The Ethics of the Apocalypse: Moral Dilemmas in the Rot & Ruin Universe
It’s been fourteen years since the world-changing First Night, when a zombie apocalypse swallowed the world into darkness. The dead rose from their graves and began attacking the living. No one really understood what happened, and even the military couldn’t figure out how to deal with the situation, to where the mag-dump method seemed like a viable idea. They fired countless bullets from tanks, helicopters, and jet fighters, causing massive casualties by the end. Little did they know that when someone died, the person also turned into a zombie. Not only was the indiscriminate firing morally wrong, but it ended up making hundreds of thousands more zombies everywhere. Here is a deeper look at the moral dilemmas in the Rot & Ruin Universe.
Human survivors took refuge in isolated towns protected by fences and patrol guards. They’re still in such towns now, trying to make the best of the scarce resources. Anybody aged 15 or older has to work, otherwise they can only get half of the food ration. Some of them turn into bounty zombie hunters. They have also improved their trade; instead of killing the zombies using firearms or melee weapons only for the monsters to rise again, the hunters drive a silver spike through the zombie skulls to make sure that the undead really are dead.
Rot & Ruin doesn’t entirely focus on the struggles to kill the zombies, but it highlights the journey of brothers Tom and Benny in their adventures through a desolate landscape.
Benny starts out as a disrespectful young 15-year-old teenager filled with hatred toward his older brother, Tom. During the events of the First Night, a vague recollection in Benny’s mind pictures Tom as a cowardly man who left their parents to die. In reality, however, Tom had nothing to do with the parent’s deaths and that he saved the then infant Benny.
It’s a post-apocalyptic world full of moral dilemmas. While there’s nothing wrong with a 15-year-old boy making a living and sustaining himself, you wouldn’t want to see that the job requires him to risk his life daily fighting monsters. And it gets even worse if you consider that all of that is just to get a full – rather than half – food ration. Thankfully for Benny, who is still new at the job and practically knows nothing about life beyond the fence, there is the experienced Tom to guide and protect the little brother while teaching him valuable life lessons.
Even the zombies in Rot & Ruin are bound by some interesting moral dilemmas, at least according to Tom. Unlike most bounty hunters who know nothing but brute force and kill the monsters mercilessly, Tom actually believes that all zombies were humans transformed by terrible diseases into mindless undead. So before he does the killing, he’ll take time to read letters from families to the zombies and then end their sufferings.
Such a method apparently comes from Tom’s own dilemma related to the incident fourteen years ago. To some extent, Tom is both the priest and the executioner to say some prayer before the convicted criminal (in this case a person’s consciousness trapped in a zombie’s animalistic brain), before administering the lethal injection. Tom is fighting to protect his brother and everyone they care about; being a zombie hunter doesn’t mean taking revenge on the evil but preserving the good in humanity – or what’s left of it – in a world where many of the living turn out to be more frightening than the zombies. Everything in the Ruin might be damaged beyond repair, and the zombies are as terrifying as they come, but something tells him that some humans can be even more dangerous.
Benny quickly learns that Tom is not and has never been a coward all his life. Tom’s different, less-messy approach to zombie-hunting has earned him respect from all others, except Charlie Pink-eye. Once again, Tom is right about the possibility of humans ending up being much worse than the zombies. Later on, Tom and Benny figure out that Charlie kidnaps and forces young boys and girls to fight zombies as some kind of nightmarish spectator sport.
And believe it or not, Charlie also has his own version of a twisted moral perspective. He refuses to see himself as an utter evil driven by nothing but a desire to see others suffer, but a conqueror in a much changed world. In Charlie’s mind, what he does isn’t a hideous act of any sort; he just wants to see the “survival of the fittest” principle at play from the front-row. While Charlie embraces the post-apocalyptic world with all the ferociousness and barbarism he has, Tom is the exact opposite, for he maintains sanity and hopes to restore order despite the chaos all around him. Both men are the manifestations of their own dilemmas.
We think Rot & Ruin is an overall properly grim post-apocalyptic story, but it still delivers a healthy dose of optimism and positive outlook toward a destroyed world. Not a single character is a mere caricature; they all have scars from a terrible past, moral quandaries to complicate things, and upbringing sprinkled with decay and deaths. Their spiritual and emotional strengths are honed by destruction, yet they’ve pulled through and come up on the other side as warriors, good or bad, in their own right.
Have you figured out what actually happened to Tom and Benny’s parents during the First Night? Which book in the series do you like the most? We’d love to hear from you.
Other Things You Might Want to Know
Some modern zombie apocalypse books you might enjoy:
Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry
The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion
Aftertime by Sophie Littlefield
Feed by Mira Grant
The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell
A few popular zombie graphic novels other than The Walking Dead:
Zombie graphics novel, not TWD
Blackest Night by Johns, Geoff
Zombie Tales Omnibus – Undead
Batman Vs. the Undead by Kevin VanHook
The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics
The Goon Nothin’ but Misery by Eric Powell
The Zombie Survival Guide – Recorded Attacks by Max Brooks
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – The Graphic Novel by Tony Lee
Marvel Zombies by Robert Kirkman
The origin of zombies?
While there’s no definitive answer so far, many agree that the Ancient Greeks might have been the first civilization to propose an idea about dead people rising from the graves. Archaeologists have discovered evidence of ancient graves in which rocks and a miscellany of heavy objects pinning down on skeletons, as a method to prevent the deceased from coming back to life.
