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Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda
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Sure they go into detail. World War Z is nothing BUT detail, about how it all started, how it grew, how people dealt with it and how it was stopped.
All of the observations in that piece are easily answered.
1. Animals feasting on the shambling dead - first, let's say something about the virus makes them utterly inedible. Second, any predator attempting to eat a zombie - which does not react like a human but rather continues trying to bite and scratch you even after being torn in half - will receive at least minor wounds and, presumably, die as a result. It's pretty easy for the sake of a zombie-oriented-story to come up with parameters for a disease that takes this out of the equation.
2. Decomposition and putrefaction - same here. Perhaps the disease does not de-activate the immune system, but rather supercharges it, notwithstanding the physical rotting effects. Perhaps the virus itself immunizes its host against such effects.
3. Freezing - this is actually a staple part of the mythology. The thing is, they tend to thaw. Even when significantly compromised, they're still a threat.
4. Spread by biting - this isn't necessarily so; in certain cases it's blood-borne (and there tends to be a lot of blood flying around), and in others scratching etc. infects you. In TWD, everyone's already infected (presumably it's airborne) so this isn't even an issue. Again referring to WWZ, the issue was that the original outbreak was in rural China, and a large volume of people were infected before anyone could figure out what was even going on.
5. "they'll just walk into #### and destroy themselves"... well the difference between people and zombies is that infection doesn't seem to be an issue for them. Nor do gaping wounds. They keep going in spite of injuries that to a human would be debilitating. This is a pretty puzzling argument.
6. Zombies would walk into rivers diminishing their numbers - really? Has this guy ever seen a zombie movie or anything? They don't drown, they eventually get out of the water. Sure, some obstacles are pretty effective zombie barriers, but then you have the issue of being behind a zombie barrier with no food. You've gotta come out sometime.
7. Lots of people can shoot them - yes because "the good guys have guns" never happens in a zombie flick. The "wouldn't the military be able to deal" argument could be had at length, but the answer is "probably yes". The weapons exist to put down a massive zombie epidemic, sure, but it would likely require killing a lot of innocent people. In any event, the point is that it's not implausible that these measures could prove insufficient, allowing us to create a plausible enough zombie fiction.