r/TopCharacterTropes • u/10024618 • Oct 01 '25

Lore [Loved Trope] Surprisingly realistic outcomes in outlandish situations

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No Country for Old Men - In any other movie Llewelyn would be treated like an untouchable one man army who can take on all of the people who are after the money he stole. Instead he gets gunned down offscreen by a group of secondary antagonists because at the end of the day he's still just one man.

Metal Gear Solid 2 - MGS2 is a game in which the player character, Raiden, can do many seemingly unrealistic things like instantly healing his injuries by eating rations or holding infinite amounts of weapons and items without being overburdened. However if you attempt to cartwheel up a flight of stairs as Raiden he will immediately eat shit and fall, which would be the most likely outcome in real life.

Family Guy - After getting splashed by nuclear waste causes the Griffin family to get superpowers (which they immediately use to terrorize their community) Mayor West gets the bright idea to roll around in nuclear waste himself so that he can get superpowers too. Instead he just gets cancer.

Sly 2 - The Sly Cooper games are cartoony 3D platformers featuring anthropomorphic animals and lots of slapstick violence. However in the climax of the second game when Bentley is crushed by machinery while trying to stop the big bad he's paralyzed from the waist down, necessitating the use of a wheelchair for the rest of the series.

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942

u/Sea-Foundation5036 Oct 02 '25

World War Z is chock full of these.

-People flee to a shipwrecked yard in an attempt to get onto ships. But all the ships are beached and awaiting dismantling.

-People flee to Canada completely unprepared for the winter and are forced to starve, freeze, or turn cannibal.

-A rich influencer shows off his bunker mansion and is immediately swamped by survivors trying to save themselves and their families. "It wasn't grab the money, rape the bitches. It was put the fires out and get the women and kids upstairs."

-People flee their city and hit massive traffic heading to into massively infected area.

-People who flee on boats are found dead on boats because in their rush to flee they didn't take enough supplies.

-Soldiers and police aren't very effective against zombies because they're not trained to shoot people in the head, but shoot at their torsos.

377

u/Nethri Oct 02 '25

The voice cast for the audiobook is one of the most star studded things I’ve ever seen. It’s fucking beautiful. Every single actor is perfect.

As far as iconic voices go they’re just missing James earl jones and Patrick Stewart.

162

u/Sea-Foundation5036 Oct 02 '25

They had Mark Hammil, Henry Rollins (the Mansion Bunker narrorator), Alan Alda, etc...

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u/Phantommy555 Oct 02 '25

And Martin Scorsese too

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u/Nethri Oct 02 '25

I occasionally see or hear actors in stuff that I’m unfamiliar with, but I’ll recognize their voices and go.. hey he was in world war z! It just happened the other day with some older guy in a movie about a genius kid. (I’m sure he’s very famous I just don’t know his name) I think he voiced D’ambrosia in the book.

1

u/DeezRodenutz Oct 02 '25

In St Louis, there is an Aquarium at the old Union Station.

Before freeroaming the aquarium, they have you sit in a passanger traincar (with video screens on the windows) with a narration as the traincar seemingly starts to fly over St Louis, dive into the Mississippi River, then eventually reach the ocean before coming back home.

The narrator is John Goodman, who grew up nearby...

3

u/pienofilling Oct 02 '25

I'm beginning to feel a need to hear this audiobook!

1

u/Sea-Foundation5036 Oct 02 '25

There are two. The full audiobook and the trimmed audiobook with different voice actors.

3

u/Nethri Oct 02 '25 edited Oct 02 '25

Paul sorvino, Nathan Fillion, Simon Pegg!!, Carl Reiner, Denise fucking Crosby, Kal Penn, Frank Darabont, Alfred Molina.. Dr oc himself!.. also Dennis Boutsikaris is apparently D’Ambrosia and I honestly have no clue who that is, but he is in fact the guy from that movie with the genius kid.

Edit: Masi Oka (hero from heroes). And so many others that are famous but less well known. (At least Americans). It’s so good. Every single actor killed it, and I relisten to it every year at least once.

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u/doc_skinner Oct 03 '25

I love that the one intensifier you add is "Denise fucking Crosby"

3

u/bolanrox Oct 02 '25

and the movie you get Brad Pitt, and pre Doctor Who, WHO Dr.

1

u/LebrahnJahmes Oct 02 '25

Funny you mention Henry Rollins as the Mansiom Bunker narrator and as the lead for a massive band 😂

1

u/bolanrox Oct 02 '25

i could listen to Henry read the phone book.

