not totally exhaused, it's not a pyrrhic victory. Was the Great Patriotic War 'pyrrhic' because a lot of Russians died?

[PainRack]

Wow, that generated some heat.

Short response:

Sheppard said that Brooks had the Romans figure out how to fight zombies, but 21st century man could not. I was pointing out that this was simply wrong; in WWZ, when 21st century man finally pulls its head out its ass and decides to actually deal with the zombies, it deals with the zombies. Rather easily too. I don't believe they suffer any casualties to their rifle formations.

They do so in the most staggerily expensive and stupid way either. We're supposed to accept that only because the US supposedly lost most of its military infrastructure and thus has to reserve its high end goods for other threats as opposed to zombies.

Like others have pointed out, it's satire. Taking it too literally is missing the point. The book is definitely not written with the perspective of "RAR! ZOMBEES R TEH AWEZOME!11!!!" There are probably a number of fanboy idiots that try to portray it that way, but they are missing the point just as much, and really, it's hardly fair to criticize a book based on its stupidest admirers. Zombies are not humanity's downfall in the book, humanity is humanity's downfall. It is a dark and pessimistic commentary on the current state of global, military, and health care politics, and human nature to a certain extent (since, obviously, humans are the ones responsible for all these issues; not like politics just magically exist on their own). Brooks actually spends a great amount of time setting up the entire global situation that resulted in the zombie epidemic, which had to do with a combination of illegal human trafficking, poor health care and regulations, deliberate misinformation spread by at least one pharmaceutical company attempting to profit from the situation, and (relatively late into the epidemic), gross military incompetence.

because the satire in and as of itself is mind boggling stupid. Somebody marketed a fradulent vaccine? And nobody notices until its too late?
It reads more like a conspiracy theory than satire.

The satire is supposed to be about government incompetence and the lack of trust between government and civilians.
The problem emerges when satire descends from comedy and criticism and becomes mere political commentary with a dose of humour added to it.

Newt Gingrich WW2 novel where the US military inability to defend the Manhatten project against Japanese infiltrators, resulting in them being rescued by Sheriff Alvin York because unlike those namby pampy scientists and US soldiers, the good old Sheriff and the town believes in the 2nd Amemndent rights is a PERFECT example of this.

Its no longer becomes satire when you're merely asserting your views/opinions as opposed to commenting and criticising events. That's why the military and government response in WWZ has been facing heat by many on this board.

The analogy with the wrestler isn't bad, it's just incomplete. To make it more apt, we would be talking about a wrestler who was hopelessly addicted to cocaine and painkillers, and had spent more time in the past 3 months feeding his addiction and fucking cheap hookers than working out. And then had his legs broken by loan sharks the night before the match. And suffered a mild stroke due to all the steroid abuse in his past. Not quite so surprising if he loses now, is it?

And? If you noticed something, Brooks argument was that the US military was too focused on gadgets as opposed to real effectiveness, and the PR war. The problem was, the PR war IS an important component of modern day operations and antiquity, hence, the whole term pysops.
And the US military focus on gadgets would have utterly blown away the zombie horde.
A better commentary would have been the US military being unable to clear infested cities because their focus on gadgets meant they simply don't have the ability to clear out cities safely, this when combined with bureacratic rules and stupidity.

If you ignore Shep, the rest of the board problem with Yonkers and the subsequent military response rests ENTIRELY on this fact that Brooks got the technical points wrong, hence, the criticism doesn't work.
It would be equivalent to someone saying that if the US didn't nuke Japan, the war couldn't have ended. While the intent is correct, it ignores the other bits and contexts that shows the overall statement to be false.

[Simon_Jester]

Of course, what this really counters is the zombie horde as an iconic threat. Dispersed zombies would be so much more of a problem.

Hey, that's what PSYOPS vehicles are for.

Play loud rock music and lure the zomboids into the open areas where they can be annihilated. As a bonus, the loudspeakers are somewhat hardened.

