Series / All of Us Are Dead

School's out for the apocalypse.

"Even if we can conquer this virus, a world in which humanity rules will never return. Can we believe people are beautiful after seeing them turn into the absolute worst beings?"

— Lee Byeong-chan

All of Us Are Dead (Korean: 지금 우리 학교는; RR: Jigeum Uri Hakgyoneun; lit. Now at Our School) is a Korean zombie horror coming-of-age series directed by Lee Jae-kyoo and Kim Nam-su. The show was adapted from a 2009 webtoon of the same name by Joo Dong-geun. The series became available on Netflix in late January 2022, with a second season now in development.

On the same day exams begin for students at Hyosan High School, a zombie virus concocted by the school's biology teacher is unleashed with the campus being ground zero for the outbreak. Because most students had been forced to give their phones to staff at the start of the day, their ability to contact the outside world is limited. The remaining students must band together to survive, but unbeknownst to them the outbreak reaches the city very early on.

Here's the trailer for the series.

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All of Us Are Dead contains examples of:

A-C

• A Father to His Men: Assemblywoman Park is shown to be something like this to her younger colleagues despite only being a politician. Probability why they are all so doggone devoted to her.
• Action Girl: Ha-ri is a crack shot with a bow and arrow, Mi-jin is skilled at spear fighting, and Nam-Ra is an Extraordinary Empowered Girl due to receiving a mutated version of the Jonas Virus that allowed her to retain her humanity. Averted with the other girls of the cast, who all lean more toward Action Survivor status.
• Action Survivor: Comes with the territory when most of the survivors are made up of either students or civilians. With only a few of them actually having had any experiences that could be transformed into fighting skill.
• Adaptational Alternate Ending: The first season adapts the entire webtoon, and ends not long after the military bombs Hyosan. The webtoon ends a full year after the suppression of the outbreak and goes so far as to show another outbreak occuring in Shimane Prefecture, Japan.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Downplayed almost as much as possible, but in the webcomic, Gwi-nam is a Serial Rapist who chases after the group of survivors to rape the girls and wants them all dead. Here, he sexually assaults Gun-ji, tries to kill Cheong-san as payback for taking his eye, and attacks Su-yeok for no other reason than Su-yeok being a better fighter than him, but he's less of a threat to the other students due to his indifference towards them.
• Adaptation Deviation: In the webtoon version, is Mi-jin, Ha-ri and Min-jae the ones who meet Yoon Gwi-nam in the principal’s office instead of Cheong-san, and Gwi-nam enmity is rather with them.
• Adaptation Expansion: The show extents some plot points and added original scenes that didn't appear in the webtoon.
  • First, there is NO love square in the webtoon, the story is all about the characters trying to survive a zombie outbreak.
  • The amplitude of the virus infection is far wider here. Only the school and the city of Hyosan are infected in the webtoon, while in the show it also reached a nearby town called yangdong, with the possibility of spreading to Seongnam, Hanam, Gwacheon, Anyang, and Gwangmyeong in a week, and even to Seoul.
  • In the webtoon, Su-hyeok doesn't take Kim Hyun Joo to the health room.
  • There is no library or school cafeteria scene in the webtoon.
• Adaptational Badass: In the webtoon version, the halfbies were merely immortal, but still at risk of being attacked by other zombies, and were more eager to bite others. The show versions are given Super-Senses, Super-Strength, Super-Toughness and more control over themselves.
• Adaptational Explanation: Unlike the manhwa, where the virus doesn't have any explicit origin, other than it was discovered by Lee Byeong-Chan, while in the show, we learn why and how.
• Adults Are Useless: Zig-zagged. Although On-jo not baselessly holds this view towards the end for how the Korean military utterly failed her and her friends, there are plenty of positive and helpful adults in the series as well, such as her own father, Cheong-san's mom, Ms. Park, the Assemblywoman, and the police officers.
• All for Nothing:
  • Lee Byeong-chan's special drug not only didn't help his son fight off his bullies, it causes the outbreak.
  • Cheong-san's mom does make it to the school but her inability to realize that one of her son's friends was zombified gets her killed. This is made especially ironic that her newly opened restaurant acts as a safe haven for multiple characters, never getting overrun by zombies. If she'd stayed put the detectives probably would have arranged for her rescue.
  • Gyeong-su's one-hour quarantine becomes this as although he isn't infected initially, Na-yeong does so afterwards to avoid apologizing for accusing him of being infected.
  • All the effort everyone goes through to contact emergency services becomes useless when the government cuts of telecommunications to the outbreak area.
  • Sun-Hwa sacrificing herself for Na-yeon only allows her to survive for about another two days. She's still killed.
  • Min Eun-ji’s attempt at stopping the upload of the photos to the Internet. She risks her safety to go to the teacher’s office to try to smash the phones, only to getting bitten several times before finally getting there, even though she got there a couple of minutes early, she begins smashing phones in an attempt to get the one that has her photos. But as she’s smashing them, the screen lights up on one, showing to be the phone and that the photos have been uploaded. She sees it, but then proceeds to smash all the other phones in a fit of rage.
• All There in the Manual: Netflix Korea releases from time to time interviews and videos with informations more in depth about the characters and zombies that were not shown in the show.
  • For example, Nam-ra was gifted a book about leadership from her mother in the day everything happened.
  • Another video establishes the type of zombies exists In-Universe: normal zombies who are dead, aggressive and have the desire to cannibalize; immortal zombies (Gwi-nam & Eun-ji), who are alive and sentient, are agressive and can spread the virus through bites; immune zombies (Nam-ra) who are immune to the virus, can be agressive, but cannot spread the virus further.
• Aloof Archer: Ha-ri is the most efficient zombie killer in the student group with her archery skills, and doesn't betray much emotion until her brother dies.
• Alternate Universe: At some point the scientists compare the Jonas virus situation to the CoVID-19 pandemic, making clear that in the show's universe, CoVID-19 was eradicated much earlier.
• Always in Class One: Played with. The main cast is from Class 5, but they fit all the criteria of the trope. However, they are also joined with a second group who are a mix of student-athletes and a different unknown senior class.
• Always Second Best: Nam-ra and Joon-yeong are stated to be the highest scoring students in the class. Joon-yeong later admits that he always came in second after Nam-ra, no matter how hard he tried. He acknowledges that he resented her for this but holds no more ill will.
• Armies Are Evil: Zig-zagged, and perhaps one of the rare Zombie Apocalypse examples where the military isn't incompetent but also isn't necessarily evil either. This trope is lampshaded in Episode 9 when the military begins to treat all survivors as infected but asymptomatic following the camp incident with Eun-ji and when they leave the Hyosan School Group behind in a cancelled rooftop rescue but is also subverted when the soldiers are still sympathetic towards the abandoned students and when the military commander Jin Seon-moo is still sympathetic and soft-hearted enough to commit suicide after the Hyosan bombing mission at the reason that he killed a lot of survivors even when the majority killed are zombies.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: Many important characters end up transforming into zombies, the most impactful being Lee Cheong-san, Nam So-ju and Nam-Ra.
• Anyone Can Die: There is no episode without at least one significant character dying or turning into a zombie.
• The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People: While the The Needs of the Many is on full display, several characters do become better versions of themselves. Nam-Ra finally opens up about herself and the others realize they resented her for nothing the whole time, Lee Byeong-Chan finally realizes that he was wrong about the human nature and dies sacrificing his life in order for Song Jae-ik to escape. Even Lee Na-yeon eventually realizes the errors of her way.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Lee Byeong-Chan experimented on cats and mice and observed that the mouse would lose all inhibitions and fight back every once in a while, leading to a spike in testosterone. Byung-chun extracted the hormone and refined it to make the virus. Yeah, a virus created from hormones, which is biologically impossible. The closest things to a virus linked to hormones, are a class of viruses that produces insulin-like hormones that can stimulate human cells.
  • The school nurse is not shown to be very worried about being bit by a human being. While is true she had no idea Kim Hyeon-ju was infected with a zombie virus, she should have treat herself regardless. The human bite is the most dangerous and infectious non-venom bite in the world.
  • The fact the main characters survive 4 days without food and especially water, showing no sign of fatigue, stomach aches, extreme thirst, organ failure and other consequences associated with dehydration. What's even funnier is that Nam-Ra correctly points out that human beings can survive without water only 3 days, and without food at most 3 weeks. The characters run, fight and climb as if they weren't suffering from any of the effects named by Nam-Ra. They do finally get some when there is a rainstorm on the second night.
• Balance, Speed, Strength Trio: Lee Su-hyeok is the best fighter and has both speed and strength, Lee Cheong-san is a Fragile Speedster, and Yang Dae-su is the Acrofatic Big Guy.
• Band of Brothers: After surviving a zombie outbreak together and overcoming their own animosities with each other, the students of Hyosan Highschool, become inseparable.
• Bathroom Brawl: Ha-Lim turns in the bathroom, prompting Joon-seong and Mi-jin to try and put her down at Mi-jin's insistence. A fight breaks out, ending only after Ha-ri and and Min-jae arrive, shooting the zombie with an arrow.
• Beta Couple: Nam-ra and Su-hyeok serves as a foil to the main pairing, On-jo and Cheong-san. When the zombie outbreak is happening, the scenes with the boys saving the girls they like, are interposed. The first couple becomes official earlier despite the characters rarely interacting before the crisis, with less tension between the lovers. The main pairing is mistaken as a couple, because the two are just childhood friends, but Cheong-san does harbor feelings for On-jo who has a crush on Su-hyeok, but returns Cheong-san feelings when is too late. Both Nam-Ra and Cheong-san are bitten and infected by Gwi-nam. For all the build-up and tension, both couples end up sinking.
  • Even the official Netflix posters advertize the pairings together.
• Better as Friends: On-jo carries a flame for Su-hyuk, who's unsure about it. After he and Nam-ra become an item and it's more and more apparent that Cheong-san is who On-jo is really in love with, Su-hyuk ends up as one of On-jo's closest friends and confidants.
• Betty and Veronica: Is kind of inevitable when the main characters are teenagers, even during a zombie pandemic.
  • On-jo and Nam-ra to Su-Hyeok's Archie. On-jo is an upbeat, fun-loving Tsundere who openly makes her move on Su-Hyeok and asks him on a date, while Nam-Ra is the introverted Aloof Dark-Haired Girl who draws Su-Hyeok's attention with her beauty and mystery.
