"What Madness Is This?" Volume II: Prophecies in the Dark
- Thread starter Napoleon53
- Start date
The dream. I really, really, want Wendigoon to cover WMIT sometime. It would change my life.
Also putting this here for later so I don't forget this cursed concept: "The Prophet's Prayer Power Puppet Hour."
I feel like it can happen if sufficently enough people send him links to the TL
But i'm not sure the structure of the TL is simple to cover in video, I mean it is far from the elusives analog horror videos he has already covered
Tough it would be interresting to see how he'll react to the crazyness of American religion in WMIT, since he his a Christian himself
I could see it, it certainly seems to fall within his realms of interest.
The video itself would be a little outside of his usual wheelhouse since there's a lot to cover, but he's done multi-part long-format videos before.
To be fair he has shown great interest in the Mandela Catalog, which is literally where Jesus is replaced by Satan and God himself is murdered. WMIT is much goofier and less offensive that concept (not that I as a Christian am offended in the slightest by Mandela Catalog). Me and Wendi are about the same type of Christian, methinks.
It seems the degradation of the RU/NUSA Military and Officer class has begun, over-reliance on airpower to bomb guerrillas combined with a reluctance to follow up bombardment with any actual infantry advance will give the guerrillas breathing room and mobility advantages in the mountains and remaining jungles of the continent(1). I expect progress away from the coast and the Patagonian Plains to slow to a crawl in the coming decade.
Meanwhile the Holyfield Feudalism with Oil Baron Characteristics will, in my view, make the South American territories a glorified money machine that will ensnare more and more officers, until the idea of actually winning will be unpalatable as that will mean an end to the juicy resource monopolies.
In addition having a massive amount of the adult male population tied down in the forever war/ponzi scheme will continue to negatively affect the NUSA civilian economy. TTL's version of Feminism could just be a government initiative to fill massive gaps in various industries hidden under pinnacle generation propaganda.
(1) Essentially the guerrillas will eventually learn to take measures to avoid bombardment, such as tracking what times the bombings happen and constructing better tunnel systems and surface fortifications that will be more camouflaged and resilient to bombing. Since massed infantry assaults will be a no-go going forwards unless results are guaranteed there'll essentially be large stretches of the continent where guerrillas are free to construct (literal) underground states awaiting the day the Yankees slip up and emerge to massacre the coastal garrisons and colonial settlements.
I also imagine Eduist Theology to go completely off the rails with the collapse of the Church hierarchy and probable death of the Eduist Anti-Pope in Rio. Lots of folk Catholicism and Indigenous Religious practices being integrated into the increasingly loose canon.
Meanwhile the Holyfield Feudalism with Oil Baron Characteristics will, in my view, make the South American territories a glorified money machine that will ensnare more and more officers, until the idea of actually winning will be unpalatable as that will mean an end to the juicy resource monopolies.
In addition having a massive amount of the adult male population tied down in the forever war/ponzi scheme will continue to negatively affect the NUSA civilian economy. TTL's version of Feminism could just be a government initiative to fill massive gaps in various industries hidden under pinnacle generation propaganda.
(1) Essentially the guerrillas will eventually learn to take measures to avoid bombardment, such as tracking what times the bombings happen and constructing better tunnel systems and surface fortifications that will be more camouflaged and resilient to bombing. Since massed infantry assaults will be a no-go going forwards unless results are guaranteed there'll essentially be large stretches of the continent where guerrillas are free to construct (literal) underground states awaiting the day the Yankees slip up and emerge to massacre the coastal garrisons and colonial settlements.
I also imagine Eduist Theology to go completely off the rails with the collapse of the Church hierarchy and probable death of the Eduist Anti-Pope in Rio. Lots of folk Catholicism and Indigenous Religious practices being integrated into the increasingly loose canon.
I was not saying that WMIT would be that offensive for Wendigoon, just that the religious side of the TL can interest him, since he has done a number of videos on similars subjects (the Mandela catalog, Dante's Inferno and even the conspirationnist iceberg in a sense)
I hope your wish will be granted, perhaps send him a link to the discord ?
Eh, I wouldn't say the degradation would set in right away. The League of Nations update said that Oswald had decided to sanction American intervention into China in 1950. Plenty of time to train up new recruits and try out new tactics (the various Chinese factions all have experience from years of war and are being supplied by multitudes of foreign backers, so it won't be a curbstomp).
The Redemption Legions, local collaborators and company soldiers maybe used to dig people out. With this world you may have American citizens pay for hunting trips to the Zone to hunt the guerrillas.
The Discord has been put under useful links on the first post, as well as on the first post of Vol I. Vol I also has a new header letting readers know about the name change from Redux to Volume I, and how it is still going as of 2022. The collective 2018+ WMIT revival is now known as the WMIT Redux Trilogy.
I also hardlinked the wiki, something I desperately want to improve in the future.
I also hardlinked the wiki, something I desperately want to improve in the future.