At which point you're basically back to something I suggested earlier: use of ground forces vastly more mobile than the zombies to draw them into killing grounds. The only difference is that you propose to use cluster bombs instead of a mechanized company to do the killing.

This might actually be cost-competitive, which amazes me; one CBU-87 would appear to cost around fourteen thousand dollars, and if you can get enough zombies into a tight enough space, that might well compare favorably with the amount of rifle, machine gun, and grenade ammunition the mechanized company uses. I'm not sure what the per-sortie cost of the bombers is, though; that could make a pretty dramatic difference.

The military would have to spread itself thin to cover refugee convoys and making it difficult to find safe areas to evacuate them to.

There are approximately 800,000 police in the US who are already trained in the use of firearms and ruidmentary tactics.

And there is the final stage of US mobilization: Activication of the Unorganized Milita.

Last used by the CSA in 1865. If you are male, and sufficiently healthy; you are now surprise surprise! A soldier in the U.S. Army.

Yes. On the other hand, you are now a soldier in the U.S. Army... with the unit cohesion of a bucket of warm spit. You'll wind up needing a lot of foot soldiers just to corset the Unorganized Militia.

Shep, you know about the problem of evacuating metropolitan areas, OK? It's a classic question when the issue of NUKEY NUKEY comes up. That's what I'm talking about here: Those 800,000 police are going to be controlling a refugee population of something like a hundred million or more. If they're spilling out of the cities quickly, in an uncontrolled manner, because of rapid-spread zombie outbreaks... it's not a trivial problem.

What makes it even worse is the problem of finding safe places to put the refugees while the zombies are lured out into open spaces, clusterbombed, the stragglers lured out and clusterbombed again, and then the actual houses swept by infantry to find the stragglers. Because it's kind of pointless to shove a hundred thousand people into a refugee camp to keep them away from zombies only to have a zombie outbreak in the middle of the refugee camp the next day.

All this is solvable. But saying "LOL clusterbombs" is only the beginning of the problem. Even without the clusterbombs the problem of getting the zombies into killing grounds would still be easy to solve; a World War II military could do it with water-cooled machine guns on jeeps.

It's the logistics of keeping the population alive, safe, and out of the way while this is done that presents you with a problem.

This is really simple, and I can't believe I have to explain this concept, but apparently knee-jerk nitpicking takes priority over common sense.

The humans won.

It doesn't matter if it was a Pyrrhic victory, it doesn't matter if the whole setup was hilariously unrealistic, by any valid definition of 'win', they won. The concept of 'winning' is not necessarily tied to the concept of realism. Taking the baseball analogy again: It doesn't fucking matter if the Yankees, at the top of their game, barely scraped by with a one point lead at the bottom of the ninth against a group of paraplegic infants wearing cute little baby-mitts on their ears. The context doesn't matter at all, only the conditions for winning: Whichever team has the most points at the end of the ninth inning is the winner, therefore the Yankees are the winner, however blatantly unrealistic the scenario is.

It's the same deal with WWZ: Whichever force dominates the earth at the end of the book is the winner, no matter how unrealistically contrived the scenario is. Humans are back in charge, thus they won.

So?

Yes. It is a story about humanity striving mightily to overcome a relatively weak enemy. I would argue that this is bad for the same reason you're criticizing the Salvation War series: when the conflict in a novel is only credible because of the enormous flaws, the weakness and stupidity of one side pitted against the strengths of the other, it undermines the story.

How is that not a valid criticism of WWZ? Or, for that matter, most other zombie stories? Or, for that matter, a large fraction of all fiction? It's not like this is an unusual problem. Making strong antagonists is hard work, and making weak or stupid antagonists to justify the success of the protagonists is easy.

Conversely, making the protagonists weak or stupid to allow the antagonists to have a string of early victories is also easy. Brooks is by no means unique in doing this.