  • On-jo herself serves as the Archie for Cheong-san and Su-Hyeok. Cheong-san is her childhood friend who has a secret crush on her since childhood, while Su-Hyeok is the Tall, Dark, and Handsome former bully.
• Beware the Living: The zombies kill and infect everything in their path, but Gwi-nam is the Big Bad.
• Bickering Couple, Peaceful Couple: Not really a couple, but whatever On-jo and Cheong-san have going on between them reeks of Belligerent Sexual Tension, relentlessly bickering and insulting each other. In contrast, Nam-ra and Su-hyeok get along from the very beginning of the zombie outbreak and are protective of each other.
• Big Damn Heroes: The archery team returns at the exact right time to start rescuing the students.
• Big Damn Reunion:
  • After many days struggling to survive, On-jo finally reunites with her father after he unlocked the gym's door, when she and her friends were trying to escape the zombies.
  • Jang Ha-ri is reunited with her younger brother in the middle of a rainy night, saving him from zombies.
  • After 4 months, the survivors of Hyosan High School are reunited temporarily with Nam-Ra in the final scene.
• The Big Guy:
  • Su-hyeok is the best fighter on the good guys side, and a One-Man Army.
  • Gwi-nam's job as bully was to be the muscle and intimidate the victims.
  • Dae-Su is the biggest and strongest of the surviving students, and it shows. He tears out a door and wields it on his own to help push back the zombies, and when the group later creates a barricade, he is one of the last people holding it up while the rest of the group escapes.
• Bittersweet Ending: In the end, out of the core group of students only seven survive, with most having lost their families and with Nam-ra being forced to live in the cordoned-off city with only a handful of half zombies as company. At the same time the two police officers and the children they find alive make it out as well, and it's implied that Nam-ra is going to get plenty of visits from her fully human friends. There are also strong indications Cheong-san and Gwi-nam are alive as well.
• Big Sister Instinct:
  • Park Mi-jin shoves her senior status in the younger students' faces, yet is shown to be oddly protective of them.
  • Special mention also goes to Ha-ri, who, despite being away from school at the beginning of the outbreak, goes to the zombie-infested school and refuses to leave until she’s found her brother.
• Big, Thin, Short Trio: Yang Dae-su is the Fat Comic Relief, Lee Su-hyeok is the tallest member of the Class 5 group and the leader, and Lee Cheong-san is shorter than the other two and always engages in friendly banter with them.
• Black Comedy: Who says the a zombie outbreak cannot be funny?
  • Nam-Ra walks among the zombies killing students around her, reading, with her headphones in, completely out of touch with reality. The zombies also ignore her for some time.
  • When he comes into the class all full of foam, Dae-su is asked what happened to him, and he says some crazy jerk shot the fire extinguisher at him. It was On-jo, who thought she was shooting only zombies.
  • The scene in which the school nurse runs towards the students and slams into the wall while being filmed by the school's bullies who have no idea she is a zombie. They simply believe she is drunk or plain crazy.
  • There is a scene where several children are impersonating some gaming characters, and one of the boys has his foot tucked into a safety cone, playing the villain. When the zombies run toward them, the one with the safety cone suffers an Undignified Death. Several scenes later he is shown again among the zombified students walking with his leg still tucked into the cone.
  • The school's gardener or plumber sticks a pair of pliers in the belly of a zombie while trying to fight him off. A little later, the same zombie is seen running around with the pliers stuck in his belly.
  • The whole scene with Kim Hyeon-ju turning into a zombie. First, she literally breaks in two, and in the next scene, she leaves the MRI room, crawling on the floor with only her hands at a really fast pace, as if she were a parody of Kayako.
  • When Nam-Ra tries to understand the sudden multitude of noises given by her Super-Senses, the camera focuses on Wu-Jin farting, then shows Nam-Ra's serious expression as if she is saying "really?".
• Blaming the Victim: Eun-ji had previously gone to the staff at the school about her bullying. One of them dismisses her by asserting that she must be doing something that warrants the bullying. Predictably, when Eun-ji later encounters this same teacher hiding out, it doesn't end well for him.
• Blood-Splattered Innocents: The surviving teenagers get covered in the blood of their own fellows.
• Bloody Handprint: Dae-su gets one on his face from a zombie trying to break in the classroom.
• Bloody Horror: Nearly every member of the cast is covered in blood, both the zombies and the survivors.
• Body Motifs: Holding hands in dire situations.
• Book Ends: The first season ends with the characters returning to the Hyosan High School to visit Nam-Ra.
• Bookshelf Dominoes: Gwi-nam confronts Cheong-san in the library. During the ensuing scuffle, a bookshelf is knocked over, resulting in a domino effect that Cheong-san attempts to outrun while jumping from bookshelf to bookshelf. He only makes it part way, becoming trapped under a bookshelf, though he is able to escape.
• Breather Episode: Episode 8 doesn't have too much action. The episodes revolves around the characters getting to know each other better and reveal their Hidden Depths to the others.
• Burn the Undead: Lee Byeong-Chan reveals to Detective Song Jae-ik that the solution for the Jonas virus is in his laptop. The solution turns out to be burning everyone who is a carrier of the Jonas virus. In the end, the commander bombs Hyosan "for the greater good", burning to the ground the whole city while many survivors were still in it.
• Canon Foreigner: Park Hee-Su and her baby, Min Eun-ji, Nam So-ju and Park Eun-hee are only show creations.
• Car Fu: Ho-cheol runs over several zombies with a bus when he returns to rescue Jae-Ik and the hapless streamer.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Cheong-san and Su-hyeok love to chat... when is the most dangerous, like hanging out the window, holding on to a hose, while a zombie clings to Cheong-san's leg.
  Su-hyeok: Shit, I told you to drop her. Why couldn't you do it?
  Cheong-san: Hey, stop hugging me. You're grossing me out.
  Su-hyeok: I am not hugging you, moron.
  Cheong-san: Get lost.
  Su-hyeok: Do you like this?
• Central Theme: There is a lot of emphasis on the The Power of Love, friendship, and family.
• Characters Dropping Like Flies: Out of forty significant characters, only ten make it out alive. And there are other hundreds of characters getting massacred every episode by the zombies. By the end of the season, the city of Hyosan is bombed, killing 60,000 nameless survivors.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The camcorder used to record the students singing, is used later by the survivors of Year 2 Class 5 to lure the zombies.
  • Subverted at the end of episode 2, Nam-Ra leaves a note for Su-hyeok, where she wrote they are heading to the broadcasting room. Su-Hyeok ends up coming into the broadcasting room from a different room, having never seen the note.
  • Sort of also applies to Lee Byeong-chan's laptop. It seems at first like a basic vehicle to capture his thoughts and emotions about his son and the experiments with the Jonas virus without much deeper meaning or information. However, he himself reveals at the police station that it's the key to understanding and combatting the virus and zombie epidemic in general, and it becomes the primary focus of the military late in Season 1.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Most of the students that became zombies appeared first as background characters.
• Clean, Pretty Childbirth: Park Hee-Su scene of giving birth is not exactly the most realistic. It looks like the birth lasted only several minutes with absolute no complications, despite the bad conditions she gives birth. There is no blood loss, no placenta, no septicemia risk, the mother is all sweaty but not exactly red-faced from the effort, in fact she moves quite well just minutes after giving birth. And the baby is almost clean, without blood, barely covered in vernix. But at least they show he was born with the umbilical cord.
• Cliffhanger:
  • Episode 2 ends with Cheong-san falling out the window because of the zombies.
  • Episode 4 involves again Cheong-san who is chased by Gwi-nam. Gwi-nam throws a knife after Cheong-san, making it look like he hit him in the back.
  • Episode 6 ends with Nam So-ju being apparently deadly shot after jumping in a river in his attempt to escape the quarantine camp. In the next episode he is shown being fine but wounded.
  • Episode 7 finishes with the students being blocked in the bulkhead roof by Cheol-soo, with their fates at the mercy of the zombies and Gwi-nam.
  • Episode 8 ends with Gwi-nam gouging Cheong-san's eye as the latter scream in pain.
• Closed Circle: The surviving students are trapped in the school by the zombies, while the special units are trapping the citizens who are trying to escape the city after is discovered some of them might be asymptomatic infectees.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Several characters do swear several times when they are scared or angry.
• College Radio: The high school sequence has a scene with a girl in the radio station talking about the weather and an unnamed psychological experiment from the USA involving 48 women and men.
• Condensation Clue: Not a clue, per se, but after Eun-ji is revealed to be a human-zombie hybrid and is imprisoned in a glass isolation cell, she breathes on the glass and writes "hungry" on it, much to the disconcert of observers.
• Cool Bike: Detective Song Jae-ik and Jeon Ho-cheol ride a scooter to escape the zombies.
• Coming of Age Story: At the centre of the story, is a group of teenagers learning to put down their animosities and bonding over their shared traumas, loyalty and the Power of Friendship... whilst battling zombies.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • Nam So-ju ends up by chance at the gym just in time to save his daughter and her friends, and they happen to have problems unlocking the gym door just when he was passing by.
  • Somehow, the Year 2 Class 5 group and the Archery team decide to reach the nearby mountain exactly on the same night, despite not even being aware of each other's existence.
  • What were the chances between Detective Song Jae-ik and Jeon Ho-cheol to end up in Cheong-san Fried Chicken and finding Park Hee-Su's baby there?
  • Of all the zombies, Cheong-san's mother stumbles upon Gyeong-su.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Joon-Young realizes that if he had awake Kim Hyeon-ju in time like she asked him to, she wouldn't have been turn into a zombie.
• Christianity is Catholic: Subverted in episode 3, where a Shincheonji priest teaches his zealous disciples that only the sinners are turning into demons.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Anyone who gets infected with the Jonas virus, dies, and then is turned into a zombie. What is even more cruel is that most of the victims are bit and eaten by their own classmates and friends.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Concocting a performance enhancer that zombifies people bitten by the mice he experimented on must have taken Lee Byeong-chan a ridiculous amount of time, equipment and effort. Even if the school and police were completely ineffectual at protecting his son, Byeong-chan probably could have gotten rich off the military applications of his drug and then had more than enough money and resources to protect his son and punish his tormentors.
• Cuteness Proximity: If only Hyeon-ju wouldn't have to find the virus-infected hamster cute to pet it and get bit by the animal.

