Anyone sick of organised battles?

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

Yeop! I would rather run into a Tank over a Witch any day both at the same time is a nightmare. UGG!

Actually The wife and I play my 6 year old spectates. I prefer L4D2. Favorite tactic in L4D2 is to throw a bilebomb on the Tank and the or Witch and run like crazy in the opposite direction. Of course I am the crazy type who likes to melee the game.

That's not so crazy. Every time my brother and I play I always have the highest melee score. It's usually above 50 when his, the second highest, might reach fifteen. Best tactic for the Witch I've seen is a well-placed pipe bomb. When I do use guns, I always try to go with the 10-roung automatic combat shotgun. BAM! BAM! BAM! Perfect. But the guitar never runs out of ammo. I usually go into a Last Stand sort of thing when I get vomited on, pull out my melee, and just go out swinging. Spinning around in a circle of course.

 

[James Coote]

#1 The matrix is well paced and structured and brilliantly executed, and visually it shone with a brilliant shimmering polish. It is essentially a comic book film. Neo et al. are caricatures not deep, intellectually sophosticated characters. You don't have to buy into the pseudo-philosophical threads to enjoy the action packed, adrenaline pumping sequences.

#2 The problem with zombies is that unlike village of the damned or invasion of the body snatchers, they are just outside uncanny valley. You can happily shotgun one in the face without the disturbing conscience, yet they still provide a convenient catalyst for failure cascade within the heroic band.

#3 Battles are artificial constructs, and the tendancy is for people to make something into a battle as a way of carving order from chaos. So yes, the level of organisation is the part that is questionable rather than the human desire to make a fort and have a plan

 

[StilLearning]

I lived in a rough area for a while: People, even very ordinary ones, do come up with plans to deal with violence, very quickly sometimes - the best plans are the ones that get you out of trouble with a minimum or no violence needed.

I'd apply that to a zombie apocalypse, and encourage people to not hole up at all - find a working minivan, and keep moving until we were well away from all the brain munching corpses.

 

[Hammerhand]

If you don't want "organised" battle, don't include soldiers. Soldiers are indoctrinated to come up with a plan to best defend themselves. This involves finding cover, posting sentries then a cycle of improvement and reinforcement of the position. Chaos comes from a lack of leadership, which is why soldiers are trained to act 1 rank up and have a knowledge and understanding of 2 ranks up. They are all leaders. For chaos, simply have either no-one running the show or too many people trying; like a gang of vigilantes who follow the roughest guy who actually may not be any kind of leader when the brown stuff starts going down.

 

[Sapheron]

History has proven that in such a situation of disorganisation a leader quickly appears, chosen in a largely organic method. It's very difficult to have no one running the show, because people instinctively look for someone to do it. They might not make a good leader, or a good plan, but in some form or another one will pretty much always be made.

 

[chrispenycate]

Sometime in the bronze age it was discovered – although I doubt whether the first one to discover it used passive mood – that organisation and preplanning won more battles than merely having the best warriors. Not that having good fighters, courage and aggressivity wasn't useful, and still is, but using them effectively multiplied their worth, in all combat situations down to individual.

Social evolution, like its biological equivalent selects by survival; and nothing is more survival oriented than war. Ultimately (quite recently in some cases) all societies learnt that if you did not have some preparation for fighting unpleasant neighbours, your culture disappeared into the junk heap of history. They didn't all choose the same solutions, and often their choices needed rapid revision when coming into contact with different ones (which obviously makes a mockery of the 'planning' bit, but how many armies over time have found themselves expecting for the previous war?), but a society with no preparation for defence has about the survival hopes of a hunter/gatherer in Manhattan.

Zombies, presumably, don't plan; if they are not controlled by a malefic master influence (take your choice; supernatural, voodoo priest, mad scientist, rogue computer) they just swarm, like locusts, so a relatively simple preparation can balance their unkillability and numerical advantage. Any society which plays by their rules – only start fighting when there is something there to fight – is going to end up red-shirted, the atrocities at the beginning of the film, before the heroes recognised the danger and started to plan, to get organised.

Even the flaming-torch waving peasant mob which invades the planning vampire's abode have some plan. It's just not a very good one.

 

[assasin]

90% of the time unplanned zerg rushes are suicide. Wolves use tactics [one distracts the horns in front while two others take the flank], many prey herd animals have lookouts to watch for predators. Its a basic fact of nature that if you don't have plans to escape or win certain situations you'll end up dead.

 

[Phillip Richards]

I agree with you, hammerhand, soldiers spend their entire service organising themselves for battle, and so to have them not do so and sit around waiting to die would be unrealistic. However, I think anthorn has a point about forts and organised defences. Spend too much time writing about this great plan and how it unfolds goes can remove the sense of sustained meanace that makes a zombie story good. So how do you avoid it? Two ways. Alter the group dynamics to make them unable to opertate together efficiently. A newly created group doesnt always select a leader straight away, they might argue. Have a senior private soldier come to blows with a police officer over who gets to lead, for instance. They could have a conflict in interests, one group wants to stay put and ride it out and the other wants to save others. Secondly, you can alter the enviornment and the enemy to make it impossible for the group to organize and plan well in advance. Why do they have to have a 'fort'? They might have to get somewhere safe, and so be moving from place to place, harried all the way. If there is a fort, why not make it too difficult to defend with the numbers in the group. Perhaps every time they manage to fix a piece in their defences another is destroyed, and so the group is unable to maintain its position. 'No plan survives a contact', the zombies dont have to play into the groups plan. Take their all singing, all dancing idea and flip it on its head!

