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

Starting to realize the extent of AH.com's dystopia issues.

Icarus Falls

I read this Tv Tropes page and I could have sworn I read this TL before but it turns out I haven't, it just hits all the cliche notes. Donald Rumsfeld being eviler than he is in RL, American politics going Fascist in a lot of ways, nukes flying way more than they should, the goverment doing more and more MKULTRA shit.
 
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RiverDelta said:
It's a bit of a long thread, could you link me to the conversation(s) discussing it?
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As I posted before...

Coiler said:
AANW is basically a The Big One with a creator who's a better sport. Which is to say it's a dry infodump-filled tale written as it went along on a forum of how the Third Reich is doomed that's mostly accurate in general terms, but has iffy parts, obvious contrivances and some dated sources.
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To elaborate (and TBO is this if you're not familiar.

  • Both are stories that have the premise of "if Germany does better in World War II and the Americans still enter it in force, the US with its much greater resources and far, far, far more advanced nuclear program will crush them."
  • The basic premise is sound, but they have their share of contrivances and questionable scenes.
  • Both are written in a dry style that exacerbates the plausibility issues by making it hard to examine in any other way. TBO at least has characters, albeit one-dimensional placeholders. AANW is pure pseudo-history, it's apples and oranges which is "worse".
  • Both have a "look at 'em go!" attitude of crushing the Germans. TBO has the mass nuking itself while AANW has more than a few scenes of "Germans run straight into a wall of Allied fire and get killed, repeat." It's a sincere attempt at debunking Wehrabooism that , at least in my opinion, swings too far in the other direction.
  • Both are not the best AH by any means, but are not the worst either.
And then...

  • Both utterly unravel after the first and most prominent installment (in the former the original TBO book itself, the latter the published Sea Lion Press version that ends along with the war), descending into more and more implausible, often to the point of being nonsensical, situations clearly done on nothing but the author's whim. TBO had several more books with a strawman "Caliphate", Communist Imperial Chipan (no joke), the Falklands War still happening in 1982, and a US Air Force so massively powerful compared to its opponents that I call it an "unironic One Punch Man". AANW I haven't read as much personally (though I haven't heard good news and what I have seen isn't exactly reassuring), but I have seen how the fanbase constantly asking questions helped in bringing it down.
 
My things are, and this is TLDR because mobile and on break:

AANW has a lot of questionable historicity. Obvious contrivances abound, and CalBear's dislike of Germany is hilariously obvious. This could maybe be forgiven if the writing were good. It isn't.

It's a milwank that is dryly written and obviously to show off his particular fetishes in military technology. It's not really a 'story' other than having something resembling a plot. Toss in that even the milwank is questionably written and...

It doesn't help that there are no 'good guys' when the response by the allies in the 21st century is 'orbital deathstrike 200k of them' to German students wanting their country reunited.
 
Thanks, that all makes sense.
 
lordhen said:
Am i bad saying Calbear TL called The Anglo/American – Nazi War is the most cringeworthy Alternate History i ever have read, sometimes i feel it only keeps going on AH.com is due Calbear being a mod there, if it was written by anybody else he would (that is how i think) would be banned.
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I mean AANW is reaaally cringeworthy but IIRC there is nothing particularly banworthy in the TL.

RiverDelta said:
Mind if I ask how come you feel it's overrated? I haven't read it, I'm just curious.
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1) CalBear literally doesn't understand how Nazism works and his Anglo wank needs incompetent Nazis. So his version of Nazi Europe is boring storywise, completely misses what Nazism is about and really is unrealistic in terms of Nazi military strength.

2) CalBear has no clue about military stuff and it really shows.

3) The post war world is even more cringy than the rest and his weird hate boners for Chinese and Germans really start showing.
 
Norseman said:
I went there out of curiosity.

Ugh.

Just ugh. Reminds me a lot of the TBO fan-threads.
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There are fan threads?!

Does Tom Kratman's carrera count as shitty alt history because of the bullshit parallelism? I ask because I wanted to avoid replicating that by shaking up as much as the RL Earth analogue as possible.
 
AANW is honestly better than my own AH stories, but my AH stories are trash so *shrug*.

My personal issue with it is that it ignores partisan groups utterly and makes the french the bad guys for some reason.
 
Silent Runner said:
I don't get it.
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Bad wording from me sorry.

Essentially he uses pop history Nazis. The Holocaust and the GPO would have happened, he is right there but the rest is just wrong.

1) The rise of the SS as described by him makes no sense in the AANW situation. The SS reached the position it did in the Nazi state because the Wehrmacht failed to deliever. In the AANW-verse the Germans won and there is no way in hell the Wehrmacht would be dissolved.

2) Himmler would have never reached the top position. Never ever.

3) The Nazis wasting ressources on Wunderwaffen is also something that only happened ITTL because they were clearly losing the war.

Its stuff like that. And don't get me started on all the handwaving required to prevent the Nazis from having a bomb in the late 50s.
 
