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- United Kingdom
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- She/Her
Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
- Thread starter veteranMortal
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GhostStalker
Jeopardy! contestant
- Location
- NYC
Nobody's responded to this yet, but I believe it's mentioned in a footnote that the Japanese government (I guess the aforementioned Doctor Kokura) decided to call zombies "siafu" after the African Driver Ants as a metaphor for how "mindless" hordes could consume society and the term stuck in Japan (because they sure as hell weren't gonna call them zombies in official government documents and press conferences). I'm not at home at the moment (on the other side of the country at AX now) so I can't check the footnote where this is mentioned right this minute, but I seem to remember this being the case.
I think I was a lot more into shonen animes when I read these chapters of the book a decade and a half ago, and a lot less informed about the politics of post-war rightist movements in Japan, so the now blatant fash adjacent parts flew right over my head. I do remember thinking that Kondo's hikki history would be plausible, but his escape down the apartment building using sheets and then conveniently finding a "Japanese katana folded 1000 times!" from a WWII officer veteran in his building (after running into a deceased hostess who had committed suicide and looting her apartment for more supplies ofc) as the weeb cliche is presented very implausible, but I swallowed it because I was and still am in many cases an uncritical reader of things that interest me, as I've mentioned before in thread.
What I mostly remember about this section besides the hikki portrayal and finding the sword and escaping the apartment building, from reading and editing the Wikipedia page for World War Z, is that Masi Oka voiced the otaku in the audiobook version. Right when he was the go to American actor for nerdy Japanese otaku sword dude after Heroes came out (the timeframe fits as well) in the pop culture consciousness (dating this book as well). Again, Brooks flexing his industry connections and the like here.
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K von Carstein
Likes to go for a walk
- Location
- Belgium
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- He
Why tho? Personally I liked it.
Looks like I've got them backwards then. Not sure what the name is of the one I was thinking of, but it sounds like you're both on the same page anyway.
Mister Bad Guy
Mr Mercury to friends
- Location
- Bay Area
Which is weird, because, like... Zombie Survival Guide brought up race relations all the time in the Recorded Attacks section. It was clumsy, sure, dripping with orientalism and noble-savage tropes on a semi-regular basis, but racism gets used as one of the main things that tended to either exacerbate disasters or render it far more difficult for the information afterward to spread. A specific example was an outbreak that happened in a Caribbean colony, where most of the white settlers were turned or devoured, leaving the surviving slaves (who had some knowledge of zombies due to oral tradition) to band together and wipe out the zombies... only for the colonial law enforcement to sail in a week later and then immediately arrest and execute or re-enslave all the slaves, as well as the free black and mulatto inhabitants, declaring the whole thing to be a slave revolt. It's not great, but it does suggest an actual awareness of the issue and an attempt to grapple with it.
I'd not be surprised if there was, to a degree, an "end of history" mindset going on: that is to say, things sucked then, but they're better now. The only real intentional racism-is-bad moment I recall in WWZ is the bit about the Indian shipyard evacuation where it's noted that some captains were refusing to let certain races or castes onto their boats.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
There is a sizeable trend within the American cultural mindset that wants to admit that race relations and bigotry caused bad things to happen in the past, while utterly refusing to engage with the question of what that implies for the present.
- Location
- An Underground Fortress
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- She/Her
IC: Finally have steady enough power and net here, and found this review. I'll be honest, a lot of this is news to me. I was very young when we fled for safety, and where we ended up wasn't exactly known for being very connected with the rest of the world even before the nezhit' brought everything crashing down. It's so interesting hearing about the experiences from people all around the world, though also sad, and very frequently gross, especially in regards to the Junta. I have not read this book until now, though I would not be surprised if it had a whole chapter about the American's march across the country, neither would I be surprised if it embellishes some details, and leaves out the more...inconvenient sides of it. I suppose few are left to tell about it now, and fewer of us who got lucky and resettled outside the Junta, with at least the potential to tell stories without restriction.
OOC: There's a sorta humor in just finishing a reread of this book and finding this thread on the exact same day. I still stand by the format being one of the most engaging ways to tell this kind of story, but some parts certainly didn't hold up. The one sole British interviewee being some royalist twat as well as what he said in his section amused my partner and I to no end. The new context OP provides is super interesting and is what really sets this apart from most other LRs I've seen.
OOC: There's a sorta humor in just finishing a reread of this book and finding this thread on the exact same day. I still stand by the format being one of the most engaging ways to tell this kind of story, but some parts certainly didn't hold up. The one sole British interviewee being some royalist twat as well as what he said in his section amused my partner and I to no end. The new context OP provides is super interesting and is what really sets this apart from most other LRs I've seen.
It's funny how that mindset managed to persist even right after it was proven wrong stateside, after just a decade of actually being a concept. I guess to some, what happened was just an anomaly, we'd be back to our regularly scheduled end of history momentarily. Idk, I'm just starting to really look into how Bush-era America acted and lived and it's fucking weird
OOC: The idea that the blind Japanese monk is really just a senile old man being used as a politcal catspaw...makes me go from hating him to pitying him in a way that I honestly didn't think was possible.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
He may have had some bad beliefs even so, but... in this interpretation, it sounds like he was relatively harmless and minding his own business until someone younger and sneakier got into the game.
Mister Anemone
"Dab Master is just Cyn wearing Drew's clothing."
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- She/They
OOC: I think that Max Brooks had well-intentions in writing this book. Except it just that it was colored by pop-culture expectations that us readers wanted to look and some veiled RL positions he espoused. That, and his skinny dipping to the ideas of the Reformer Movement.
