What is the most dystopian AH work ever created?

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Everyone keeps saying how horrible and dark it is... are there any neutral or good outcomes?
Yes. Here's some off the top of my head.

-LBJ's Great Society path
-RFK can do some good stuff (just don't get assassinated!)
-John Glenn's path is generally a good outcome with his emphasis on social programs and space exploration (although it requires George Wallace to be president first)
-Ciano can turn Italy into a parliamentary republic and join the OFN (TTL's NATO expy)
-Many moderate socialists and democrats can reunify Russia/USSR
-HMMLR (Her Majesty's Most Loyal Resistance) can liberate the UK from Nazi occupation
-The Nazis can be forced out of Africa completely
-Oskar Dirlewanger can die in many hilarious and sometimes ironic ways

TNO is only truly grimdark if you play as a nation like Himmler's Burgundy
 
Yes. Here's some off the top of my head.

-LBJ's Great Society path
-RFK can do some good stuff (just don't get assassinated!)
-John Glenn's path is generally a good outcome with his emphasis on social programs and space exploration (although it requires George Wallace to be president first)
-Ciano can turn Italy into a parliamentary republic and join the OFN (TTL's NATO expy)
-Many moderate socialists and democrats can reunify Russia/USSR
-HMMLR (Her Majesty's Most Loyal Resistance) can liberate the UK from Nazi occupation
-The Nazis can be forced out of Africa completely
-Oskar Dirlewanger can die in many hilarious and sometimes ironic ways

TNO is only truly grimdark if you play as a nation like Himmler's Burgundy

Don't forget wholesome tolerant Orthodox Russia or Speer being sidelined by his own bloc.
 
Yes. Here's some off the top of my head.

-LBJ's Great Society path
-RFK can do some good stuff (just don't get assassinated!)
-John Glenn's path is generally a good outcome with his emphasis on social programs and space exploration (although it requires George Wallace to be president first)
-Ciano can turn Italy into a parliamentary republic and join the OFN (TTL's NATO expy)
-Many moderate socialists and democrats can reunify Russia/USSR
-HMMLR (Her Majesty's Most Loyal Resistance) can liberate the UK from Nazi occupation
-The Nazis can be forced out of Africa completely
-Oskar Dirlewanger can die in many hilarious and sometimes ironic ways

TNO is only truly grimdark if you play as a nation like Himmler's Burgundy
--Drowns the economy in debt because you aren't allowed to pay for it because LOL Americans hate taxes LOL, and inevitably results in a segregationist or American Nazi victory.
--Likely to be assassinated because LOL parallel aren't we so clever?
--That's not actually a good outcome. That's barely clawing back to Square One.
--A corrupt asshole keeping the racism and imperialism but giving the whites a managed democracy isn't actually a good thing. It's a sham pretending to be a good thing.
--They are all assholes. Even "Glorious Hero Sablin". Only the Free Aviators are halfway decent and they can do nothing but sit there and shoot Nazis who get too close.
--They always lose unless directly player-controlled. And they have to be imperialists if they want to reunify the UK rather than just freeing England.
--Only at massive expense because the Nazi African empire are invincible martial supermen who can do no wrong until the game decides to stop wanking them once they win. And even then, the American hegemony is just as bad because LOL Americans are racist, we just cut ourselves on our own edge!
--That isn't actually a good thing, that's just a slight reduction in the bad things.

Even before you get to the cringe that is Madagascar and the idiocy that is Bond Villain Himmler, TNO presents a world where everybody is a self-serving asshole, there is no hope for improvement, and the world will inevitably end in nuclear fire anyway because Bond Villain Himmler is just the most amazing evil mastermind ever to exist rather than a demented theater reject obsessed with medieval LARPing.

In my opinion, the pessimism about the nature of humanity puts TNO at or above the level of For All Time and What Madness is This? on the grimdark scale. It presents a world where humanity has degenerated into the worst possible interpretation of itself, what few functional states are left are slowly dying, and everybody cares more about killing each other than fixing the mess.
 