Osteoclast said:
We should come up with an "Alaska cruisers supreme" timeline to throw over there.
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I've heard (don't know the veracity) that they would have been good candidates for missile conversion. The reasoning is that thanks to their size, they could handle the clunky, big early SAM/Radar complexes better than the smaller cruisers they were historically stuffed into.
 
Coiler said:
I've heard (don't know the veracity) that they would have been good candidates for missile conversion. The reasoning is that thanks to their size, they could handle the clunky, big early SAM/Radar complexes better than the smaller cruisers they were historically stuffed into.
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From what I've read, the only reason the planned conversion never occurred was because of cost and Congress buying the Chair Force's 'nuclear bombers obsolete everything' line.
 
Hot take, but I actually prefer the post war updates for the AANW over the actual war.

It's where it finally drops the mind numbing "Nazis run at Anglo guns, die" pattern and gets into some semi-interesting word building (I also have a self-admitted soft spot for India-wanks), and I think he justifies the morally grey nature of the WAllies so that the "rocks fall, neo-Nazi's die" state of the world makes sense.
 
Skywalker_T-65 said:
My things are, and this is TLDR because mobile and on break:

AANW has a lot of questionable historicity. Obvious contrivances abound, and CalBear's dislike of Germany is hilariously obvious. This could maybe be forgiven if the writing were good. It isn't.

It's a milwank that is dryly written and obviously to show off his particular fetishes in military technology. It's not really a 'story' other than having something resembling a plot. Toss in that even the milwank is questionably written and...

It doesn't help that there are no 'good guys' when the response by the allies in the 21st century is 'orbital deathstrike 200k of them' to German students wanting their country reunited.
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Anchises said:
3) The post war world is even more cringy than the rest and his weird hate boners for Chinese and Germans really start showing.
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Yeah, about the treatment of Germany. Remember that in AANW the Nazis

  • Literally made the conquered peoples of Eastern Europe tear down their own cities
  • Almost completely depopulated the nation of Poland
  • Continued the Holocaust to the point where the surviving Jewish population of Europe is smaller than the present-day population of the Falkland Islands
  • Used chemical weapons against both Allied troops and population centers
  • Completely destroyed Paris to keep it out of the hands of the Allies, even salting the area with bioweapons for good measure
Even if you disagree with the A4's postwar attitude towards Germany, it's kind of understandable how they arrived at their conclusions.
 
@Silent Runner

The A4 as a concept are stupid enough. We have seen what massive overmilitarization does to an economy in OTL's 1991. Portraying them as "troubled good guys" just exposes some f***** up ideas.

And given how China suddenly turned into "lol biological warfare not!Maoists" the Stettin bombing to me seems more like CalBear is reflecting his IRL biases.

I mean come on. "Hey we use kinetic weaponry against student protests" Like...send a tank battalion?
 
Anchises said:
@Silent Runner

The A4 as a concept are stupid enough. We have seen what massive overmilitarization does to an economy in OTL's 1991. Portraying them as "troubled good guys" just exposes some f***** up ideas.

And given how China suddenly turned into "lol biological warfare not!Maoists" the Stettin bombing to me seems more like CalBear is reflecting his IRL biases.

I mean come on. "Hey we use kinetic weaponry against student protests" Like...send a tank battalion?
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I fundamentally disagree.

In a world where the Nazis lasted significantly longer than they did OTL forming that kind of militarized organization to stop a successor state from rising up makes perfect sense. They've seen the full horror of Nazism and have no intention of it repeating.

Obviously, I'm not going to say deploying that kind of response to Student Protests is acceptable but we're talking about an international community that is existing in a fundamentally different historical context than ours. When Germany did such horrible behavior it should come as no surprise that any action in favor of German unification would result in an extreme response.
 
RiverDelta said:
Mind if I ask how come you feel it's overrated? I haven't read it, I'm just curious.
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Adding to what others have said the work is full blown revenge porn against Germany, to an unnerving degree, rivalling what Desisive Darkness had happen to Japan, and afterwards the nuclear and orbital weapon backed Anglo-American Hegimony pf the A4 reads like a power fantasy at times.
 
@Fourthspartan56

Basically what @Iscariotpaladin says.

Tbh the behavior of the A4 indicates that they would have just wiped out Germany. A few more nukes and quietly wait for suppressed Europeans to do the rest.

Of course that would have disturbed the unnerving "grey" image for the A4.
 
Anchises said:
And given how China suddenly turned into "lol biological warfare not!Maoists"
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That's actually one of the more plausible things given just how wacky OTL Chinese (ultra)nationalists were. The thing is, such people never reached the reins of power in our history due to cooler heads screwing them over in their own pursuit of power.
 
Iscariotpaladin said:
Adding to what others have said the work is full blown revenge porn against Germany, to an unnerving degree, rivalling what Desisive Darkness had happen to Japan, and afterwards the nuclear and orbital weapon backed Anglo-American Hegimony pf the A4 reads like a power fantasy at times.
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Accurately describing what Germany would've done if allowed isn't revenge porn.

The rest of the world taking brutal action to make sure that Germany doesn't have the opportunity to do it again is just the logical conclusion of the premise.
 
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