D-G

• Dangerous Windows:
  • One of the zombies manages to come through the window from the above classroom.
  • Other zombies made surprise entrances through the inner windows of the classrooms and the survivors had to hold them off.
• A Death in the Limelight: Min-Jae, the male archer, spends much of his time in the periphery of Ha-ri, his female counterpart. However, he eventually becomes separated from the group, retreating to the gym, and has a scene of his own where he is killed by Gwi-nam after putting up significant resistance.
• Defiant to the End: Min-Jae is bitten by Gwi-nam in a fit of rage. In spite of Gwi-nam's augmented powers, however, Min-Jae continues to resist, stabbing Gwi-nam with an arrow and attempting to shoot him with a bow before finally turning.
• Dénouement Episode: The penultimate episode deals with the Cheong-san and Gwi-nam bowl and the bombing of Hyosan city. The last episode is mostly about showing what happened to the main characters months later after the events of the precedent episode.
• Destination Defenestration:
  • At the very beginning of the outbreak, several students and their zombie attackers break through windows and fall several stories to the ground during their struggle.
  • A half-human, half-zombie Gwi-nam is thrown out a fourth floor window by Su-hyeok. He survives.
• Determinator:
  • Min Eun-Ji manages to resist turning longer than anyone by focusing on the task of destroying all the phones in the hopes of smashing the one set to upload nude photos of her to the internet. It later turns out that it's a Subverted Trope. She wound up infected with a mutation of the virus that lets her keep her sentience.
  • So-ju manages to escape the initial outbreak, break out of island quarantine, and swim back to the city in order to rescue his daughter.
• Devoured by the Horde:
  • Gwi-nam is eaten alive in the library, but as he is eaten, his determination to kill Cheong-san keeps him sentient.
  • Cheong-san's mother ends up devoured by the zombified students and the worse is she didn't even know is going on with everyone.
  • Gwi-nam allows his former boss to be attacked by zombies.
• Dirty Coward:
  • The school chairman, who hides out in his office and refuses to take action to help the students.
  • Yoon Gwi-nam sacrifices just about everyone he runs into when trying to stay alive, throwing four people to the zombies BEFORE he becomes a hybrid.
  • Kim Cheol-Soo refuses to let the other surviving students onto the roof even when there's a rescue helicopter full of armed soldiers present that could take down any zombies that might be chasing them. His cowardice also indirectly dooms the second rescue attempt of the said students, as the Martial Law Command calls off their rescue due to seeing him get bitten by Eun-Ji in the quarantine camp just moments prior.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Lee Byeong-chan using a bible to beat his newly zombified son into submission at the start of the series, especially when you know it came after his scientific research not only failed to give his son the strength he needed to fight his bullies but ultimately goes on to cause the zombie outbreak.
  • The way people and the authorities responded to this "strange infection" clearly draws its inspiration from the beginnings of the CoVID-19 pandemic: the crashing of the stock market, zealous religious figures taking advantage of the situation, insensitive trolls making pranks, fake rumors about the spreading the epidemy and people desperately leaving their country.
• Downer Beginning: The series starts with a scene where a random innocent student is beaten by bullies and then thrown off the roof. When his father comes to see him at the hospital, he turns into a zombie and his father puts him into a suitcase.
• Dramatic Irony: The school motto is "Happy students, safe school". Happy students who get sexually assaulted and then try to commit suicide, and a safe school where a zombie outbreak takes place, killing most of the students.
• Dramatic Shattering: A team of commandos make an impressive entrance by breaking through glass windows on their mission to retrieve Byeong-Chan's laptop from Hyosan High School.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • The only thing that stops Min Eun-Ji—who has just been sexually assaulted and then told that her bullies are going to leak naked images of her online—from jumping off the roof is the zombie outbreak.
  • Na-yeon leaves the safe room after everyone figures out that she deliberately infected Gyeong-soo. It's later subverted in that their teacher's Heroic Sacrifice allows her to escape to the music room, which has a bunch of food in it.
  • An unnamed student is seen hanging out the window with a noose tied around her neck, implying this.
  • The general who orders the bombing of the town, probably damning tens of thousands of deaths, can't handle the impossible choice he had to make, and promptly shoots himself after leaving the command room and making what amounts to a video will.
  • Ji-min attempts this after she sees her parents dead.
• Dropped Glasses: When Gwi-nam confronts the group, Joon-yeong's glasses are knocked off and smashed in the ensuring struggle. His vision ultimately seems okay in spite of it, however.
• Duct Tape for Everything: The survivors are shown wrapping their arms in duct tape to guard against bites. It actually works.
• Dwindling Party: The show starts with (and roughly focuses on) over two dozen characters, but as time goes on, characters start getting bit or otherwise dying left and right, even those that were thought to be important or have story arcs are dropped just like that. Only seven, possibly eight (depending on if Cheong-san survived) make it to the end.
• Dysfunction Junction: After losing most of the people they love, witnessing a literal Zombie Apocalypse, and trying to survive without not getting bitten, certainly makes the main characters to qualify. After all, they are just a bunch of teenagers going through a lot of emotional turmoil in less than four days.
• Elite Zombie: The halfbies themselves.
• Elaborate University High: The Hyosan high school has huge buildings, the main building, a big cafeteria, an endless campus, and another building under construction.
• Emergency Authority: Martial law is eventually declared on Hyosan, with Major General Jin Seon-mu placed in charge over the region.
• Establishing Series Moment: The Downer Beginning establishes for everyone that this is going to be a series about Zombie Apocalypse because some bullies chose to pick on the son of their biology teacher. His son is shown turning into a zombie, and his father has no choice but to kidnap him from the hospital, presumably to kill him without getting caught. Several days pass from the incident and it turns out Lee Byeong-Chan keeps his son in chains at home trying to heal him.
• Everyone Has Standards: Nam-Ra may be at risk of becoming a zombie and killing those around her, but Lee Na-yeon, who is human entirely is considered subhuman by her peers for murdering Han Gyeong-su.
• Eye Scream:
  • Gwi-nam loses an eye thanks to a cellphone to the face.
  • Happens to Cheong-san as well, specifically as revenge for the above incident.
• Facial Horror: Among the first signs of transformation into a zombie are the deformities that appear on the face.
• Failure Is the Only Option: No matter how much the characters struggle to come up with a good plan, there is always something that destroys their chances to succeed without heavy loses.
  Mi-Jin: Fuck. Nothing is working out. We keep hitting dead ends.
• Fast-Roping: The commandos sent to the school to retrieve Byeong-Chan's laptop fasten ropes to hooks on the roof and enter the school by rappelling down the side of the building and breaking through windows.
• Fat Comic Relief: Any character who happens to be fatty seems to have the most humiliating things happening mostly to them.
  • Yang Dae-su is biggest Butt-Monkey, he always says some random thing earning confused looks from his friends, is often ignored and his best friend always makes jokes at the expense of his weight.
  • Yoo Jun-sung is speared by his own stick after confronting a zombie, becoming The Load for the rest of the season.
  • Another "big", but nameless character, suffers one of the most embarrassing deaths, he gets turned into a zombie because he couldn't outrun them, his foot was tucked into a safety cone.
• Feel No Pain: Is hard to feel any sort of physical pain when your nervous system is killed by a zombie virus. As for those who become Elite Zombies, it means becoming partially super humans.
• Fingore: Min Eun-Ji smashes their own finger while breaking phones.
• Fire Hose Cannon: Nam So-ju uses a fire hose to decent effect against a zombie horde when evacuating politician Park Eun-hee and her staff from a government building.
• Firing in the Air a Lot: A military commando does this to deter the surviving students from rushing the helicopter, after he is ordered to give up on rescuing them due to fears of asymptomatic infected.
• Foreshadowing: All over the place.
  • The girl from the radio station talks about a mysterious US psychological experiment on people.
  • Lee Jin-su stays sentient quite long after being injected with the virus by his father. Later is revealed that some characters can develop into new types of zombies that can keep their humanity intact.
  • The biology teacher explaining to his students about what a virus is and giving as example the leucochloridium paradoxum, a parasite that inhabits usually a snail's body and takes control over its brain. Later scenes show that he was using the parasite example as an analogy for the zombie virus.
  • Right in the morning before the virus outbreak, Nam So-ju tells his daughter to call for his help in case something is happening. Little did he know she will really call him to save her from zombies.
  • When Su-hyeok asked Cheong-san if he's really not dating On-jo, the latter respond that "if the world comes to an end and only On-jo, him[me], and a zombie are left, he[I]'d go out with the zombie. He literally goes out with a zombie, Yoon Gwi-nam.
