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What's the most Cringeworthy Alternate History you've ever read?

Also, Mortal Engines is at least honest about the core concept. The problem with City Darwinism that such a thing doesnt work. BTW, guess what: It isnt working in setting either.

All the age of traction cities has done is slowly cause resources to dwindle over time for the traction cities. They have grown concerned that they are running out of smaller cities to hunt. They have become so invested in the idea of City Darwinism as the basis of their society that the simple idea of...just stopping doing that is considered preposterous. Worse, anyone who does stop just gets attacked by the ones who do continue.

Understandably, the Anti-Traction League is every day becoming more and more powerful as it doesnt waste all those resources on eating each other...which is why the traction cities decided to stop fighting each for long enough to go blitz them down.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
I'm having trouble parsing your sentence here and determining (1) exactly what you are trying to say and (2) why it belongs in the Cringeworthy Alternate History thread.

Discussion of history itself, or attitudes about history, can have a place here in my opinion, but I'm... not sure how this in particular fits well.
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Well. To be fair, the world as Republicans believe it to be is quite alternate from reality.
 
To make matters worse, "Critical Race Theory" as used by the far right is effectively a term they made up out of whole cloth. There is something by that name, but it's a specific academic concept and they're basically just using it to mean "anything you could tell my kids that might cause them to think I'm racist."
 
Simon_Jester said:
To make matters worse, "Critical Race Theory" as used by the far right is effectively a term they made up out of whole cloth. There is something by that name, but it's a specific academic concept and they're basically just using it to mean "anything you could tell my kids that might cause them to think I'm racist."
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Pretty much, yeah. It boils down to white supremacy. The far right tries to dress up its hatred in feel good terms about fairness in education and free speech because the truth is inconvenient. That's the hypocritical cruelty of it too. It's not enough for them to treat minorities as second class citizens and re-enslave black people through prison labour, they wear that on their sleeves openly, but they also feel the need to dress it up in flowery language and sanitize it. Texas published textbooks remove the word slave from history books. It's replaced with "immigrant worker" and other euphemisms.

It's standard historical revisionism the far right does.
 
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Hm, I always just thought of Critical Race Theory as the idea that race preference and sexism plays more of a role in history than most care to admit.
 
SpiritFluid said:
Sliding back to an earlier discussion but not the main part of it, more a tangent

That would be Scott Westerfelds Leviathan trilogy, which is...

Okay? The real meat of the war and matter of countries pitting off another is all but entirely off screen, and has a very pop-history viewpoint, with "those dastardly germans who secretly assassinated the archduke to set off this war" (what), "always showing up everywhere to threaten out heroes, jingoistic monster who have ZERO named characters" and the likes, and with a lot of stuff being pushed to the backseat to either hop from locale to locale for Quick Little Vignette Scenes (usually ti dripfeed the premise of "fucked up monsters and oily mechs") or brief political stuffs ("hey, the ottoman empire is collapsing" "oh hey, Tunguska" "oh hey, japan" "Oh hey, mexico" "oh hey, new york city", those last three are all in the same last book, it's rushed as fuck).

They're okay, because the characters aren't annoying or anything - just really flat, and without too much interest in a different history (outside the second book, which even then has the fallout or really build up of the Committee of Union and Progress revolt against the sultan just. Almost entirely off screen (Which I'm Now Realizing AS I Write This Also Completely Writes Off And Ignores The Genocidal Actions It Would Commit By Just. Making Them Never Happen For Arbitrary Reasons, By Having Not In Power At That Time And Depicted As The Good Guys, Which Is...... A Choice,,, O take back what I said about it being okay,)

It's only real saving grace is some fantastic artwork by Keith Thompson
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The structure and plotting of the Leviathan series makes more sense when you learn the author deliberately patterned it on early 1900s boys own adventure novels. It's why for a potentially massive sprawling alternate history, it has young teen protagonists, huge thrilling action sequences and setpieces, and Those Dastardly Germans as the main bad guys.

Which works for the story it tries to tell: a thrilling adventure story about exile princes and daring (air) sailors in a world of giant animals and giant machines. It doesn't work if you try to consider it in the context of real life history, especially with the way it simplifies geopolitics. See: its treatment of the CUP as good guys, with the only depiction of their less good tendencies being a character remarking that now they've won the revolution, they're going back on all the feminist promises they made.
 
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I remember reading a shitty TL that kept confusing washington the state with washington, dc.

Given how bad the grammar and spelling was, I'm not sure that they were native english speakers.

Anyway they had washington annexed by canada.
 
Admiral Halsey said:
You konow I'd love to see someone rewrite Rumsfeldia with Rumsfelds actual views from that era instead of what was actually done with him.
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IIRC, Gumboverse!Rumsfeld's fall into anarcho-capitalist insanity happened because he was a huge Agnew supporter and was left disillusioned by the Agnew administration's downfall.
RoseEmbolism said:
Wouldn't that violate the "AH historical figures must not resemble the actual historical person" rule?
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Since when was that a hard and fast rule that every AH writer had to follow?
 
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