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

One thought I had was for a self-insert into Khrushchev that starts a reform effort in the USSR that looks like it may go interesting places..... and then the SI stumbles into a nuclear war by being overly aggressive due to their knowledge of OTL. Something along the lines of "they try and invade Iran to liberate it from the Shah and only succeed in raising tensions to the point where shooting starts in Germany and the situation spirals out of control" more or less.

I'm not sure it's a great concept, but If I have to read about an SI I'd like to see an SI who makes mistakes, which on the level of a national leader can be enormous in scale. In this case, the future knowledge of an event the SI considers negative (the Iranian Revolution) leads the SI to take preventative measures which are disastrous in the here and now.

EDIT: preferably just don't write a historical self-insert though, it's usually much more tolerable with media than with real life historical figures, especially if the writer hasn't done enough research.

Edit 2: it's fine if you write a historical SI, just do research please, and come up with an interesting idea.
 
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Astrid Wells said:
SIs are stupid. There, I said it.
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Tbh this has always been my attitude as well.

I'd much rather see the sort of "Ultra-Competent Ruler/General gets ISOT'ed into the mind of unremarkable short-lived king" sorts of things. Self-inserts are just kind of bland by comparison.

It'd be much more interesting to see, for instance, how Nicholas II fares if he has the mind of Alexander II or somesuch.


Lazer Raptor said:
One thought I had was for a self-insert into Khrushchev that starts a reform effort in the USSR that looks like it may go interesting places..... and then the SI stumbles into a nuclear war by being overly aggressive due to their knowledge of OTL. Something along the lines of "they try and invade Iran to liberate it from the Shah and only succeed in raising tensions to the point where shooting starts in Germany and the situation spirals out of control" more or less.

I'm not sure it's a great concept, but If I have to read about an SI I'd like to see an SI who makes mistakes, which on the level of a national leader can be enormous in scale. In this case, the future knowledge of an event the SI considers negative (the Iranian Revolution) leads the SI to take preventative measures which are disastrous in the here and now.

EDIT: preferably just don't write a historical self-insert though, it's usually much more tolerable with media than with real life historical figures, especially if the writer hasn't done enough research.

Edit 2: it's fine if you write a historical SI, just do research please, and come up with an interesting idea.
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Or you know, trying to act on OTL knowledge doesn't always come across as logical or sensible. Not to mention if you take actions that don't correspond to the society and political system, that has problems. Someone who becomes say, leader of the Soviet Union would likely have to compromise their own attitudes and goals in fairly considerable ways if they wanted to stay in power as opposed to get ousted.

I mean, I get that most SIs would be boring if it ended with the SI leader getting quickly overthrown and/or assassinated but like... that's a pretty likely outcome for someone who gets suddenly tossed into an unfamiliar political system like that.
 
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Honestly what I want to see in an SI is someone start off well meaning but slowly become more self-serving and morally grey as they become more and more tempted by the power they know have while also dealing with the massive pressure they're under. Because who are without that kind of power would not be the kind of person we'd be if we were suddenly thrust into a position of power, even more so with those SIs that are basically fusions of the two people.

I'm not dissing But I don't speak German. I like it even if many of the tropes within it have become entrenched in the Genre.
 
I kinda want to see a SI-AH with two opposed SIs clashing. Especially if it leads to something like, say, Belgium invading France at the start of the 20th Century or Great Britain having an England vs Scotland civil war in the 1870s. You know, very ahistorical oddities popping up everywhere due to uptimers in positions of great power fighting.
 
Nyvis said:
Honestly gay Stalin would be fine, all he has to do is not reinstate the ban on homosexuality :V

I'd read about gay Stalin, that sounds fun.
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Those exists in the swampy parts of the internet
Anchises said:
I mean I really enjoyed the SI where the author essentially ISOTed a Neonazi version of himself into Adolf Hitler precisely because of the reasons you mentioned. People might find that tasteless but at least it wasn't a fucking carbon copy of "within 20 years of SI we achieve global peace and luxury gay space communism". The author also made it sufficiently clear that he does not share that views and that the resulting world is a nightmare just to prevent any confusion.
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Can I get a link to that?

