Newsflesh/YMMV

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• Acceptable Religious Targets: There's a schism between those who believe and those who don't after the Rising. It is mirrored in the After The End Times team: Georgia and Shaun are atheists, though they aren't above invoking the G-word or praying in tight moments; Buffy is devout. Each side has their own point of view on the other. And some are more extreme than others.
• Complete Monster: The Big Bad behind the conspiracy as of Feed, Governor David Tate fits the bill. What's the monster done? Used weaponized Kellis-Amberlee, which is the worst crime anyone can commit -- so bad that it is agreed on globally as an act of terrorism. Also not above killing friend or foe alike, and that includes children. Has the requisite emotionless, blank expression (but is capable of hiding it under a warm expression). No remorse for actions.
  • The Big Bad behind the conspiracy as of Deadline, Doctor Joseph Wynne fits the bill as well. What has he done? Been behind murders of people with reservoir conditions so that a wide immunity to KA would not form, and been behind the tailoring of worse and worse strains of KA -- encouraging the mob behaviour and the moaning only when zombies are mobbed enough to easily take down their prey, as well as setting Kelly up as a Judas goat to kill Shaun and his team. Also responsible for the outbreak and subsequent firebombing in Oakland.
• Fridge Logic: Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King, Hardee's and all other burger or beef based fast food restaurants had to change or go out of business after the Rising, since cows can amplify and convert. Even eating them as veal is not safe.
  • And on a sadder note, the adoption and foster care systems are probably also hit very hard. You think it's hard to get someone to take a non-caucasian child, or one with a birth defect? People are not trusting of blood not their own in the Newsflesh-verse. It's likely orphans or the children of unwanted pregnancies grow up in orphanages. Shaun and George were adopted, but their parents had ulterior motives.
• Marty Stu: Senator Ryman is perfect in many ways, most notably as the perfect President, and even hardass Georgia sang his praises. He's inoffensive in person though, and manages to estrange himself from the main characters, so it's eventually subverted.
• Memetic Mutation: Buffy apparently owned and wore a "Joss Whedon is My Master Now" T-shirt ^{[dead link]} .
• Narm: Each chapter is presaged by an "article" from a blog. In reality, those articles are (often and at worst) melodramatic proclamations that try a little too hard to be profound. A reader might find his faith in the main characters' integrity as journalists rather shaken.
  • If there are any stand alone quotes, the shorter ones tend to be dramatic and/or profound as well as being generic (What the fuck is going on here?, When did the world stop making sense?). The problem is, they are attributed to one of the main characters, instead of, say, any of the thousands of people who had expressed the exact same vague but important sounding sentiments in the exact same wording, in mutltitudes of different contexts, for decades before hand.
• Nightmare Fuel: Plenty. Starting with the fact that every single mammal on the planet has Kellis-Amberlee. And when they die, no matter what the cause, they will reanimate as a zombie. There's no escaping it. And if that's not bad enough, every single mammal on the planet includes giraffes and killer whales.
  • To say nothing of multiple needle based blood tests happening on a daily basis.
    • In Deadline, it's revealed that having so many of them isn't actually necessary unless you've been in the field, but it's used to keep people afraid.
• Paranoia Fuel: If you aren't already making plans for what to do when the Rising occurs, the trilogy may very well get you sitting up nights thinking about it.
• Real Women Never Wear Dresses:
  • Becks, since she's an Irwin, and wearing pretty flowy skirts is highly impractical, especially into the field.
    • Stacy Mason is also an Irwin, and tends only to wear dresses for photo ops.
  • Buffy, Maggie and Doc do not count for this trope, as, generally speaking, none of them intentionally ever enters the field wearing a dress.
    • Doc only wears dresses to impersonate Buffy, and as a scientist only ever wears slacks. She dresses practically when with Shaun and Becks.
  • Georgia is the trope codified as she never wears dresses unless it's a formal event or she has to for a bet or a photo op. Georgia also comments on the fact that dresses never went out of fashion after the Rising, and that formal wear is still something that will get a woman killed due to impracticality.
• Unfortunate Implications: Although there are several female politicians in Feed, one is a gay woman we only hear mentioned in passing, and the other is a former porn star who bases her campaign on how little clothing she wears. It was perceived by some reviewers as slut-shaming.
  • Many of the protagonists, and most obviously the viewpoint characters, are rather dismissive of The New Tens culture, especially on architecture and child-rearing. While it's justified in that repeating such behavior would get you killed quick in the series, Shaun and George both tend to imply that, regardless of circumstance, things such as taking your kids for a walk are at best trite and superficial fripperies and at worst unintelligent decisions for which the decision-maker deserved what they got when the Rising came around.
  • Going off the above, the Ultra-utilitarian mindset of all the protagonists results in an implication that any inapplicable art is excessive and should be stripped away, not necessarily in the context of a zombie outbreak. Art for the sake of art is in general disparaged.
  • No one really cares that antagonizing Kelly for, as Shaun notes, naivety and ignorance might be a tad judgmental, even after she had undergone some significant Character Development to pull herself out of that. Most of them maintained that she deserved it.
• Unreliable Narrator: Several reviewers have said Georgia is one because despite her relentless pursuit of the truth, she never elaborated on her sexual relationship with Shaun because she never considered it the reader's business, and that's intellectual dishonesty.
  • She points out in Blackout that they knew that was the one thing that wasn't safe for them to write down.