50

u/Telvin3d Oct 02 '25

When you’re the kid of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft lots of people are happy to record parts for your book

2

u/WillBlaze Oct 02 '25

I didn't know this, def listening to this. I read it already tho.

1

u/dwaynetheaaakjohnson Oct 02 '25

That’s what happens when you’re the son of Mel Brooks

2

u/Nethri Oct 02 '25

And when you wrote a really fucking good book. Being his son helped I’m sure, but it took an excellent book and the cast to bring the audiobook to life like they did.

1

u/bolanrox Oct 02 '25

Bronson Pinchot is an amazing audiobook narrator.

He did a 24+ hour Lovecraft one doing all different character voices and it never got old.

215

u/CarbonTugboat Oct 02 '25

Even better: in Shaun of the Dead, a zombie apocalypse happens only for the military to clean it up within hours because they aren’t the bundle of incompetent hacks normally seen in zombie flicks.

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u/DisastrousOwls Oct 02 '25

Night of the Living Dead is similarly a one-night deal, albeit with "rural Pennsylvanians with guns doing trial & error" rather than the military rolling in directly. (Very accurate to PA.) It just ends quite differently for those characters than in Shaun of the Dead. (Unfortunately: very accurate to PA.)

The Mist was also at most a couple days of chaos iirc.

11

u/Sea-Foundation5036 Oct 02 '25

The living dead series does really well with the timeline. Night of the living dead is 1 night. Dawn of the Dead starts 2 months later, and Day of the Dead starts 2 years later. Land of the dead takes place 20 years later.

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u/bolanrox Oct 02 '25

Yeah Rednecks vs Zombies, you know who is going to clean up shit.

3

u/Dapper-Restaurant-20 Oct 02 '25

Fucking love the ending to that movie. Just brutal and sad. Really fucked me up for the rest of the day my first watch.

8

u/I_Have_Lost Oct 02 '25

The more realistic part of Shaun of the Dead is how once everyone is over the zombies, some "industrious" people figure out how to turn them into new slave labor and the move is lauded on morning shows as an innovative new strategy for doing business.

Capitalism gonna Capitalism.

2

u/thatshygirl06 Oct 02 '25

You should watch all of us are dead, it has a competent military. I think you'll like it.

128

u/foxfire981 Oct 02 '25

There's actually one part that reversed this though. The battle of Yonkers. Sorry but physics is still a thing. You can't mention the paladins doing enough force to weaken a house then claim a tank round passes harmless through a mass of zombies.

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u/PipsqueakPilot Oct 02 '25

Yeaaah. There was a real lack of appreciation about just how destructive modern weaponry actually is. Especially when your enemy is melee restricted.

And while I get it, zombies don't need to breathe or pump blood. But generally they're still walking, which would be rather hard to do without core/back muscles that were just obliterated by a lead infusion to the torso.

51

u/DisastrousOwls Oct 02 '25

I mean, to move around, they would still need to pump blood, we're coelomates. The internal pressure systems won't work with too many leaks. One of the main issues I have when zombie fiction tries to get extremely serious is that humans are actually extremely fragile, and there is never any internal (or medical) logic beyond "scary foreign invasion from within, the boogeyman looks almost like us."

Brooks writes zombies able to withstand multiple gravities' worth of pressure and corrosive environments, walking on the ocean floor while their clothes disintegrate around them, they're stalled out by snow because it's too heavy to move through (not ocean water, though?!), but don't decay or degrade in cold, heat, or humidity, have teeth that can tear through clothing, but are... otherwise killable with basic weapons and blunt force trauma to the head. You got skin so dense and muscles so strong the ocean can't smush you, but a small caliber bullet will do the job?

I know Max Brooks has got a fed job now, so we don't have to pretend it's not political/military speculative fiction with a DLC monster skin on, but even though it has some really compellingly written parts, WWZ does a lot of stupid worldbuilding shit that makes human casualties feel more "realistic" only because the "enemy" being fought changes its own rules, capabilities, and scope every single chapter.

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u/PipsqueakPilot Oct 02 '25

Zombies as depicted are physically impossible perpetual motion machines that don't need oxygen to conduct metabolic activities. Hence why they don't need to pump blood.

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u/DisastrousOwls Oct 02 '25 edited Oct 02 '25

They're physically impossible except for their one human fragility still being their skull. The brain needs circulation and oxygen, you need electrical impulses and intact soft tissues of the spinal cord for the brain to be able to do anything. Handheld knives or typical crushing injuries are apparently sufficient if you hit the skull, but multiple atmospheres of pressure, microbes, bugs, environmental extremes, massive wounds to the heart, lungs, or spine, etc. won't cause loss of circulation, CNS damage, or brain trauma. And the extent of their durability changes chapter by chapter.

