And in the midst of this terrible, terrible disaster, one question arises: Are you drift-compatible?
I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to Iceland unleashing its cat jaegar on the Silent World!
"Strong national identity" and "Britain" are not two things I expect to see in the same sentence, actually.
You'd be surprised. Just because we're not saluting a flag every day doesn't mean the British identity isn't a deeply held one. Just look at any expat community. Mainly though I think it's a thin line between 'strong national identity' and 'refusing to adapt to any foreign society because we think they're mad'.
Okay i dont want to be "that guy" but this line bothers me a lot.
The Scandinavians have left a very strong imprint on Britain thanks to years of settlement/invasion. Centuries later it's still around today, such as place names, family names and language. The Lincolnshire dialect especially has a lot of words that are extremely close, to the point it's said that you could probably carry out a conversation with a Swede using it. Plus with genetics there have been centuries of exchange between the two, and studies have shown that there's a strong link. I'm also speaking from experience here; I'm as English as afternoon tea, yet when I go abroad I'm often mistaken for a Scandinavian. Maybe it's the hair, I dunno. I had a very bizarre encounter in Spain of all places when a woman came up to me and start talking in a foreign language. I apologised and said I didn't understand her. She replied in perfect English "Oh, sorry, I thought you were Swedish!" and walked off!
The Britain-Scandinavian genetic link isn't as strong as, say, Sweden-Finland or Norway-Iceland, but it's still there. Funnily enough the greatest concentrations of Nordic genes are in Scotland and the North East, which also would geographically be amongst the best places to survive the outbreak...
Well, cold.... I suppose it's not particularly warm in the usual sense of the word but to an Icelander it would seldom be particularly cold. The point about animals might be true, but in a country with a higher population density than Germany and France the primary spreaders would be humans.
I'd imagine a scenario where some Britons might survive like the Hotakainens - living as boat people in the relatively calm Irish Sea before seeking isolated islands on the coast of Scotland.
The problem with the climate is that it's horrendously changeable to the point that you don't know what the season will be like until it happens. Winter can be cold enough to cause 4ft of snow, or mild enough to make the flowers bloom early because they think it's spring. Summer can be a total washout with torrential floods or hot enough to melt the asphalt on the roads. I imagine this causes boom and bust years with the monsters, with particularly bad winters killing off large numbers and preventing the spread, and mild winters causing plagues of them the following year.
Your Hotakainens comment has given me the fantastic image of a literal floating city around the Isle of Wight. Each year the IoW holds a massive sailing regatta and it's sails as far as the eye can see, so it would make a lot of sense for people abandon the land en masse and form a floating settlement. It also raises the question of what's going on in the Channel Islands, since they'd be a very good place to hunker down and survive the apocalypse.
If they can get cold they also get hot, and blistering heat is very deadly, sunburns can become very serious, and maybe trolls can suffer sunstrokes if their brains function proparly.
(Also im really into the idea of named giants, awesome!)
You know that stereotype of Brits always burning in the sun? I imagine the trolls all become tomatoes come June time. "Ay lad, it's the first signs of summer: the swallows are nesting and the trolls are turning red!"
Glad you like the naming idea! Since some trolls and giants would be too large/dangerous to kill, I'd imagine that communities would eventually give nicknames to certain ones. "Careful, Grendel was seen down near the woods yesterday." "The Old Matron is a lot more active this season, I don't like it."
You can guarantee that, somewhere in post-Rash Britain, some poor castle is having to deal with a 90 year old giant nicknamed
Mr Blobby and nobody remembers why it's called that...
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