IRL: Frequently Asked Questions
The feedback I get writing this TL is near overwhelmingly positive and supportive, but I figured I'd toss out my two cents to some common critiques. I'm threadmarking this for ease of reference later and because I tend to get a lot of the same questions over the years. In real life, I am the kind of guy to have a 2 am crisis of "What if I'm actually an awful, annoying person and everyone treats me normal to be nice," and I'm the same way with my writing in my digital life. This will be part Q&A and part rambling blog post about my thoughts on the timeline as a whole since its inception.
The Union has been an underdog for nearly half of its existence, and the spirit of national tribulation has moved like a shadow from one generation to another, determined to never again find itself being torched by invading armies. That much, at least, is sympathetic. From the time of its inception, the Old Republic had fallen due to corruption and in-fighting, crushing infant democracy in the cradle. They were treated as a useful tool but also as a backwater by France, and the Southron Republics laughed off their pleas for help when Canada was burning it to the ground. For the first half of the 19th century, the Union was brutally impoverish, its only real success being the bloody, eventual defeat of the Canadian invasion and the conquest of, uh, Vermont. Up until Lincoln and the Second Sons, America was a mere regional power in North America, with the South controlling the Mississippi. The story of Colonel Goodyear was a story of a man fighting for the rest of the world to recognize what his nation was possible of. But they treated it him, and the Union, like garbage. How many times has this story played out in real life, to horrifying results? Karl Marx himself said that the people of Imperial Russia were so whipped that it would be the last country on earth where a Communist revolution would happen. It was the first. How many countries united against the USA as we beat back and conquered tribe after tribe of Native Americans, including my own grandmother who was on the Trail of Tears? Sure, it wasn't as industrialized a slaughter as Mexico, but it was a slaughter, and the near-cultural extinction of Native ways of life that followed have only recently been under attack by any large amounts of people. Ho Chi Minh begged for Vietnam's freedom in Versailles after WWI, eventually becoming a Communist leader that shaped history decades later in insane ways. The German government begged for easier terms there, as well, the deaf ears that greeted them eventually leading (though not singularly) to the rise of Hitler. Saddam Hussein, or as his mother called him in the womb "Satan," was a blood-thirsty madman, low-skill assassin and hitman that many laughed off or discounted before he rose to lead the Ba'ath Party. Before the outbreak of WWII, Germany was an obvious threat that only a fool would fail to immediately take action against... oh, never mind. Clear and present dangers have presented themselves time and time again, throughout history, to be met with a chorus of crickets.
After the Great American War, the Union became the largest power in the hemisphere, although not the only one. And after Lincoln's assassination, the Union faced decades of poor to middling leadership and economic stagnation and depression. By the time of Custer and the MDP, things were bound to come to a head, one way or another. The cult of AFC has now had two generations to slowly push its agenda on the rest of the country. For its part, Mexico was an unstable North American dictatorship, one of several, and the world honestly had other things to worry about than a possible Union invasion of it. No Frenchman in the late 1800s was ready, ITTL, to go defend Mexicans that hated them and their Spanish kin, nor would they stand much to gain by a full invasion of their own. They already colonized much of South America, India, and Africa. They don't need another war. Plus, the Napoleons of that time weren't exactly... the best. Most of the GAR invading Mexico fought battles, pillaged, and looted. The mass-scale atrocities were conducted by ORRA, who are absolute cultist nutjobs on literal drugs. There is nothing really to compare this to from real history of the same era, with the possible exception of Belgian Congo. And while many, many European leaders raised questions or criticized Leopold's conduct, not once was the world going to unite and rescue a bunch of tribes in the middle of the deepest heart of Africa. It is realistic, even, as pathetic as it may be, that they don't take the moral high ground, for they all had skeletons in the closet, both ITTL and OTL. There is no social media, no internet, no phones, barely telegraphy, and the common man in Europe is much more concerned with what is going on in Eurasia than with the crazy Yankees across the pond. And following their conquest of Jerusalem, most Europans are going to think they are doing just fine.
As for the modern era (post Great World War), we haven't yet arrived at what OTL referred to as the Cold War Era. Saying "no one sees the threat of Steele and Oswald or the Union/NUSA!" upon reading everything written so far is the same thing as saying "no one saw the threat of Stalin or sought to truly unite against Communism!" because you read a history book written in 1946. You're in for a wild ride. Also, I deliberately haven't written many stories of the Manifest Climax frontline because I don't want to write first-person perspective literary war crime porn, and I keep it mostly vague, but the entire continent of South America not only united to oppose the looming threat of the Yankees, but also put aside their massive political differences and even attacked first, via their assault on Port Pierce, Cuba.
WMIT is what you make it. If you enjoy tongue-in-cheek dark comedy, or absolutely wild writing with lots of variety in style and content, you'll likely enjoy WMIT. As with anything, some people just won't like it, and that's totally okay. Although I like to imagine I please everyone with my writing, and the literal countless hours I have put into this timeline, I know some people won't care for it. And that's a-okay and completely understandable. So many people love to read A Song of Ice and Fire, but I just can't get through the first couple books. I don't know why, it's just not my style. Nothing against Martin nor disrespect to those who love it. I'm glad they do. But to say the fans basically circlejerk around WMIT or "how great my writing is" is not true. They are just people like any of us, and they enjoy my stories a great deal and like exploring the crazy world I have created. Many of them I am sure dislike some chapters or story decisions, and some say so. I even decanonized and rebooted Vol II because I wasn't satisfied.
