Its the chance to be exceptional and use skills you excel in that you normally don't get to use in everyday life.FaxModem1 wrote: ↑Thu Nov 15, 2018 10:24 pm Zombie fiction can be anything, from Romero's "Humanity is evil and needs to die", to the film Fido's "Conformity and denial of differences are bad", to Snyder's............... but mostly, zombie fiction is 'civilization ending disaster, only this time it's zombies'. This can lead to various types of stories, but the one that found it's audience is, "Being prepared will make you survive".
Essentially, preppers.
There is an appeal to the individualism of the zombie apocalypse. The air is still the same, the water is still the same, the food is still there, and there's no radiation. Heck, all the electronics and modern conveniences still exist as well. You are still competing with the population, but now you can get away from them and enjoy life how you want to. You don't have to deal with the numerous paperwork, or working a 9 to 5. If you want, you can just conquer a mansion, grab some supplies, build some walls, and boom, you're king of the mountain.
At least, that's the appeal of the fantasy. In reality, if such a thing happened, you're probably one of the countless millions who are already dead and a zombie.
Why is this appealing?
Because in reality, they seem to lack agency. They're either in a dead end job, or a student, or settled down somewhere. And the best they can do is working a dead end job to pay the bills. It's an appeal to frontier fiction, only with it being possible in modern day. Same way that westerns were the heyday programming of the 1950s and 1960s.
Now, whether this is toxic or not is debatable. But I think it's a symptom of a rather sizable group of people being unsatisfied with their lot in life, and not seeming to have the possibility to make a change in it.
The issue is that is all that zombie fiction and such can turn to given the seeming dislike to honestly face the situations survivors would be in. Everything would devolve into a hunter-gatherer society (only now with predators to seriously threaten our survival as a species) where the whole comes before anyone else. Modern ideas of individuality and freedoms would have to be thrown away asap and those who throw them away quicker have the best (still slim) chances of survival.Imperator-zor wrote: ↑Thu Nov 15, 2018 8:59 pm Besides the stupidity of the military failing to wipe out an mob of shambling dead fuckers frankly there is some rather unpleasant thematic stuff in this whole set up. It's a highly antisocial worldview, possibly to the point of sociopathy. Individualism taken to the extreme of rejecting a pillar of humanity on par with intelligence, cooperation. No one human built society, it was build by myriad humans working in concert for thousands of years. Being able to make metal tools is a great skill to have and especially for a group of humans to have, but to do so you need ore, fuel, a forge and food on hand so you can master your skill. It's also hypocritical as Zombie Survivalists don't run into the woods and hunt deer with stone tipped spears. No they scavenge foodstuffs from shopping malls, ammo from gunstores and whatnot. Things that were made by an industrial society which could only exist because millions of humans get along.
That's an honest admission and one that describes the above I said. In the end all suicide comes down to "I don't want to deal with this".
Yuke, you need to take a break or something. X's position he posted was the exact opposite of what your describe and would be more akin to my own given that nothing gets better without life continuing on living.Yukaphile wrote: ↑Thu Nov 22, 2018 7:02 am Yeah, I know a Libertarian, like Admiral X, who thinks "life at all costs" is of paramount importance. I disagree, naturally. I think it depends on if the quality of that life is worth living. Then again, my friend is too focused on math. He sees all of life in terms of numbers and statistics. He's like an Arctic breeze in terms of warmth and empathy.