Like others have pointed out, it's satire. Taking it too literally is missing the point. The book is definitely not written with the perspective of "RAR! ZOMBEES R TEH AWEZOME!11!!!" There are probably a number of fanboy idiots that try to portray it that way, but they are missing the point just as much, and really, it's hardly fair to criticize a book based on its stupidest admirers. Zombies are not humanity's downfall in the book, humanity is humanity's downfall. It is a dark and pessimistic commentary on the current state of global, military, and health care politics, and human nature to a certain extent...

Oh God yes.

Totally true. This is why, as I've said before, the fact that a work can be criticized does not make it bad. WWZ is pretty good except for its failure from the milgeek perspective on account of it presenting the protagonists in the early stages as weak and stupid.

Which is, as you have rather successfully argued, exactly the point. Brooks does seem to be making a point about 21st century civilization, including the technologically sophisticated West that has the ability to do so much with its resources (like kill zombies). The fact that the massive zombie attacks are such a threat comes about largely because security measures that ought to work are subverted, circumvented, or ignored. Problems arising in the Third World are ignored in the First World until they have already spread beyond easy control, and the measures undertaken to fight the problem are 'too little, too late' until it is very nearly too late to stop the disaster from destroying everything.

The prompt military response Shep describes is the exact opposite of the response undertaken by the government in this book, which systematically underestimates and ignores the problem they face until it blows up in their faces, by which point the home front is in such chaos that they can't respond effectively.

Even so, I think it's fair to say that the military is presented as more ineffectual than is all that credible; it would have been nice if Brooks could have beefed up the zombies a bit, somehow. Or emphasized more that it was the disruption, the lack of a secure rear area, that collapsed the military response. Like, if all those guys at Yonkers were already demoralized because they were afraid of zombies killing their families while they were off fighting in New York. Or, hell, some of them probably had relatives in New York who were in that zombie wave.

Things like that would have helped a lot. The portrayal of events in Russia was sort of good for that, in that you got a sense that it was the breakdown of morale that nearly killed them, not the breakdown of firepower.

Shep is very good at calculating firepower. I'm not sure his arguments hold up well when morale is factored in, though.

Back to the pessimism point; the basic message (that I get anyway), is that humanity is so self-absorbed, greedy, arrogant, and stupid, and we've got our heads stuck so far up our own asses, that even when an incredibly obvious, stupid, slow-moving catastrophe is building up, we don't notice (or choose to ignore it) until it bites us on the ass. And even then, you end up with a bunch of slimy weasels trying to figure out how they might be able to exploit a cannibalistic ass-biter to make a buck before they consider just chopping the thing's head off, or a bunch of egotistical blowhards who try to make some huge grandiose display of how big their dicks are instead of just killing the thing, or you end up with a bunch of people who just go, "hey, as long as it isn't my ass getting bit."

The analogy with the wrestler isn't bad, it's just incomplete. To make it more apt, we would be talking about a wrestler who was hopelessly addicted to cocaine and painkillers, and had spent more time in the past 3 months feeding his addiction and fucking cheap hookers than working out. And then had his legs broken by loan sharks the night before the match. And suffered a mild stroke due to all the steroid abuse in his past. Not quite so surprising if he loses now, is it?

Heh. I see your point.

Its a Pyrrhic victory because you lost most of your initial landmass and a huge proportion of the world population.
Are you simply going to ignore that humanity population is effectively halved after WWZ?

And the world ecosystem/environment is screwed after the war, meaning that we're effectively seeing a global meltdown of agriculture and the environment decades later?

How the fuck is this not a pyrhic victory?

To borrow a concept from the opening chapter of Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War, humanity "prevailed" in World War Z, without necessarily having "victory" in the classical sense. If a war is destructive enough that no sane person would be glad it happened in hindsight, it's hard to say you truly "won" from a psychological standpoint: you've got lots of dead relatives, it's going to be the work of a lifetime rebuilding the economy, and so on. But on the other hand, in a real sense you "prevailed:" you're doing relatively better than whoever you were fighting, and you have a future even if it sucks compared to what you would have had without the war.