  • Just before, Han Gyeong-su gets closed in the recording room, Lee Na-yeon suspiciously looks at a stick full of zombie blood when no one pays attention to her. After the 30 minutes limits had passed Cheong-san goes at the door whistling and jokingly telling his friend he will kill him. Several minutes later Lee Na-yeon infects Han Gyeong-su with the virus turning him into a zombie, and Cheong-san is the one who takes him down.
  • Nam-ra make Su-hyeok to promise her that if she gets bitten, he kills her.
  • In episode 7, when Nam-ra looks on the camcorder, the bloodstains on the screen overlap just above her forehead and her left eye.
• Foe-Tossing Charge: In a scene, Dae-su tears out a door and charges at the zombies with it.
• Foil: On-jo and Nam-Ra have unique dynamics. On-jo is tomboyish, social, surrounded by many friends, has a loving father, is Book Dumb, but makes up for it with her survivalist skills. Nam-ra is a solitary Aloof Dark-Haired Girl with good grades who was raised by a helicopter mother. Nam-Ra starts as an Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold, but as the shows goes on, she starts to open-up to others, ending up gaining a lot friends, while On-jo keeps on losing hers one by one until she becomes herself a loner. Even the way they respond to being romanced is opposite. On-jo likes Su-hyeok, while being painfully oblivious to Cheong-san, her childhood friend. She initially rejects him, and accept his feelings just mere seconds before his death. Su-hyeok is in love with Nam-ra who completely ignores him at first, they become an item early on, but they cannot be together because of Nam-Ra's condition.
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: Ji-min and Min-jae both become separated from the group during the rush to flee to the gym, and both characters are eventually killed without ever reuniting with the main group. Following their separation from the main group, no one else ever specifically mentions Ji-min and Min-jae by name, nor do they question what happened to them. One character does broadly mention the people that died attempting to reach the gym, which may indicate that the group considers Ji-min and Min-jae to be dead, but even then, they are not specifically mourned by name in the same way other characters like I-sak, Gyeong-Su, or Joon-seong are.
• Force and Finesse: Su-hyeok is known for being athletic and a One-Man Army, capable to keep up with Empowered Badass Normals like Gwi-nam. Cheong-san is far from weak, but as a Combat Parkourist, he favors tactics that involve outspeeding and outmaneuvering his opponents.
• Forgot About His Powers: Nam-ra is completely immune to the zombies, is never targeted, and has superior strength; however, the group never thinks to have her safely draw zombies away or fight them (which she only does voluntarily in the final episode), leading to countless deaths thanks to desperate plans.
• Four Lines, All Waiting: The show has around eight different plot threats happening within about four days, and some characters don't even meet. There are the Year 2 Class 5 survivors, the Archery Team, Park Hee-Su's side plot, Min Eun-ji and Kim Cheol-soo, Yoon Gwi-nam surviving the zombies alone, Nam So-ju's quest to save his daughter, Detective Song Jae-ik trying to get Lee Byeong-Chan's laptop, and Orangibberish's hunting down views by visiting Hyosan.
• Four-Philosophy Ensemble: Four of the main girls: Mi-jin is the cynical, On-jo is the optimist, Nam-ra is the apathetic and Ha-ri is the realist.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • The luggage Byeong-chan used to get his son out of the hospital can be seen in the scene where Hyeon-ju is kept hostage. Another bonus is that the luggage wasn't in the biology lab's supply room in the day Byeong-chan kidnapped her, but appears next day, implying that Byeong-chan was planning to put Hyeon-ju in the luggage and get her out of the school without anyone noticing him.
  • In Nam So-ju's introduction scene, there are photos of him gaining a competition. For less than a second before the camera blurs away, it can be seen on Nam So-ju's Championship belt written, Games Chungju 2018. For those who don't know, the World Firefighters Games took place in 2018, in the city of Chungju.
  • One may think that Nam-ra's ribbon suddenly disappearing may be an editing error, but in episode 2, where she sits on the floor, her ribbon can be seen next to her.
• Freudian Excuse: Byeong-chan doesn't appear to be guilty about the outbreak, and views it as retribution for nobody doing anything to help his son when he was being violently bullied. This changes later though.
• From Bad to Worse: Literally every escape plan the characters have leads to a somewhat worse situation. For example, Nam-Ra's plan to leave the broadcasting room to go to the music room and then to the rooftop, was relatively easy and safe, but on the road they meet many challenges like being chased by zombies, Gwi-nam also chasing them resulting into Nam-Ra being bitten and Kim Cheol-soo keeping the rooftop door closed.
  • Yoon Gwi-nam embodies this trope. He starts off as a bully who violently abuses, beats, and even strips and takes photos of one of the students, with the victim of the last one attempting suicide. Once the outbreak begins, he starts throwing everyone he can into the zombies. It even turns out that the entire outbreak is partly his fault, because the parent of one of his victims accidentally started it trying to protect his son from Gwi-nam. Then he gets infected after a fight with Cheong-san and becomes a complete psychopath willing to infect any student he sees and desperate to take Cheong-san's eye at any cost.
• Funny Background Event: When Dae-su mention the possibility of Lee Na-yeon kissing Han Gyeong-su, Jang Wu-Jin is shown trying to vomit in the background.
• Gang of Bullies: Right from the first scene. There are the main reason for the start of a Zombie Apocalypse.
• Genocide Survivor: On-jo, Su-Hyeok, Nam-Ra, Dae-su, Ha-ri, Hyo-Ryung and Min-Ji are the only people who survived the bombing of Hyosan, which killed around 60,000 people.
• Genre Blind: Despite the existence of zombie media in their world as well, a few seem to show they didn't learn anything from them.
  • The school chairman thinks that what's going on is just some rowdy students.
  • The sports teacher Kang Jin-gu refuses to acknowledge that he's been bitten and lashes out at the students who call him out on it.
  • I-sak makes the same mistake as the above-mentioned teacher. This is made especially ironic by how she was one of the only girls wearing pants, and she was bitten in the leg. Her best friend is also in complete denial of it, even after the zombification process is done.
  • Cheong-san's mother is smart enough to realize that the zombies should be avoided, but can't accept that her son's best friend is one of them and gets herself killed right after reaching the school grounds. Her decision to rush to the school unarmed and without a vehicle could be considered this as well.
  • Even though the kids realize that Nam-ra is a half zombie who won't turn on them, they don't realize that this means that she can walk amongst them and at worse they'll be attracted to the sound she produces but not attack her. This could have been an invaluable tool for escaping, but it's somewhat justified as testing that theory would require gravely risking her safety. Even if she doesn't turn, they don't know that half zombies can shrug off lethal amounts of blood loss and the like. Still, it's odd that the possibility never even comes up in conversation.
    • On a related note, it's hard to believe that they don't consider the chance that Cheong-San would also become a half zombie since this is what happened to Nam-Ra after she was bitten by the same person.
• Genre Savvy: Although there's a decent amount of people that have a good idea at what is going on and do their best to survive from what they learned from the media about Zombie Apocalypse.
  • The students quickly realize that they're dealing with zombies and even mention Train to Busan by name. They also realize that emergency services won't believe them and instead say that there's a fire.
  • Mi-Jin saves Joon when she overhears the girl hiding in the bathroom stall with him talking about feeling very ill. She immediately gets him out of there, moments before the girl turns. She's the first character to suggest killing bitten people before they can turn too.
  • The main group of surviving students also figure out that Hyeon-ju was infected and caused the outbreak to spread beyond the school by episode three.
  • When Nam-ra doesn't turn when bitten by someone they knew was bitten but not rabid the kids quickly realize that she's somehow immune, or a half zombie.
  • The students use sound to their advantage in navigating the school.
  • The military manages to handle things quite deftly once they realize what's happening. They also believe the two police officers they run into who claim to have run into the man who engineered the virus and immediately take action based on the provided intel.
  • The military also figures out how the zombies are attracted to noise and immediately employs the strategy of luring them out using drones designed to emit sound and then taking them out with air support.
• The Ghost: Nam-ra mentions her mother several times, but she never appears on screen.
• Gorn: The characters get torn apart in horrific details and excruciating pain.
• Go Through Me: When the existence of asymptomatic carriers of the Jonas Virus comes to light, soldiers arrive to move U-sin, Assemblywoman Park Eun-hee, and her aides to new holding cells. Outraged by what is happening, Park's aides and a reluctant U-sin try to form a human wall to prevent them from moving the Assemblywoman, though the soldiers simply subdue the entire group and move them by force.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Two of them for the main group: Ms Park briefly helps and takes care of the group in the communications room, and On-jo's dad briefly joins the group of teens as they escape Hyosan High.

