Y: The Last Man #3

[history79]

Comments

[reveen]

Alright, I'm really starting to question the logistics of this scenarios it's being portrayed.

Are there really so few female cops, soldiers, or Republican party staffers in Washington DC that those ladies can call on that they have to roll up personally with a shotgun to try to seize power? They couldn't even get their hands on an angry mob? In this series 50% - 60% (depending on female casualties) of the population of the planet died, but it seems to act like it was close to 80-90%.

[zachbeacon]

Well it isn't like anyone lives in DC.

*snicker*

Now I'm just thinking of the running joke on Sailor Business about how unpopulated Tokyo is.

[burkeonthesly]

I think a lot of the usefully "angry mob" types got swept up in that amazon biker gang cult.

[q99]

Considering the effect the loss of 50% should have on things like food supply and infrastructure, I would guess notably more than 60% losses. And a lot of people are simply going to try and get to their loved ones.

[wizardru]

Here's the breakdown of the # of women in Congress leading up to the year this was written.

102nd 1991–1993 33 6.2%
103rd 1993–1995 55 10.3%
104th 1995–1997 59 11.0%
105th 1997–1999 66 12.3%
106th 1999–2001 67 12.5%
107th 2001–2003 75 14.0%

So, yes, they SHOULD be acting like that many people in the US government died...because 86% of the government (and at that time, virtually all senior members of it) did.

And while 80% of mankind did not die, a huge amount of the people responsible involved in maintaining the infrastructure HAVE died, requiring a massive restructuring of everything. Who's maintaining the power infrastructure (and preventing nuclear meltdowns), delivering the food, keeping order? I mean, we see scenes of the huge effort just to clear the dead bodies and try to prevent massive disease outbreaks. It's not that 80% died, it's that the burden of the death of 50% is huge on the remainder.

[arilou_skiff]

For a comparison, 50% of the population is Black Death levels of dying. And that happened over a couple of years, not instantly. And that's without the gender-imbalance things going on.

[reveen]

The issue with that is that the population during those times was vastly lower. You could fit entire kingdoms of people in some of our cities.

[reveen]

First of all. Are you talking about women in congress the building or women in congress the political institution?

Second, I think there's a larger problem in works that portray this kind of post-apocalypse stuff in that they seriously don't get just how many people there are. The DC metro area has over 6 million people in it. Even after the 50% of the men die and 20% of the women either die, leave, or are occupied, that still leaves almost two million people.

Like people just don't get how many people that really is. Even if we only count Washington DC itself, the same breakdown will still leave use with about 200,000 to work with. That's a fuckton of people. I simple can't believe that things would be as barren as they seem here.

[seisachtheia]

Okay, but the problem is 1. scale and 2. skills.

You may need half as many people to support half as many people, but most of they infrastructure and systems would be set up for the original population, which means you wouldn't have the people to keep it all operating, especially if people were still distributed as they had been.

Having the numbers is not the same thing as having the knowledge or skills. You can't just sub people in and out. Have you ever worked for a company that had a high turn over, or some how lost a bunch of its employees (this happened a lot in Nevada where I lived during the economic crisis - people'd get foreclosed on and leave)? Just sticking bodies back in there doesn't make it run. It's a shambles, sometimes to the point of complete non-functionality.