Pop Culture Timelines Go-To Thread

Megafighter3

Megafighter3

PaulieRomanov said:
I've been watching Fredrik Knudsen's YouTube documentary series Down The Rabbit Hole and Justin Whang's Tales From The Internet and I wouldn't mind doing a timeline inspired by either one of those shows.

The TL would concern internet figures, urban legends, and early internet culture diverging in vastly different ways compared to OTL and a lot of the events are focused on the 1990's and 2000's, although I will cover the 2010's as well, now that we're only a little over three months away from that decade ending.

I'm trying to figure out the point of divergence and I'm thinking it would be in the early 1980's.

I do want to include alternate takes on both Christian Weston Chandler (of Sonichu infamy) and Jennifer Cornet (the woman who led the "Final Fantasy House" cult in the early 2000's) among several other online figures such as PewDiePie and maybe even Whang and Knudsen themselves, as well as entirely new media works that emerge and very different versions of works from OTL.

Here's some of the divergences from OTL that I have already figured out...

The first Avengers movie in 2012 is plagued with executive meddling and ends up being a box office bomb that does to superhero movies what Heaven's Gate did to Westerns and the other MCU films are never made

White Wolf never merges with CCP and consequently, doesn't get bought out by Paradox Interactive. This is the result of the short-lived Capcom-White Wolf deal that gave us Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game and a vaporware Werewolf: The Apocalypse game for PS1 and Sega Saturn lasting a lot longer than it did in OTL and we explore how it would have played out. Bloodlines ends up being developed and published by Capcom and we get RPG's based on Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and the fabled Darkstalkers RPG that never materialized, among many other major changes.

Mitt Romney narrowly gets elected in 2012. This is more of a non-sequitur to illustrate how different the TL is from our own, at least for now. If I can find a way to meaningfully tie it into the greater narrative, I will.
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I think I had thought of one concerning GameLife where Andrew never made the shooting threat against his girlfriend, meaning the TV deal with MTV didn't go south. GameLife became a ratings success and then the whole thing became a big wank where a lot of internet reviewers actually got to jump past the internet. Some examples of divergences were as follows.

  • G4, initially on the way to network decay, sees the ratings MTV got for GameLife and saw there was a market for gaming, thus putting a stop to any of their non-game programs, butterflying away Code Monkeys getting canceled and them scouring the internet for new talent to match GameLife. They'd find James Rolfe and soon the Angry Video Game Nerd would make his home on G4, albeit in a very censored form.
  • At the Movies would also turn to the web, offering the position for new hosts and by chance, getting Doug Walker and Brad Jones, both Illinois natives who had actually written for their local papers. Because of this, there's a good chance that Channel Awesome would get butterflied away and instead, it's Rooster Teeth who would set up the Rooster Reviews subsection of the site while ScrewAttack would occasionally pick up new players to replace the Nerd on their channel (though never grabbing Chris Bores, natch) while G4 used them and RT's Blistered Thumbs to pick up talents such as Justin Carmichael and Jason Pullara based on their You Can Play This and Until We Win series respectively.
And that's really as far as I got. I might go back to this post about Down the Rabbit Hole for potential PODs for everyone (though what to do about Chris Chan? Hmm...)
 
Megafighter3

Megafighter3

Funny thing is, I had also thought of Chris joining the Final Fantasy House after posting that. To be honest, I tend to skip many of the episodes dealing in non-internet subjects (The Collyer Brothers, Mouse Utopia, Henry Darger, Rajneesh, Plague Doctors, the hurdy-gurdy, etc.) and focus on the web-based ones. Been rewatching them and some possible PODs for the subjects.

  • Digital Homicide: During the development of Dungeons of Kragmor, a game Sterling had actually praised for its effort, the Romine Brothers have a chance encounter with Scott Cawthon of the Five Nights at Freddy's series. Having faced critique from Sterling before, Scott actually talks James out of the idea of suing Jim, explaining how he took Jim's criticism of Chipper & Sons to heart and managed to make a great game out of it. The talk actually gets through to the brothers and they drop any plans for a lawsuit, focusing on finishing and releasing Kragmor. The game becomes a minor hit on Steam and the first real success from a critical and financial standpoint for Digital Homicide, resulting in a future remake of Slaughtering Grounds (dubbed Slaughtering Grounds: Inquisition) that gets a full review from Sterling who calls it "a complete 180 from its original and a shining example of how developers can learn and grow from criticism."
  • Sonichu and CWC: On a morbid note would be Chris-Chan dying in the fire, though Chris-Chan ending up in the Final Fantasy House would be a hell of a situation. Most likely he would be Wedge.
  • Time Cube: Gene Ray is more open to followers, not rejecting Richard Janczaerski and his influence on the web spreads, maybe even overtaking the likes of the Final Fantasy House and causing a war between Ray and Jennifer Cornet.
  • GameLife: As mentioned, Andrew Rosenblum doesn't make the shooting threats, allowing GameLife to flourish on MTV.
 

wwbgdiaslt

Something I'm pondering -

Gerry Anderson manages to spin plans for the third season of Space 1999 into a new show in conjunction with the BBC in 1982.

