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

My eyes glasses over at 'economic and nuclear juggernaut Chile under Pinochet' tbh.

I jumped out of that to preserve my brain cells.
 
I can't believe this story that you're telling me. It's macabre!

But no, seriously. That timeline's from alternatehistory.com? The place that goes ballistic when you propose any tiny divergence from OTL as ASB? They're approving of a Brazil rejoining Portugal, and Ted Bundy becoming US President? Nevermind that if something like the New Deal Coalition was actually retained, its unlikely that you'd have the same overall political system, what with the New Deal Coalition being an odd agreement that involved segregationists and racial minorities.
 
I just gave it another look, and apparently it's got WW3 going with the Soviets losing to a military defeat and somehow not emptying their entire nuclear arsenal into NATO, with NATO doing the same in response? What?
 
Keeping a hold on realism isn't a bad thing persay, but what I'm wondering is how Buggs Bunny Belarus got past the censors, so to speak.
 
Havoc123 said:
Keeping a hold on realism isn't a bad thing persay, but what I'm wondering is how Buggs Bunny Belarus got past the censors, so to speak.
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There are no censors for something like that. AH.com has long been host to wide range of TLs. You may face criticism for a badly-written improbable TL, but that doesn't mean you have to stop writing it.
 
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Space Oddity said:
There are no censors for something like that. AH.com has long been host to wide range of TLs. You may face criticism for a badly-written improbable TL, but that doesn't mean you have to stop writing it.
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I can't think of any timeline on AH.com which hasn't had at least one or two people declaim it as implausible and/or ASB. Queen Nixon has certainly had a parade of people point out its various insanities, although that never stopped the author pushing the frontier of the bullshit envelope.
 
Jared said:
I can't think of any timeline on AH.com which hasn't had at least one or two people declaim it as implausible and/or ASB. Queen Nixon has certainly had a parade of people point out its various insanities, although that never stopped the author pushing the frontier of the bullshit envelope.
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ASB is overused as a way to describe implausible TLs, and should be left to outright instances of magical intervention.

Implausible though... History is implausible. Is a small Corsican nearly conquering Europe plausible? Is someone discovering America by searching for India plausible? Is a country which remained isolated from the world for decades suddenly pulling its head out of its arse and becoming a major military and naval threat plausible?

History is full of twists most TLs would get lambasted for.

But those twists aren't deliberate irony, edge, or wish fulfillment, and that's where we should draw the line.
 
Havoc123 said:
Keeping a hold on realism isn't a bad thing per se, but what I'm wondering is how Bugs Bunny Belarus got past the censors, so to speak.
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I might need to clear this up. The U.S. in the aftermath of WW3 has its own version of the Marshall Plan. Taking advantage of their position compared to the rest of Europe, there was an incentive put into place for war torn countries not to put any limits on foreign media, which would end up getting the U.S. a wave of unlimited access to a new market, Eastern Europe. Some scream cultural imperialism, but to the negotiators, this is just helping domestic business. It's a two way street though, as a new class of Eastern European animators and influences America in turn. Hence "Disney's Baba Yaga". I had the idea that "Mickey Mouse Pirogi" become a popular cafeteria food but that seemed like too much of a tangent. Anyways, since native entertainment studios couldn't match American ones in many cases, Eastern Europe sees a lot more American cartoons on TV. Kids in Belarus, as an example, took a liking to Bugs Bunny. Hence the joke TTL that Belarus is gonna add Bugs Bunny to the flag.

As for why there's an added graphic for it, well tbh it was because the thought of Bugs Bunny defacing the flag of Belarus was pretty funny in my head so I wanted to make an image of it to kill some time. I showed it to Laxault2020 and he decided to put it in the main update. Personally I wouldn't have done it but hey.
 
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To begin with how did the complete shift in NATO's strategic warfighting, build up of troops and aggressor infrastructure, and the idelogical movement explaining away the Soviets as an enemy safe to knock around go so unnoticed in Moscow that we're able to jump them in a non-nuclear non-total war?
 
bookwyrm said:
To begin with how did the complete shift in NATO's strategic warfighting, build up of troops and aggressor infrastructure, and the idelogical movement explaining away the Soviets as an enemy safe to knock around go so unnoticed in Moscow that we're able to jump them in a non-nuclear non-total war?
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Through the power of wish fulfillment.
 
bookwyrm said:
To begin with how did the complete shift in NATO's strategic warfighting, build up of troops and aggressor infrastructure, and the idelogical movement explaining away the Soviets as an enemy safe to knock around go so unnoticed in Moscow that we're able to jump them in a non-nuclear non-total war?
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The new NATO war machines were built from an alloy of narrativium and handwavium.
 
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