At the very least have a boring SI realize that causing meaningful change is impossible without taking more power for yourself, and have to live with the fact they made the country into an autocracy when the next guy takes charge
 
Teen Spirit said:
Honestly if we're doing a mental replacement of Hitler. Have Hitler replaced with Albert Speer, specifically Post War Albert Speer. So you who is probably at least somewhat regretful of what they did but is more focus on saving their own ass, with the incredibly tempting fact that they know they now have all the power and influence Hitler had and a chance to do everything over. So what wins in that case, his regrets, his survival insitincts or his desire for power.
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Holy shit. That is a brilliant idea actually. Especially if you think it through. Let's say we take 1981 Speer, he dies in London and wakes up as Hitler shortly after the Fall of France. How would he react to meeting his 1940 self?

Personally I think Speer was a ruthless opportunist, his regrets couldn't have been that big if we look at his post-war actions. The really scary thought is having someone in control who knows how OTL played out while being completely devoid of any (meaningful) moral compass while also being familiar with the inner workings of the Nazi hierarchy.

Teen Spirit said:
I did see one that adopted that approach but it was weird.
Rudolf will Reign, Dear. It features two people ISOTed into the bodies of Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria and his wife Stéphanie of Belgium.

Those people are Reinhard Heydrich and Tennis player Maria Sharapova. So uh, yeah.
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What...that is weird to say the least....

Lazer Raptor said:
One thought I had was for a self-insert into Khrushchev that starts a reform effort in the USSR that looks like it may go interesting places..... and then the SI stumbles into a nuclear war by being overly aggressive due to their knowledge of OTL. Something along the lines of "they try and invade Iran to liberate it from the Shah and only succeed in raising tensions to the point where shooting starts in Germany and the situation spirals out of control" more or less.

I'm not sure it's a great concept, but If I have to read about an SI I'd like to see an SI who makes mistakes, which on the level of a national leader can be enormous in scale. In this case, the future knowledge of an event the SI considers negative (the Iranian Revolution) leads the SI to take preventative measures which are disastrous in the here and now.
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Teen Spirit said:
Honestly what I want to see in an SI is someone start off well meaning but slowly become more self-serving and morally grey as they become more and more tempted by the power they know have while also dealing with the massive pressure they're under. Because who are without that kind of power would not be the kind of person we'd be if we were suddenly thrust into a position of power, even more so with those SIs that are basically fusions of the two people.
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A combination of these two seems really interesting tbh. The SI starts of as well meaning but completely screws up and then survival instincts kick in and the SI does more and more questionable shit.

Trying to prevent WW1 and ending up waging an even more brutal industrialized war to avoid the rope for example.
 
SIs can be a guilty pleasure, but if I want to talk a MindSOT, I'd rather have it be the same person. 'You die and get to go back to yourself before everything happened' is more interesting to me. Nicholas II?* I find it more interesting to think what would happen if you take him, after seeing his family killed for his mistakes, and stick him back in (I dunno) 1904 or something. Would things materially change? Or would he just proceed to muck things up even worse because "MY GOD, THE REDS MUST DIE" or something?

That's more interesting to me, but it does rather require an author who understands psychology and character work which is...rather rare on AH.com.

*I use Tsar Nicky as the example because mind-raping him seems to be the current trend in ASB right now, what with there being like three or four concurrently running versions of 'let's SI ourselves into the Tsar' right now.
 
Psychology and history are very rarely intersecting professions, or indeed passing hobbies.
 
Admittedly, I'm a character author first and foremost. I like getting into character's heads, so my opinion should always be viewed through that lens.


(plus, y'know, I had to take like six psychology classes to get my history teacher degree so I like actually getting some use out of that time :V)
 
There's a pretty good SI on SB where the author get's ISOT'd into Arthur Harris and turns Bomber Command into a precision-strike arm.
 
Anchises said:
I would really love to read an SI where (for example) someone wakes up as the last Tsar and nopes the fuck out because that is what I would realistically do. Sell the crown jewels, buy a ticket to America and buy a remote cabin to sit out the Spanish Flu. I am certainly not going to order millions of men to their death or get shot by the Reds just because some asshole ASB decided to fuck with me.
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There's a Russian movie where a Tsar and a guy who happens to look identical to the Tsar switch due to a time machine accident. The army figures out the Tsar is an impostor within the day and storms the palace. The substitute Tsar has to hold them off by throwing caviar while the time machine's inventor wrangles the original Tsar back into the time machine.
 
theJMPer said:
There's a pretty good SI on SB where the author get's ISOT'd into Arthur Harris and turns Bomber Command into a precision-strike arm.
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Isn't that the one where the author has a massive "men cheating on their wives when away from home" fetish that like half of his characters, including himself who has explicitly worked to have a better relationship with his (or rather Harris's) then-wife? Like, I'm not one to kink-shame, but when he goes out of his way to talk about how he's a better husband than Harris was historically, then cheating on her with a French girl with basically no reasoning other than "she was enthusiastic", I start to wonder about the author.
 