Edit: Changed the statement.
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- Location
- Upstate NY, USA
- Pronouns
- Fjf
Gonna OOC here. I've argued about the above a lot over the past few years. Everyone in the US needs to read the 1619 project, or watch the companion series on Hulu.
Gonna push back against this, a little. The right kind of shovel absolutely can. A heavy duty shovel that can withstand being repeatedly rammed into rocks all day isn't going to have trouble with skulls.
Granted, that's not the kind of shovel you'd expect a hotel gardener to be using for puttering around flower beds. But the kind meant for compacted clay soil filled with rocks and spite? Plenty tough.
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- Location
- California Conservation Corps
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- She/Her
As a general rule, most tools you would think of grabbing to use as an improvised melee weapon are oddly effective at being a weapon expecially against zombies. Odds are, if the tool is decent quality durability won't be a factor.
The real limitation is that they'll tire you out far faster than any actual weapon would. Shovels, crowbars, hammers, etc tend to be both heavier and balanced far differently than a dedicated weapon is. That said, a shovel probably is the best improvised weapon you can get as it's basically a dull spear.
A solid wood shafted shovel, 5 foot long is likely the absolute best weapon you can find that wasn't explicitly designed to be a weapon. Is it a polearm or spear? No. Is it a better choice than a baseball bat? Usually.
SemiSaneAuthor
TARDIS powered by Snark, Spite, and Tea!
- Location
- Sol-3, Memetic Quarantined World - For English
- Pronouns
- They/Them
By the way, on the notion of Zombies and Oral Histories ...
Someone's done an Oral History in a World War Z style about the Borg and Wolf 359 and such. I can share it it's considered relevant to Zombies and an Oral History?
Someone's done an Oral History in a World War Z style about the Borg and Wolf 359 and such. I can share it it's considered relevant to Zombies and an Oral History?
There are certainly tools which would potentially be better, they're just far less common. A long-hafted brush axe/billhook, say.
But hell, anything that gives you reach and is light enough to leave you some endurance should be good - so not that solid metal lobo, a damn table leg might actually be better than that. Even a sturdy broom might be good enough for tripping/pushing ala a sasumata (and gets the in-universe weeb bonus), albeit perhaps best with a team who can finish it.
- Location
- Somewhere within the static
I'd doubt even Max Brooks himself would be offended if we used Terkelist style instead of WWZ style. Our userbase is partly Alt-history and Max wears his influences on his sleeves in interviews.
I literally came across this story recently by pure chance, and its a thing of pure beauty. I cannot stress enough just how intresting the idea of doing a let's read, but putting it in that universe.
Oh, yeah, this is a reminder. I haven't read WWZ since high school, and it has not aged well. Of course, me saying it hasn't aged well was likely due to the fact I didn't read between the lines all that well, at just how messed up things actually got. I really hope to see more of this in the future.
Oh, yeah, this is a reminder. I haven't read WWZ since high school, and it has not aged well. Of course, me saying it hasn't aged well was likely due to the fact I didn't read between the lines all that well, at just how messed up things actually got. I really hope to see more of this in the future.
Time displaced Warhammer 40k Krieger, maybe.
On the subject of Zombie Types,
I don't know where, exactly, entrenching tool mania came from, but it wasn't the Death Korps, it just got associated with it from elsewhere.
Frankly that meme is likely as not to arise from this book, rather than the other way around. As I mentioned earlier in my discussion, the three Vraks series books Imperial Armor books, which are basically a novel-length analysis of a Death Korps campaign and from which much of the Death Korps lore is consolidated... this doesn't happen. Like, using entrenching tools as an improvised weapon gets mentioned maybe twice in hundreds of pages. Because the Death Korps has bayonets and trench knives and other weapons that are actually dedicated to their purpose. For that matter, it's noted that they rarely use the entrenching tool to actually dig trenches, but more for spot maintenance - the trenches are dug by big excavators on a Leman Russ chassis, like you'd expect when digging thousands of kilometers of elaborate earthworks.
I don't know where, exactly, entrenching tool mania came from, but it wasn't the Death Korps, it just got associated with it from elsewhere.
Theaxofwar
Definitely not a Bunny Cat in disguise.
- Location
- Standing right behind you
It's interesting to me how… cartoonishly other cultures are portrayed. Britain is all monarchy and castles, Russia is a totalitarian empire that happily decimates its own soldiers, Japan is some sort of weeaboo wet dream, etc. It creates this really strong feel of someone trying to write a global perspective without ever talking to someone outside of the US.
- Location
- England, unfortunately.
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- She/They
It's a Zombie War World Tour.
No seriously. This is the kind of depiction I expect from a 90's kids anime trying to sell me on some form of toys.
Could you edit the title into this post? People reading the thread to catch up are sort of put in a position of either DMing you weeks later or, as I'm doing now, asking for the title in thread because this feels less socially awkward, and I feel like it might save you potentially a dozen odd PMs over the years from people asking about it to edit the title into the post talking about it.
Also @veteranMortal this is a great story/psuedo RP, extremely clever concept, I've been gushing about it to my father on car rides the last few days, it's fascinating, a really cool and engaging way to do a teardown of a very bad book XD Thanks for writing this!
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- He/Him
Keep going through the posts, a link will appear from me.
oh whoops you already linked it, my bad, should have waited a page or so here XD
- Location
- London, UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
If people don't mind, I'd like that. Or I could ask on your profile page if it's against the rules.