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Least favorite alt-history story?

OK, this. It's a first TL, so I don't want to go too hard (after all, I've written horrible things in the past myself). But...

It says something about my (utter lack of) literary taste that I've read too many books about this kind of thing. I've read books from the perspective of the rebels (naturally they're axe-grinding "FREE MAN" fiction), books from the perspective of the government (where militias and the like are used as yet another post-Soviet thriller opponent), and even a book that tried to provide a wakeup call to the whole thing and show how nasty, horrible, and unromantic such an event would really be (didn't quite succeed but I give it praise for trying).

So having read such a big sampling of Second Civil War Fiction, I'll say that this is something the "TL" format isn't suited for. I'll admit this is probably a personal hangup on my part, but I'm far more willing to put up with a premise like that when it's used as the basis for a narrative story (even a cheesy cheap thriller) than when it's just plopped down as a small list of events. For a "TL"-format story to succeed for me, it needs detail and it needs a sense of "feeling right". This has neither.
 
I only just became aware of this thing because it's starting to generate reports and I don't want to read it seriously. Is it NDCR-bad?

Well, it seems to be over, all bar a few more posts, unlike NDCR which just kept going and becoming even more of a jerk-off fantasy
 
There's a TL going on in AH.com chat where Elizabeth Warren becomes president in 2024 and because she makes some vague statements in support of gun control and hate crime legislation every red state secedes, makes a constitution which does away with secularism, abortion and same-sex marriage (and also has a balanced budget amendment), and wins every battle while the US government is presumably eating paste or something.

Looks like a standard future history timeline from 2009, with trash-level plausibility and everything done through headlines with exclamation marks! at! the! end! of! each! of! them!

Where's the Corbis?
 
God, what a pile of burning trash. It almost makes one long for a NDCR post on what’s happening with Nintendo PlayStation during the Bundy Administration.
Yeah. I've been making some wikiboxes for Part 3 of NDCR (not because I like the timeline but just because I enjoy making wikiboxes), and when they told me that The Congressman planned to have President Bundy back in August, I audibly groaned at the use of one of the most implausible "edgy" AH clichés.
 
Any timeline or story that delves into the American primary process, to the point of breaking up a single primary election night into multiple chapters, is a special kind of painful for me.

I prefer that TLs just do one update around 2000 words about the entire primary process from the first primaries to the cnvention, instead of doing multiple updates about the Iowa Caucus, and another one about the New Hampshire Primary, and another for Super Tuesday, and so on.
 
I don't mind breaking the primaries up into multiple chapters- when it's the point of the TL. But certainly when it's like some fucking wikibox TL that about 40 updates ago succumbed to Globetrotter Syndrome and it comes off as hopelessly dreary when it feels the need to have Iowa and New Hampshire as their own boxes instead of just doing the full Primaries like they would for any other national election.

Speaking of, no better way to kill my interest in a Wiki-TL than if it has Globetrotter Syndrome. Only one or two have pulled off the 'go global' stuff, otherwise I just find it insufferable when the author, ahem, doesn't stay in their lane, by which I mean they don't stick to their premise and specified scope and lose sight of it because they feel like they have to do the politics of a country they hardly know anything about and come out for the fascists.
 
If there's a story to tell in the primaries I'm interested in hearing it but those timelines never have anything happen. It's all just Romney wins or Romney loses and that's that.
 
If there's a story to tell in the primaries I'm interested in hearing it but those timelines never have anything happen. It's all just Romney wins or Romney loses and that's that.
In many respects, I do get the sense many would be happy to tell totally fictional stories about US Presidential Primaries with their OC muscle flexing Iowa, but then again I do also get the sense that they'd also much rather go into excruciating detail about how their Waifu would have won county [x] had they done [y] but why would I then show their actual presidency.

idk, I'd be up to read or even write a proper fictional US Primary story on the principle of 'see if it can be done' but it does just feel pointless when a lot of the stuff out there are people who never learned that you only show the interesting bits least you end up a boring dullard wanking about Romeny.
 