H-M

• Half the Man He Used to Be: Several zombies miss the lower part of their bodies.
• Hallucinations:
  • Before turning, Gyeong-su hallucinates the others being turned into zombies and feels extreme fear. It's implied that this is the process of turning into zombies for everyone who got infected.
  • Na-yeon's guilt causes her to see Gyeong-su everywhere.
• Hallway Fight: The promotional posters show all the main characters facing the zombies on the school's hallways.
• Hard Truth Aesop: To quote Nam-Ra: "If they wanted to save us, they would have. But even if they do come, we won't be the first to be rescued. We are not that important. We're just students, nothing more." One would expect her to be proven wrong, but the show goes at an Anvilicious length to show how the authorities really left the students down. And there are also the more or less intentional parallels to a Real Life tragedy, the 2014 Sewol Ferry Disaster where the students were lied about the gravity of the situation and abandoned by the adults in charge. The lesson can be summed up as "the students and children will not always be the top priority of the authorities, like most people would expect from a moral point of view ".
• Happy Flashback: On-jo remembers what a good friend I-sak was to her, while her friend is turned into a zombie.
• Hate Sink: Lee Na-Yeon: Due to her being unhelpful, selfish, cruel, loud and shrill, snobby and needlessly bullying Gyeong-Su (who embodies qualities opposite of hers), which ultimately leads to his death and Cheong-San's mother's death by extension. Subverted later, where she's shown crying for what she did while in a room alone, and resolves to try and make amends to the other survivors.
  • Yoon Gwi-Nam's even viler than Na-Yeon as the school bully's despicable and cruel actions are the main catalyst for Hyosan high school and the whole town becoming a rampaging ground for the zombie apocalypse because one of his bullied victim's father who's the science teacher at the high school created the Jonas virus because he's disillusioned with the teachers not bothering to step in and stop Gwi-Nam and took into his own hands to stop it but he unintentionally spread it around via a student causing huge atrocities as a result. He gets more and more psychopathic when the outbreak begins, from pushing people to the zombies to outright infecting several students with the virus.
• Hate Plague: When a person starts to turn into a zombie, the Jonas virus turns their fear into rage and hunger.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: Na-Yeon feels incredible guilt over killing Gyeong-Su and tries to bring food and drinks to the rest of the class, but when she overhears them understandably calling her subhuman, she retracts in fear of what they'll do when they see her. After they've fled to the roof, she resolves to go up there after them, but unfortunately, she doesn't make it far and dies.
• Heroic Sacrifice: As to be expected of the genre.
  • Several characters attempt to invoke this to save the others if necessary throughout the series. However, it comes at the protest of the rest are already traumatized from previous losses.
  • Byeong-chan does this to help the detective to escape and search for his laptop and as repentance for creating the virus
  • Joon-Sung (already partially immobilized by an earlier injury) realizes that he's dead weight and sacrifices himself to distract the zombies near season one's end.
  • Sun-Hwa does this for Na-yeon, extending her life by two days.
  • Oh Joon-young does this after he realizes he's infected after saving Min-ji in the gym.
  • Shortly after, So-Ju distracts the zombies so that his daughter and other students can escape.
  • Wu-Jin gets bitten when he gets between his sister and a zombie.
• Honor Before Reason: Nam On-jo's father could have pulled strings to get rescue staff to the school sooner, but didn't do so. He even avoids mentioning that the government officials who are stranded in the city include a woman who holds a particularly lofty position because it wouldn't be fair to get special treatment for that reason. Subverted later on when he persuades the assemblywoman to have the Martial Law Command send a rescue chopper towards the school (which leads to the rescue of just Cheol-soo who deliberately withheld from the soldiers the fact that there were survivors just outside the locked rooftop).
• Hope Spot: The survivors of Year 2 Class 5 finally make it to the rooftop where a helicopter comes for them, and just when they are about to be rescued, General Jin Seon-mu gives the order to cancel each rescue mission because he cannot risk bringing asymptomatic infectees.
• Horror Hunger: All of the halfbies, whether they like it or not, seem to only feed off human flesh. Should they not eat it, they will enter into a state of psychosis and try to eat any human in the vicinity, friend or foe.
  • Nam-ra constantly struggles to not bite her friends because of her acquired halfbie nature. In the end, she seems to have mostly gotten it under control.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: The turn into a zombie is so fast, the characters don't even get the chance to ask to be eliminated.
• I Choose to Stay: Nam-ra stays in the burnt out remains of Hyosan to find other halfbie survivors like her, but with the promise that she and her friends are always going to be together, and that they know where to find her.
• I Know You Re In There Somewhere Fight: Nam-Ra almost succumbs to the virus and attacks On-jo and almost bites her. On-jo and Su-hyeok try to snap her out of it.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Though So-ju is chased by multiple soldiers firing automatic weapons at him, only one manages to even minorly graze him.
• Implacable Man: The half-zombified Gwi-nam gets thrown out of the school building numerous times, and comes back each time with barely a scratch whatsoever. He develops a single-minded mission to take out Cheong-san's left eye for taking his on top of being filmed killing the principal.
• Improbable Infant Survival: Averted. We eventually see an elementary school filled with infected children. Played straight with Hee-Su's newborn baby.
• Improvised Armor: Park Eun-hee and her staff are equipped with firefighter knee pads and armrests for their trip to the rooftop where a helicopter is coming to save them.
• Innocently Insensitive: During an attempt to escape the school, the group runs into Cheong-san's zombified mother. Dae-su, Joon-yeong, and Wu-jin subsequently attempt to bludgeon the zombie in front of them, prompting Cheong-san to shove them away and hit Dae-su in rage. Dae-su later apologizes for the incident, noting that he wasn't aware that the zombie was Cheong-san's mother.
• In-Series Nickname: Dae-su calls those immune to the virus "hambie".
• Inverse Dialogue/Death Rule: The turn rate into a zombie is inconsistent most of the time. If the character is important to the plot, they are given several minutes to say their goodbyes. If they are insignificant, they turn into mere seconds.
• It's the Only Way to Be Sure: The solution to end the spread of the Jonas virus is to bomb the entire city of Hyosan.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Mi-jin comes off as a rebellious and catty girl, but she's absolutely loyal to her friends and she ends up forming an Odd Friendship with Ha-ri, who's her exact opposite at face value.
• Kid Amid the Chaos: Detective Song Jae-ik and Jeon Ho-cheol find Park Hee-Su's newborn and later a little girl being chased by zombies.
• Laser-Guided Karma: A lot of bad people get turned into zombies and/or die horrifically.
  • Hyeon-ju is one of the bullies and the third person after her victim who gets infected.
  • Chang-Hoon, another bully, gets infected very early on by a particularly brutal bite to the face.
  • Myeong-Hwan, the leader of the bullies, is betrayed by his former Dragon and mauled by a large hoard of zombies.
  • Na-Yeon actually survives for some time alone, but is ultimately eaten by Gwi-Nam right after having realized the error of her ways and wanting to make amends.
  • Kim Ji-Min finds herself isolated and surrounded by zombies outside after abandoning her friend, and is quickly killed.
  • There's a sequence where Min Eun-Ji remembers all of the bullying she faced... as she gazes at her now zombified former bullies.
  • Kim Cheol-Soo prevents the main group of students from escaping due to his cowardice. He is later eaten by Min Eun-Ji in the quarantine camp, the one place where he thought he was safe.
• The Leader: Originally, the main group is led by Su-Hyuk, with On-jo and Cheong-san occasionally taking over when the situation calls for it. After the main building group and the archery group merge, Cheong-san and Ha-ri jointly lead until the former dies, and then Ha-ri leads for the rest of the season.
• Limited Wardrobe: The students caught in the school during the zombie crisis, spent all four days until making it to safety, wearing only their uniforms.
• The Load: Lee Na-yeon doesn't help too much anyone, except for yelling at others to do something, instead of doing something useful herself. Nam-Ra calls her out on her behavior.
• Love Confession:
  • Lee Su-hyeok confesses his crush on Nam-Ra. She kisses him back.
  • Cheong-san finally admits his feelings for On-jo only for her to reject him.
  • Dae-su straight-up goes for it and confesses his love for Ha-ri in quite an emotional manner. She responds by kicking him.
• Lovable Coward: Ho-cheo combines this with Genre Savvy. He isn't needlessly cruel and his cowardly decisions often have sensible logic behind them. For instance, he wants to escape and then arrange for the children he and the detective have found to be rescued later. They are in a locked restaurant with food and water the zombies can't get into. He also smartly points out that if they die the knowledge that all the research of the man who engineered the virus is on a laptop in the high school dies with them. The one time he seems to do something cowardly, abandoning the detective, it's because he realizes that they're about to be cornered and lose their only means of escape. He comes back with a bus, a much safer way to travel than the scooter they had before.
• Love Triangle: Two are at the center of the series:
  • One between On-Jo, Chan-young, and Su-hyeok.
  • And another between Su-hyeok, On-Jo, and Nam-ri.
• Lovely Angels: Ha-ri and Mi-jin are the closest to having this dynamic. As they bond, they gradually fight off zombies side by side with a long-range/close-range combat contrast (bow for Ha-ri and stick for Mi-jin).
• The Mall: The Korean armed forces clean up the Hyosan Mall while searching for survivors.
• Mama Bear:
  • Despite not being an Action Girl, Cheong-san's mother drops everything to try and get to the school.
  • One of the survivors is Hee-Su, who gives birth in a bathroom stall and fights to protect her newborn baby the day of the outbreak. While she's infected, her baby is rescued.
• Marionette Motion: The zombies in general are able to contort in impossible positions, but can get back up exceptionally fast.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!"!: Everyone in episode eight during the campfire, just as Gwi-nam climbed the rooftop after being believed dead.
• Men Act, Women Are: At least those are the dynamics of the Year 2 Class 5 survivors. The boys often do the physical fighting, protecting the girls, while the girls come up with the plans, like Nam-ra creating a rescue plan to the rooftop or On-jo helping with her survivalist skills she learned from her father.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: Averted, the virus is not picky at all about who becomes a zombie. The persons who officially start the zombie outbreak are both women, Kim Hyeon-ju and the school nurse.
• Militaries Are Useless: Subverted. Once the initial panic subsides, the military is able to get a decent, albeit imperfect, grasp of the situation, and soldiers are seen adeptly fighting the zombies.
• Missing Mom: Byeong-chan's wife is never directly mentioned. We don't know if she's in the picture until we find out that she was infected by her newly zombified son, making her the second victim.
• Missed Him by That Much: It happens twice in episode 5. First, when Cheong-san was trying to hide through the hallway pipes, unknown to both, Ha-ri shot the zombie that was holding his leg. She doesn't notice him, and he doesn't see as he hides in the walls. The second one happens when Ha-ri group jumps out of the window, the drone appears from another window, missing them just by a second. Thankfully, Wu-Jin recognizes Ha-ri's arrows.
• Mistaken for Dying: Nam So-ju stays behind to hold off zombies with a water hose while his firefighter colleague, U-sin, accompanies a group of survivors to a rooftop for evacuation. U-sin goes back for So-ju and finds him stumbling up the stairs. Thinking him zombified, U-sin prepares to kill So-ju, only to see that he is still alive, albeit tired and wounded.
• Mobstacle Course: The only to go through a horde of zombie is to weave a way through the horde, changing speeds and directions, parkouring left and right and pushing them aside.
• Modesty Shorts: Most of the girls wear something similar to bike shorts under their uniform skirts.
• Monster Munch: Gwi-nam often turns unnamed characters he encounters into zombie meat.
• Mood Whiplash: Episode five starts off dark, but the storyline involving police officers trying to get to the school quickly veers into a comedic shaky-cam chase sequence as they fail to secure a vehicle and are forced to flee. They provide most of the comedy in the show.
• Must Have Nicotine: Mi-jin is introduced smoking a cigarette, and occasionally mentions that she's jonesing for one. In the end, one scene has her gleefully dragging on a cigarette like she's in heaven.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Byeong-chan, when he sees what his virus does to people firsthand. Leading him to enact a Heroic Sacrifice to repent.
  • A military squad is sent to Hyosan High to retrieve a laptop containing data on the virus. While there, they come across the surviving students and agree to evacuate them. However, the commanding officer, now informed of the existence of asymptomatic infected, orders the squad to abandon the students lest they turn and jeopardize the laptop. The commandos acquiesce, even holding the students at gunpoint to prevent them rushing the rescue helicopter, though they are clearly not happy. One commando, once in the air, removes his gas mask and throws it in rage.
• My Sister Is Off-Limits: Dae-su has a crush on Wu-Jin's sister, the archer Ha-ri. Wu-Jin is not particularly happy about this, strongly prefers Dae-su not tell her. When Dae-su does confess, Wu-Jin tries to cover Ha-ri's ears so she can't hear the confession.
• Mythology Gag: Ji-Min dies differently in the show. There is an unnamed student who committed suicide by hanging herself out of the window with a noose tied around her neck, exactly how Ji-Min dies in the manhwa.

