I get that, but honestly it just annoys me more. They take so many stupid risks that they should have been dead in the first day. That they aren’t is such blind luck. I want fiction to reward cleverness and hard work, not stupidity (since the real world isn’t very good at that).
A counterexample is Walking Dead. Virtually everyone in that show is incredibly hard working and very clever. They succeed because they constantly outsmart their opponents and the cruel world they inhabit. They come up with clever uses for the dead, they constantly invent new ways to keep going, and they never stop working hard for what they have. The stupid or careless die quickly, which makes the world internally consistent with the danger level being represented.
Aside: I’m not saying there aren’t issues with the writing in WD. The big one is that they vastly underestimate how much food people eat. They have entire villages living on what is enough canned goods for one person for a week. That and there’s a weird libertarian undercurrent to it that, among other things, completely ignores the role of trade and commerce in human survival. People trade immediately and constantly in every situation, yet their world is entirely without commerce for almost a decade. We know from real world disasters that the first thing people do in an apocalyptic situation is they start trading with each other for what they need.
Okay, I’m off topic and rambling here. Back to your regularly scheduled thread.