 

[Denise Tanaka]

To me, there's something innocent and almost childish about the fighting-back-the-zombie-apocalypse type story. It reminds me of grade school boys pretending to have a fort on the playground, or (apologies to any video game players) folks who spend a lot of time doing World of Warcraft or Call of Duty. It's a completely unrealistic fantasy to imagine that when everything in the world goes to pieces, a small brave group of Red Dawn survivalists will tighten their boot straps and defend humanity. It makes for fun entertainment, but on a deeper level I don't believe it.

I look back at history and all the real world examples of when apocalypse actually happened, mostly to the indigenous cultures taken over by European colonialism. Sure a few of them had a Geronimo type hero who rallied a group of freedom fighters, and made a brave stand, but in the end they all lost. The first season of The Walking Dead had a few sweet moments of the women and children at the campsite, and how the most vulnerable members of society were conducting themselves with courage and quiet dignity. That's how humanity survives, not with walls and guns and blowing off zombies heads one at a time.

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

The difference is though, DT, if you can survive long enough, the zombies should eventually die out due to starvation. Hehe.


No, I want to see something different coming out these days. Rehashes of old superheroes, zombie apocalypse, vampires, werewolves, rehashes of fairy tales, blah-de-freaking-blah. The entertainment and literature industries these days...I want to see something relatively fresh and original, or if not that, then a hand in something rarely used. When was the last time we actually saw Cthulu? Or airborne viral apocalypse that leaves just a few ragtag survivors with natural antibodies? Or a halfway decent dystopia?

 

[Phyrebrat]

I'm just sick of zombie apocalypse in general. It's why I don't watch The Walking Dead.

Do you realise how silent I have been on this very topic for years and years and years, for fear or being beaten with a stick? Even as a child the whole zombie concept bored me senseless. I can't get scared, or empathise a sense of peril with some shambling mindless thing. I gave 28 Days Later a shot because it looked a little different, and the running ragers did impress me somewhat, but there is still not enough sense of risk for me.

However.... I did see - primarily because I am a Darabont fan - The Walking Dead and have been an eager fan ever since. There is one particular moment where I was squirming! Very rare for me.

Elsewhere in this thread I have seen people mention The Matrix and The Passage. I'm so-so on The Matrix. I enjoyed it at the time but felt it lost its way. My (uber-geek) sister and I had a long chat about why people even cast Keanu Reeves in anything but then we started finding qualities that suited him for various roles , the one I think he really got right was A Scanner Darkly.

Regarding The Passage, I really enjoyed the beginning but the jump cut to the future made this brick a real drag. I'm a bit OCD in finishing things I have started (case in point: Assassin's Creed Renaissance, by Oliver Bowden which stands out as the worst example of fiction I have read so far) so I lumbered on with the book. To a wholly unsatisfying end. I also thought a whole section could have been edited out as pointless but my biggest gripe came when I returned the book to my sis who then told me it was the beginning of a series. I felt so miffed. If I had known that I would have broken my OCD rule and canned it.

Anyway, thanks Karn for allowing me to come out of the Z-closet.

pH

 

[StilLearning]

I want to see something relatively fresh and original, or if not that, then a hand in something rarely used. When was the last time we actually saw Cthulu? ......

With reference to that: I've just posted the start of a Cthulhu mythos tale, set in the near future, in the critiques section. I abandoned it because I couldn't see how mythos fans would have missed writing something like that many, many, times before me!

 

[Toby Frost]

Personally I agree with some of the earlier comments: I find zombies slightly boring because they don't do much. I also think all the commentary on society that can be made with zombies has been done by now. For a while, zombies were the fashionable pulp thing among the middle class the way Bollywood used to be, but it seems to be dying out. What's really interesting is what people do during and after a crisis.

As for 'organised battles', I don't know of enough good zombie stories to make it a literary cliche. I guess there are those end-of-level bits in Left 4 Dead, which is hardly a philosophical masterpiece (although good fun). Besides, holing up seems pretty sensible in such a situation. And if you could just stay there in perfect safety, it'd get boring.

Also Denise is right to flag up the naff Davy Crockett fantasy that ruins some apocalypse stories. It doesn't have to be that way, but anyone seeing the death of most of the population as liberating needs to consider the resulting lack of facilities and the piles of rotting, disease-ridden bodies. I don't need no dang govmint when I got zombies to shoot! Just please God don't let me get toothache...

 

[Kylara]

Haha something I think is brought up in Day of the Triffids - they keep scavenging cities, but then the buildings start to fall, something the protagonist never really thought would happen, but then realised how likely it was...A friend of mine wrote an excellent comic panel show script about zombies, and zombie rights, how they weren't all after brains and how unfair and emotionally painful that was...in an exceedingly funny way...I think zombies are used more as a plot device than characters which is a shame, some fun things could happen to characters, but plot devices? not so much