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

ExNihilo said:
Wait why is this a post-1900 thread now? What if I want to post an earlier bad alt-history?
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As previously noted, "cringeworthy Alt-History timelines" and "Alt-History timelines written by someone with a big ideological axe to grind" tend to have a high degree of correlation. The latter timelines tend to focus on more recent events, although I can think of a couple of exceptions focusing on the classical era: One guy who got booted off SDN for loudly and repeatedly claiming that Egyptians were all black and that anyone claiming otherwise was a racist, and someone else started off with a mildly interesting premise (the Roman Empire discovering gunpowder) and then went off into so much wank that I'm pretty sure they're still getting physio for the damage to their wrist with a side order of worse historical research than Asterix the Gaul.
 
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Jake said:
As previously noted "cringeworthy Alt-History timelines" and "Alt-History timelines written by someone with a big ideological axe to grind" tend to have a high degree of correlation.
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It became even higher when AH and After 1900 specifically shifted to being more of an online fiction forum. Plausibility and detail? Less important. Updating quickly and especially playing to the crowd? A lot more important.
 
Coiler said:
It became even higher when AH and After 1900 specifically shifted to being more of an online fiction forum. Plausibility and detail? Less important. Updating quickly and especially playing to the crowd? A lot more important.
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In fairness all AH, technically speaking, is pretty much online fiction anyway. The only actually scholarly AH, referred to as counterfactual history, is pretty much purely an intellectual exercise that's heavily constrained by rules intended to keep it as a tool for better analyzing the past than actually digging into the Road Not Taken.

Detail is certainly a thing all TLs would benefit more from but when it comes to plausibility what is and isn't plausible is very much in the realm of how well the author establishes said plausibility within the confines of the given scenario. Plausibility and probability aren't the same thing and it's important to keep that distinction in mind when reading any AH.

That said most of the timelines in this thread fail that test by virtue of being poorly researched, badly written and not well thought-out.
 
LHB said:
Detail is certainly a thing all TLs would benefit more from but when it comes to plausibility what is and isn't plausible is very much in the realm of how well the author establishes said plausibility within the confines of the given scenario. Plausibility and probability aren't the same thing and it's important to keep that distinction in mind when reading any AH.
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Also note that it is entirely possible for there to be too much detail, at least about stuff that's not directly relevant to the plot. We don't generally need to know the exact number, calibre and make of every weapon fitted to a fictitious class of ship that's only going to show up for one or two chapters, for example.
 
So all this discussion on long term grudges makes me understand why humanity buries the hatchet in Out of Balance, rather than start out a stellaris play through with 4 starting planets
 
Nothing screams 'stagnant' like going from medieval level technology to beating up the Russians in the span of four decades.
 
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I can imagine that to save face. Every history text book on Earth would say that WW2 didn't end until they kicked the race off Earth, so as to deny defeat
 
This isn't in reference to any one specific timeline, but some TL titles make me roll my eyes so hard they fall out of my face.

Protip: if you think a title "sounds cool", it almost certainly isn't.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
This isn't in reference to any one specific timeline, but some TL titles make me roll my eyes so hard they fall out of my face.

Protip: if you think a title "sounds cool", it almost certainly isn't.
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Coiler said:
It's a toss-up whether the overly dramatic titles or the overly pretentious ones are worse (knowing it's entirely possible to be both).
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Do you guys have examples of dramatic or pretentious titles?
 
LHB said:
The sheer volume of wrong, Orientalism and total economic illiteracy is giving me a headache before going into the "long live colonialism!" bullshit.
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Not to mention retreading the common misconception that Japanese isolationism was this absolute thing: Japan's trade with foreign nations actually increased after the Tokugawa Shogunate enacted the Sakoku Policy. It's simply that Japan's trade ceased to be with Spain and Portugal and instead was conducted with the Netherlands which was much less interested in missionary activity (which the Tokugawa saw as a major threat) than the Catholic Iberian powers were. Moreover, the constant movement of the Tokugawa court actually stimulated regional centres of trade and thus generated more wealth even in regions which were peripheral to its authority. So isolationism actually brought considerable benefits to Japan's internal economy while still allowing it access to the foreign goods it wanted. In light of this information, we could make the argument that isolationism benefited Japan's economy, perhaps even more than it harmed it.

