Yes, but I mean in general across timelines. - historical prestige plus traditional connections
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Look to the West Volume IX: The Electric Circus
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Well, one can easily say that Japan is already a "humiliated" culture well before the Societists came to power.
That said — before the Societists — how much of the Japanese culture can we reliably determine that we have changed? Surely — the Russians have found some use for ninjas, but beyond that, what had been of the daimyo that had always been fiscally independent from any central Japanese authority?
They'd still be Societists, adopting the Chinese system as a logical consequence of it forming a direct chain to the Bronze Age, but not Chinese culture— things would still be standardized to a massive degree, just around a Sino-Indic similarities rather than Eurocentric ones. As for the faith, I chose modified Buddhism (with added elements from the ever-present PIE obsession) because it could serve a good class collaborationist purpose: "Maintain good karma through proper Societist behavior or you'll be reborn in a lower class/among the nationalistically blinded!", and there's of course room for a synthesis of Taoism/Ayurveda with proper modernist modifications. The Celestial equivalent to the Universal Church would have far more meat on its theological bones, with synthesized spirits and creatures, but importing modern deities wholesale would be an obvious no go as it would favor the traditions of specific regions over others.
Celestial Societism would still be pioneered within
Yeah, actual
*Naturally they take that a bit further than the Combine in canon, since they can say with pride that their culture has been gradually extinguished over the span of centuries.
In terms of cultural fusion, Indo-Chinese cuisine exists OTL so an actual GHBE cuisine is more achievable than that of the Combine
Also, re:Co-Prosperity Sphere comparisons, given the combination of proximity and Sino-Indic synthesis the immediate frontiers for expansion would be:
- The remainder of India
- Siam
- Nusantara
😂😂😂
Thanks! As a longtime lover of Double-Blind What Ifs and the mechanisms and interactions of AH ideologies the idea struck me and checked both boxes 😂
You'd need a code book to figure out what the national time zone is whenever you travel
In all seriousness, there was ample time before any Black Scare got started to come to an agreement on a standard, and despite Great Britain's much lower prestige than the UK attained I think Greenwich is still in the best position to be the datum on the basis of its pioneering status regarding precise naval charts. Could be Paris, though.
The most ironic scenario would be if the Societists had chosen their own meridian unbiased by the worldly motives of Third-Society gangs and then pulled the Combine out of an otherwise global consensus in order to implement it.
No, too obviously parochial. I'm thinking more like the Cayambe meridian, since "highest-elevation point on the equator" is not dependent on any specific culture.
Honestly, Greenwich seems good just for having such a small amount of land along the date line - if the Combine want to differ from that the other sensible option would be to have the date line down the Atlantic so the sun rises over Greenland and Brazil first and sets over Iceland and Guinea last.
Oddly, I think Timeline-L's crosstime researchers would ultimately find OTL ideologically reassuring. Stuff like the petrodollar, globalization, and European Union would freak them out. But look at it this way...
We, generally, would view the U.S. achieving superpower status due to a combination of vast natural resources, weak neighbors that couldn't threaten it, and more than a little good historical luck. But Timeline-L's researchers aren't gonna go, "Oh yes, European geopolitical heft partly declined because they lacked good access to oil, and the U.S. had a plentiful domestic supply that last long enough for them to establish a global trade empire." They're gonna go, "Everyone else in this timeline uses that infernal 'metric' system while the Americans stuck to their cultural heritage, and logically they were rewarded for it." I could see Timeline-L researchers trying to explain such a weird difference and, thanks to their ideology, going, "Ah yes, Washington's Farewell Address. The ENA's founders saw themselves as an extension of the Hanoverian Realms, but this Washington fellow had the diversitarian insight that the Novamund was a distinct sphere from Europe."
(Or if you want a grimmer example, the ENA kept lurching from one crisis to the next through its history, and ended up with a large peripheral puppet state (Carolina) annexed by a bold foreign gambit. A mix of written Constitutional laws and unwritten readings of those laws allowed the U.S. to reabsorb 'Carolina' like it was a large-scale version of Wales... Timeline-L researchers might see the failure of Reconstruction as a good thing, the "one neat trick" to keep 'Carolina' as a nation-within-a-nation. Outlaw slavery but functionally change very little! And the whole arrangement could hang together thanks to the cultural weight that Americans invested in their Constitution and Founding Fathers, which papered over the obvious ideological inconsistency in such a stance.)
In other words, the Timeline-L researchers could see globalization/Americanization not as an economic process but the logical -- if unfortunate -- consequence of there being only a single diversitarian Great Power. If you only have one color of the rainbow shining brightly, it'll tint the other colors with its sheer luminance.