How often do you consume some post-apocalyptic media and people slog it on empty highways or whatever for miles and miles on foot or revert back to fucking horses for some reason? Like I can suspend my disbelief that somehow there's just shittons of fuel laying around everywhere that magically doesn't spoil for decades but even then there's so many scenes where the characters are struggling to walk a distance or take forever and you could literally do it in a quarter of the time on a bike.
They're comparably easy to fix, they don't require keeping a whole ass horse alive, they're fairly abundant everywhere and the fuel is you. It just fucks with my disbelief. What, do these people walk through what remains of the suburbs, looting houses for supplies and just ignore every bike they see?
Maybe it's a tone thing where if you let bikes be a significant part of it the world will simply be too much of a delight to be dystopic
Just add headwinds for the scene or whatever. No one is happy in headwinds
Would be amazing to watch an "end of the world movie" that starts out all "scary doomsday preppers about to murder each other for their cans of beans" that quickly turns into an upbeat 80's or 90's dirtbike/BMX buddy style movie by the end.
Americans hate bicycles so much that even their speculative apocalypse fiction throws shade at them.
It's not even limited to Americans it's just....memory holed globally. I mean GTA tends to have bicycles in one form or another, it's not like people don't know them. I'm assuming they all get raptured before shit hits the fan for being the best manmade object ever.
There has been too much violence. Too much pain. But I have an honorable compromise. Just walk away. Give me your bike pump, the spare tires, the extra tubes, and the whole compound, and I'll spare your lives. Just walk away and we'll give you a safe passageway in the wastelands. Just walk away and there will be an end to the horror.
Lord Humungus is keeping all the bikes
spoiler
you're right I should have done that I was overthinking it. pedal would have been funnier
The first time I watched 28 days later and the guy picks up a bike in one of the first scenes I knew it was going to be one of the most realistic zombie movies I'd ever seen.
Rule of Cool maybe?
I guess people don't consider bikes cool because we can't destroy the environment enough with them
I mean Premium Rush and Quicksilver exist and they did okay, I guess? I can even understand it from gameplay perspective if we're talking video games because the map scaling gets weird, but like - you walk through town after town in the Last of Us and complain about your weary, hard way and it's just...pick up a fucking bicycle you morons. Teach Ellie, it takes half a day, it saves you weeks of travel.
And then they arrive in their brothers compound which is doing okay for the apocalypse, allthough certainly not great, but everybody there is apparently fully onboard with the luxury of a fucking horse stable. The roads are okay! You might have to heave your bike over a log or something but jesus fucking christ eat the food instead of giving it to the dumb horses.
wot if knowing how to ride a bicycle somehow diminishes your chances of surviving the apocalypse 🤔 like how drunk people sometimes suffer lesser traumas when falling bc their muscles are already relaxed. learning to keep the balance too good wasn't such a good idea now, was it?
Bicycles are fine as long as your sidewalks and roads aren't broken. Horses can't pop a bicycle tube and can handle more types of terrain.
In the first few years of Nazi occupation in the Netherlands the Nazis took the rubber from everyone's bicycle tires, and people modified their tires with wood . Kids could then still ride them to school. I'd like to see you replace your horses broken leg with wood. Bikes were also modified to generate power for resistance printing presses and to light peoples houses during outages/Nazi mandated blackouts.
FWIW a little later on in the war the whole bicycle would be confiscated, either for the steel or taken by German soldiers who wanted to flee. It's the source of our national anti-German quip: "give us our bikes back".
Dutch Jews were never allowed to own bicycles.
national anti-German quip: “give us our bikes back”.
:michael-laugh:
My great grandpa's brother was a member of the Communist Party of the Netherlands, and he helped spread the communist resistance newspaper De Waarheid (the truth), which were made in part with those modified bikes. He was put in a concentration camp in July of 1944, and executed several months later. He was 49.
Edit: now I'm on the subject anyway, another brother's son died in a forced labour camp in Berlin, in 1944. It's unclear how, maybe allied bombing, maybe execution. He was 22, and his corpse was found in 1947. His father never fully recovered from losing his son after the war, my dad remembers how he was a sad broken man until the day he died.
Dutch Jews were never allowed to own bicycles.
When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.
