Pop-culture in TL-191

David bar Elias

I think that the ultimately the superhero genre would evolve differently in the US in TTL.

US comics would no doubt develop assorted heroes early on, some of whom might be analogous to OTL characters. Yet like everything else, the comics medium would be shaped by a very different culture, which itself is shaped by a very different national US experience:

-The destructiveness of two Great Wars waged across North America, the second of which begins with a sneak Confederate attack.

-The horrors perpetrated by the Featherston regime, including the Destruction.

-The use of nuclear weapons in both North America and Europe at the end of the SGW.

I feel that the superhero genre, as it develops postwar in the US, would be less optimistic than in our world. Hypothetically, the lack of an analogue to the Comics Code Authority - along with a more openly left-wing US culture, might open the door for more social commentary. For an idea of the resulting movie landscape, you might have more movies, in the US, at least, like Joker or Chronicle or Brightburn, instead of anything like our world’s MCU. For that matter, this world might not go in the overall general direction of larger and larger franchises as occurred in OTL.
 

DanielXie

Ok so I've drawn up a basic idea for a hypothetical New Order mod using TL 191 as a basis using Fill in the Gaps and the HOI4 mod

  • PoD ties into the socialists reforms in the US leading to political chaos
  • CSA somehow develops the Superbomb early
  • North America fragmented into warlordism after the CSA wins
  • Japan is defeated by the Entente after they backstab them and CSA is somehow involved(maybe Japan attacks the CSA somehow)
  • Germany wins the western front and defeats France, but conventionally. They are pushed to signing a peace with honor with Britain and Russia however, somehow
  • In Germany, the Yockeys expy is led by the Strasser brothers(Just so I can use Strasserism!)
  • Russia is to some extent the Imperial Japan expy, controlling satellites in Central and East Asia, and the Great Asian war is China against Russia, not Japan.
  • Iberia is mostly unchanged since Spanish civil war still happens, but between Monarchists and Falangists, so maybe one of the rebels are monarchists when the collapse happens
  • Mexico at one point falls into political chaos tied to the events of the mod, CSA intervenes and sets up alt-Burgundy
  • The omnicidal mastermind in alt-Burgundy is someone who was a really ultra racist from the real world or an OTL Klansman. I don't really see Koenig or Plinkard as a suitable Himmler expy(yeah I'm not going full parallelism here, especially since a lot of the Freedom party figures were born in the 1880s and would be too old for a mod set in 1960s)
  • Not sure who are the analogues for the Confederate civil war, but I'm thinking of George Wallace be the reformer, echoing his OTL "redemption" or mellowing out. Maybe Goldman will be the status quo candiate and Nathan Bedford Forrest III lead the militarists as their figurehead, with Lemay as the power behind them. Heydrich expy will be someone that did not feature in the books(Plinkard is too old to be the heydrich expy, but it could maybe work given that it would be 1-2 years before armageddon).
 
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oshron

oshron

Soundwave3591 said:
IIRC Clarence Potter mused on CSA Superhero "Ultraman" in contrast to "Superman" and mentioned that the CSA hero had wrecked NYC, Philly and other US cities.
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you're probably thinking of Hyperman--Ultraman is a DC character IOTL, a supervillain counterpart to Supes from another universe with the basic "inverted morality" premise (he leads the Crime Syndicate of Amerika--yes, actually spelled with a K--against a heroic Lex Luthor and the Justice Underground. that's the ultra-simplified version of it, at least.)
 

Soundwave3591

1595617322346.png

US Military vehicles mocked up as Confederate Barrels "Invade" Sandusky in the film "Blackbeard" (1970)
The Film was middling at the box office, and receives criticism for its reliance on hindsight, as there are at times ham-fisted representations of the CSA's belief that they have cowed the US with the operation, while the US characters act as though the CSA was allowed to "stick its neck out" and were planning to "cut the head off" all along in the CSA's subsequent Operation Coalscuttle.
On the other hand, the movie received some praise for its more realistic depiction of the war, in particular taking time to give attention to the suffering of the civilian population.

Is_Paris_Burning-Tank-7.jpg

Confederate "Mark 3" Barrels made from US Mk 9 light barrels, as seen in "Pittsburgh" (1973)

By Contrast, the 1973 Drama "Pittsburgh" was a smash hit at the box office, albeit one that also held controversy for its presentation of the suffering of Confederate troops in the surrounded city. The film was one of many films criticized in the 21st century for upholding the "Innocent Johnny" mythology popularized by Confederate veterans, where the crimes of the regime were placed at the feet of Featherston, his inner circle and the Freedom Party Guards rather than blamed on the average Confederate soldier and citizen.
 

Nivek

weaverj said:
Do you think the Second Great War would be as Iconic to American culture as the Civil War and Revolution are OTL?
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Even More than those, specially as War of Secession was a fiasco ITTL, and both wars were on home soil, if anything that is the apex of USA ITTL
 
Marklin

Marklin

S. Marlowski said:
340.jpg

I've been wondering what ITTL's version of this meme would be like?
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How people think SGW was: Shows a Knight with a Union Flag dueling a Knight with a Freedomite Flag

How it really was: Zooms out to show a Knight with a German Flag fighting off a Knight with a French Flag on one side and a Knight with a Russian Flag on the other with a Knight with a British flag chilling behind the French Knight (Like the British T Rex behind the American one in the image above). And then you have a Japanese Samurai in the corner.
 

