History Literature / Jam

* IKnowMortalKombat: Tim and Travis both have basic tactical knowledge from playing strategy video games. Dub mocks them mercilessly for it, but their analysis is right on the money more often than not.

''Jam'' is a [[AfterTheEnd post-apocalyptic]] novel from 2012 by [[Creator/BenCroshaw Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw]], with a twist, and even a couple of [[{{Satire}} satirical]] jabs at some of the apocalypse genre's recurring tropes.

Travis, an unemployed {{everyman}} from Brisbane, wakes up one morning to discover that the city has been covered in a thick layer of a red, sticky substance that smells distinctly of strawberry, not too much unlike jam. The problem, however, is that the substance has one major characteristic that it doesn't share with jam: it devours any organic matter that comes too close to it, including humans.

* AmbiguousDisorder: There's ''something'' going on with Travis. He's extremely slow on the uptake, tends to get irrationally fixated on the last thing he was told was important, and even before the disaster had a habit of calling his roommate at work in panicked indecision every time there was a knock on the door.

-->"How can you be a secret government agent when you're so bad at lying?!"\\

** Don isn't much better when he tries to deny knowing Y, who then starts shooting arrows at them.\\

* {{Determinator}}: Don will get his hard drive back if it's the last thing he ever does.

* GoMadFromTheRevelation: Surprisingly, everybody retains their sanity pretty well in the face of the jampocalypse, acclimatizing well. [[spoiler:Too well in Tim's case. He goes mad at the revelation that it ''isn't'' the real apocalypse.]]

** After first travelling with Tim, Don and Travis, Y cuts a deal with Hibatsu to suppress the mall survivor colony and [[spoiler:kills many of them]], as he was trying to fulfill his end of the bargain to protect and extract X, as they had means of communication to the outside. He did what he had to, even nearly killing the protagonists, but [[spoiler:it obviously caused him major psychological grief]] [[spoiler:After his death]], [[ShaggyDogStory it was revealed]] that, in a turn of corporate phrasing, it was just a sheet they had put on the side of their building.

** Using things lying around their office, Hibatsu had jury rigged a full-scale catapult that used office hardware (printers, filing cabinets) as ammunition. They also made improvised bows, crossbows, and slingshots to shoot box cutter blades, glass, and sharpened [=DVDs=].

* SuperSoldier: Y. He easily takes on multiple opponents in situations where he is at a severe disadvantage, and can improvise weapons out of almost any materials at hand.

* GangOfHats: The two main factions of survivors display rather noticeable quirks. Lord Awesomo’s Bagmen are covered head-to-toe in plastic and act like pretentious hipsters who treat the supposed apocalypse like a game even when reality would demonstrate otherwise. The Hibatsu corporation wear stereotypical tribalistic dress fashioned from mundane office supplies but still operate effectively using corporate jargon and buzzwords.

* DarkMessiah: Lord Awesomo serves as one of these, despite his claims that it's "only [[YouKeepUsingThatWord ironic]]". [[spoiler: Tim]] later tries for this more naturally.

* {{Irony}}: The inhabitants of the mall form a death cult based around irony, [[YouKeepUsingThatWord or at least what they understand to be irony]]. For instance, one of their leaders, Princess Ravenhair, is blonde.

* YouKeepUsingThatWord:
** As Tim points out, the cultists don't really know what irony is. To make things stupidly simple; they confuse "sarcasm" with "irony"; very common with hipsters. They also love the "we're doing it literally but rolling our eyes while we do it" variant, like being "ironically" evil by "ironically" executing people for petty reasons.
** The Hibatsu executives insist on using "acquisition" as a verb and refuse to use "acquire".