Worst Written Alternate Timelines In Media
- Thread starter Rosswash3r3
- Start date
-
- Tags
- bad worst timlines
“In real life”
The clean Wehrmacht should belong here but the monumental reveal in season 3 demonstrated that the show runners understood writing
For how not to do this: settler societies. Despite calls for change, the original storyline is intact. Sometimes with the ugly “no genocide, but here’s our excuse” ‘dying-race’ arc. Australia I’m looking at you. You managed to write yourself out of that ANZAC myth hole: the poor writing here is just pathetic.
The clean Wehrmacht should belong here but the monumental reveal in season 3 demonstrated that the show runners understood writing
neither the Wehrmacht nor ordinary Germans were clean, it was earth all along
The Freedoms Rangers series of books by Keith Andrews. The first book is actually pretty well written and thought out and I enjoyed it a fair amount. The sequels to it as the series progress get worse and worse as well as much shorter leading to a rushing of very implausible leaps of logic and even plot. Even taking into account that there are time machines involved, it gets very weird and hard to follow pretty fast as the first book was a fairly serious novel and it digresses into snarky over simplified novellas.
To quote the Zero Punctuation review of that game: ‘Guys, if you want the villain to be China, make the villain China’.
Everything about this, so much wasted potential.
en.wikipedia.org
Konpeki no Kantai - Wikipedia
Another one that I haven't read, but have seen a summary of is Joe Steele by Turtledove. It basically makes it so that Stalin was always going to turn out evil. If Stalin had been born in California like in this story he'd be completely different. Even if he did have traits that would make him a crappy person its not like he'd become evil dictator president. There were lots of directions to go. Hell, you read about Stalin's early days in the communist party and he sounds more like a mob boss than a politician. That'd be a fun alternate history. Stalin as a gangster in the 20's. Heck, have all the world war two dictators end up in the US where Stalin is a criminal, Hitler is an architecht and Mussolini is an actor or something fun like that.
Viola
Banned
Nobody does.
North Korea however is a decent expy for China, with the benefit of not angering China by portraying them as bad guys.
Deleted member 94680
The majority of Turtledove’s stories are cut and pastes of real history with the identities changed to suit his story.
“Wizard of what if”? More like “master of ctrl-c, ctrl-v”
There was a great thread going a couple months back on Stalin-as-mobster in the US
I think Mussolini would go back to being an editor and publisher, later branching into radio and television and creating an early multimedia conglomerate... (MTV - Mussolini Television?
)
Most of TL-191, but in particular American Empire and Settling Accounts. Not because they're irredeemable drek, but because they're just so fucking disappointing.
Pretty much everything by Robert Conroy is thinly sketched "I want the US to fight the Nazis alone, the Nazis start off with a few wins to look scary, then GLORIOUS 'MURICA single-handedly saves the day!!!" nationalist masturbation. Even when the enemy is Imperial Germany, Conroy always contrives to make them Nazis before the end of the book.
Pretty much everything by Robert Conroy is thinly sketched "I want the US to fight the Nazis alone, the Nazis start off with a few wins to look scary, then GLORIOUS 'MURICA single-handedly saves the day!!!" nationalist masturbation. Even when the enemy is Imperial Germany, Conroy always contrives to make them Nazis before the end of the book.
Oh is that the one where Ironclads cross the Atlantic (without sinking) and trounce the 'wooden hulled' RN repeatedly
Every land battle is won because of Gatling guns (I guess the Royal Artillery Regiment had taken the war off)
Harrison went the Hollywood route - don't let historical facts get in the way of a story
Deleted member 94680
My favourite part of it all is the original premise. The confederates manage to get the British into the War (richmond’s wet dream) and then abandon it all because of what is essentially a friendly-fire incident?
Oh we have made a navigational blunder and attacked the wrong city - oh well lets sack it anyway - insert monocle, twist moustache, make evil laugh
His other books were good - this trilogy was just appallingly bad.
Deleted member 94680
Even then, at the price of British intervention, you’d bite your lip and make only the most formal of protests (whilst planning to arrange damages after the War) to ensure the British stay on your side, surely?
The whole sacking the city and world’s premier navy ‘getting lost’ is the usual American casual anti-British nonsense, but the attitude of the confederates broke it for me.
My own writing?
Seriously, I wanna say the newer version of 'a disturbance of fate', bring the jubilee, newt Gingrich's pearl harbor books, the csa mockumentary, 1901, Dukakis and the aliens, the war of '07, Hamilton, the league of extraordinary gentlemen movie.
Seriously, I wanna say the newer version of 'a disturbance of fate', bring the jubilee, newt Gingrich's pearl harbor books, the csa mockumentary, 1901, Dukakis and the aliens, the war of '07, Hamilton, the league of extraordinary gentlemen movie.
Yeah, pretty much.
Like: while CSA survival until 1914 is unrealistic, it has definite narrative potential. But it gets completely messed up in favour of parallelism to the max.
I feel like a CSA that survives past the 1800’s is unrealistic.
Ah, but remember one of the unbreakable rules of AH - a post-WWI Germany must always descend into some form of jack-booted Wehrstaat dystopia, whether they win or lose, OTL Versailles or ATL Versailles, no matter what. It's right up there with the inevitability of American Manifest Destiny...