World-Building: Where the Hell Is It?

[Nashville]

Okay then (overachiever!  teacher's pet!)  I'm going to start reading now.

Can't take too much credit; I bought it back in mid-December, but didn't get started reading it until about 3-4 weeks ago. diebartdie shamed me into it. ;>

[iRarelyWatchTV36]

I would totally welcome the idea & execution of some serious world-building in TWD, as walkers & bad humans just don't "really do it for me" anymore, but I fear if tptb did a great job at it, and then when the story calls for going back to 'non-world building; ie, "it just is"' , it will be a major letdown.  I mean, Darabont tried his hand at the ultimate 'world building' exercise - in a show like this - in the first season, and Kirkman said "nuh-uh, no way!".

 

I guess in a long roundabout way, I'm saying that world building (from just about the beginning of the series) would have been a great thing to see, but now?  Why risk it??

 

I'm sure there will an odd few 'late-comers' to the series, like myself who joins a few seasons into it, here and there... but, for the most part, as far as the quantifiable viewing numbers go, I'm thinking they've pretty much "got what they've got".  So, if there's a good chance that 'world buliding' will alienate or drive off viewers, 'stick with what works'.

[Irishmaple]

The geography of this show is driving me insane. I know no place really exists in the narrative until Our Heroes stumble onto it but this past season and the upcoming one are blowing my mind. Nobody found Alexandria until Rick's group got an invite? In all of his wanderings, Aaron never found a Saviour or a Hillsider or one of the crew that rescued Morgan and Carol? All of these people just roamed around roughly the same area completely oblivious to each other?

It was particularly glaring in the season finale. Everyone's taking Maggie to the doctor at Hillside but Negan has salted every road, laneway and cow path with his men. Alexandria isn't in another dimension; it's a couple of hours drive away from Hillside and Negan has infested the area. How the hell did he miss Alexandria? It was right there for years with an armoury and food stocks, solar power and a doctor, and was woefully undefended. They had a no guns policy FFS.  And he missed it? He should hit himself in the head for that.

[peach]

18 hours ago, Irishmaple said:

The geography of this show is driving me insane. I know no place really exists in the narrative until Our Heroes stumble onto it but this past season and the upcoming one are blowing my mind. Nobody found Alexandria until Rick's group got an invite? In all of his wanderings, Aaron never found a Saviour or a Hillsider or one of the crew that rescued Morgan and Carol? All of these people just roamed around roughly the same area completely oblivious to each other?

It was particularly glaring in the season finale. Everyone's taking Maggie to the doctor at Hillside but Negan has salted every road, laneway and cow path with his men. Alexandria isn't in another dimension; it's a couple of hours drive away from Hillside and Negan has infested the area. How the hell did he miss Alexandria? It was right there for years with an armoury and food stocks, solar power and a doctor, and was woefully undefended. They had a no guns policy FFS.  And he missed it? He should hit himself in the head for that.

This is how it started falling apart for me in season 6.  I say this show has Blair Witch geography.  Maybe that would make it more interesting at this point.  lol  Now we have the Kingdom which is apparently also unknown to either Alexandria, the Hilltop, the Wolves, or Negan.   Of course, back in Georgia they could drive for hours and still be in the same county.

I don't know how Aaron couldn't find Hilltop when it's literally on a Hilltop.  I spend a lot of time in the country.  The thing about Hilltops is that you can see them from far away.  You can also see things from a Hilltop.  Of course, you can also hear a car, or say, a tank, coming from miles away.  Also, creatures walking through the woods.  So I guess I should stop talking now. 

[peach]

Another good book about this stuff is The Girl With All The Gifts, set in Britain.  It's going to be a movie, but I doubt it will do anything in the book justice, since it depends primarily on the thoughts of a very unusual character.

[AngelaHunter]

On ‎10‎/‎25‎/‎2016 at 3:30 PM, peach said:

This is how it started falling apart for me in season 6.  I say this show has Blair Witch geography.  Maybe that would make it more interesting at this point.  lol  Now we have the Kingdom which is apparently also unknown to either Alexandria, the Hilltop, the Wolves, or Negan.   Of course, back in Georgia they could drive for hours and still be in the same county.
 

