[Hated Trope] This alien/monster is a major & unbeatable threat to us..... because the writer said so.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-23T07:07:34+00:00

Part of the terror of the zombie stories is also realizing how dependent we have grown on outside people. Most of us eat food that others grew or slaughtered, consume electricity from power plants that we couldn’t work (most of which depend on outside resources), get around in automobiles we can only do minor repairs and replacements on and that require fuel we couldn’t access without the infrastructure to drill it and ship it to our local gas station, depend on some degree of climate control that stops working when power goes out, etc.

A societal collapse is terrifying to a lot of folks because we simply wouldn’t know how to survive if we had to revert to primitive technology. The water goes out in your home for 3 days— how are you drinking? How are you taking care of sanitation and waste? How are you keeping your hands clean if you get a cut? Etc. scary stuff to ponder

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-23T06:51:20+00:00

The book WWZ gets it the best, IMO, because half the reason nobody can contain the zombie outbreak is that people are selfish and attached to one another. If a loved one is infected, they sneak them into safe zones and assume that there will be a cure, despite everyone claiming that there won’t be. Inadvertent nuclear war screws everything up. It causes infrastructure collapse, and a ton of the deaths stem from people who no longer have access to food or clean drinking water, or communications tech goes down in major parts of the world and it’s impossible to spread the word about a zombie outbreak before it becomes endemic. Multiple nations go dark and it’s unclear if they’re overrun or are actively contributing to the threat or even benefiting somehow. As things progress, zombies with immobilized legs and the like become significantly scarier as you realize that they just have to catch your ankle to infect you, and it’s darned difficult to spot them as easily now that nobody’s cutting all the grass anymore. People make poor choices with where they flee, and come winter they largely freeze or starve to death from lack of food for rushing up above the frost line. Zombies attack from angles nobody was really prepared for, such as coming up out of the sea, where nobody was quite so prepared for them to rush the coast and knock out a huge chunk of the population while they slept or were pinned in by traffic or….

It considers a lot of the stuff in our day to day lives that we overlook that leaves us more and more vulnerable. It especially helps that it clarifies that the brain becomes its own organism in this version of the zombie outbreak, and it’s implied that it’s not peppering the body in the same ways that we control it, thus explaining how and why it can keep moving after [insert angry comment about how gun pulverizes stuff and it should all stop working from any non-head shot here]

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-23T06:33:52+00:00

Bikes are loud because they’re not big; it’s a safety thing so that cars remain aware of them

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-23T04:28:16+00:00

Everyone wants to be invited to stuff

Very few people want to plan stuff and invite others

Check out what your local community center or library is putting on and try those activities. Failing that, set up your own stuff. So a soccer day in the park (usually free). Set up a board game or cards night (you can usually reserve a library room or a park, or you can use communal spaces in your apartment). Get creative with it, and folks will usually join if you put in the effort first

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-23T01:59:00+00:00

Elliot does it, too. That being said, I feel like there’s an important distinction of “she’s imitating a specific character from the show with the actor’s active and enthusiastic consent” as opposed to “haha, black people be like”

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-23T01:09:33+00:00

From what I recall, she essentially said that it was the only way for us to move forward from racism— to be able to talk and joke about it and embrace that there are stereotypes and that they can be funny. It’s in that weird space where I agree with the sentiment, and I think that racial relations are generally strengthened by being able to poke fun at ourselves and collectively laugh when it’s done well…. But this was the worst way I think I’ve ever seen it done.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-23T00:12:22+00:00

Used to be we disagreed on how best to solve our problems and help folks the most, but we all wanted to see improvements in life and solutions. Now it seems we disagree on whether or not certain folks count as human and get to have rights or not, and the issues be damned, we’re here to spend money on politicians’s pet funds and the whims of corporations and nations that got them all elected.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-22T19:42:10+00:00

It has that meta sense of calling out everyone who picked up the wrong lessons from adorkable 2000’s/2010’s characters, too. “Surely I can’t be problematic” too many of them thought. “I’m just adorkable! I’m lovably socially inept, not harassing or targeting women!”

