Wow! Every single one of the comments on here are from men who are simply outraged at your observations about the new wave of zombie movies. I wonder why?!!!
I think its a perfectly valid observation, though. You just illuminated an entire subgenre of the zombie narrative, which I’ve been clocking for a while now, in literature. There are basically three types of zombie stories: the anthology style, like World War Z, the Walking Dead version, with a group of diverse people trying to recreate civilization after the end of the world, and this.
The love of gun culture, the mowing down of faceless others by heavily armed White men, (either nebbishes, or the survivalist types, also featured in Zombieland), traipsing through the apocalypse, collecting pretty White women as they search for various loved ones, or a cure, or civilization, or whatever.
*Zombies don’t represent anything in my mind except a global change of some kind. And the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this. That’s really all they’ve represented to me.
— George Romero (creator of Night of the Living Dead)
*Whatever the cause, the result is the same; the recently dead have risen, en masse, to feed on the living. With each victim they claim, their numbers swell, and no force on Earth can contain them. As society collapses, it’s up to the Big Damn Heroes to fight their way to safety or keep shooting until things blow over.
So yeah, you’re not wrong about the tropes you observed. I stopped reading a lot of zombie fiction, not just because so much of it was derivative of the more famous movies, but a lot of it had a blatantly conservative bias consisting as it did of the white male hero blowing away hoards of “the other”, and taken into account with Romero’s quote, that’s especially chilling.
