{"id":24391,"date":"2014-09-18T18:26:26","date_gmt":"2014-09-18T23:26:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24391"},"modified":"2014-09-18T18:26:50","modified_gmt":"2014-09-18T23:26:50","slug":"last-of-us-ep2-suddenly-chest-high-walls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24391","title":{"rendered":"Last of Us EP2: Suddenly, Chest-High Walls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/oXMaYWejb_I\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=oXMaYWejb_I'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>This is a problem I have with any sort of post-apocalyptic world. If we&#8217;ve regressed back to pre-technology days, then nine out of every ten people need to be farming. Food is <em>everything<\/em><span class='snote' title='1'>We&#8217;re assuming clean water is easily obtainable. Which it isn&#8217;t. Especially in cities.<\/span>. What are these soldiers guarding? Why are we living in these cities where there are (apparently) lots of zombies and no food? Why are we wasting our precious fossil fuels<span class='snote' title='2'>Spoiler: Gasoline apparently has a shelf-life of only a couple of years, even when stored in ideal conditions. Twenty years after the end of the world, all the gas is GONE. Sorry.<\/span> driving solders around in humvees and huge <em>troop trucks<\/em> when we could be putting that magic labor juice into farming equipment? Are people STILL dying on a regular basis from random zombie bites? Why would anyone need to &#8220;smuggle&#8221; guns in a world like this? Is the government really trying to maintain an unarmed population? Isn&#8217;t everyone that doesn&#8217;t own a gun already dead? <\/p>\n<p>Before we go any further: YES, I know there are in-game answers to some of these questions. But those answers themselves just replace one question with another:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Who feeds ALL THESE GUARDS who produce nothing except corpses?<\/li>\n<li><em>The government feeds them!<\/em>\n<li>Where does the government get the food to feed the soldiers?\n<li><em>Well, they&#8230; probably have taxes or something. They can take whatever they want!<\/em>\n<li>So who are they taking from?\n<li><em>There must be farmers. Somewhere.<\/em>\n<li>The farmers need to outnumber everyone else by 9 to 1. Where are they?\n<li><em>Probably out in the rural areas someplace?<\/em>\n<li>Wouldn&#8217;t that make them REALLY vulnerable to attack? I mean, if people are getting bit inside of these walled cities then it must be insane trying to grow food in fields surrounded by plants!\n<li><em>Well maybe they guard the farms with soldiers.<\/em>\n<li>Why not take these soldiers from the city and have them guard &#8211; or work on &#8211; farms? Why is anyone bothering to live in these cities?\n<li><em>Well they have to stop the fireflies from blowing up their checkpoints!<\/em>\n<\/ol>\n<p>And so on. Everything leads down to this awful circular logic: <em>The soldiers exist to guard the places where the soldiers live.<\/em> <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not saying these are plot holes, I&#8217;m saying the world as presented requires a huge amount of extrapolation, hand-waving, and head-canon to survive scrutiny. I realize this stuff is just something that you have to accept when you watch a story like this. But I can&#8217;t help trying to think through it. The game presents you with a problem (how can humans survive?) but the world itself lacks the fidelity and sense to survive the analysis required to answer that question. Like, I wouldn&#8217;t be asking these questions except the game itself suggests they&#8217;re at the root of all the problems we see.<\/p>\n<p>The game makes a big deal about finding a cure for zombie-itis, but all I can see is a society that&#8217;s shooting each other instead of growing crops. You could find a cure tomorrow, but you&#8217;d still starve to death.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not going to sit here and nitpick the &#8220;But what do they eat?&#8221; business through the whole season. Once we get out of the city and away from the generic &#8220;evil government&#8221; stuff we can focus on the characters and their struggles, which is where the game is at its best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) This is a problem I have with any sort of post-apocalyptic world. If we&#8217;ve regressed back to pre-technology days, then nine out of every ten people need to be farming. Food is everythingWe&#8217;re assuming clean water is easily obtainable. Which it isn&#8217;t. Especially in cities.. What are these soldiers guarding? Why are we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[439],"class_list":["post-24391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-the-last-of-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}