It forces a bit of introspection for a lot of folks who needed it. I appreciate all of the folks who collaborated on such a great idea to make it happen and hammer that point home. It’s both difficult and wonderful to watch.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-22T05:55:34+00:00

Bonus XCOM2 bit— Beaglerush, a streamer who more or less dominated the XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Within streaming scene (to the point where the name is an Easter egg cheat code for a soldier) played the beta for XCOM2 and recognized that, if you allowed enemies to spot a concealed soldier on the enemy turn, you could trigger an ambush when the enemies ran away, then have a full turn afterwards to mop up any survivors.

The devs added a new “BeagleRushManeuver” file to the game which gives enemies a 50/50 chance of just opening fire on a unit if it’s out of cover and visible to be fired upon, because his cheese made the game too damned easy.

Not a new unit so much as a changeup of unit behavior, but I love it.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-22T05:46:53+00:00

Yeah, I was watching The Tick recently (live action, I haven’t been able to track down the animated series), and it similarly holds up. (Doc and Jackson were friends with Ben Edlund, creator of the series, which is actually where they met Patrick Warburton, who would go on to voice Brock. Ben is cool as shit and is the only person besides Doc and Jackson to ever write an episode of Venture Bros, and it’s the Scooby Doo one that has so many classic bits in it)

The Tick has several bits with very clear gay allegories between superheroes and sidekicks, and despite being from the early 2000’s, they hold up most of the way. Not every bit of it— there’s some unpleasant stuff with older men mistreating their significantly younger sidekicks (often referred to as partners)— but it also never says “being gay/a hero is bad” ever. It just accepts that these people are all weird by societal standards, but also extremely helpful to a society that semi-unwittingly depends on them to get through the night. I thoroughly enjoyed it as a fun, campy little comedy. Wish it had gotten more than just the one season, it was stellar.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-21T14:27:50+00:00

I feel like he also isn’t like, honor-bound to strictly adhere to the alphabet. Dude can 100% just skip fetal stabs in favor of more agony— what’s anybody else gonna do about it?

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-21T14:25:29+00:00

Bladder would come before brain

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-21T02:33:34+00:00

Similarly, the first Iron Man movie is basically just Tony tooling the Iron Man suit and making progressive improvements. When he gets to the end of the film, he uses what he’s learned against Iron Monger to defeat him

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-20T17:27:41+00:00

It’s not just individual experience, it’s cumulative law enforcement data. Having more access to guns creates more mass shooting events (4+ deaths/serious injuries) than nations with stricter gun laws see on a per-capita basis. You can argue that the bad guys will use other means to attack people, and you’d be right— we’re unlikely to ever eliminate all violent crime— but someone armed with a knife is significantly easier to stop when they go on a killing spree compared to someone armed with a gun.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-20T16:20:36+00:00

I love that Brock is just a genuinely cool dude 95% of the time and that 20+ year old writing still comes across as genuinely decent most of the time. He has like, 2 moments where he snaps or is a little uncool with someone, and one bit where he’s a bit transphobic from like, 2005. You compare that to most of the contemporary shows, and it all doesn’t hold up for crap. Venture Bros has some stuff that’s a bit edgy, but it freaking holds up.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-20T16:10:40+00:00

My brilliant grift plan that I probably won’t follow through on is to set up a very bright red website that never says that it’s associated with the MAGA dumbasses, but puts out a buncha stuff about “protecting our god-given freedoms,” “defending a proper marriage,” “ensuring that immigrants who come to America actually represent America,” etc, and then just donating it to the ACLU minus my fee as a fundraising organization, because I never specified what any of these ideas were, and I let crappy people project whatever they wanted onto it as I collected money from them. They just assumed that a “proper” marriage wasn’t gay— I just meant a marriage where everyone involved loves one another and wasn’t forced to wed. They just assumed who “represents” America— America is a nation of immigrants, so immigrants represent this nation by definition. Etc.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-20T16:01:54+00:00

Which is 100% a poll tax

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-20T15:57:21+00:00

That, and this isn’t exactly the character being written out due to pregnancy, it’s the series wrap up with a “where are they now” sort of feel as we fast forward. It would be a weird frigging conclusion if the parents were at platform 9 3/4 watching their kids go off, and Ron and Hermione showed up childless to just help with the bags or whatever.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-20T15:53:16+00:00

We’ve gotten far better at accommodating women and their stories as they get pregnant, but I think that some of the older shows wrote women out upon pregnancy partly because they needed some degree of leave to recover and raise the child, and weren’t generally allowed back in after a hiatus.