Because you love WMIT, and this includes me, the creator, does not mean you are a bigot, weirdo, edgelord, or anything else. You're a fan of a fictional dystopian world. You're a fan of an openly comic book-esque, pulpy, grindhouse style of writing and alt-hist that is similar to many things but not quite any of them. If other timelines on this site are the Leo Di Caprio or Daniel Day Lewis of alt-hist/historical fic, I'm Nick Cage. And just like Nick Cage, I'm totally, absolutely thrilled to be Nick Cage. I'm not trying to be Di Caprio or Lewis. In fact, that would bore me. My approach to the Lovecraftian elements of the TL is the same: H.P. Lovecraft was the Nick Cage of classic literature and weird fiction. I call him my favorite author but I'd have to be a lunatic to think there aren't one million better authors or that his style of writing wasn't bombastically purple in its prose or ridiculous. That's why I love Lovecraft. It's spooky, but it's also pretty funny in a bizarre way.
WMIT's core concept was to create a world that is just, to put it simply, the w o r s t. And to do that without Hemingwaying myself (in Minecraft), because I could write a very realistic dystopia if I so wished, I need comedy. It's a comedy. It's a parody. It pulls a little from everything and every alt-hist, horror, and sci-fi trope. The most valuable creative advice I ever received was that there is no such thing as originality. The Heroes and Villains of One Thousand Faces have been reborn one billion times, and will be one billion times hence. The key to drawing in readers, keeping them, and even keeping yourself excited, is to create something that is an absolute frankenstein of every mythos that has come before. I take a little bit of everything from everywhere, and have incorporated ideas from sources as disparate as Dr. Strangelove, esoteric theology, Lovecraft, Star Wars, Warhammer, G.I. Joe, There Will Be Blood, conspiracy theories, corporate history (McDonalds, KFC, Walmart, etc) and even Shakespeare. I remix and turn on the Combobulator 9000 and end up with results like Oswald, Mr. Tobias, Tsar Viktor, Slog Thomas, and Holyfield. And that's what I do, and I tend to be proud of my results.
The most important thing to remember about WMIT, is that it's entirely fictional, not at all serious, and if anything it's a parody of wordy, professorial alt-hist that changes very little or takes few risks in the interest of "muh realism" that I, myself, don't particularly care for or find very interesting or stimulating (I'm super happy if you enjoy it, and it takes incredible skill and patience, it's just not my personal preference). Writing a long, winding manifesto on a guy named Slog who loves to eat weird meat, breeds and sells mice to a Carolinian megacorp that puts them in egg nog, and his son goes on to be the Press Secretary for an evil JFK who is married to President Stalin's daughter and rammed a marshal's baton down George Patton's throat is hysterically funny to me and almost hallucinogenic in its ridiculousness. Yet, somehow, some way, I have made it so that it is somewhat believable in this universe. It's a very fine line to walk and I don't always stick the landing, but most of the time I think the results are pure entertainment. It's the reason most of the fans love it. It's a macabre comic book funhouse mirror of history, with explicit and open plot armor because I am going to tell the story I first formulated over a decade ago in the best way that I know how. I was also a teenager when I created the core concepts of WMIT that remain today, and some of those were amateurish and edgy. Since 2018, when I first started the reboot, I knew I wanted to tell the story of Joe Steele, Chuck Oswald, and the innumerable lackeys and cronies of the Pinnacle Future in a more detailed, logical, and much more thought-out way and I had to get the story to that place one way or another. Here we are now! The main conflict and story is within the Union government. It's its own worst enemy. I have taken the pile of Lego bricks of concepts and characters that was 1.0, and now they are being built into the big set pictured on the box in my mind's eye.
Would I change things in retrospect even further? Maybe. I'd probably drop explicitly labeling the Union as "fascist," because even though they largely are and ITTL invent the term fascism due to their Rome fetish, they are much more. They are an oligarchy, a corporate state, a Christian Socialist theocracy, a Darwinist Extremist cultist caliphate.
The most common criticisms, including my own, of the 2012 continuity was the rapid conquest of South America and the Union turning on its black citizens during Oswald's reign. Those things will not and have not occurred in WMIT 2.0. Operation Manifest Climax, and its successor Enduring Climax, are parodies of the never-ending continual wars and money pits of the OTL West and its military industrial apparatus. If you are like me and grew up in the Bush years and barely remembers the pre-War on Terror 1990s at all, you can probably see where this is coming from. Not that all of those wars were entirely without merit or reason, but that's a discussion for another day and another place.