Not really surprising when it took them from daylight to full dark to get to the end of one street in Alexandria.

[Mu Shu]

They need a compass.  Head inland and south to a less densely populated area, possibly SW Louisiana with no large cities and a mostly warm climate.   Less walkers, less psychotic weirdos.  Daryl can get by on nutria rat, and Judith grows up bi lingual.  

[ganesh]

Another problem related to the geographical issues brought up. No one has drawn a map of anything anywhere? If only to mark where large concentrations of walkers are, fresh water , etc. 

[Irishmaple]

T-Dog was doing that after they left the farm. He had a map spread out on the car and he was marking horde concentrations and areas they had already scavenged. Avoiding those no-go areas was how they found the prison, if I'm remembering correctly.  They haven't done it since though. And if Aaron had a map, he managed to avoid Hilltop, The Kingdom and roads blocked by Saviours, so it must have been a really good one!

Edited November 2, 2016 by Irishmaple
Credited the smarts to the wrong character.

[ganesh]

I don't know how he did, since all those places seem to be a block and a half away. 

[HighMaintenance]

I'm constantly bugged by not knowing where each community is in relation to another. As well as the wonky timeline, but that's another issue.  I'm sure the show doesn't want the audience to know the spacial geography. The less that is based in fact, the more the writers can play loose and free with plot holes sprinkled throughout the story and the less apparent it is to the general audience.

Anyway... to somewhat accept the logistics of TWD, I have to suspend my disbelief about the 3 different camps NOT encountering each other, i.e. Aaron & Eric's survivor searches.  I just have to assume that they are all out of the search radius of each other.  

If it takes ASZ folks 2 hours to get to Hilltop by car, I have to assume that the closest they might be is, I dunno... 30 miles apart?  Assuming this includes lots of slow travel or big detours between them.  ASZers searching for other camps/neighborhoods in their search radius of around 3000 square miles would take a very long time before you actually stumbled upon one.

Random thoughts: I also don't know if GPS devices work or exist in the ZA.  I would think the satellites would be operational for a few years before they gave out.  However, Morgan did a good job of mapping Rick's home town in "Clear".  And that is while he was full on cray.

[ganesh]

It's like we know exactly how long it takes to travel from Casterly Rock to King's Landing and what roads you take depending on the weather, but it's a total mystery how one gets from ASZ to Hilltop besides "about two hours."

[peach]

18 hours ago, AngelaHunter said:

Not really surprising when it took them from daylight to full dark to get to the end of one street in Alexandria.

Hahaha!  My favorite part was when Morgan made it back to ASZ from the Walker Parade in like five minutes, while it took Michonne a whole day, and Glenn several episodes.

[AngelaHunter]

14 minutes ago, peach said:

Hahaha!  My favorite part was when Morgan made it back to ASZ from the Walker Parade in like five minutes, while it took Michonne a whole day, and Glenn several episodes.

Glenn, I can understand. He spent so much time dawdling with his moralistic, hope-filled, lesson-learned monologues to a turtle-eating teenaged girl and with flying what appeared to be symbolic red balloons, (all apparently more urgent than finding out if his "wife" was dead or alive)that I was surprised it didn't take him even longer to get there.  Yeah, as horrible as it was, I'm glad he got permanently stifled.

[kj4ever]

Here's a google map of all the communities.  It includes comic and TV show scenarios:

 

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=16hfonczAwRME-TKVV9XRd8_bCdk&hl=en_US&ll=38.89841865432114%2C-76.87860660782496&z=10

[Nashville]

It’s a shame nothing’s been posted here in over half a decade.  This looks to be as good a home for new discussion as any, though, and the thread topic is at least tangentially related - so here goes:

21 hours ago, oakville said:

One of the main themes of TWD is that Rick & his friends would approach a settlement like Woodbury or Alexandria or the farm & end up destroying them. Sure, there were a valid reason for killing the Governor, but Alexandria was like a mini Commonwealth when Rick arrived.

