manacus

Banned
Also now Alaska has been probably left unguarded by the Russians. It is Manifest Destiny time.
Did someone say manifest destiny edit im not sorry
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I immediately recognized the photo of Nikodim Maksimov as the real-life Hermann Rorschach, the Swiss psychiatrist who invented the famous inkblot Rorschach test.
 

manacus

Banned
Implying that the RU can only conquer the american continent and not all Eurasia
the Americas are for America as the prophet burr decreed and Africa is for the pinnacle men of Africa as Europea is for the anglo tetonic people as Asia is for the pinnacle men of the Nipponese as the prophet decreed do u even AFC bro
 
the Americas are for America as the prophet burr decreed and Africa is for the pinnacle men of Africa as Europea is for the anglo tetonic people as Asia is for the pinnacle men of the Nipponese as the prophet decreed do u even AFC bro
are you forgetting part when the second prophet of god shall come down and unite the 5 tribes of man and spread them across the stars?
 
Actually if Russia collapse into revolution, either Persia will follow suit or somehow it will start expanding into the russian tertitories. I wonder what will happen to China however
 
Meanwhile in China;
Oh no, not again.
Meanwhile in the Netherlands;
Are we like the only nation that isn't collapsing.
Meanwhile in Persia:
Yes the great Satan is dying, ha, ha...we're next aren't we.
Meanwhile in Korea:
I sense a great disturbance in the force

I'm hoping for MonBol Russia here, Viktor's boy decides "I can work this to my advantage" and becomes the Illuminati head.
 
Unpopular opinion time:

I'm hoping Viktor gets crushed like a bug. To be honest, I've never really warmed on him or TTL Russia. The Madness-verse is full of villains, of course, but the other villains, as exaggerations of negative national trends, were memorable and compelling without being so ridiculous that I entirely lost interest in them. Viktor, on the other hand, was so over-the-top he went full circle and it became boring. The idea of Orthodox Russia treating Kaiser Wilhelm's far-more-psychotic ATL self as a literal god-emperor, and loads of people fanatically dying for him, while he goes around declaring himself Khan of Khans… I couldn't maintain willing suspension of disbelief at all, for any instant he was on the page. It felt like he walked out of some cartoonishly over-the-top story much worse than this one, because the relentless Viktor-wankery got on my nerves. Though we're usually talking about the RU, TTL's Russia has actually been treated much more wankishly than the Republican Union ever has been. The Americans have a real fight when they're trying to conquer Quebec, Canada and California, all of which would inevitably be extremely sparsely populated compared to the RU simply as a fact of geography. Russia, meanwhile, gets to devour vast swathes of the most populated country in the world, with a population of hundreds of millions, on a logistical shoestrain (even if he built ten Trans-Siberian Railways it would still be nowhere near the same thing as putting resources in Europe) at the same time as they're waging industrialised war against the industrial heart of Western Europe which they're blatantly unsuited for, a war which in any half-real world they'd be being utterly thrashed, and they get away with it because… umm… Viktor is cool and scary? It didn't feel like anything that would actually happen. It felt like Viktor was only getting successes because of authorial favouritism. Normally the Madness-verse is great when it's showing things (almost always) that are horrifying, but feel like they might have actually happened, and that makes you think and shudder. Viktor never felt like that.

There are loads of things in this reboot that are more detailed than the original. I think lots of them are great; they make the world more believable and immersive and interesting. Russia—until now—was the exception that proves the rule.

I say "until now" because this new twist in Russia—Lenin/Ulyanov as a ruthless businessman (heh, remembered that from Classic—loved that one), the Illuminati uprising as an interesting twist on OTL radical ideologies and conspiracy theories while actually being pretty thoroughly believable in an environment where the old order has been discredited by tearing itself apart in a bloody slaughter that nobody in Europe really won—is much more to my liking. I'd go so far as to say that it's much more typical than Viktor is of the Madness-verse's usual level of interest and high quality. So, for the sake of the TL, I'm hoping we get more of the Illuminist revolutionaries and less of Mad Tsar Viktor—who, in-universe, is now a proven failure who's thrown away millions of his subjects' lives, subjecting them to incredible misery, and then got humiliated because he lost the war. Plus Asian Russia was never, is never and can never remotely possibly be a match for the part of Russia that has nearly all the people in it.

Both from in-universe 'what should happen' perspective (Viktor's regime has not just one but comically many of the sort of things that cause regimes to catastrophically collapse) and an out-of-universe narrative-choice perspective (I could never take him seriously because he was so over-the-top and kept winning for no good reason), I hope/think/want-to-think Viktor will lose.
 