N-R

• The Needs of the Many: A quite tragic example. This is the justification used to bomb Hyosan. Is better to bomb an entire city and sacrifice the rest of the survivors than to let the virus spread to the rest of the country and the world.
• No Bikes in the Apocalypse: Gwi-nam tries to outrun the zombies with a bicycle with faulty pedals.
• No Help Is Coming: After the main characters realize the adults won't come to save them, they make a plan to escape to high school on their own terms. By the end, Su-hyeok is asking the army why they didn't save them.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Gwi-nam is the master of punching and slamming characters on the floor after becoming a halfbie. Cheong-sam, Su-hyeok and Nam-Ra learned the hard way.
• No One Gets Left Behind: Pretty much all the surviving students of Year 2 Class 5 subscribe to this belief from the beginning to some degree, which continues to increase as the series goes on. Ironically enough, the abrasive Min Eun-Ji is constantly shown to be the biggest advocate of this (moreso by action than words).
• No "Police" Option: The mission of getting a phone to call for help ends up fruitless because martial law is declared, blocking every possibility of communication.
• Nobody Poops: Averted: A sequence in episode 4 is dedicated to the survivors figuring out how to make makeshift bathrooms, preceded by several characters admitting that they need to poop.
• Non-Uniform Uniform: Hyosan High School students are seen with variations of the uniform. While the regular uniform has a white shirt, plaid pants/skirts, ties, bowties for the girls, and green vests, some of the girls are seen wearing P.E. pants under their skirts, pink sweaters instead of the green vests, or other hoodies over their uniforms.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Averted, the characters who Genre Savvy call them directly for what they are, zombies and even come up with a turn for those who became Elite Zombies, halfbies.
• Nuke 'em: Discussed - once the students learn that their school will be bombed, Hyo-ryung asks if the military is going to use a nuke. Dae-su counters by stating that South Korea doesn't possess nuclear weapons.
• The Oner: Impressively used in the second episode, when the outbreak hits the cafeteria.
• Oblivious to Love: Imagine being oblivious for more than ten years to your own best friend is in love with you.
• Official Couple Ordeal Syndrome
  • Cheong-san and On-jo. While Cheong-san confesses his feelings and On-jo eventually reciprocates, Cheong-san is bitten by an enraged and infected Gwi-nam, and sacrifices himself to lure the zombies and Gwi-nam away from the others, ensuring their escape. It's possible he's still alive but he's still missing by the end of the series.
  • Su-Hyeok and Nam-ra. While both survive the series, Nam-ra is bitten and must survive as a half human, half zombie who is beset with periodic frenzies of hunger and violence, prompting her to abandon the others prior to their rescue and survive apart from Su-Hyeok. Still, the two reunite temporarily at the end, so perhaps all is not lost.
• Ordered Apology: Lee Na-yeon accuses Gyeong-su of getting infected while fighting off a zombie and calls him "welfie". Gyeong-su agrees to stay isolated for 30 minutes only for the sake of his friends. After the 30 minutes limit, everyone demands Na-yeon to apologize Gyeong-su. And she does it, by infecting him with the virus.
• Our Zombies Are Different: As Cheong-san notes, the zombies are very similar to those from Train to Busan. They are fast-moving and tend to have rabid behavior, people turn only a few seconds after getting bitten, they are attracted to sound and seem to ignore any sort of pain. But there are also several key differences from the movie, the people who turn into zombies, do die, beside, while others can be asymptomatic or even stay partially human after getting bitten, turning into something neither zombie or human, called halfbie.
• Paint the Town Red: The whole Hyosan has its streets covered in blood and filled with corpses.
• Patient Zero: Lee Jin-su becomes the first zombie after his father injects him with what he thought would be an enhancement serum to fight off his bullies.
• Parkour: The students often have to resort to this to evade the zombies.
• Papa Wolf:
  • So-Ju makes everything in his power to get to his daughter’s school and save her. He even sacrifices himself to give the group a chance to flee. And even after he is dead, the trail he left helps the group to get out of the woods without getting lost.
  • The detective becomes this when he finds Hee-su’s baby and a little girl who just lost her mother. While fighting the zombie apocalypse, he prioritizes finding milk for the baby and making sure the little girl feels better despite the situation.
• Plague Zombie: The source of the zombie epidemic is the Jonas virus, which was created from mouse testosterone.
• Plot Armor: Even with their athletic abilities, Cheong-san and Su-hyeok survive some situations that got other skilled characters zombified.
• The Power of Friendship: The main characters survived for so long by relying on each other.
  • This is the very thing that keeps Nam-Ra from attacking her friends, while she succumbs more and more to the virus.
• Product Placement:
  • Cheong-san and his friends are shown drinking Coca-Cola soda at his mother's restaurant.
  • Also at the Cheong-san Fried Chicken, several cartoon boxes of Cass Brewery can be seen in the kitchen. Cheong-san's father must love beer a lot.
  • The storeroom is filled with Pocari Sweat, Hot Six, and other common Korean products.
  • On-jo used to own an Apple iPhone.
• Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice: The few survivors of the zombie outbreak were guarded by the authorities and military deployment was put on display to make sure the situation doesn't escalate. General Jin Seon-mu even gave the orders for the people to be quarantined for an indefinite period of time. Even after 4 months, the people are forced to live in camps guarded by gendarmes.
• Race Against the Clock: Once the bombing of Hyosan city is announced, the survivors have less than a day to escape.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Assemblywoman Park proves herself time and time again to actually give a damn about the people of Hyosan, particularly the young ones, given that she takes the fall for On-jo's dad escaping to save them, and refuses to do shady political deals to save her career because she knows the city and her people need her more.
• Redemption Equals Death:
  • Byeong-chan eventually realizes the error of his ways and gives the only surviving police detective at the station the location of his laptop, which holds all of his research and the key to stopping the virus after sacrificing himself to save him.
  • Subverted for Na-Yeon. Just as she tries to go to the rooftop to deliver supplies, she gets ambushed by Gwi-nam.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Downplayed, as a few scenes with Gwi-nam show that slashing zombies' necks works just as well.
• Retirony: Staff Sergeant Lee Jae-Jun is one week from being discharged from the military, but volunteers to participate in the effort to quarantine Hyosan. He is bitten by a zombie and turns.
• Rich Bitch: Na-yeon, whose classist contempt against one of her classmates eventually leads to her murdering Gyeong-su by infecting his wound with zombie blood.
• Rooftop Confrontation: Gwi-nam follows the group to the roof with the intention of enacting vengeance on Cheong-san. A fight breaks out, in which several people are kicked around and Gwi-nam is knocked off the roof, but no casualties are taken.
• Room Full of Zombies: Several class doors are opened by the characters in order to hide, only for them to be full of zombies.
• Rousseau Was Right: There are a number of instances of characters sacrificing themselves or helping each other out during the disaster which is the very thing that saves their lives, contrasting Lee Byeong-Chan's nihilistic views on humanity.
• Rule of Symbolism: There are several occasions in the show where the color yellow is used to create a peaceful and hopeful atmosphere, like the scene where Cheong-san and his friends go to eat at Cheong-san Fried Chicken, Ms. Park using yellow chalk, or the children finding in the woods the yellowish headbands left behind by Nam So-ju. Yellow appears also in the Downer Beginning. When Lee Jin-su is thrown of the building, he hits a a yellow store sign, destroying the sign at the impact with his body. The name of the store appears to be "Hope".
• Run or Die: The sequence with Detective Song Jae-ik and Jeon Ho-cheol running around the city trying to make it to the Hyosan High School.
  Song Jae-ik: Hurry!