ExNihilo said:
Isn't that the one where the author has a massive "men cheating on their wives when away from home" fetish that like half of his characters, including himself who has explicitly worked to have a better relationship with his (or rather Harris's) then-wife? Like, I'm not one to kink-shame, but when he goes out of his way to talk about how he's a better husband than Harris was historically, then cheating on her with a French girl with basically no reasoning other than "she was enthusiastic", I start to wonder about the author.
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Maybe? I kinda yadda-yadda over the bits not relating to making Landcasters more killy.
 
theJMPer said:
Maybe? I kinda yadda-yadda over the bits not relating to making Landcasters more killy.
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(Before we go any further, the fic is "And they shall reap the whirlwind" by sbiper on SB.)
While fair, that does mean you have to skim over a lot of the plot points, including vague and unclear misogyny(see, whenever the topic of the women working on RAF bases are brought up and how they are objectified, or his hatred of his pre-insert wife), the weird subplot about how the Catholic Church, or at least major parts of it, want to assassinate him because a medieval demonic manuscript predicted his Insertion (I think that's what's going on, at least), and MC's unwillingness to cooperate with anyone who doesn't explicitly agree with him or is named Churchill, but they still mostly do what he wants them to, except when it's unimportant so he can have "aha see" moments.

Overall, I wouldn't hold this up to be a "pretty good SI".
 
I may have simplified a bit, but yeah I skimmed over the "vague and unclear misogyny" bits because that honestly doesn't interest me in the slightest. The subplot with the church is interesting enough, and his bullheadedness is presented pretty clearly as a flaw.

I mostly categorize it as "pretty good SI" because of the abundance of research that clearly went into it. It presents a plausible enough divergent path of Bomber Command becoming a technically proficient precision-strike arm with midair refueling and various other innovations that were overlooked at the time. That's what I want outta my SIs, not so much gender politicing.
 
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Teen Spirit said:
So can I vent about the SI trend on AH.com again. Because honestly the more I think about the genre the more it bugs me. Mainly because I've yet to see anyone do something really unique with it. Every SI is good and fairly virtuous, having a distinct Center-Left and or Monarchist bent like it's my freaking SB LP thread all over again. You don't see anyone do anything really different like suddenly everyone's really freaked out by the SI's drastic shift in personalty, or the SI turns out not to be the best person or they don't really know what they're doing or hell, they're gay and that's a bit of an issue when it's the 1920s and your now Joseph Stalin. It is a genre full of cowardliness.
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Has that been a thing recently? I certainly haven't seen many recently, honestly iv seen more on SV and SB then on the ASB forum on AH.
 
And like I said, there's at least three (maybe four) variations on 'let's take over Tsar Nicky' running right now, at the same time.

(on the subject of the Turtledoves, it was a nice surprise to see my timeline get nominations >.>)
 
Skywalker_T-65 said:
And like I said, there's at least three (maybe four) variations on 'let's take over Tsar Nicky' running right now, at the same time.

(on the subject of the Turtledoves, it was a nice surprise to see my timeline get nominations >.>)
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And I've yet to see one for Catherine the Great.

Actually come to think of it, besides that one Tennis Star being paired with the Butcher of Prague, has their been an SI involving either someone ISOTed into a woman or at least a Woman being the original SI?
 
I've noticed that a lot of AH authors (at least, on AH.com) are male.* The lack of female SIs doesn't overly surprise me, since even if someone was willing to go with 'not technically an SI' going to 'a completely different gender than I am' is pushing it a bit more.


*which is an interesting counterpoint to the meme about 'all fanfiction authors are female' you get online.
 
Teen Spirit said:
And I've yet to see one for Catherine the Great.

Actually come to think of it, besides that one Tennis Star being paired with the Butcher of Prague, has their been an SI involving either someone ISOTed into a woman or at least a Woman being the original SI?
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I remember seeing one as Cleopatra (VII, the important one). Don't think I read it, though.
 
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