Still don’t buy it. People have been in far more harrowing situations, for an extended period of time, and have come through with a greater love of life, not less.
As far as the fact that everybody but Morgan is as dumb as rocks when it comes to creativity — why have they all died off? Shouldn’t they have been the ones to survive (on average)?
That is what kind of ticks me off about the show. At least one person should have pointed out the obvious. For 99% of human existence, this was how people lived — in a hostile world, filled with peers who wanted whatever you had, in a world where insta-death was an ever present possibility. Yet everyone, without exception, sees this as the worst possible state for man to live in.
In addition to “where are all the creative people?” — where are all of the people who understand the kind of world our ancestors lived in? Personally, I would much rather face herds of walkers, or a bunch of incompetents from Woodbury, than be a farmer in northern England facing a bunch of Vikings.
i agree about the love of life thing, and i think they’ve shown some of it in season 2, but not much. problem is the show is more interesting with them under stress.
i don’t think all of woodbury is incompetent, clearly they aren’t. but generally looking at intelligence on the bell curve, you don’t get a lot of geniuses and most people aren’t great innovators when you do work that has nothing to do with skills or fixing things or feeding people or building stuff, and then come home and watch 6-8 hours of tv and video games and surfing the web. just sayin.
“Personally, I would much rather face herds of walkers, or a bunch of incompetents from Woodbury, than be a farmer in northern England facing a bunch of Vikings.”
You touch on the nub of it there, perhaps. Most civilized people are utterly incompent when it comes to basic survival skills. We’ve seen only a few—Daryl, Merle, Michonne, maybe Shane when he wasn’t being stupid—who’ve had the right mindset. Morgan seemed to have somewhat of a handle on it in spite of mental problems. Rick’s kid seems to be learning. The rest are too stuck in the past.
Then again, we only get to see a tiny sliver of the new zombie world. Maybe there are gangs doing much better.
Speaking of modern incompetence, an old book called “Castaway” by James Gould Cozzens popped into my head. It’s a updated Robinson Crusoe plot, wherein a man holes himself up in a department store amidst some sort of disaster. Despite having everything he could possibly need at hand and there only appearing to be one other person in the building, he struggles considerably. It ends up being one of those “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” stories. But in the meantime the character demonstrates about all you can expect from regular people cut off from modern civilization.