The point is that Manifest Climax is a meat grinder that will never end. There's no cakewalk, there's no grand parades through Rio, with bootlicking Infees praising their conquerors. There's an entire continent bombed to the stone age and still resisting with everything they have indefinitely despite a complete blockade from the rest of the world and their only way to resupply is what they already have or what they can loot from Union corpses, of which there are hundreds of thousands. And my decision to have blacks, Japanese, and Jews welcome citizens of the Union is a deliberate parody of real life racism, showing how abstract and stupid racism really is. It is not to show that those ethnicities/races are evil or excited to help the WASPS carry out global subjugation in the name of the Prophet Burr--that's absolutely ridiculous. It is suppose to show how racists often cheaply dodge hard questioning or reasoning in favor of accomplishing goals, no different than Japan being appointed with "honorary Aryan" status in OTL, despite the fact they clearly couldn't be farther from anything the Germans held up as racially superior, and the Allies turned around and were racist to the Japanese at home and abroad in the ultimate irony. And those who say that racial treatment of the Japanese, especially American citizens, was understandable in the time and place only further proves my point.
It is also to show how anyone can be racist, and it's not always black vs white or in America or Europe or what have you, it can be many, many combinations of people in infinite styles and degrees, from intolerant snickers as you pass someone on the street of Beijing, to a Spaniard regarding a Mexican as a mongrel, to a Southern man smoking a pipe and nailing "Colored Only" above his dollar store's second water fountain. Racism is stupid. As someone raised by a racist extremist father in the middle of nowehere West Virginia and as someone who eventually passionately regretted any evil traits or thoughts brainwashed into me, don't be racist, kids. It doesn't make any sense and you are an idiot. I was taught to be racist to people I never met and never even saw, and I will never stop being mad about it. The Union's population ITTL, in a way, is a mirror of how I was brought up. How many Yankees actually get to meet or have in-depth discussions with Infees? How many Yankees ITTL are comfortable in their lives and don't welcome any "stray thoughts" or guilt feelings, and deliberately repress them? How many Americans ITTL simply follow the crowd and do what the government and church says because their authority figures surely wouldn't lie. They were appointed by God, after all.
Speaking of Him, WMIT is NOT a condemnation nor disrespectful of any religion or faith. I, personally, am a moderately conservative, pushing libertarian, Christian. If you have watched Wendigoon on Youtube, I'm precisely what he is. I treat everyone with kindness and love, regardless of anything about their appearance or beliefs. IRL, I might swear around friends who don't mind, even the F-Bomb, but I refuse to say "Oh my God" or "Goddamn," unless I'm directly quoting someone, because I think it's actually forbidden by the Ten Commandments I try (and fail) to live by. But I do try. If I'm around friends or family that don't swear at all, neither do I. Know your audience and be respectful to others. Above all, I never try to be offensive to others for offensiveness' sake. That's lame, juvenile, and boring, and not what WMIT is.
The God of the Republican Union/NUSA is NOT the Christian God. If it exists ITTL, Jev is a diabolic demon acting as a mockery of God. Jev is God ITTL, but he is not Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, the Hindu Pantheon, or anything of the sort from OTL. Jev is the worst parts of man's worst cults and evils thrown into the Combobulator 9000. Jev is the Stanford Prison Experiment. Jev is the non-deity but sickening spirit of the Stalinist Soviet Union. Jev is the Feathered Serpent eating human hearts on the Aztec Pyramids. Jev is the Conquistadors that slew them. Jev is the terrorist flying his plane into a tower. Jev is the British soldier torturing an Irishman. Jev is an Irishman launching a molotov into a coffee shop. Jev is the Holocaust and the Holodomor. If you feel offended that Jev is making fun of your faith or is blasphemy, I gotta tell you you need to look at your religious views for a moment and ask "what went wrong?" And then hopefully seek therapy.
For those who might say, "Then WMIT says a lot about nothing because it's not calling out real views!"... you're wrong, and you're missing the black comedy I shoot for, and maybe that's my fault. But it's a timeline that is a parody of racism, religious and political extremism, and man's inhumanity to man since the dawn of time, all told with a heaping helping of comedy to make it palatable to write and read. The whole point is to show that man, if he is not careful, can be taught destructive and insane ideologies that eventually just become the norm, without using many untouched or unaltered OTL beliefs. The men and women of the Madnessverse are willing to not only fight and die, but send their children to die, for ideas that are not only insane, but sometimes outright farcical. Just like things like the Falklands War, Operation Just Cause, the Anglo-Zanzibar War, the innumerable wars of regional royal succession in the Middle Ages and such, it's tough to imagine being willing to risk a single hair on your head for things like the fucking Virginia-Carolinian War over Cuba ITTL, or the Yankee invasion of Vermont. But just like the bizarre wars of WMIT, there are people in OTL who answered the call to war because the talking heads of the day said it was necessary and proper, and altogether good that their prince should marry that princess over there for... Uh, reasons. And if that princess's serfs dislike it, we'll absolutely slaughter them to the last man. That'll teach 'em! Then we'll salt their fields! Yeah! And then we'll burn the Princess at the stake! Yeah! Alright! That'll really show- wait what were we invading for again? I dunno. I just like salting fields and was really feeling myself in this chainmail and codpiece.