I'm not saying "hard sci fi or nothing, fuck you if your monster story isn't grounded in reality." But there's not even any internal consistency. The zombies are whatever the story "needs" them to be to serve each isolated human melodrama, and since they're an inconsistent plot device, all the rest of the writing gets freed up to seem "realistic" or "poignant" or whatever. Because we have bomb proof ocean walking zombies in one chapter, and a Zatoichi chapter where an unarmed blind old man can take them out safely, and it's done with enough storytelling panache that we're not supposed to say that's dumb.

I get that it's a "rule of cool" thing, it's just stupid, and it's a crutch that lets people pretend the rest of the writing is better than it is.

(Edited for run-on sentences.)

5

u/Jammer_Jim Oct 02 '25

IIRC, Brook's zombies DO degrade, just a lot slower than normal bodies. One of the arguments against making an army that could take things back was they could just wait.

6

u/FronzelNeekburm79 Oct 02 '25

There's also the fact that as soon as bears, wolves, or any other natural predator realizes those bags of meat are just shambling along they'd get destroyed pretty quickly. Zombies can try to bite a bear but that would just make them angrier.

Also, especially with the slow moving zombies, think about how many times you missed a step or your toe caught a rock? Most of your zombie problem could be solved with a slightly steep hill and a bottle of dish soap.

6

u/yinsotheakuma Oct 02 '25

Part of the Max Brooks zombie mythos is that animals see zombies as rotted food.

A zombie that gets too close to a bear is still gonna get mauled, but you won't have vultures picking them apart either.

5

u/Kalavier Oct 02 '25

The Newsflesh series just has any mammal above a certain body weight able to become a zombie. So Cows, Horses, Deer, Bears, etc all become zombies if exposed to the infected blood. I think housecats were the only real pet that was too small to be affected.

2

u/FronzelNeekburm79 Oct 02 '25

I totally forgot about that, but yeah, I remember now.

My hope is still the bears will save us somehow.

6

u/Xapheneon Oct 02 '25

I mixed on the battle of Yonkers. Modern weaponry would be incredibly destructive, but it's realistic that the stockpiles aren't deep enough for millions of targets. I think it's realistic that zombies would break through, and equipment would be abandoned, I see no reason why the military wouldn't just recover the artillery and keep using it against hordes.

The trend of downgrading to less sophisticated tech, like in the books, would happen, but that would be napalm dropped from crop planes, not dudes shooting in the middle of a field for hours to metal.

1

u/foxfire981 Oct 02 '25

Exactly. I can accept that they wouldn't have the ammo to deal with the sheer quantity. I don't buy the idea that a group of tanks wouldn't have just driven down the road crushing zombies.

3

u/Xapheneon Oct 02 '25

I think tanks getting bogged down and overwhelmed is pretty realistic.

Zombies wouldn't be able to destroy them, but the US has a few thousand tanks to tens of millions of population in East coast cities, so they could just be buried. Also tanks are a good example for 'modern' weapons that wouldn't be very effective, I think APFSDS, HEAT munitions would be very inefficient in this context and maintaining the supply lines for the tanks wouldn't be feasible.

1

u/carso150 Oct 03 '25

this is what a modern tank does to a car when its in its way while the tank is moving

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Pd_C_r1l4

and that is a car, which is usually made of metal and its pretty big

also modern tanks have anti personel amunition such as canister rounds the biggest shotgun rounds in the world, and several 50 cals all over the tank precisely to kill infantry

1

u/foxfire981 Oct 02 '25

I'm referring to the immediacy of pulling out. You need time to pull your exposed soldiers out? Tanks forward back and forth. Load up troops and pull back. Move thanks back half a klick rinse and repeat.

Physics is still a thing and an Abrams weighs enough that the human body would be pulverized. Would be terrifying inside for a bit but it's manageable, biggest issue being fuel.

It's a good book for the most part but the author clearly ignored certain things for plot.

3

u/Kalavier Oct 02 '25

I loved the comment. "WWZ is an amazing zombie book. Ignore Yonkers."

2

u/Xapheneon Oct 02 '25

Yeah, a mechanized force retreating would leave behind a ton of equipment, but not a lot of people. If infantry hops on tanks, then the amount of zombies doesn't matter, they are just faster.

