Always OOC:
Fascinating that the Junta immediately went to copying names of German formations off of the Eastern Front isn't it? I know they're fascists but I don't even think it's a proper nazi thing. I think it's just that they think the Wehrmacht is cool.
I'll say it again:
The sheer size of the armies required to sweep and clear the North American continent after zombies had taken over a big slice of it would
necessitate the restoration of the "Army Group" level designation, because you're talking about putting millions of rifles in millions of hands. The existence of a clearly defined front line that runs on a more or less north-south axis makes it reasonably logical that you would designate the commands with names like "Army Groups North, Center, and South."
While we're at it, the French in World War One had an
Army Group North,
Army Group Center, and
Army Group East because the front lines bent around a bit.
Now, could you
also name the groups "one, two, and three" or "A, B, and C?" Theoretically, yes.
But this isn't really a worthwhile place to pin fascism on, or "Wehraboo"-ness on. Both fascists and nonfascists use the concepts of north, south, east, and west, and high-level military organization into divisions, corps, armies, and army groups is a standard feature of all modern armies.
The second line also presumably provided blocking forces to prevent the guys in the first line from deciding discretion was the better part in the face of a large ghoul swarm or the like, right?
Uh, theoretically maybe, but in practice they probably honestly are there as a reserve force mostly?
Like, if suddenly 10,000 zombies come pouring out of a dip in the terrain and you didn't see it coming, you'd
want your front line of skirmishers to fall back and consolidate with the first line.
Now, within the reality of the AU that's being spun up so well in this Let's Read, sure, maybe the Junta actually was crazed enough and bad at morale enough that they needed blocking forces. But really, you'd want your sweeping forces advancing in multiple lines whether they were doing that or not.
That said they could plausibly have so many troops as to justify an XXXXX/Army Group level command? So that these formations exist is not completely absurd. Additionally, the Allies used (non-sequential) numbers at least partially for security reasons, and zombies aren't known for their intelligence. In either sense of the term. So, a simple geographic name could make sense, you could say it's not just a Wehrmacht thing so much as naming such large often ad-hoc formations after their intended purpose is simply intuitive. I'm not... super inclined to hold it against Brooks, though the fact he used the exact ordering of the words as the Wehrmacht as opposed to, like, 'Central Army Group', 'Central Front', or given all the other US Civil War references he's made, 'Military District of the...' river names optional.
I kind of agree, yeah, as I said above.
In the English language, using "fronts" instead of "army groups" doesn't come naturally, and "Army of the [rivername]" doesn't work in the context of the terrain being fought over and the overall theater of operations from the Rockies to the Eastern Seaboard, because you'd have to repeatedly redesignate the units as they advanced.
There's plenty of stuff we can nail Brooks for, when it comes to latent fascism, so I prefer not to put weight on something as rickety as this.
OOC: Man, he handles feral kids worse than even the
cop from way back.
But then, I think a fair amount of zombie fiction just fundamentally doesn't believe human life intrinsically has value. Like, it's usually a contrived scenario that emphasizes 'lifeboat ethics', 'survivalism'
on an individual level, and paranoia being life-saving. The prospect of a cure to zombie infections is rarely even raised, let alone allowed for by the scenarios' creators -- and of course, the zombies themselves are usually just targets, rather than victims.
It's honestly kinda sad that a creation of Haitian folklore inspired by the horrors of plantation slavery got hijacked into this.
Yeah, frankly. To all of this. The underlying idea that motivates zombie apocalypse fiction is "the mindless hordes of useless eating people are now a threat to the useful good people who matter." It is inherently a story concept that leaps readily into the hands of a certain kind of artist, waiting to be played like a fiddle. And the kind of artist in question is the kind who, on some level, does not really consider most human lives to be valuable.
The bit about "feral bulls" is likewise kind of fascinating because, like, how are these people surviving out there? How are they surviving in a zombie infested wilderness and yet acting like insane berserkers who will attempt to charge an armed soldier to engage in melee?
Yeah. It only works either:
1) If you enter the wildly unrealistic mindset the author has, where certain kinds of people just 'go feral' and there's no question of how they even live or whether it's psychologically realistic, because they exist to be killed by the protagonist, like the stereotypical "orc guarding a treasure chest in a 10x10 foot room" in D&D.
OR...
2) If you read between the lines and recognize that these are innocent people, teenagers, who were shot dead by the advancing forces of the junta for any number of reasons and retroactively labeled as "ferals who charged me."
Yeah it's something that would make more sense in a setting where your zombies are runners, more the movie than the book - there at least you've got an argument that if you're spotted it's already too late to run, so your best hope of survival is immediate, explosive violence, put the zombie down hard before it can attract more, then break contact and make distance. But the book is pretty consistent that 'zack' is all shamblers, which... You don't even need to outrun, a brisk walking pace is your best defense lol.
Plus also the part where Max Brooks zombies are super-infectious, so if they bite you even once or any blood or whatever gets into you, you're dead.
Someone who would charge a zombie with their bare hands would be dead many times within a few years in Brooks zombie apocalypse country.
OOC I'm given to understand that Aztec Reconstructionism or whatever you'd call it isn't, like, a thing in Mexico, so I'm not sure what causes American reactionaries to think that Mexicans are just itchin' to throw up some huge pyramids so they can start carving out people's hearts again. Probably their usual mix of racism and projection; they go out of their way to never learn anything about their closest neighbour except for atrocities committed centuries ago and the most obviously terrible things happening there now, and they want to bring back religious and governmental forms that were abandoned centuries ago and so figure that everybody does. Hmm.