And sometimes, just sometimes, I really am just spinning a yarn because I like to tell ridiculous, weird, or funny stories.
Am I a pessimistic person IRL? Yeah, a bit. Hard not to be. But it could always be worse. If anything, writing this TL makes me glad I live in the one we do, even if it does kind suck ass sometimes and some mornings when I read the news I gotta call "ASB" on God.
Overall, I hope readers who don't like certain aspects will approach WMIT like I approach the Disney Era of Star Wars. It's not all made for one generation or one specific type of fan. I try to do fresh, new things, and also sometimes use the nostalgia crutch of well-established characters. Sometimes my stories in this universe fall flat, sometimes they are mid, and sometimes they are epic, and I hope there is a little something for everyone to enjoy, because some people hate the stories others love and the same but reversed. And at the end of the day, unlike Disney's greed, I genuinely do this for fun, never push my Patreon, and am here for the express purpose of entertaining everyone for free. And most of all, I'm here to entertain myself. I look back at the last decade since I invented WMIT and smile. I am a much better author, scholar, and artistic mind because of this creative world-building project, and all the people who give me comments and advice along the way. And I dare to say I am a better person and worker because of the sheer work and dedication I have sunk into this. I hope, even if you can't stand the timeline, you'll at least know I'm trying my very best out here. At the end of the day, we all are here because of our love of history and science fiction, and WMIT is my love letter to both of those things.
The 2012 Continuity has about one million views. The Union Forever has two million views and counting. Prophecies in the Dark is going to hit half a million views in August, Jev-willing. Even the cancelled Vol II: Pinnacle Future has well over one hundred thousand views. I couldn't be more proud. And as someone whose dreams don't always pan out at all like I thought or hoped they would and as someone who struggles with anxiety and depression, this is the one area of my life where I am well and truly proud. And I'm proud to consider all you online weirdos my friends. I love you all.
God bless and good fortune,
Your Whacky Infee Friend Napo53
The Union goes unchecked by the rest of the world:
The Union has been an underdog for nearly half of its existence, and the spirit of national tribulation has moved like a shadow from one generation to another, determined to never again find itself being torched by invading armies. That much, at least, is sympathetic. From the time of its inception, the Old Republic had fallen due to corruption and in-fighting, crushing infant democracy in the cradle. They were treated as a useful tool but also as a backwater by France, and the Southron Republics laughed off their pleas for help when Canada was burning it to the ground. For the first half of the 19th century, the Union was brutally impoverish, its only real success being the bloody, eventual defeat of the Canadian invasion and the conquest of, uh, Vermont. Up until Lincoln and the Second Sons, America was a mere regional power in North America, with the South controlling the Mississippi. The story of Colonel Goodyear was a story of a man fighting for the rest of the world to recognize what his nation was possible of. But they treated it him, and the Union, like garbage. How many times has this story played out in real life, to horrifying results? Karl Marx himself said that the people of Imperial Russia were so whipped that it would be the last country on earth where a Communist revolution would happen. It was the first. How many countries united against the USA as we beat back and conquered tribe after tribe of Native Americans, including my own grandmother who was on the Trail of Tears? Sure, it wasn't as industrialized a slaughter as Mexico, but it was a slaughter, and the near-cultural extinction of Native ways of life that followed have only recently been under attack by any large amounts of people. Ho Chi Minh begged for Vietnam's freedom in Versailles after WWI, eventually becoming a Communist leader that shaped history decades later in insane ways. The German government begged for easier terms there, as well, the deaf ears that greeted them eventually leading (though not singularly) to the rise of Hitler. Saddam Hussein, or as his mother called him in the womb "Satan," was a blood-thirsty madman, low-skill assassin and hitman that many laughed off or discounted before he rose to lead the Ba'ath Party. Before the outbreak of WWII, Germany was an obvious threat that only a fool would fail to immediately take action against... oh, never mind. Clear and present dangers have presented themselves time and time again, throughout history, to be met with a chorus of crickets.
After the Great American War, the Union became the largest power in the hemisphere, although not the only one. And after Lincoln's assassination, the Union faced decades of poor to middling leadership and economic stagnation and depression. By the time of Custer and the MDP, things were bound to come to a head, one way or another. The cult of AFC has now had two generations to slowly push its agenda on the rest of the country. For its part, Mexico was an unstable North American dictatorship, one of several, and the world honestly had other things to worry about than a possible Union invasion of it. No Frenchman in the late 1800s was ready, ITTL, to go defend Mexicans that hated them and their Spanish kin, nor would they stand much to gain by a full invasion of their own. They already colonized much of South America, India, and Africa. They don't need another war. Plus, the Napoleons of that time weren't exactly... the best. Most of the GAR invading Mexico fought battles, pillaged, and looted. The mass-scale atrocities were conducted by ORRA, who are absolute cultist nutjobs on literal drugs. There is nothing really to compare this to from real history of the same era, with the possible exception of Belgian Congo. And while many, many European leaders raised questions or criticized Leopold's conduct, not once was the world going to unite and rescue a bunch of tribes in the middle of the deepest heart of Africa. It is realistic, even, as pathetic as it may be, that they don't take the moral high ground, for they all had skeletons in the closet, both ITTL and OTL. There is no social media, no internet, no phones, barely telegraphy, and the common man in Europe is much more concerned with what is going on in Eurasia than with the crazy Yankees across the pond. And following their conquest of Jerusalem, most Europans are going to think they are doing just fine.