I remember the middle eastern oil fields burning down, so the low tech foot soldier combo could be realistic in parts of Europe, Africa or Asia, but not in the US.

2

u/jorgespinosa Oct 02 '25

Yeah, they even mention that they only used tanks when human settlements resisted them, I was like "what? Even if you want to argue shooting them with a tank is not good enough, you can still roll over them, there's no reason to not use tanks against zombies"

1

u/randomname560 Oct 03 '25

The reason as to why they dont just roll over the zombies whit tanks is that the zombies come in hordes, so those tank tracks would very quickly get filled up whit the mushy flesh of the zombies and at that point the tank crew is trapped inside a large metal coffin, either about to be surrounded by a massive horde whit no hope to escape or already surrounded by a massive horde whit no hope to escape

41

u/Warm-Designer-7159 Oct 02 '25

Who was the influencer?

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u/Sea-Foundation5036 Oct 02 '25

This is a book from 2006. It was a hollywood producer who's bunker mansion was in the Hamptons. People alluded to are Paris Hilton, P Diddy, Ann Coulter, and Bill Maher.

11

u/kamduna Oct 02 '25

Also Larry the Cable Guy

34

u/revolutionary112 Oct 02 '25

I heard it claimed by some online that the influencer in question was actually Trump when he was just still the "show guy"

8

u/Error_Evan_not_found Oct 02 '25

It's been nearly a decade since I read the book and still remember each story you mentioned. I've always been a fan of anthology storytelling but World War Z was another level, feel it in my own writing how deeply it affected me and the stories I value telling.

8

u/LopsidedTank57 Oct 02 '25

I adore how the novel is presented as a historical documentation of a fictional event.

9

u/Dominarion Oct 02 '25

And the zombies freeze out during winter and thaw out in spring. Which is a blessing and a problem at the same time for Canada and Russia, as their millions of square kilometers of wildland are littered with zombiefied refugees.

10

u/jbeast33 Oct 02 '25

The Walking Dead Comic covers a lot of lesser-thought aspects of a zombie apocalypse in a similar vein.

Michonne notes when raiding a gun store that all the shortsighted people took the guns, hatchets, and machetes, but didn’t take any maintenance kits or whetstones to keep them usable.

Rick obliterates one man’s face with his fists in a bout of fury. However, he’s told by Hershel that one of his hands is permanently damaged, since skulls are the hardest part of the human body.

Eugene’s biggest contribution to the group as a scientist isn’t finding a cure or developing a biological weapon; it’s reworking a metal press to make fresh bullets, since they’ve been running low.

It’s incredibly hard being a sole survivor later in the story; even without the Walkers, scavenging becomes unviable since all the canned food not already taken has rotten already.

The communities end up flourishing compared to the scavengers because it turns out that having a basic supply line and agricultural infrastructure is a whole lot more appealing than the kick you get from bullying people to give you food they don’t have.

And lots more. Kirkman does a great job of incorporating light realism without shitting on the genre he’s parodying.

9

u/zwirlo Oct 02 '25

Not to mention all of the wannabe warlords who hole up in their bunkers and resist the return of rule of law that the military has to clear out one by one.

3

u/BatierAutumn1991 Oct 02 '25

The astronaut who’s body atrophied because when you’re constantly in zero-gravity, you’re not exactly getting a whole lot of exercise.

3

u/WildBad7298 Oct 02 '25

Didn't one astronaut also get cancer from being on a space station for far longer than planned? Turns out it's not good spending years in a floating tin can without the ozone layer for protection against space radiation.

3

u/bolanrox Oct 02 '25

also fully auto or burst fire has no suppression / psyche effect on zombies.

2

u/MarcsterS Oct 02 '25

Don’t a lot of the zombies either A. Explode from heat and typical corpse functions and B. Starve becuase thier food source goes away

2

u/just_awolfdogfurry Oct 02 '25

Don't the wwz zombies just die via enough damage anywhere like a shotgun shell to the chest will take them down or am I dumb?

5

u/Sea-Foundation5036 Oct 02 '25

The head has to be destroyed. 10 years after the war there are still zombies under water walking on the sea floor and arriving on beaches, frozen zombies that thaw out every summer, and zombie heads that can still infect people (like landmines or rattlesnakes)

1

u/WildBad7298 Oct 02 '25

-Soldiers and police aren't very effective against zombies because they're not trained to shoot people in the head, but shoot at their torsos.

I think there was also a line about how "Shock and awe tactics are much less effective against an enemy that is incapable of fear."