I actually always intended for Viktor to be built up as this God of War only to send him crashing down in catastrophe. I wanked him to screw him hard. Lol I thoroughly intended for him to be overextending and throwing away his subjects lives for his own glory. The part where he strangled a messenger in front if his generals was much less "Darth Vader" and much more "lunatic Ivan the Terrible strangling his son while drunk and drooling." He's become a pathetic, pitiable character, and he's literally just fleeing the capital without even trying to stand his ground. He knows it's over.

My original idea was for some sort of true republic to built in his ashes. Now though, with my invention of Illuminism, things are about to get real interesting. *evil laughter*
 
Prediction: the Russian empire collapses and is replaced by a democratic Russian Union. Steele is pissed he has to share an abbreviation with slavs
 
It occurs to me that if Asian Russia does succumb to some sort of egoism, a variant of Russian Cosmism could come into play. OTL it's influenced transhumanism and what is more egoist than trying to become some sort of unholy lysenkoist ubermensch?
 
...OK, maybe not as unpopular an opinion as I thought it was. o_O Oh well. I did expect a dogpile at that point, so I'm happy to hear it!

The part where he strangled a messenger in front if his generals was much less "Darth Vader" and much more "lunatic Ivan the Terrible strangling his son while drunk and drooling." He's become a pathetic, pitiable character, and he's literally just fleeing the capital without even trying to stand his ground. He knows it's over.
implies that he may fall outright.

Whereas what the ending seemed to be implying
The entirety of the European portion of the Empire was collapsing even as the Asian half held strong.
was a division of Russia between Viktor and the revolutionaries, rather than Viktor falling outright. Which would have been pretty silly, given the number of strong social forces pushing him to fall outright.
  • Losing a massive world war? That's… pretty bad. Not many regimes tend to survive that. Taking massive casualties in a massive world war? That's… also pretty bad. People often tend to underestimate just how unstable post-WW1 Western Europe was; so many people died, so much damage was done, that Britain in the 1920s underwent chaos and political instability vastly exceeding anything else in the century since, such that there was a genuine risk of revolution; and that's the side which won the war, securing Belgium's independence and seeing its rival Germany defeated and making huge territorial gains all over the world. And this war, if I recall correctly, was bigger than OTL World War I.
  • Huge biological/climactic events, even if they're beyond the regime's control, happening under its watch and thus being blamed on it, like the colossal plague here? That's… also very, very bad.
  • A totalitarian leader with a pervasive cult of personality that dominates the state, preventing people from seeing or hearing anything except what it approves, thus getting used to the luxury of control over what people are thinking—those troops were calling Viktor a god-emperor—that suddenly experiences a huge external event (here, Viktor losing the war) beyond its control which it can't stop people from knowing, thus exposing the regime as liars. That's also pretty devastating.
  • A grotesquely unequal society at the dawn of the 20th century, suffering the rise of working-class consciousness of how much the working class are being screwed over, while totally lacking any non-hierarchical institutions like parliaments and political parties which the public will trust, to help siphon off the discontent or channel it in a peaceful direction? Oooh boy.
  • The regime employing mass brutality against its own people in a time of tumult and hardship where they feel aggrieved, instead of negotiating with their grievances to calm tensions—helpfully providing a spark for something more? Check!
Any one of those forces would put a regime in extremely severe danger of revolution. Together? It would be amazing, and not in a good way, if Viktor retains a square inch of Russia. It's as if he was trying to help the revolutionaries have as many as possible of the conditions that would lead to his final moments being in a shack, watching some pissed-off working-class men pointing guns at his head.

What do you mean, please, if I may ask? Do you mean Viktor is falling from power outright? Or do you mean you're letting the Viktor regime keep an empire in Asia? Sorry if this is just me being an idiot; it's difficult to tell.
 
The chapter isn't over and I wrote it while passing out. XD "The Eastern half holding strong" was just me thinking out loud and also keeping spoilers to a minimum. Basically, the eastern half has minimal revolts. But news travels slowly in such a repressed nation. I don't wanna spoil the second half of the chapter but what's about to happen is gonna make the Bolshevik and French revolutions look like an episode of Sesame Street. Viktor's hold on power is a lot less than he thought. The groupthink of his barely literate hordes proclaiming him a god-emperor was purely out of fear. Now it will be time for him to fear. *evil laughter*
 
It occurs to me that if Asian Russia does succumb to some sort of egoism, a variant of Russian Cosmism could come into play. OTL it's influenced transhumanism and what is more egoist than trying to become some sort of unholy lysenkoist ubermensch?
So I looked it up and discovered Lysenko was actually born in what is now (drumroll) UKRAINE! If you thought the Illuminati having a Council of Jehovah analogue and strange occultist beliefs was weird, they could have their own version of Scientific Marxism!
 
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