--Drowns the economy in debt because you aren't allowed to pay for it because LOL Americans hate taxes LOL, and inevitably results in a segregationist or American Nazi victory.
--Likely to be assassinated because LOL parallel aren't we so clever?
--That's not actually a good outcome. That's barely clawing back to Square One.
--A corrupt asshole keeping the racism and imperialism but giving the whites a managed democracy isn't actually a good thing. It's a sham pretending to be a good thing.
--They are all assholes. Even "Glorious Hero Sablin". Only the Free Aviators are halfway decent and they can do nothing but sit there and shoot Nazis who get too close.
--They always lose unless directly player-controlled. And they have to be imperialists if they want to reunify the UK rather than just freeing England.
--Only at massive expense because the Nazi African empire are invincible martial supermen who can do no wrong until the game decides to stop wanking them once they win. And even then, the American hegemony is just as bad because LOL Americans are racist, we just cut ourselves on our own edge!
--That isn't actually a good thing, that's just a slight reduction in the bad things.

Even before you get to the cringe that is Madagascar and the idiocy that is Bond Villain Himmler, TNO presents a world where everybody is a self-serving asshole, there is no hope for improvement, and the world will inevitably end in nuclear fire anyway because Bond Villain Himmler is just the most amazing evil mastermind ever to exist rather than a demented theater reject obsessed with medieval LARPing.

In my opinion, the pessimism about the nature of humanity puts TNO at or above the level of For All Time and What Madness is This? on the grimdark scale. It presents a world where humanity has degenerated into the worst possible interpretation of itself, what few functional states are left are slowly dying, and everybody cares more about killing each other than fixing the mess.

I have turned against the Sequel Trilogy due to IX but I'll post this for reference:

VnQ2CNW.gif


Not going to go into this debate or break it down point-by-point. We get it, you fucking hate this mod because you think it fails in it's messages about fascism=bad, it's hard, the nice socialists are not <whatever you think leftism should be>. Don't barge in and raise objections on every single person that says "TNO is not that dark". It's our opinion so leave us alone.
 
I have turned against the Sequel Trilogy due to IX but I'll post this for reference:

VnQ2CNW.gif


Not going to go into this debate or break it down point-by-point. We get it, you fucking hate this mod because you think it fails in it's messages about fascism=bad, it's hard, the nice socialists are not <whatever you think leftism should be>. Don't barge in and raise objections on every single person that says "TNO is not that dark". It's our opinion so leave us alone.
Leaving the reaction image aside, I have played the mod, and it is one of the most gratuitously dark, miserable, hopeless things I've ever seen. Even the theoretically "good" paths all end in misery and the mod mocking the player for the hopelessness of their efforts.

It's great that you enjoy it! I still feel that, based on its content, it is one of the grimdarkest AHs ever.
 
-Many moderate socialists and democrats can reunify Russia/USSR
And Boris Yeltsin can redeem himself through reunifying Russia under his banner and giving Russians hope for the future (his unification event literally says that) as his vision of a freer and safer Russia free from extremism comes true. In fact, his economic policies here, even if disastrous IOTL, can be argued to be good for stimulating growth here with how they guarantee property rights in a country which has only known "might makes right" for decades.
 
Almost any timeline where theocrats run things is, IMVHO, very grim, or bound to get that way really fast. Either all independent thought will be stifled, or there will be a revolution of some sort, most likely a bloody one. (There is a third option, but it is probably rather unlikely.)

GURPS Alternate History I and II have some pretty grim ones. Reich 5 is especially grim, if implausible.
 
There was a timeline (can't figure out its name) that had Earth KOed by global warming... do those kinds of timelines count?
 
The Kirov series is technically this, given how it's had two nuclear World War IIIs, and, arguably worse, nearly everyone fated to be simply overwritten as the timeline constantly changes.

But in terms of tone, it's not that dark, because of its "wargame sandbox" nature and focus on only a few time travelers.
 
There's this really fucked up anime called "Genocidal Organ" which has one of the shittiest America screws in fiction. The plot is that in 2014 Islamic extremists manage to nuke Sarajevo. In the decade afterwords the Western World becomes a hyper militarized police state where the right to privacy is nonexistent and the deep state can do pretty much whatever they want in the name of public safety. Ironically this is actually shown to be a good thing in-universe with crime rates dropping to zero, none of the three letter agencies ever abuse their power, and terrorism gradually becomes extinct in the West, but rest assured the anime isn't some shitty 1984 ripoff, trust me when I say the story would be so much better if it was that.

