My theory is that it is due to a combination of prejudice, propaganda, and the desire to project the defects of one's own nation onto another. Not surprisingly, the much later racial attitudes of the British Empire and the United States are projected onto Spain in many cases. As well as the "perceived need" that someone has to play "evil country". And if you're writing England (therefore England can't be the evil country), but Germany does not exist, the focus is to try to befriend France, the Ottoman cannot be used because of Islamophobia, and Russia is irrelevant, only Spain remains.
What is a common thing or trope that always seem to happen?
- Thread starter Viking25
- Start date
Honestly...why can't England be written as the evil country and narrator at the same time?
But is an evil country even needed? I mean, there should be other conflict fuels.
Because people only like to do that when the point of the story is to see how ridiculously evil they can make the country.
Which leads the authors to ignore that according to their beloved balance of power theory, ALL the other neighbors should be horribly scared of that genocidal, militaristic, Nazi neighbor who won't stop screaming about how much he wants to massacre them all. And, of course, they should be trying to organize coalitions to destroy that existential threat, or failing that, contain it.
But that doesn't happen because what fun would it be to write the evil country if you can't massacre the whole world without getting any negative consequences from it.
In reality, in many cases what we see is that the strength, power, and wealth of the wicked country is DIRECTLY proportional to the extent and severity of their wicked deeds.
And of course there could and should be other forms of conflict. The problem is that it seems that fighting for pure strategic interests is ugly, so people resort to the opposing country desperately trying to outdo Hitler in evil. That way they can justify that you MUST GO to war because, of course, entry is more than justified because "we have to keep that evil country in check."
*a civil war waged between islamists vs British colonial administration
In terms of wanks, it would make sense to have a table of common invasion routes and areas that are likely to be annexed to countries of relatively large population/area. For example, Iran ruling Iraq and the east coast of Saudi Arabia makes sense due to logistics and population (and history as recently as the ilkhanate), which could then be used as a template for say, Russian rule of all of the above mentioned areas based on Russian comparative strength relative to Iran.
Seriously, not even talking about my own TL
Horus Triumphant and The Realm of Millions of Years are waaaay too good
Horus Triumphant and The Realm of Millions of Years are waaaay too good
B_Munro has an Embiggen the nations series which is pretty good: https://www.deviantart.com/quantumbranching/gallery/77898457/embiggen-the-nations
this exists due to a mixture of things. The first is that the stories are told from the English/US view of the world (our enemies are evil and we are the good guys , all that stuff.) The second is religion Catholicism vs Protestantism (with Protestantism seen as superior). The third is the European view with iberia, as napoleao and louis xiv said "europe ends at the pyrenees". Iberia was seen as a mixture of Catholics and Muslims, a bastard child so to speak. The fact that this child divided the world and managed to hold the biggest European powers despite its low population or importance caused a lot of bitterness (post charlamane, with basically france, italy and germany being the most important and england sort of being part of france). Portugal for example in the midst of its biggest crisis was able to hold the dutch and bankrupt the dutch west indies company, was the nation that broke Islamic control of the sea of india etc.
this comes from a romanticism of the idea of andalus. Andalus did not get along with anyone (it was considered hedonistic by the other Islamic powers, and heretics by the European powers), it had a severe ethnic division (Moors and Muslim Iberians hated each other, with Iberian Christians and Muslims allying against the Moors several times. With the Arabs staying on top and doing little to solve these problems). Andalus was tolerant for a single period (from the Umayyad conquest to the first period of the taifas, after that it was controlled by fanatics who managed to radicalize the Iberian Christians.) A colonization of the new world by andalus will be similar to the colonization made by Portugal. The Iberian view of blacks comes in part from the Arabs, with blacks being seen as the sinners (and black skin representing this). In relation to science the nation was indeed a giant. Being the only place in the Islamic world that did not have a great strength of reactionaries (In the rest of the Islamic world reactionaries won over liberals). Algazali's work The Inconsistency of the Philosophers was only challenged in Iberia with a book called The Incoherence of Incoherence written by the Andalusian Muslim Averroes. The author defended the use of Aristotelian philosophy within Islamic thought, trying to create a harmony between faith and philosophy/ science.
In otl the ottoman ships took slaves as far as iceland, if andalus survives and is a strong nation. Europe will have a lot of raids after slaves (especially ireland, great britain and scandinavia. but other regions like italy and france will suffer too)
Last edited:
It bears noting that a number of timelines actually do have other conflict fuels. I'm not sure how common "X country is evil and must be fought because it's evil." - not just any given nation claiming that (because who has said "We're fighting X because we're the baddies."?), but I have not read as many that are strongly Some Countries Good/Author Favorites, some Evil/Author Unfavorites as some people here seem to have.
Last edited:
Oh that TL! One of my favourites back in the day! Never quite managed to finish it but its definitely one of the best timelines on here!
Look to the West
Read it here, here, here, here,here,here and here. Look to the West, written by Thomas "Thande" Anderson, is one of the longest-running and acclaimed alternate timelines on AlternateHistory.com, a site dedicated, unsurprisingly, to Alternate …
tvtropes.org
The longer you wait the longer it gets 😂 it's on something like Volume 8 now.Oh that TL! One of my favourites back in the day! Never quite managed to finish it but its definitely one of the best timelines on here!
Look to the West
Read it here, here, here, here,here,here and here. Look to the West, written by Thomas "Thande" Anderson, is one of the longest-running and acclaimed alternate timelines on AlternateHistory.com, a site dedicated, unsurprisingly, to Alternate …
Oh that TL! One of my favourites back in the day! Never quite managed to finish it but its definitely one of the best timelines on here!
Look to the West
Read it here, here, here, here,here,here and here. Look to the West, written by Thomas "Thande" Anderson, is one of the longest-running and acclaimed alternate timelines on AlternateHistory.com, a site dedicated, unsurprisingly, to Alternate …
I read about it but forgot.
This a mostly random thing but in most 2000s TL' s I've read, it seems that American Airlines Flight 587 is a multiversal constant, when in all reality is probably one of if not the easiest accident to butterfly away