On the Routineness of Ex-Special Forces Protagonists in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

I recall running across a gripe session on a discussion board among people annoyed with the trope of a zombie apocalypse scenario where the hero just so happens to be ex-special forces.

There was more in the way of amusing cracks than genuine insights into the matter, but it still got me thinking about just why we see so much of this. One way of looking at the matter is to say that the reason there are so many such characters in these stories is that they are such natural protagonists for them--people trained for combat, survival in harsh conditions, etc. having skills that would be very useful indeed in such situations, and besides being helpful to them potentially helpful to any group of people they link up with.

But people sure have seen it a lot, so much so that it seems predictable, and "convenient," and trite.

That suggests another, larger, problem--namely that there has been so much writing in this genre for so long, so that like any genre that gets so deeply exploited for so long it is tired. The issue, then, seems less the kind of protagonist than the fact that people had seen this story so many times before.

And that in turn suggests a bigger problem still--that we are overdue for some new genres with which to amuse ourselves. Alas, pop culture is stuck in a rut—likely because everything else is too.