AH Recurring Tropes, and the timelines that avert or subvert them

Silver01

Practical Lobster said:
Ooh! I have two:

A lack of Islam (in late antiquity timelines) meaning a massively expanded Christian world in the Near East. This, imo, underestimates the resilience of the Zoroastrian priesthood, and generally overestimates the Christian population of Mesopotamia (who are, mind, negligibly Iranian). Similarly, Christianity made relatively weak progress in Arabia.

There's loads of ways that this could go (and my own timeline presents an admittedly rather unrealistic one) but I'm skeptical that Christianity was gonna go wild over the region when it hadn't yet after a few centuries.

And the other one maybe isn't so much of a trope but I cannot stand the term "bend the knee" - it's imprecise (i.e. there's usually a better word to describe what you're saying - acquiescence, surrender, protectorate status) and it takes me out of any serious history and makes me think we're in game of thrones. If you mean the literal act, we have words for that - kneeling, bowing, proskynesis...
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Depends entirely on what version but yeah people do over estimate the amount of Mesopotamian chirstians who where mostly from the north and the south ones ie the nestorians where a minority but it's totally possible with a pod where the 602 and the 628 civil war still happened as the sassanid state would be on the verge of death and the Romans over the years could create a series of client states but It depends how long the balkanization of Persia last it can last to a decade or shown by the collapse of the ilkhante 50 years For Persia to be reunited

The only way iam seeing a Persian Iran is that one of the Turkic tribes convert to nestorianism or heck even manichaeism and force covert the people with the khagan become the. "sha" and adopting Persia culture but not the religion
 

herkles

One thing that bugs me is if a nation has territory in the Americas after the US is founded then no matter what Americans will cross the border and drag the land into the US. Even though I am an American, it annoys the crap out of me. It feels way to deterministic, and half the time the conversation just bogs down into discussions about the US crossing the border and pulling a texas and not the implications of what if that region was ruled by another power or not part of the us.
 
Aghasverov

Aghasverov

herkles said:
One thing that bugs me is if a nation has territory in the Americas after the US is founded then no matter what Americans will cross the border and drag the land into the US. Even though I am an American, it annoys the crap out of me. It feels way to deterministic, and half the time the conversation just bogs down into discussions about the US crossing the border and pulling a texas and not the implications of what if that region was ruled by another power or not part of the us.
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There's a thread going on right now you'd probably enjoy checking out on a "British Louisiana" which goes into quite a bit of depth on that very subject :)
 
Sarthak

Sarthak

Aghasverov said:
Wreck? I was rather enjoying it :openedeyewink:
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Hm, the deterministic attitude of some Americans is really irritating though. The comparison to the Texan Rebellion is very loose when you realize that the rebellion had been very lucky for Houston and the fact that Santa Anna had told his troops to sleep when going into a rebellion. I am pretty sure no British officer worth his tea would have committed such a mistake.
 

TRH

Sarthak Bikram Panta said:
Hm, the deterministic attitude of some Americans is really irritating though. The comparison to the Texan Rebellion is very loose when you realize that the rebellion had been very lucky for Houston and the fact that Santa Anna had told his troops to sleep when going into a rebellion. I am pretty sure no British officer worth his tea would have committed such a mistake.
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There was that one British officer who pulled a Varus...if Varus had handed over hostages to the enemy commander...repeatedly, after getting betrayed several times. That was only six years after the Texas Rebellion, actually.
 
AltoRegnant

AltoRegnant

I find that the inevitability of a ww2 depends more on the politics of the victors. Otl it was partly inevitable for a very simple reason imo- germany kept the vast majority of its industry, but lost enough to get angry, which it was only allowed to do because of American and British cooperation in the negotiations. If not for wilson, if the German revolutions break out sooner, etc., then france is in a better position to make demands of satellites or territories. Would there be unrest? Certainly, but prior to ww1 Alsace-Lorraine hated being under the Kaiser's thumb due to restrictions on Catholicism and the kulturekamph to prussify it. I assume there were such issues throughout the rhine (mostly on religious issues due to the area always being german, if a different form of it).

It's far from the most insightful analysis, but I think any ww2 is dependent less on the anger or trauma of the loser (especially in regards to germany; the country had a victim complex bigger than the British empire) but much more on how powerful the Victor's are allowed to become by their allies
 

Silver01

one trope i find is a response to another trope this being the lack of butterflies due to this people went to the other extreme having to much butterflies
we must take on to account how specific , major the event was and the distance.

i will i give an extreme example Claudius never becomes emperor in 41 Ad due to the butterfly effect Minjung never becomes king of Goguryeo in 44 Ad
of course not most examples are not as extreme as this but you get my point.
 

Mort the Reaper

Goldensilver81 said:
one trope i find is a response to another trope this being the lack of butterflies due to this people went to the other extreme having to much butterflies
we must take on to account how specific , major the event was and the distance.

i will i give an extreme example Claudius never becomes emperor in 41 Ad due to the butterfly effect Minjung never becomes king of Goguryeo in 44 Ad
of course not most examples are not as extreme as this but you get my point.
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TBF, it's not always easy to determine how far the butterfly effect "should" reach.
 
Aghasverov

Aghasverov

Mort the Reaper said:
TBF, it's not always easy to determine how far the butterfly effect "should" reach.
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Think it's up to the individual author... on the one hand, you can have a TL with a very specific and limited-in-scope POD which only affects certain narrow parameters, and the TL progresses more-or-less parallel to OTL, just with a few differences... on the other hand, there are those that just scream "butterflies!!" and EVERYTHING is different from OTL within just a few years, regardless of how seemingly "minor" the POD seems...
IMO "success" may lie somewhere between the two extremes....
 
Alias_The_J

Alias_The_J

Aghasverov said:
I swear I'm gonna start my own TL *one of these days* but I have this gnawing fear that someone will comment with "oh yeah, this is just like what *insert long-banned or defunct username here* did twelve years ago..."
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Bit of a late reply, I know, but...

...your idea being exactly the same as something a banned member did twelve years ago is a good reason to do it; that banned member isn't pulling any new interest towards the TL, and you can learn from said member's mistakes in the TL. Information is much more available now than 10 years ago, after all....
 
Aghasverov

Aghasverov

Alias_The_J said:
Bit of a late reply, I know, but...

...your idea being exactly the same as something a banned member did twelve years ago is a good reason to do it; that banned member isn't pulling any new interest towards the TL, and you can learn from said member's mistakes in the TL. Information is much more available now than 10 years ago, after all....
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Well, TBH it's not any gnawing fear that's preventing me from starting one... more like a mix of, well, laziness, being busy with work and life, and probably a touch of ADD... I'm pretty easily distracted :winkytongue:
I could see myself starting a TL and going back a year later and - "Oh yeah! I should update that sometime..." :)
 
Alias_The_J

Alias_The_J

Aghasverov said:
Well, TBH it's not any gnawing fear that's preventing me from starting one... more like a mix of, well, laziness, being busy with work and life, and probably a touch of ADD... I'm pretty easily distracted :winkytongue:
I could see myself starting a TL and going back a year later and - "Oh yeah! I should update that sometime..." :)
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Too true.

Hey, here's another trope that hits stories and TLs alike: being busy, distractible or losing interest! And I loath it, even if I'm the one doing it!
 
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