CalBear, like a lot of people who discuss Hong Kong, tends to forget that Hong Kong's democratic tradition and laws only came about at the very end of Hong Kong's existence as a British colony when it had already been agreed that the handover would take place in 1997. For all CalBear crows about the greatness of British democracy, Hong Kong didn't have it: it was directly ruled by an unelected Governor appointed by the British government. We can't judge the British legacy in Hong Kong favourably by actions which took place in the last few years of British rule when Hong Kong had previously experienced decades of rule as a colony by a nation which had seized control by force of arms.

And honestly, if you read his TLs, it's really obvious that he has a deep and abiding love for Britain, so he tends to overlook the uglier aspects of Britain's history as a great power. Not to mention a certain degree of hard men making hard decisions that seems to underwrite a lot of it.

RiverDelta said:
Oh my god, CalBear is a racist.
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I'd also add misogyny to that list. If you ever see any thread where he even incidentally discusses his opinions on Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi, it's so obvious that he's barely containing his loathing for them. He basically put down Trump's election to Hillary being bad, which is... pretty fecking quick to overlook how awful Trump is. He also absolutely, positively, LOVES guns and gun rights and goes into any thread where gun control comes up and basically spends the whole time naysaying about how "it'll never work!" but in such a way that makes it so patently obviously that he thinks gun control doesn't work because he doesn't want it to.

He also feels the need to mention that, among his circle of friends in real life, he's considered a liberal on gun rights. But that just makes it more damning. If CalBear has to show that he's liberal by the standards of gun nuts, then, by Jove, he's still a gun nut.
 
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Can't you dislike Pelosi and Clinton without being a misogynist, though?

But yeah, that all makes sense.
 
RiverDelta said:
Can't you dislike Pelosi and Clinton without being a misogynist, though?

But yeah, that all makes sense.
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You can, but in this case, it's very clear that CalBear has a problem with them that goes beyond political disagreements.

CalBear is a self-identified conservative Democrat, and he hasn't really updated his views to match the times, so there are times where he just comes across as a total dinosaur when it comes to his views on certain issues.
 
ExNihilo said:
I mean, it could also be a sun-based empire (Pharonic Egypt, Suryan Hindu) restoration and make a lot of sense, but I'm guessing it's not that.
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IIRC it's about Korea, so...yeah.

Even if it was about some kind of sun-based empire building itself back up, the title itself is basically word salad.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
There was a spin-off of "Decisive Darkness" called "A Morning Reborn", which sounds like something an AI would generate.
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It's one of those times when a title that works in one language doesn't transfer over to another.

Another example would be my own AH project (in the sig), "Red Plum Blossom". It's quite nice in Korean and Japanese, but the English version.... yeah.
 
For both of my TLs, I went with music. The first one was part of a line from a song, and the second is named after a song that I like (Miles From Our Home). Sort of cringy (especially considering how terrible my first TL was), but hey...it could be worse!
 
Norseman said:
Forgive me, but... didn't they take in a lot of Korean pretenders and aristocrats after the yayoi period? Weren't they basically just one more country among many for centuries? Or have I gone ever so slightly nuts?
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"Japan" wasn't even a thing during the Yayoi period, not as much as "Russia" at the time. It also ignores the fact that Japanese culture today isn't even the same as 70 years ago, let alone the "3000 years" of cultural tradition.

Sumeragi said:
This started a whole new hot-take thread: Cultural inertia regarding Japan
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This thread was genuinely amazing in how bad the hot takes are, you can debunk half of them with fucking wikipedia.
 
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