KazuyaProta

Something that I thought is if the future Migrants Crisis would/could have a very different framing that ours ITTL.
I can imagine future minority ethnic groups, especially those in vulnerable situations being very worried at sudden arrivals of migrants in this world. Remember that this is a world where Fetherstone commited genocide with the explicit intention to replacing the dead population with migrants.
I already can see some worried minorities becoming aware of this and well, the relations between "native" minorities and migrants in the future would be interesting.
 

Soundwave3591

KazuyaProta said:
Something that I thought is if the future Migrants Crisis would/could have a very different framing that ours ITTL.
I can imagine future minority ethnic groups, especially those in vulnerable situations being very worried at sudden arrivals of migrants in this world. Remember that this is a world where Fetherstone commited genocide with the explicit intention to replacing the dead population with migrants.
I already can see some worried minorities becoming aware of this and well, the relations between "native" minorities and migrants in the future would be interesting.
Click to expand...
I would imagine the Mexican population in the former CSA would be especially worried about retribution from the surviving black population. On the other hand, the US was already heavily leveraged towards immigration, so perhaps the two mindsets might cancel each other out, in North America at least.
 

KazuyaProta

Soundwave3591 said:
I would imagine the Mexican population in the former CSA would be especially worried about retribution from the surviving black population. On the other hand, the US was already heavily leveraged towards immigration, so perhaps the two mindsets might cancel each other out, in North America at least.
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American pro immigration mindset could actually make it worse.
The jokes about how American settlers were migrants? They would be actual arguments about how American pro migrant attitudes are comorbid with genocidal tendencies.
Imagine things like "Americans called migrants to kill the Natives, Confederates called migrants to kill the blacks, why do you think they want migrants now?"
I already can imagine seeing the Native American genocides as a sort of "prelude" of the Population Reduction.
 
InfernoMole

InfernoMole

...this is more of a thought experiment than anything, but maybe there's a Turtledove expy who writes a series of books, spanning multiple decades from the 1860s to the 1940s, where the Confederate States of America - owing to the War of Secession ending later than in TL-191 - is in a far weaker position, with their largely agrarian economy crippled by an overreliance on cotton and a tense political situation, and ultimately end up becoming dependent on outside powers: Britain, France and, most of all, the resurgent Second Mexican Empire, who end up buying parts of the Confederate West and generally making Dixie their junior partner. This is not lost on the United States, whose revanchism becomes tinted with anti-imperialism and virulent Hispanophobia (or, in more extreme cases, stringent anti-Papism). The standoff between the United States and the Second Mexican Empire dominates New World geopolitics from then on, with the two practically diametrically opposed powers battling for influence in the impoverished South, Central America with its various proposed shipping routes, the Caribbean and South America, with the Empire of Brazil falling to a pro-Mexican coup d'etat with Confederate bayonets. Of course, by the beginning of the 21st century the Empire and the United States are looking for allies elsewhere, with some European powers becoming more keen on allying with the ardently Republican power...

The unofficial title is, of course, Remember the Alamo. :p

I apologize if a similar proposal came up already in this thread, but I couldn't help but make one nonetheless.
 
pattontank12

pattontank12

KazuyaProta said:
American pro immigration mindset could actually make it worse.
The jokes about how American settlers were migrants? They would be actual arguments about how American pro migrant attitudes are comorbid with genocidal tendencies.
Imagine things like "Americans called migrants to kill the Natives, Confederates called migrants to kill the blacks, why do you think they want migrants now?"
I already can imagine seeing the Native American genocides as a sort of "prelude" of the Population Reduction.
Click to expand...
I always pictured that after SGW the United States deported a lot of border state Confederates, suspected rebel Canadians and Mormorns to either overseas territories or far northern Canada (which wouldn't have the best living conditions.) Replacing them Eastern-Central European's and United States war veterans via land grants and tax incentives.
 
Allochronian

Allochronian

KazuyaProta said:
Something that I thought is if the future Migrants Crisis would/could have a very different framing that ours ITTL.
I can imagine future minority ethnic groups, especially those in vulnerable situations being very worried at sudden arrivals of migrants in this world. Remember that this is a world where Fetherstone commited genocide with the explicit intention to replacing the dead population with migrants.
I already can see some worried minorities becoming aware of this and well, the relations between "native" minorities and migrants in the future would be interesting.
Click to expand...

KazuyaProta said:
American pro immigration mindset could actually make it worse.
The jokes about how American settlers were migrants? They would be actual arguments about how American pro migrant attitudes are comorbid with genocidal tendencies.
Imagine things like "Americans called migrants to kill the Natives, Confederates called migrants to kill the blacks, why do you think they want migrants now?"
I already can imagine seeing the Native American genocides as a sort of "prelude" of the Population Reduction.
Click to expand...

That’s actually a good question that I haven’t given much thought on.

All that has happened in the North America during SGW related to immigration and the Devastation would probably lead to a type of Great Replacement Theory becoming more credible.

However, I think immigration would still occur since I tend to imagine that the U.S. government would try to frame it as both a moral duty and a way to gain American loyalty from oppressed people trying to escape German and Japanese spheres of influence.

If anything, I do see anti-immigrant sentiment being somewhat mainstream and viewed with skepticism in some circumstances, not for racist or nativist reasons, but as a knee-jerk response to prevent “Cultural Genocide” based on the Devastation as a horrifying precedent.
 
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KazuyaProta

Allochronian said:
If anything, I do see anti-immigrant sentiment being somewhat mainstream and viewed with skepticism in some circumstances, not for racist or nativist reasons, but as a knee-jerk response to prevent “Cultural Genocide” based on the Devastation as a horrifying precedent.
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Same, that's my point.
 
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