As for the modern era (post Great World War), we haven't yet arrived at what OTL referred to as the Cold War Era. Saying "no one sees the threat of Steele and Oswald or the Union/NUSA!" upon reading everything written so far is the same thing as saying "no one saw the threat of Stalin or sought to truly unite against Communism!" because you read a history book written in 1946. You're in for a wild ride. Also, I deliberately haven't written many stories of the Manifest Climax frontline because I don't want to write first-person perspective literary war crime porn, and I keep it mostly vague, but the entire continent of South America not only united to oppose the looming threat of the Yankees, but also put aside their massive political differences and even attacked first, via their assault on Port Pierce, Cuba.
The readers make it out to be much better than it is or just love evil muhahas:
WMIT is what you make it. If you enjoy tongue-in-cheek dark comedy, or absolutely wild writing with lots of variety in style and content, you'll likely enjoy WMIT. As with anything, some people just won't like it, and that's totally okay. Although I like to imagine I please everyone with my writing, and the literal countless hours I have put into this timeline, I know some people won't care for it. And that's a-okay and completely understandable. So many people love to read A Song of Ice and Fire, but I just can't get through the first couple books. I don't know why, it's just not my style. Nothing against Martin nor disrespect to those who love it. I'm glad they do. But to say the fans basically circlejerk around WMIT or "how great my writing is" is not true. They are just people like any of us, and they enjoy my stories a great deal and like exploring the crazy world I have created. Many of them I am sure dislike some chapters or story decisions, and some say so. I even decanonized and rebooted Vol II because I wasn't satisfied.
Because you love WMIT, and this includes me, the creator, does not mean you are a bigot, weirdo, edgelord, or anything else. You're a fan of a fictional dystopian world. You're a fan of an openly comic book-esque, pulpy, grindhouse style of writing and alt-hist that is similar to many things but not quite any of them. If other timelines on this site are the Leo Di Caprio or Daniel Day Lewis of alt-hist/historical fic, I'm Nick Cage. And just like Nick Cage, I'm totally, absolutely thrilled to be Nick Cage. I'm not trying to be Di Caprio or Lewis. In fact, that would bore me. My approach to the Lovecraftian elements of the TL is the same: H.P. Lovecraft was the Nick Cage of classic literature and weird fiction. I call him my favorite author but I'd have to be a lunatic to think there aren't one million better authors or that his style of writing wasn't bombastically purple in its prose or ridiculous. That's why I love Lovecraft. It's spooky, but it's also pretty funny in a bizarre way.
WMIT's core concept was to create a world that is just, to put it simply, the w o r s t. And to do that without Hemingwaying myself (in Minecraft), because I could write a very realistic dystopia if I so wished, I need comedy. It's a comedy. It's a parody. It pulls a little from everything and every alt-hist, horror, and sci-fi trope. The most valuable creative advice I ever received was that there is no such thing as originality. The Heroes and Villains of One Thousand Faces have been reborn one billion times, and will be one billion times hence. The key to drawing in readers, keeping them, and even keeping yourself excited, is to create something that is an absolute frankenstein of every mythos that has come before. I take a little bit of everything from everywhere, and have incorporated ideas from sources as disparate as Dr. Strangelove, esoteric theology, Lovecraft, Star Wars, Warhammer, G.I. Joe, There Will Be Blood, conspiracy theories, corporate history (McDonalds, KFC, Walmart, etc) and even Shakespeare. I remix and turn on the Combobulator 9000 and end up with results like Oswald, Mr. Tobias, Tsar Viktor, Slog Thomas, and Holyfield. And that's what I do, and I tend to be proud of my results.