S-Z

• Sacrificial Lamb:
  • The school nurse gets bit and spreads the virus through the entire school.
  • Kim Min-ji turn into a zombie after being bitten by the sports coach, who was alive just minutes before her.
  • Lee Ha-lim marks the introduction of Mi-jin and Joon-sung to Ha-ri and Min-jae.
• Sacrificial Lion:
  • Jin-su is Patient Zero.
  • Kim Hyeon-ju is the one who spread the Jonas virus to the school by bitting the nurse and then to the whole city by infecting the medical staff of the Hyosan Hospital.
  • Yoon I-Sak is the first impactful death for the Class 5 group.
• Safe Zone Hope Spot: Both the gym building and the mountain behind the school were overrun with zombies.
• School Is Murder: Right from the original title, 지금 우리 학교는 which can be translated as "At our school right now...".
• Scream Discretion Shot: The first clue about zombies being attracted by sounds, was the scream of an unknown girl whom they followed on the hallway.
• Second Episode Introduction: Jang Ha-ri, Park Mi-jin, Jung Min-jae, Yoo Joon-sung, Lee Ha-lim were all introduced in the second episode.
• Second Year Protagonist: The core group is from Class 2-5, with the only seniors being Ha-Ri, Mi-Jin and Joon-sung.
• Setting Update: The webtoon happens in 2011, while the show happens in 2021. Therefore, characters make mentions of events like the CoVID-19 and Train to Busan.
• Sequel Hook: Nam-ra and a few unseen half zombies are still alive in the city and it's made clear that the government made sure to capture the first two zombies alive.
• Shameful Strip: In the first episode, Gwi-nam forcefully undresses Min Eun-jin of her bra and shirt, then films her. Somehow, he and the other bullies don't go further than that, but it was humiliating enough for the poor girl.
• Shipper on Deck: Year 2 Class 5 survivors are excited to watch Han Gyeong-su and Lee Na-yeon talking to each other, wondering if they are gonna kiss after all the fights between them, which in their minds were signs of Belligerent Sexual Tension. Too bad Lee Na-yeon turns Han Gyeong-su into a zombie.
• Short Range Guy, Long Range Guy: Ha-ri is a bow woman, while Mi-jin uses an improvised spear.
• Shout-Out:
  • When the students begin to realize what's happening, one of them outright mentions Train to Busan, it's even showed off in the trailer.
  • While watching the images received from the drone, Dae-su says is like Zombieland outside.
• Shovel Strike: Su-hyeok tries to kill Nam-Ra with a shovel after attacking On-jo, but he cannot bring himself to do it.
• Slashed Throat: The principal has his throat slashed by Gwi-nam.
• Slut-Shaming: One of Gwi-nam's lowest points is filming Min Eun-jin after stripping her, then later in the same day, during the biology class, he writes on her shirt "I'm fucking sexy", while the entire class was laughing at her.
• Spared By Adaptation: Dae-su and Hyo-ryung the first is maybe the third or fourth victim of the outbreak in the webtoon, but survives the first season of the Netflix Adaption, while the second died in the webtoon after being tackeled from a window by a zombie while su-Hyeok tried to save them.
• Super-Senses: The halfies seem to have supernatural senses of smell and hearing. The former allows them to hunt by scent, but the latter can be crippling by loud enough noises (like thunder).
• Straight Man and Wise Guy: The stoic Ha-ri and the hammy Mi-jin.
• Super-Persistent Predator: The zombies will chase humans for as long as it takes to catch them as if they see humans as their prey.
• Super Window Jump: When raiding the school to retrieve Byeong-Chan's laptop, a group of soldiers make their entrance by smashing through windows on the side of the building.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Hyeong-su sticks her finger in an animal's cage and then gets bit by it.
  • While they're slow to realize what's going on, the South Korean government eventually realizes that there's an infectious disease spreading through bites, blockades the affected area, and then sends in small tactical squads to clear buildings and conduct rescue operations. The problem is that they drag their feet when it comes to the school, presumably because they know it's ground zero for the outbreak and thus assumes nobody there made it.
  • The only students with some ability to hold off a zombie unharmed are Lee Su-hyeok, who is established as being a very good fighter due to being a former bully; Gwi-nam, a bully equipped with a knife, and the archery team. The first still needs help when they're swarming together. Everyone else needs help for even a single zombie unless they're lucky and can trick them into doing something akin to jumping out a window.
  • Cheong-san's mother rushes to the school to save her son, on foot, alone, and without any weapons. She is subsequently mauled by zombies and turns.
  • The Hyosan School Group protagonists, being unarmed high school students all have great difficulty dealing with hordes of zombies, let alone a couple or even only one of them, but in later episodes, we see highly trained members of the South Korean military easily mop off hordes of the infected.
  • Form a human barricade to protect Assemblywoman Park from armed soldiers during Martial Law, that would be a ''great'' idea.
• Survival Horror: Most of the characters are just Action Survivors in a Zombie Apocalypse, who barely have any idea about what they are dealing with. Only those who are Genre Savvy enough survive the longest.
  • Is quite blatant when the lead is the daughter of a firefighter who taught her survivalist tactics.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Both main couples.
  • Just when On-jo finally corresponds to Lee Cheong-san, he dies.
  • Lee Su-hyeok can't be with Nam-Ra the way he wants because she is infected with the Jonas virus.
• Straw Character: There are several protestors outside of Hyosan city who don't want to receive the refugees out of fear. Other characters, like pranksters, and religious zealots just worsen the situation, and the media simply blames the zombie outbreak on government conspiracies, like the USA being behind the epidemic, which unfortunately leads to the declaration of martial law in order to stop the spread of the fake news.
• Starts Stealthily, Ends Loudly: After getting separated from his own group, Su-hyeok ends up in a classroom full with zombies. He sneaks among them by hiding behind the pieces of furniture but is discovered in the end exactly when he sneaks out through the window.
• Synthetic Plague: Courtesy of the biology teacher who in reality wanted to create some sort of super soldier serum and ended up with a zombie-like virus created from mouse hormones.
• Super Serum: The Zombie Apocalypse started because the biology teacher created a super soldier vaccine from testosterone.
• Taking the Heat: Paramedics So-ju and U-sin beat up guards and appropriate their uniforms in an attempt to re-enter Hyosan and save the students at the school, though only So-ju successfully escapes. Councilwoman Park Eun-hee lies takes responsibility for the incident, falsely claiming that she encouraged them to do so. U-sin escapes severe punishment as a result, but he notes that Eun-hee's actions were just as motivated by political pragmatism as they were altruism, as Eun-hee and her staff plan to use the video of her confession in future political campaigns.
• Teens Are Monsters:
  • The whole outbreak is indirectly caused by the acts of a band of bullies in school, whose actions spur Lee Byeong-chan— their biology teacher and their victim's father—to try and make a performance enhancer for his son so he'd be able to fight back.
  • Na-yeon proves herself to be a profoundly entitled, spiteful asshole, who looks down on Gyeong-su for being a "welfie" (a person on welfare), and ends up outright infecting him because the rest of the group stood up for him against her initial accusation of what was just a normal scratch, retroactively proving herself "right".
• Those Two Guys:
  • Wu-jin and Dae-su have this dynamic.
  • Dae-su and Joon-yeong also qualify. Joon-yeong makes a beat for Dae-su when he sings, the two fall asleep on each other when the group is trapped in a locker room, and when the survivors are rescued by the military, Joon-yeong's death is shown to have affected Dae-su the most.
  • Hyo-ryung and Ji-min as well, though downplayed as they're subject to less focus compared to the other examples.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: As Gwi-nam pursues Cheong-san through the corridors, he throws his knife at him. It hits his back but only the handle makes contact, barely slowing him down.
• Time Skip: In the last episode, there is a four months time skip between the characters being rescued and the final scene.
• Toilet Humour: The whole scene of Dae-su trying to explain his classmates how they could pee and take a dump... out of the window.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Lee Byeong-chan thought a specialized performance-enhancing virus was a better solution to his son's bullying problem than collecting evidence. While it's eventually made clear that neither the school nor the police were willing to do anything, it's also established that Byeong-chan has the skills and resume to get a job at a university. If that wasn't an option, he could have sold the fruits of his research to the military and gotten enough money and influence to protect his son that way.