Kahn talked about this in the context of nuclear war, where it's easy to see how this could happen. WWZ is portrayed as being about as destructive, in terms of loss of life, as a nuclear war would have been... so I think the comparison is valid.

Whether we talk about humans surviving WWZ and overcoming the zombies as "victory" or something rather less depends more on how we think of the meaning of the word victory than it does about anything else.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

snip cry baby shit

Look, I'll make this easy for you since you apparently are too fucking stupid: I'm saying a "victory" that is worse than a pyrrhic victory shouldn't be considered a victory at all.

If you think that losing most of the worlds population, infrastructure, knowledge, etc. constitutes a victory because humanity survived, then all power to you.

I don't.

It's alright sweetcheeks, I can understand you being pissy because reality doesn't agree with what you think things should be like. But it isn't my fault that your definition of 'win' differs from the one the rest of humanity uses.

The threat facing humanity was extinction. They didn't go extinct and are still doing pretty damn well as the dominant species on the planet. It was a victory, they won, QED. Now be a dear and come back when you have an actual point to make rather than whining.

As for everyone else... are you guys even reading my posts? At no point during any of this did I disagree that the entire setup was incredibly retarded and stretches credibility to the very limits. Yes, I know it's stupid and while I can ignore the highly retarded bits long enough to enjoy the other parts of the story, I can understand why other people wouldn't. There is absolutely no dispute there. The only thing I was disputing was the claim that humanity didn't win against the zombies, because that is simply not true.

[PainRack]

As for everyone else... are you guys even reading my posts? At no point during any of this did I disagree that the entire setup was incredibly retarded and stretches credibility to the very limits. Yes, I know it's stupid and while I can ignore the highly retarded bits long enough to enjoy the other parts of the story, I can understand why other people wouldn't. There is absolutely no dispute there. The only thing I was disputing was the claim that humanity didn't win against the zombies, because that is simply not true.

Do you even understand what is meant by pyrhic victory? Its one where the costs of doing so means you can't afford another such battle.

WWZ, with its massive economic, demographic and environmental costs qualify.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Do you even understand what is meant by pyrhic victory? Its one where the costs of doing so means you can't afford another such battle.

WWZ, with its massive economic, demographic and environmental costs qualify.

So the fuck what? Again, you haven't been reading my posts, I pointed out earlier, Pyrrhic or not, it was still a victory. This isn't a war where losing means you lose some territory, or watch your culture get assimilated into the conquerers, or get sold into slavery. If humanity lost the war THEY WOULD BE EXTINCT. Any victory, Pyrrhic or not, is preferable to this.

Also, considering the fact that most of the people in the book are of the opinion that with the new awareness they have about zombies, even with their technological, population and industrial set-backs, they're confident that the only way they could possibly lose to another zombie attack in the future is if they return to the ignorant mindset they had before the war. For some odd reason that strikes me as anything but a Pyrrhic victory.

[Samuel]

[quote+"Simon Jester"]Or emphasized more that it was the disruption, the lack of a secure rear area, that collapsed the military response. [/quote]

As Shep has shown, that isn't a problem. Remember zombies attack people so this may be the only war where leaveing supply dumps nearly undefended is a good idea.

Like, if all those guys at Yonkers were already demoralized because they were afraid of zombies killing their families while they were off fighting in New York. Or, hell, some of them probably had relatives in New York who were in that zombie wave.

I'm not sure why that would have them break. Morale would not be great, but it wouldn't cause them to slacken or desert.

The portrayal of events in Russia was sort of good for that, in that you got a sense that it was the breakdown of morale that nearly killed them, not the breakdown of firepower.

Russia was even stupider than the US. They could clean out cities using loud speakers but instead they decide to throw bodies at it... because you know, russians fight using human waves