The most important thing to remember about WMIT, is that it's entirely fictional, not at all serious, and if anything it's a parody of wordy, professorial alt-hist that changes very little or takes few risks in the interest of "muh realism" that I, myself, don't particularly care for or find very interesting or stimulating (I'm super happy if you enjoy it, and it takes incredible skill and patience, it's just not my personal preference). Writing a long, winding manifesto on a guy named Slog who loves to eat weird meat, breeds and sells mice to a Carolinian megacorp that puts them in egg nog, and his son goes on to be the Press Secretary for an evil JFK who is married to President Stalin's daughter and rammed a marshal's baton down George Patton's throat is hysterically funny to me and almost hallucinogenic in its ridiculousness. Yet, somehow, some way, I have made it so that it is somewhat believable in this universe. It's a very fine line to walk and I don't always stick the landing, but most of the time I think the results are pure entertainment. It's the reason most of the fans love it. It's a macabre comic book funhouse mirror of history, with explicit and open plot armor because I am going to tell the story I first formulated over a decade ago in the best way that I know how. I was also a teenager when I created the core concepts of WMIT that remain today, and some of those were amateurish and edgy. Since 2018, when I first started the reboot, I knew I wanted to tell the story of Joe Steele, Chuck Oswald, and the innumerable lackeys and cronies of the Pinnacle Future in a more detailed, logical, and much more thought-out way and I had to get the story to that place one way or another. Here we are now! The main conflict and story is within the Union government. It's its own worst enemy. I have taken the pile of Lego bricks of concepts and characters that was 1.0, and now they are being built into the big set pictured on the box in my mind's eye.
Outdated or incorrect assumptions:
Would I change things in retrospect even further? Maybe. I'd probably drop explicitly labeling the Union as "fascist," because even though they largely are and ITTL invent the term fascism due to their Rome fetish, they are much more. They are an oligarchy, a corporate state, a Christian Socialist theocracy, a Darwinist Extremist cultist caliphate.
The most common criticisms, including my own, of the 2012 continuity was the rapid conquest of South America and the Union turning on its black citizens during Oswald's reign. Those things will not and have not occurred in WMIT 2.0. Operation Manifest Climax, and its successor Enduring Climax, are parodies of the never-ending continual wars and money pits of the OTL West and its military industrial apparatus. If you are like me and grew up in the Bush years and barely remembers the pre-War on Terror 1990s at all, you can probably see where this is coming from. Not that all of those wars were entirely without merit or reason, but that's a discussion for another day and another place.
The point is that Manifest Climax is a meat grinder that will never end. There's no cakewalk, there's no grand parades through Rio, with bootlicking Infees praising their conquerors. There's an entire continent bombed to the stone age and still resisting with everything they have indefinitely despite a complete blockade from the rest of the world and their only way to resupply is what they already have or what they can loot from Union corpses, of which there are hundreds of thousands. And my decision to have blacks, Japanese, and Jews welcome citizens of the Union is a deliberate parody of real life racism, showing how abstract and stupid racism really is. It is not to show that those ethnicities/races are evil or excited to help the WASPS carry out global subjugation in the name of the Prophet Burr--that's absolutely ridiculous. It is suppose to show how racists often cheaply dodge hard questioning or reasoning in favor of accomplishing goals, no different than Japan being appointed with "honorary Aryan" status in OTL, despite the fact they clearly couldn't be farther from anything the Germans held up as racially superior, and the Allies turned around and were racist to the Japanese at home and abroad in the ultimate irony. And those who say that racial treatment of the Japanese, especially American citizens, was understandable in the time and place only further proves my point.
It is also to show how anyone can be racist, and it's not always black vs white or in America or Europe or what have you, it can be many, many combinations of people in infinite styles and degrees, from intolerant snickers as you pass someone on the street of Beijing, to a Spaniard regarding a Mexican as a mongrel, to a Southern man smoking a pipe and nailing "Colored Only" above his dollar store's second water fountain. Racism is stupid. As someone raised by a racist extremist father in the middle of nowehere West Virginia and as someone who eventually passionately regretted any evil traits or thoughts brainwashed into me, don't be racist, kids. It doesn't make any sense and you are an idiot. I was taught to be racist to people I never met and never even saw, and I will never stop being mad about it. The Union's population ITTL, in a way, is a mirror of how I was brought up. How many Yankees actually get to meet or have in-depth discussions with Infees? How many Yankees ITTL are comfortable in their lives and don't welcome any "stray thoughts" or guilt feelings, and deliberately repress them? How many Americans ITTL simply follow the crowd and do what the government and church says because their authority figures surely wouldn't lie. They were appointed by God, after all.
Speaking of Him, WMIT is NOT a condemnation nor disrespectful of any religion or faith. I, personally, am a moderately conservative, pushing libertarian, Christian. If you have watched Wendigoon on Youtube, I'm precisely what he is. I treat everyone with kindness and love, regardless of anything about their appearance or beliefs. IRL, I might swear around friends who don't mind, even the F-Bomb, but I refuse to say "Oh my God" or "Goddamn," unless I'm directly quoting someone, because I think it's actually forbidden by the Ten Commandments I try (and fail) to live by. But I do try. If I'm around friends or family that don't swear at all, neither do I. Know your audience and be respectful to others. Above all, I never try to be offensive to others for offensiveness' sake. That's lame, juvenile, and boring, and not what WMIT is.