 

19 hours ago, Nashville said:

A quote from “The Andromeda Strain” regarding crises:

*****

Gladstone, upon hearing of the death of "Chinese" Gordon in Egypt, was reported to have muttered irritably that his general might have chosen a more propitious time to die: Gordon's death threw the Gladstone government into turmoil and crisis. An aide suggested that the circumstances were unique and unpredictable, to which Gladstone crossly answered: "All crises are the same” .… According to Lewis Bornheim, a crisis is a situation in which a previously tolerable set of circumstances is suddenly, by the addition of another factor, rendered wholly intolerable. Whether the additional factor is political, economic, or scientific hardly matters: the death of a national hero, the instability of prices, or a technological discovery can all set events in motion. In this sense, Gladstone was right: all crises are the same.

*****

In this context, CDB is invariably the “other factor” which tips the scales towards self-destruction and oblivion - but hey, at least they brought dinner.  😄

 

9 hours ago, Bad Example said:

I.e, "You people are the plague", one of the best quotes of the whole series.

 

9 hours ago, oakville said:

Agreed. I have not read the comics but it is a constant theme in FTWD & TWD that the protagonists arrive in a settlement & end up destroying it.

 

The series’ run has basically been a repetitive cycle of:

1. Find a new home.
2. Settle in.
3. Stay a while.
4. Blow the whole thing to hell.
5. Depart the smoking ruins and hit the road again.
6.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  

Funny thing, though: in some (not all) cases, I don’t necessarily consider CDB to be the direct cause of the destruction of the communities in which they land.  They may be an indirect factor to be sure, but IMHO our intrepid little troop frequently doesn’t immediately set to decimating the settlement personally; rather, they have a knack for exposing vulnerabilities in the community’s systems (including defense) to which their hosts may have been ignorant, complacent, and/or just plain in denial.

ASZ is/was a perfect example of such.  Prior to CDB’s arrival, Deanna and her crew were living in a fool’s paradise - certain they must’ve come up with the secret to eternal life in the apocalypse simply because nothing serious had happened YET.  As time showed, though, the simple truth was the ASZ was positively aswim in a sea of vulnerabilities - but nobody had either the vision to see them, or the courage to address them:

1. The construction of the perimeter walls.  Deanna’s husband Reg who designed the perimeter wall defense) was described as a “professor of architecture”, but I can only surmise he earned that title at the Rocco School of Typewriter Maintenance.  I mean - what frikkin’ moron puts the supporting buttresses on the OUTSIDE of the wall?  Wassamatta, did all that ugly steel fuck with the settlement’s feng shui?  First time I saw Reg’s handiwork I was surprised a stiff breeze hadn’t knocked the walls in, much less a sufficiently sizable walker herd.  Not to mention any antagonistic groups out there automatically have more access to your perimeter defense support structures than you do.  Helluva job there, Reg.
2. Perimeter watch and patrols - more specifically, there weren’t any.  Beyond huddling behind their astoundingly-obvious-from-the-outside walls and hoping nobody noticed, the original ASZhats were totally vulnerable to any opponent with a cognitive level above that of walkers (as the stoner-headed Wolves so aptly demonstrated).
3. Defensive training (against walkers or otherwise) for the general populace; again, there wasn’t any.  Only the foraging groups had any direct experience at all in dealing with walkers.  The rest of the ASZhats simply huddled behind their walls and dreamed pasta maker dreams.  When the Wolves breached the ASZ defenses, the CDB folks were the only reason the settlement survived.

To reiterate:  the ASZ’s continued existence prior to CDB’s arrival was pretty much dumb luck, not survival acumen; the ASZhats simply hadn’t yet run into a breeze stiff enough to give their house of cards enough of a shove to topple it - and while CDB may not have personally done the shoving, they do kinda have a knack for pointing out any weaknesses to the coming windstorm.

[Boofish]

7 hours ago, Nashville said:

ASZ is/was a perfect example of such.  Prior to CDB’s arrival, Deanna and her crew were living in a fool’s paradise - certain they must’ve come up with the secret to eternal life in the apocalypse simply because nothing serious had happened YET.  As time showed, though, the simple truth was the ASZ was positively aswim in a sea of vulnerabilities - but nobody had either the vision to see them, or the courage to address them:

Agreed with the whole post; especially this piece.

I do directly blame them for The Saviors finding ASZ.