People talk about some areas of the real world as boring because you just see endless wheat or corn fields. Things widely viewed as boring are not going to feature heavily in entertainment products.

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bee_rider 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In a zombie setting the fact that agriculture takes up a lot of space could be really useful from a story-telling point of view. It provides a reason to expand past the walls of the settlement.

It’s weird because in these settings a successful settlement is usually portrayed as basically impossible for the zombies to break into. Then, somebody has to do something stupid to let them in. Movies where things fall apart despite nobody making an obviously stupid mistake are a lot more satisfying IMO.

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bluGill 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You don't expand beyond the settlement - your fields are already there. You leave the settlement to tend the fields. You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.

expanding is done when the fields get too far to walk there and back in a day. Then you make a new village.

more likely you practice what birth control you can to limit population. Your other choice is go to war and kill some other village so your kids can move there. There was essentially no unclaimed land you could expand into.

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bee_rider 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree. The main point here is that the inability to put the farm inside the walls provides necessary motivation to have people go out and get bit, which is what we need for the story to happen.

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Cthulhu_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.

An interesting take on this is depicted in Attack on Titan, where they do in fact wall all the fields - the city (I don't remember if it's like the last vestige of humanity or whatever) is surrounded in concentric ring walls, the outer one which contains villages and farmland having a circumference of about 3000 kilometers for an internal area of 723,822 km², making its area just a bit smaller than Zambia and Chile.

Of course, a 3000 kilometer, 50 meter tall wall is ridiculous. But then again the great wall of China is 21.000 kilometers long. I believe there's more info about the walls and their construction in the source.

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thechao 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Ballpark figures based on the ram earth construction for TGE vs AOT would have the AOT wall be 5-10x the volume & mass of the TGW. The issue is labor — the Great Wall probably represents 20–100 million ma years of labor. The AoT wall probably has at most 100k man years of labor it could've pulled from. That'd mean it's labor-mass ratio is off by 1000–10000x.

	▲	Izkata an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This gets into spoiler territory, but the walls in Attack on Titan weren't made with human labor. The first hint that something funky is going on was at the end of the first season finale, but we don't get the full story about the walls until much later.

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nine_k 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Cutting off some forest might help.

	▲	bluGill 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What forest? Either it was owned by a noble with enough of an army to stop you, your great...grandparents already cut it, or the land wouldn't be useful for farming for some other reason. North America had vast empty forests - but remember just before Europeans arrived disease (small pox) killed large portions of the population. We have very little recorded about what life was like before Columbus, but archeological evidence suggests that the land was already used to the max capacity of their technology. (Europe did bring technology to better use the land - for some definition of better. I'm not qualified to comment on why they didn't develop the technology, but there seems to be some interesting culture factors - perhaps you can find an expert)

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Gravityloss 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just like in I guess a large portion of human history after farming started. You abandoned the fields and retreated to the walled hilltop when the enemy came. Maybe that's what we have been genetically conditioned to expect and that's why we have these zombie films and series.

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rendaw 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People always talk about how reality is too boring, and that's why shows need to have spaceships bouncing around and explosion sounds and superhumans etc.

And then something like The Expanse comes out and it turns out that realism is actually really interesting. Sure, the space is unfamiliar realism, but so is serf life to most viewers. And direction is also very important.

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enaaem 7 hours ago | parent [-]

One example I can think of is armour. In movies armour don’t seem to do anything at all. You see fully cladded soldiers getting killed by single sword blows, but people in armour are actually really hard to kill. There is a lot of story potential by treating armour like super suits, where characters get stronger with armour upgrades and elite soldiers are like Space Marines.

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Cthulhu_ 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I've seen clips of medieval reenactments, iirc in Poland they don't really hold back. But they try to use swords on people in full plate armor, which... does nothing, really.

Anyway, you mention Space Marines, there's animations and lots of media about them. Some depicting them as basically invulnerable (like the 40K episode of Amazon's Secret Level), but plenty of them where they die en masse - because while they're super suits, they're up against the worst the universe can throw at them (like the British).

	▲	Ekaros 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		40k is weird. The scales are often entirely off. Considering the stated populations and areas involved. Or the amount of equipment fielded. This comes from it fundamentally being small scale skirmish game. So realistic army sizes are not possible. And on other hand you need some level of game balance. You can't expect one side to have dozen models and other to field thousands or tens of thousands. And even there. Considering stated population of any reasonably build world to be in billions and more populated to go to hundreds of billions. Number of normal humans you could stick a weapon in hands and told to shoot at that direction would still be in at least millions if not billions. A few thousand whatever can do very little against that.

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eapressoandcats 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The funny thing about this is that pre modern cities featured in modern media are always surrounded by unformed grassland because it makes the shot more dramatic and it’s easier to do than showing lots of little farms growing in density up to the city walls.

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CalRobert 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, a little diversity in crops wouldn’t hurt. And most of the corn isn’t for humans