It was an interesting coincidence that The Simpsons aired their “survivalist” episode “Homer Goes to Prep School” the same night The Walking Dead was wrapping up its third season. Actual preppers probably don’t watch The Walking Dead, despite their reliance on fictions to justify their lifestyle, but the show serves as a guide to that mindset, since both preppers and TV writers share the same Incredibles complex, namely that there are but a few worthy people on this planet and the rest are sheep.
(Don’t worry about your standing. You are one of the sheep.)
Take Lost. There were more survivors and more people on that Island than the opening credits would suggest. Where else did they get all those people to run in front of bullets? Random people pop up whenever the writers needed to display the Island’s hostility to humanity without losing a main player or when someone needs to stand behind Jack’s shoulder and nod during emotional “group” faceoffs.
These people experience the same suffering, the same losses, and the same struggles as our main characters, but for some reason, they are not exceptional. They are functional, what gamers would call NPCs (non-player characters).
Back to The Walking Dead. Woodbury was a town full of NPCs. They support their sociopathic leader (the Governor) without question, right up until they don’t. The Governor has this vast network of spies, soldiers, and commandos, watching the prison, capturing walkers, etc. – but only about three men get names, lines of dialogue, and close ups. The rest are sheep, even though they stop bullets as good as anyone.
So if you want to survive a zombie apocalypse, you can’t lose your PC badge, which is not as easy as it sounds. Andrea, she was a PC, and look what happened to her. She had many “emotional moments” that would seem to grant her a permanent “PC” tattoo – but The Walking Dead is essentially an unending sequence of emotional moments. One way to guarantee loss of PC status is to become the moral foil to either the protagonist or the antagonist. Andrea was both. That’s a definite fail on her saving throw.
Fans complained about her obtuse inability to see the Governor’s true nature. But characters are only as smart as the writing allows. And the writers twisted and turned and contorted to keep her as dumb as a post. There was plenty of information floating around that should have swayed her opinion of the Governor – e.g., he had Glenn tortured, he sexually assaulted Maggie, he gunned down a group of soldiers and took their weapons.
Any one of these tidbits, had they been communicated to her, would have swayed her to one side and altered her character arc. But we never see this information passed to her. No one tells her. Why? Because doing so would spoil her function. She needs to get us from Point A to Point B. Andrea didn’t kill the Governor because the script told her not to. She lost her PC badge.
Like The Walking Dead writers, preppers see NPCs everywhere. Except their canvas is reality, filled with radiation canaries destined to die from the formaldehyde in a flu shot or a fifth-column drone attack on American soil or an uprising by jackbooted government soldiers. They see a world full of zombie food.
So both preppers and TV writers both are willing to sacrifice NPCs to realize their narratives. Except TV writers are trying to make fiction look more like reality, while for preppers, it is just the opposite. They might, for example, edit a popular animated show so that it appears to foretell actual events.