I don't mind breaking the primaries up into multiple chapters- when it's the point of the TL. But certainly when it's like some fucking wikibox TL that about 40 updates ago succumbed to Globetrotter Syndrome and it comes off as hopelessly dreary when it feels the need to have Iowa and New Hampshire as their own boxes instead of just doing the full Primaries like they would for any other national election.

Speaking of, no better way to kill my interest in a Wiki-TL than if it has Globetrotter Syndrome. Only one or two have pulled off the 'go global' stuff, otherwise I just find it insufferable when the author, ahem, doesn't stay in their lane, by which I mean they don't stick to their premise and specified scope and lose sight of it because they feel like they have to do the politics of a country they hardly know anything about and come out for the fascists.
My new timeline will be doing a bit of globetrotting, but only to explore how a few countries are directly affected in unexpected and surprising ways by butterflies unique to my project. I think the best example of a convincing globetrotter timeline on AH.com right now is No Southern Strategy, largely because the ideas are so compelling, well-thought-out plausible that they make the whole thing interesting, even if the writing is a little dry at times.
 
I don't mind breaking the primaries up into multiple chapters- when it's the point of the TL. But certainly when it's like some fucking wikibox TL that about 40 updates ago succumbed to Globetrotter Syndrome and it comes off as hopelessly dreary when it feels the need to have Iowa and New Hampshire as their own boxes instead of just doing the full Primaries like they would for any other national election.
Now I'm tempted to tell a big chunk of my Buddhist Roman Empire TL using Wikiboxes.
 
There's a TL going on in AH.com chat where Elizabeth Warren becomes president in 2024 and because she makes some vague statements in support of gun control and hate crime legislation every red state secedes, makes a constitution which does away with secularism, abortion and same-sex marriage (and also has a balanced budget amendment), and wins every battle while the US government is presumably eating paste or something.
This and the Falcon Cannot Hear are why I don't really care for the Second Civil War trope in Alternate History.
 
This and the Falcon Cannot Hear are why I don't really care for the Second Civil War trope in Alternate History.
Second Civil War is far more interesting when it's, like, a state/region wide civil conflict, like the Civil Rights movement failing and going Ulster or the Coal Wars becoming a full on labour war. When it's "state secede" it's just a bit bleh.
 
The 'Second Civil War' in the thirties trope is often annoying because it takes the ideological conflicts of Europe in the 40s, moves them back ten years and then expects the rest of the world to more or less continue as usual.
I can forgive the Falcon Cannot Hear for teeing up a Japanese invasion because sometimes an outrageous narrative twist is what you want for entertainment's sake, but the way the French and British just sit on their hands for years rather than rearm in the face of a collapsing security system beggars belief.
Appeasement was to a certain extent based on the idea that in any massive outbreak of war in Europe or Asia America would at the least be an economic participant on the side of the Entente- you can't smash them apart and expect Paris and London to go 'well, the world center of finance just went up in smoke, so business as usual...'
 
I rather liked The Falcon, until the excrement labelled "plagiarism" hit the fan. I had no idea about the plausibility, but I did find it an engaging story. Then I found that a huge part of what made the story so good - the prose - was the work of others. Rather soured me on the whole TL. I never got back into it.
 
Now I'm tempted to tell a big chunk of my Buddhist Roman Empire TL using Wikiboxes.

Somebody should make wikiboxes election parodies based on movies. Such as Raptor vs T-rex vs Indominus Rex (or whatever was the name of the big beasts in the Jurassic World series). Or Alien vs Predator.
 
Now I'm tempted to tell a big chunk of my Buddhist Roman Empire TL using Wikiboxes.
Who knew you were Kasumigenx’s little brother this whole time? And please, Buddhist Roman Empire TL’s are cliched and boring. Make a Aztec England timeline instead.
 
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