So the main plot is that in the decade since the terrorist attack, multiple genocides have been popping up in Asia and Africa in countries that previously had little to no history of intense ethnic violence. The CIA and JSOC have linked these genocides together by the involvement of an American named John Paul, someone who has managed to infiltrate the government of each genocide victim's governments and 6 months after he gets their they start to do genocide. The U.S has been trying to install order in these nations and in order to prevent another genocide to take place with 6 already having been committed, the government sends the protagonist, a special forces operator named Clavis Shepherd, on a mission to hunt down John Paul.

Long story short, the plot has Clavis get into contact with John Paul's girlfriend who he falls in love with but uses to get to John Paul. The climax of the movie sees Clavis confront John Paul when he's in Kenya setting up the genocide there. So to simplify a heavily convoluted plot, John Paul reveals that he uses some psuedoscience bullshit called a "Genocidal Organ" which is some sort of part of the human brain that when manipulated has everyone be bloodthirsty savages and want to kill each other. BS science aside, John Paul reveals that the reason that he did all of those genocides was to punish the West for creating the war on terror since it was Islamic terrorists who nuked Sarajevo, where incidentally his wife and daughter died in the nuke attack while he was cheating on them with his current girlfriend (Keep in mind he's only been pushing third world nations with no connection to the West into genocide and hasn't done a single thing to punish America despite the fact that he insanely places blame on them instead of you know, the fucking terrorists). John Paul states that the West deserves to go through their own genocide since they create all of these wars and never suffer the consequences on the homefront. Somehow Clavis agrees and then sides with John Paul, betraying his best friend and squad by shooting them when they try to capture John Paul. In the aftermath Clavis takes John Paul BS Science genocide sequence and manages to somehow perfect it to its ultimate state. When he's ordered to testify before Congress about John Paul, Clavis unleashes the Genocidal Organ, thus infecting the US government to become a genocidal one. While the aftermath isn't shown in the film, in the novel it's based off of the US descends into a nuclear civil war with the nukes flying starting a Judgement Day scenario where afterwords humanity is nearly wiped out with the sequel novel focusing on the remnants of humanity being run in a totalitarian state that makes 1984 look like a Civil Rights paradise, I'm dead serious.

So in the end some piece of shit Far-Right Japanese author thought the West was the greatest evil in the world that they made a story where the guy whose committed multiple genocides and is literally worse than Hitler is some sort of messiah and our protagonist manages to throw humanity into its dark ages, and it's alright because America is the greatest evil since they drone people and invade other countries. Just remember when reading some of the site's worst dystopia TL's that there's always something out there that is worse, and someone got paid to write about it.
 
FaT, for sure. Not many people realise it nowdays, but it set many of the dystopic tropes later AH works would use (and sometimes overuse) in stone. Bonus points for being meticulously researched -especially for an early 2000s TL- and relying more on clever plot twists and dark humor to establish its relentlessly grim and oppressive atmosphere than simply browbeating the reader with descriptions of atrocity after atrocity. It's basically the AH equivalent of Brass Eye.
 
There's this really fucked up anime called "Genocidal Organ"

Okay, that really is something. Probably will have to see that myself, just out of morbid curiosity.

FaT, for sure. Not many people realise it nowdays, but it set many of the dystopic tropes later AH works would use (and sometimes overuse) in stone. Bonus points for being meticulously researched -especially for an early 2000s TL- and relying more on clever plot twists and dark humor to establish its relentlessly grim and oppressive atmosphere than simply browbeating the reader with descriptions of atrocity after atrocity. It's basically the AH equivalent of Brass Eye.

Of course there are the occasional screw-ups in it as well -- my personal favourite is Vande Lanotte being a general of the Belgian Army in 1970.
 
Okay, that really is something. Probably will have to see that myself, just out of morbid curiosity.



Of course there are the occasional screw-ups in it as well -- my personal favourite is Vande Lanotte being a general of the Belgian Army in 1970.

Oh for sure, there were flaws. Jörg Haider somehow ending up as Chancellor of the Fourth German Reich despite the 1942 POD or the somewhat OOC portrayal of Lin Bao as a treacherous, nuke-happy expansionist madman. The final chapter, though enjoyable, was also clearly much more hastily written and less detailed.

I always thought that either Rumsfeldia or Icarus Falls were a better 70s-80s continuation to FaT than what it actually got.
 
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