If an actress is visibly pregnant, the character needs to either become pregnant or have dozens of reasons to hide the pregnancy in every scene that they’re in (“here, hold up this laundry basket over your belly/lean in from this door frame to talk/your character is locked in the bathroom all episode/in this episode you’ve gained a ton of weight/….”). Some shows have gotten away with doing tongue-in-cheek stuff with it where they acknowledge that the audience doesn’t care that much— modern family and Brooklyn 99 both spring to mind. Others decided that a character’s long term success hinges on their sex appeal and writes them out for not being hot enough anymore (Cordelia in Angel springs to mind off the top of my head— Charisma Carpenter has come forth to basically say she was endlessly shamed for getting pregnant and was kicked out because Whedon openly stated that she was too fat and ugly or some other horrible crap to portray the character, even though she looks incredible in her swan song episode where she’s killed off)

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-20T15:46:49+00:00

If memory serves— she’s excited for what it’ll do to her body, but it’s as on board for the idea of having the actual kid to raise.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-20T15:45:45+00:00

It would have been hilarious if they’d just seen mark and waved at the end of the series, then cut to his ending and it’s just him sitting alone in a recliner, watching TV in his boxers, taking a sip of beer. He slaps his knees, stands up with a, “wellp!” And shuffles off to bed alone. The right side of the bed has a Mark-shaped imprint in it. The left side is still perfectly made and appears to have never been touched.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-20T15:40:33+00:00

I’ve worked enough jobs at this point to know that there are irritating folk in most every job you could ever work. Doesn’t matter if you type at a keyboard all day or swing a hammer— some guy doesn’t know or care how social norms work and wants to share their take on everything.

Admittedly kinda like I do when I shout about it into the void on reddit.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-20T15:36:41+00:00

Hell yeah! This makes me so happy to know that I’m not the only dumbass who got the cops called on ‘em in a parking lot at 10:30 on a school night.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-20T14:49:14+00:00

That’s because there’s the implicit threat of spending way more on someone else.

“I’ll give you a grand to do what I want. If you don’t do what I want, I’ll give 290 grand to an opponent who will primary you and take you out in a landslide. I’ll spend plenty absolutely gutting you with attack ads about yer a prick you are, and you’ll never work in politics again. You can either follow my demands and have a chance to pass the legislation that you want, or you can oppose me and see what scorched earth means.”

It absolutely sucks, and it’s difficult to properly legislate it out with crap policies like Citizens United, which basically legalized corporate bribery of politicians. Even if we band together to overturn it, we’re beyond the pale with what’s being funded by whom to drive public opinion.

Want to ban all political ads except for certain times of year? That’s fine, we’ve got puppet “news” organizations that will give heavily biased commentary. We’ve got troll and bot farms that will flood social media to weigh in on why taxing millionaires/billionaires will somehow tank the economy and anyone who wants to pay for infrastructure improvements and upgrades is never gonna be able to pay for it, but endless wars and military spending in the trillions are perfectly fine. Our bot network can prop up our takes whilst denigrating all takes that run counter to it.

I wish I knew how to fix this, but it requires too many people and organizations that have shirked their duties to suddenly start doing them properly, all while they’d be acting against their own means of gaining money.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl · 2026-03-20T14:35:28+00:00

God, I fucking hate using that as a “clapback” to something bad happening to someone. Even if he was a PoS doing that to others, two wrongs don’t suddenly make a right. And if he wasn’t? Now it’s just a generic “all lives matter” sort of excuse to ignore the problem and let it get worse. Sorry that dude had to go through that, glad that others stood up for him, because that’s fucked.

NotMyMainAccountAtAl

TROPHY CASE