Horses can't pop a bicycle tube
I have some bad news; horses are incredibly fragile, and if they break a foot or a leg, you're basically fucked and they're not going to be able to carry you again. Not to mention the need for a consistent food supply, and one that doesn't change rapidly to avoid colic. They can't puke, so anything wrong goes down that hatch and that could be the end of it.
I'd rather try to repair an inner tube with whatever random materials I can find around then try to do field veterinary work on an injured horse.
And you don't actually need bicycle tubes to ride bicycles. During WWII there was a rubber shortage and people got creative with makeshift tires made from rope and corks and stuff. It was a bumpy ride compared to inflatable tires but it worked.
can handle more types of terrain.
idk, I'd trust a skilled rider on a bike to handle far rougher terrain than a guy on a horse. But I have no idea how much a horse rider's skill affects their ability to navigate, maybe unskilled bike rider vs unskilled horse rider, horse rider wins.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well. You can ride up and down stairs on a bike, and I feel like trying this on a horse is just asking to break a leg or two. (Or your neck when you go tumbling off the thing)
Modes of transportation other than cars are so unimaginable to the burger brain that they would ruin the suspension of disbelief even more than what you're describing
If you've ever played CDDA, finding a bike in early game is always a joyful treat. Doing circles around the zombies so I can go and steal some books from the local library is great.
:comfy-cool:
Oh neat, didn't know it had that. Good to know, anything bicycling is just insanely rare in vidya. I'm genuinely looking forward to Bicycle Mechanic Simulator even though it's all gonna be wrenching on pristine 5000€ bikes and not jury rigging some bullshit together
I've been playing 7 Days to Die and rushing quest so you can get your bike as early as possible is the best way to play.
yeah bikes are kind of the best in cataclysm
enough speed to avoid any reasonable threat, it's a vehicle so you can put extra storage on it, no fuel
cw dysphoria
add bicycles to introduce actual realism and introduce a new horror/suspense element by making your character trans and constantly in search of hormones
Y the Last Man does bring that topic up, then drops it in the next scene and never mentions it again.
You talking about the comic or the series?
Never read the paper but I have hate watched a chunk of the show. Fuck I hate this show so much...!
I take it all back, I still can't think of one.
I was picturing last kids on earth, but even they walk or use cars.
Does stranger things count? Or maybe that's how we know the events in stranger things aren't leading to an apocalypse.
If there had been bicycles in The Walking Dead - I think viewership would have tanked. Americans of most political stripes are members of the Cult of the Car. Some members such as liberals would vehemently deny that they are members but if you're in that cult - you must hate bikes.
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine Americans using bikes.
I guess it's also largely because you can just use cars in most situations. They offer more protection, storage space, and speed, while using less of your own energy (food).
But it may also be because the entire "wasteland apocalypse" genre exists as an American fantasy of settler-colonial type stuff. Lawless people in a sparsely populated land where they can do whatever they want to 'survive'. Bikes aren't part of the American conception of "freedom" that the apocalypse is really about. Because apocalypse shows rarely seem to be about densely populated places or ever really explore anything more interesting than "What if there were no cops or government and you spent your time roaming around awful sprawling US suburbia". Bikes don't work when everything is so far apart like in the US. They'd mainly be useful in cities (which apocalypse movies in the tradition sense don't usually take place in). And apocalypse movies are often about suburbia, because of that deeply-ingrained with that "American heartland" trope we're all now very familiar with. The "heartland" is the places that are empty, because the places with people have "too many blacks and jews" (like the :the-podcast: folks pointed out)
Bikes don’t work when everything is so far apart like in the US.
That's sort of the joke, tho. Nothing works, absent our incredibly energy-hungry infrastructure, in the US. That's why a natural disaster or a public disturbance or a bottleneck in the Suez Canal can result in store shelves hollowed out inside a week.
In an apocalypse, the things that would disappear wouldn't be bicycles but suburbs.
I guess it’s also largely because you can just use cars in most situations. They offer more protection, storage space, and speed, while using less of your own energy (food). [...] Bikes don’t work when everything is so far apart like in the US.
I mean if I stick with The Last of Us example, Joel and Ellie hoof it from coast to coast over a year, many times on foot. That's sort of my issue. Of course you'd take a car (and of course disbelief can be suspended about magic fuel with no shelf life) but like just toss two bikes in the back of your pickup truck.
This gets even more egregious when it comes to fucking horses. You have no cars or ability to keep them running, you revert back to horses?
