this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Zombie Survival

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Discussion about the hypothetical scenario of a zombie apocalypse.

Unless stated otherwise, by zombie we're refering to The Walking Dead -kind of undead creature.

Serious discussion only.

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I personally can't imagine anyone surviving long-term around running zombies. Even if fighting them was relatively easy, it’s statistically inevitable that sooner or later you'd get bitten. This applies to walking zombies too, but at least with them, you have the option to avoid physical altercations altogether, at least for the most part. That’s what I think most TV shows get wrong about zombies: even if there’s just one, and you could easily take it down, just don’t. It’s almost never worth the risk. In my view, the best way to survive is to avoid them as much as possible. Fighting is the last resort and should only be done in self-defence.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ammo might be a pain in the ass. But standing atop a tall wall with a pike stabbing down into skulls would probably work well.

Plus a good fire pit to burn the bodies so other diseases don't crop up.

I've kind of wondered if you could make a sustainable fire using only zombie bodies. They could be an interesting source of fuel.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Bodies don't actually burn well at all. Even dried out bodies more smolder (people used to burn mummies, among other really silly things they did to them) than burn.

So, you can definitely make a pyre to make sure any flesh is gone, but the zombies won't make good fuel.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Fair enough. It's mostly just for preventing the rotting corpse from festering diseases.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yup, makes sense :)

Watching TWD, and the various other zombie fiction, I'm always surprised how little attention gets paid to the other parts of what a walking, rotting corpse would mean. It never really gets covered in the kind of way I would expect it to.

Yeah, when excrement meets air conditioning, you don't stop and worry about the corpse juice on every little scratch and injury, but nobody ever dies from the kind of infections that would be running rampant after a zombie fight.

And nobody really cleans up the environment around them after a zombie fight near their camps. They'll drag the bodies off, but that's not really enough to prevent every risk from ever happening. You'd have tainted watersheds, possible contamination as insects and scavengers come to check out the smells of rot, then spreading pathogens.

TWD only had one plague pre-carl dying (I stopped after that), and that seems a bit low for what was years of time.

Which, there's all kinds of ways to explain that stuff away, but they never do lol.