  • Episode 4 opens up with a streamer sneaking into the city with some very basic armor and a hand axe for protection to investigate the rumors of a zombie outbreak. He quickly finds himself in over his head. Ironically enough, he is one of the few survivors of the series.
  • In the same episode, Min Eun-Ji walks down from the roof to try to smash the phones so the nude pictures won't get released, despite it being the last thing on people's minds in a zombie apocalypse. It's only through sheer good timing that she got infected with a mutation of a virus that kept her sentience. That said, this is more justified than most examples - as she is suicidal.
  • When the group attempts to escape the school, Kim Ji-Min abandons her friend, Hyo-ryeong, after the latter slips. Instead of following the path and the rest of the group, however, she darts off into the woods, where she is predictably surrounded by zombies and killed.
• Town Girls: In the group of Year 2 Class 5, On-jo (the butch) is tomboy, immature and social, Lee Na-yeon (the femme) is a Rich Bitch and wears pink all the time, while Nam-Ra (the neither) is the bookish Aloof Dark-Haired Girl.
• Tragic Keepsake: So-ju's flashlight eventually makes it into On-Jo's hands. Hee-su also leaves a teddy bear bag dangler for her newborn child before she ties herself up and turns, though of course the baby is too young to have any memory of her.
• Tragic Bromance: All over the place.
  • The first tragic example that really hit home were I-Sak and On-jo.
  • Na-yeon infected Gyeong-su just to proof she was right. Cheong-san does not take well his friend's death.
  • And latter, Cheong-san himself dies. After making it to safety, each character remembers a significant loss to them, Su-hyeok being the only one thinking about Cheong-san's sacrifice.
  • Not even the Plucky Comic Relief is sparred from this. Even Dae-su loses his best friend, Jang Wu-Jin.
• Tragic Monster. The zombies, like in most media. Once the virus takes over their bodies, the affected lose all of their agency.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The trailer shows several key characters dying or turning into zombies.
• True Companions: By the end of the season, the survivors of Year 2 Class 5 group and Archery Team become inseparable Fire-Forged Friends. In the last episode, On-jo decides to visit Nam-Ra alone and she is taken by surprise when everyone shows up, ready to go with her.
  Onjo: You're really going? All of you?
  Ha-ri: You are not the only one who feels indebted. We're all hurting just like you. Being alone doesn't make it hurt less.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Upon finding an injured girl who had been confined by the biology teacher, they don't believe him when he says that he did it because she's infected with a virus and sends her to the hospital. This accelerates the outbreak's spread when before that it had been largely contained to the school.
  • The system of taking students' phones during an exam is reasonable, but in this show, it makes getting the word out about the outbreak significantly more difficult.
  • Lee Byeong-chan's original intention for making the virus was to make a performance enhancer that would make his son strong enough to fight his bullies.
• Vertigo Effect: Done often with Gwi-nam to emphasise how dangerous he is.
• We Hardly Knew Ye:
  • Episode 7 starts by introducing Staff Sgt. Lee Jae-Jun who volunteered to contain the outbreak in Hyosan. He gets zombified a few minutes in.
  • Min-Ji is part of the main group that assembles in classroom 2-5. Unfortunately, the sports teacher Kang becomes a zombie shortly thereafter, biting and zombifying her.
  • Ha-Lim is a student taking shelter in the bathroom with Joon-sung and Mi-jin. Shortly after her introduction, she is shown to have been bitten on the collarbone and is fought and killed by Mi-jin, Joon-sung, Ha-ri, and Min-jae after turning into a zombie.
• We Just Need to Wait for Rescue: On-jo and Nam-ra have disagreements about what they should do. On-jo believes they should just be waiting for someone to rescue them as much as they can, while Nam-Ra is already pessimistic about anyone coming to save them, and believes they should be thinking about all possible options and take action.
• Wham Shot:
  • Lee Jin-su being thrown off the roof by the bullies.
  • Kim Hyeon-ju returning to her class after missing for two days, covered in blood and seemingly wounded.
  • The cafeteria madness.
  • I-sak remembering being bitten by a zombie in an earlier confrontation with them.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Besides Ha-Ri, and Min-Jae, the fate of the rest of the archery team was never shown.
  • So-ju runs into a desperate man whose pregnant wife is trapped, injured, in a wrecked car. While he wishes to assist So-ju realizes the situation is futile without heavy equipment to cut into the car and leaves, though he gives the man a shotgun to defend himself with. The family is not seen again, though considering the government bombs Hyosan shortly after, their odds aren't great.
  • Eun-ji is seen being experimented on to discover an optimal method of luring the zombies to kill zones. She is not seen after this, and her containment cell is shown empty and in the process of being cleaned.
• What You Are in the Dark: Na-Yeon deliberately infects Gyeong-Su and kills him, but is later shown being remorseful and crying for it...when she's in a supply closet all by herself with no one for her to deceive.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Zigzagged example in episode 9. A special force squad via helicopter sent by Major General Jin Seon-mu did intend to rescue the surviving students stuck on the school roof after finding the hidden data about the Jonas virus inside the building. However, when the Major General learns that there has just been a asymptomatic case popped out of nowhere in the base, he calls off the "rescue" part of the mission, fearing the possibility of more. One soldier (and ALL the students) objects to simply abandoning them, but the Major General goes as far as to order him to shoot the students to prevent them from boarding the helicopter. Although the soldier cannot bring himself to fire directly on the children, he does reluctantly leaves them to their fate.
• Wrong Genre Savvy:
  • Na-yeon says Gyeong-soo is infected because he was scratched and has a small nosebleed even if he wasn't bitten, but everyone quickly realizes that she's saying this because she's been trying to pick up fights with him ever since the outbreak started.
  • When Na-yeon goes into the broadcast room with Gyeong-soo after being told to apologize for accusing him of being infected, most of the other students watch through the soundproof glass and assume that it's playing out like her bad treatment of him is actually a Tsundere crush. No, she really does hate him enough to deliberately infect him with the virus, just to punish him for being liked by the other students despite his lower economic class, and to "prove" that she was right.
  • While the military's initial response of sending in small squads to clear the city while keeping it blockaded is quite wise, their response to discovering the existence of asymptomatic people is framed as needlessly cruel, and it is. If they'd bothered to wait and run some tests on their confirmed asymptomatic prisoner, they would have been able to confirm that even the half zombies have a body temperature that would be hypothermic by a normal person's standards, giving them an easy way to confirm if someone is in the clear or not.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Because there is no home to return to. Hyosan gets bombed in end to make sure the zombies don't spread the virus, and the survivors are forced to live in refugee camps after the events.
• YouTuber Apology Parody: A group of YouTubers from Seoul have the brilliant idea of making a fake zombie attack on a train. When the mass hysteria about the zombie outbreak reaches high levels, the author of the prank is forced to make an apology video on his knees for causing chaos... only for him to say he is not sorry and dance on his knees. Nobody is happy at this.
• Zombie Apocalypse Hero: The Survivors of the Year 2 Class 5 group and the Archery Team.
• Zombie Apocalypse: For the city of Hyosan.
• Zombie Infectee: The Jonas Virus is compared to CoVID-19, in the way humans react to it. The majority of the infected will become zombies, others are asymptomatic at first because the virus is keeping them sentient, but still manifesting several symptoms, and others become completely immune after a while.
• Zerg Rush: The zombies are a great danger whether they attack alone or in big numbers.

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