The new show, Deep Star Odyssey (or, Gerry Anderson's "Odyssey"), stars Lewis Collins as Commander Winston Trager and Kate Jackson as Doctor Eleanor King on the Starship Capricorn, flagship of the Zodiac Fleet, sent out to find a new homeworld for mankind after environmental devastation.*


* - early proposals would have made this a direct result of the moon being blown out of orbit twelve years prior.
 
Gabrielico

Gabrielico

What would be needed to make animated films and series, cartoons and animes, the "mature", "adult" and "popular" entertainment, while live-action is relegated to children's TV and obscurity?
 
Mr_Fanboy

Mr_Fanboy

Mr_Fanboy said:
Hey, so I am trying to work out a scenario which features some alternate media consolidation over the past decade or so. Among other things, some differences include...
  • News Corporation purchasing NBCUniversal in 2009 instead of Comcast. MSNBC and the NBC broadcast network are spun off to avoid antitrust issues, but Rupert Murdoch also decides against splitting up News Corp. in 2013.
  • A virtual collapse of the Redstone media empire in 2009 or 2010 caused by a somewhat worse financial crisis and exacerbated by an earlier Moonves scandal and ousting, leading to Time Warner acquiring the CBS Corporation (largely in an effort to add their own broadcast network to their portfolio) and, shortly thereafter, Comcast buying Viacom as a consolation prize for their failed NBCUniversal bid.
  • The Walt Disney Company acquiring Time Warner a few years down the line - the former making their move for the same reason that they bid for 21st Century Fox in our world, the latter acquiescing for the same reason that they agreed to the AT&T acquisition in our world. The CBS broadcast network is sold or spun off, but this has the neat side-effect of putting Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Lucasfilm, and the film rights to Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and the Star Trek franchise under the same corporate roof (Iger pursued a very similar acquisition strategy in this world, though the worse recession may cause the timing to be a little different for some of the purchases).
  • A few years after that, toward the end of the decade, Apple, Inc., led by a surviving Steve Jobs, buys this mega-Disney.
Bearing in mind that the Great Recession is worse and the domestic and international political situation are somewhat more chaotic in this world, I have a few questions...
  • When the various NBC assets are spun off to bolster chances of approval for the News Corp./NBCUniversal deal, might they be formed into a new, united entity in a manner similar to the creation of the Fox Corporation after our world's Disney/Fox deal? Or might they simply be sold off to other parties? If so, would they more likely be sold as a package deal, or separately?
  • Who might buy the CBS broadcast network, shorn of the actual television studio?
  • Assuming that AT&T follows roughly the same strategy here, what media entity might they try to acquire instead of Time Warner?
  • What would be some interesting outcomes for Sony, Lionsgate, Netflix, and Amazon?
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Nivek

Gabrielico said:
What would be needed to make animated films and series, cartoons and animes, the "mature", "adult" and "popular" entertainment, while live-action is relegated to children's TV and obscurity?
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eldandythedoubter said:
That is a good question, that I don't think I can answer.
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You need a POD very far...maybe no seduction into innocents so comics have well stablished market for adults in a way, other would be cartoon getting the anime and manga way, in a way telling stories for all, to young to adult and touch 'strong topics'(violence, sexuality, politics, use of substance) and evolve that way, as is cheaper than practical effect for some.

Is hard because of theatre, hollywood and film tradition in the west make easier movies and tv to be the mainstream form.

for live-action be for kids, would means more kids watching tv early and more show like muppets, mr rodgers and super sentai/power rangers esque for them
 
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Nivek

Neoteros said:
To the men of culture around here, what if the Endless Eight hadn't happened? :p
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The franchise would have either adapt the dissapareance as a series as should have been or keep pushing with the filler novels to get right before the suprise part 1...that means the franchise would be alive...maybe suprise movies instead? the dual TL worked better as a movie, playing our expectation which TL is which...
 
Neoteros

Neoteros

Nivek said:
The franchise would have either adapt the dissapareance as a series as should have been or keep pushing with the filler novels to get right before the suprise part 1...that means the franchise would be alive...maybe suprise movies instead? the dual TL worked better as a movie, playing our expectation which TL is which...
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Hopefully, the lack of a backlash against Haruhi enables the original author to wrap up the light novel series, since several plot threads were left unresolved. The way I see it, the whole masquerade would've been broken eventually, most likely in the way Kyon himself envisioned in the series, and a few main characters would've died as well, with Asahina being the most likely casualty - her adult version wants to break the stable time loop responsible for her own existence, after all.
 
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