The God of the Republican Union/NUSA is NOT the Christian God. If it exists ITTL, Jev is a diabolic demon acting as a mockery of God. Jev is God ITTL, but he is not Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, the Hindu Pantheon, or anything of the sort from OTL. Jev is the worst parts of man's worst cults and evils thrown into the Combobulator 9000. Jev is the Stanford Prison Experiment. Jev is the non-deity but sickening spirit of the Stalinist Soviet Union. Jev is the Feathered Serpent eating human hearts on the Aztec Pyramids. Jev is the Conquistadors that slew them. Jev is the terrorist flying his plane into a tower. Jev is the British soldier torturing an Irishman. Jev is an Irishman launching a molotov into a coffee shop. Jev is the Holocaust and the Holodomor. If you feel offended that Jev is making fun of your faith or is blasphemy, I gotta tell you you need to look at your religious views for a moment and ask "what went wrong?" And then hopefully seek therapy.
For those who might say, "Then WMIT says a lot about nothing because it's not calling out real views!"... you're wrong, and you're missing the black comedy I shoot for, and maybe that's my fault. But it's a timeline that is a parody of racism, religious and political extremism, and man's inhumanity to man since the dawn of time, all told with a heaping helping of comedy to make it palatable to write and read. The whole point is to show that man, if he is not careful, can be taught destructive and insane ideologies that eventually just become the norm, without using many untouched or unaltered OTL beliefs. The men and women of the Madnessverse are willing to not only fight and die, but send their children to die, for ideas that are not only insane, but sometimes outright farcical. Just like things like the Falklands War, Operation Just Cause, the Anglo-Zanzibar War, the innumerable wars of regional royal succession in the Middle Ages and such, it's tough to imagine being willing to risk a single hair on your head for things like the fucking Virginia-Carolinian War over Cuba ITTL, or the Yankee invasion of Vermont. But just like the bizarre wars of WMIT, there are people in OTL who answered the call to war because the talking heads of the day said it was necessary and proper, and altogether good that their prince should marry that princess over there for... Uh, reasons. And if that princess's serfs dislike it, we'll absolutely slaughter them to the last man. That'll teach 'em! Then we'll salt their fields! Yeah! And then we'll burn the Princess at the stake! Yeah! Alright! That'll really show- wait what were we invading for again? I dunno. I just like salting fields and was really feeling myself in this chainmail and codpiece.
And sometimes, just sometimes, I really am just spinning a yarn because I like to tell ridiculous, weird, or funny stories.
Am I a pessimistic person IRL? Yeah, a bit. Hard not to be. But it could always be worse. If anything, writing this TL makes me glad I live in the one we do, even if it does kind suck ass sometimes and some mornings when I read the news I gotta call "ASB" on God.
Conclusion:
Overall, I hope readers who don't like certain aspects will approach WMIT like I approach the Disney Era of Star Wars. It's not all made for one generation or one specific type of fan. I try to do fresh, new things, and also sometimes use the nostalgia crutch of well-established characters. Sometimes my stories in this universe fall flat, sometimes they are mid, and sometimes they are epic, and I hope there is a little something for everyone to enjoy, because some people hate the stories others love and the same but reversed. And at the end of the day, unlike Disney's greed, I genuinely do this for fun, never push my Patreon, and am here for the express purpose of entertaining everyone for free. And most of all, I'm here to entertain myself. I look back at the last decade since I invented WMIT and smile. I am a much better author, scholar, and artistic mind because of this creative world-building project, and all the people who give me comments and advice along the way. And I dare to say I am a better person and worker because of the sheer work and dedication I have sunk into this. I hope, even if you can't stand the timeline, you'll at least know I'm trying my very best out here. At the end of the day, we all are here because of our love of history and science fiction, and WMIT is my love letter to both of those things.
The 2012 Continuity has about one million views. The Union Forever has two million views and counting. Prophecies in the Dark is going to hit half a million views in August, Jev-willing. Even the cancelled Vol II: Pinnacle Future has well over one hundred thousand views. I couldn't be more proud. And as someone whose dreams don't always pan out at all like I thought or hoped they would and as someone who struggles with anxiety and depression, this is the one area of my life where I am well and truly proud. And I'm proud to consider all you online weirdos my friends. I love you all.
God bless and good fortune,
Your Whacky Infee Friend Napo53
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"Pulpy" and "comic-book-y" is a good way to describe how this feels viscerally different from other dystopias that are uncomfortable to read despite ostensibly not being that different in terms of what actually happens...
And I like Nick Cage; his movies may not always be great films, but his performances have never failed to entertain the hell outta me.
The Weird Al to Turtledove's <insert musician who has their head so far up their own pretentious ass it's not even funny here>?
That's surprisingly similar to Warhammer 40,000.
The God-Emperor is interned on the Golden Throne (and is reduced to a skeleton) and is stuck there because he was mortally injured by his former favored son Horus (and his other favored son Sanguinius died because of Horus). Then again, What Madness Is This in general seems similar to Warhammer 40,000 (grimdark alternate future/alternate past in WMIT's case; oppressive religion; there is only war; etc.) that's often played for black comedy (and is more fun that way). It's big, it's grim, it's sometimes implausible, but we like it because it's all those things.
WMiT is better than 40K IMHO; 40K takes itself way too seriously, so most of the humor is unintentionally a result of the grimderp.