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Alternate History General Discussion

I just learned about this now and whaaaaaaaaaaaa--
I remember watching the Adam Curtis documentary about it and I was like ‘hahaha-, wait what?’

I like that Stirling genuinely seemed to believe that his plan involving former SAS men and Mercenaries would not devolve into a blood bath involving numerous Labour folk being dead.
 
Please could you explain what this actually means, preferably with an example?

It means "that it feels like just a collection of names, numbers, and events tossed out, with divergences being for their own sake and no attempt to work them into a bigger whole.". Two example given was a lot of poll results or "this candidate has won a primary in West Virginia", without any real grounding in what that means or what's going on in the world, it's just a bunch of numbers. If a presidential candidate wins a primary in West Virginia in the real world, for example, people discuss what that means for their campaign, who their base is, what's going on in the state etc.

Or a trinketised timeline would go "Johnson talks up Brexit, Tories win northern seats" without telling us what else has been going on in North England that caused a flip, it'd solely be a story about Johnson winning in the What if Boris Played timeline
 
I've actually grown to view rivet counting as a lesser evil to trinketization. Maybe it's just because online AH increasingly has more of the latter.

I think rivet counting is a type of trinketization.

So background, in an article on this site @SpanishSpy argued that there is a problem with viewing history as the aggregation of bits of trivia, whose own complex interrelationships are neglected. This reduces the study of history to a collection of trinkets rather than the system of the world that many academics spend entire lives studying but a tiny portion.

He coined this as Trinketization which he said meant this 'in practice means that it feels like just a collection of names, numbers, and events tossed out, with divergences being for their own sake and no attempt to work them into a bigger whole.'

It's something I'm often guilty of myself, because I do like trivia and often view the broader trends of history as just a place where anecdotes happen as if I'm sat in a pub listening to Abraham Samuel go 'you won't believe what I did the other day, marra. So there I was...'

I remember when I was reading up on the Mahdist Wars and @Japhy was reading on the Second French Intervention in Mexico, I mentioned to him that some Sudanese soldiers had gone over with Maximilian and fought in the French Mexican war. And he was like 'that's like Wikipedia level history, man, it's trivia but it's not important. The Mexican war would have played out the same whether they were there or not' and he was entirely right to call me on that.

You said this is something you've noticed as a problem in amateur AH, the names and events that happen for the sake of novelty and trivia but aren't weaved into the narrative.

I don't disagree, I think in classic timelines, lists and maps you often see Europe being well thought out and then you get to the rest of the world and the zulus are conquering madagascar because something needed to happen there and that's something original and different. The space-filling empire is a classic of that. It's just something to fill a gap because otherwise there's nothing there.

The thing is it's impossible to be an expert on everything and this isn't just an ah problem. Like early Simpsons is a superb satire of American life written by Americans who know their country, when they visit Australia and the uk, the satire is shallower and the jokes less clever. Same with Blackadder and France. In Independence Day the USA get the political structure they have and the South Africa hold spears and shields. And so on and so forth. The world outside your focus is just trinkets.

The problem with AH communities is they often deliberately encourage an expansion of focus which inevitably results in you reaching the trinkets. So the standard is to do a world map even when a map of europe is better suited to your purposes. This is why when people write timelines on greece, get told this would effect persia and you get 7,000 words on persia which start with the disclaimer 'I'm not an expert on persia so let me know if any of this doesn't work' and of course it won't work, you've read 10 books on greece and one jstor article on persia.

Now rivet counting is an obsessive focus on military equipment to the point of counting every rivet. It's a military thriller which spends 60 pages talking about the types of hardware you use.

Tom Clancy gets lots of praise for his diligent research into military hardware and how you they could realistically evolve and be used. But then he puts those weapons in a world where the geo-political realities are just nonsense. India tries to invade Australia, China invades Siberia, two majority Castilian areas of Spain break out into ethnic strife against each others.

The politics and even the wars are trinkets, they're things that happens as a collection of names and events so that the bit Clancy does care about, the cool weapons going boom can have a background to go boom in.

And in AH what this often results in is unrealistic political happenings so that the rivets can get their work out. So the trent affair becomes a war so that we can test two militaries against each other in a wargame style and never mind that neither side had any actual motive to go to war.

The battles becomes trinkets because there's no attempt to actually work out what that means. There's no attempt to explore the social effects or politics, its just people shooting at each other. Trinkets.

I think @zaffre pointed out that civil war timelines seemed way more interested in british interventions than in black american social changes.
 
Essentially the key is just to have something to say. If you have a point to your thing, the quirks feel like a part of that. If all you have is just wacky stuff happening, that's all you have.

The most successful big timelines have a world view they are trying to express.
 
I think rivet counting is a type of trinketization.

I agree with a lot of what you say (especially how the pressure to broaden the scope leads to the author leaving their most knowledgeable zone with frequently poor results), but I'd flip the two and say that trinketization could be considered a diluted form of rivet-counting. The former is ideally demonstrating a knowledge of one thing while the latter demonstrates a lack of knowledge beyond just names.
 
And in AH what this often results in is unrealistic political happenings so that the rivets can get their work out. So the trent affair becomes a war so that we can test two militaries against each other in a wargame style and never mind that neither side had any actual motive to go to war.

The battles becomes trinkets because there's no attempt to actually work out what that means. There's no attempt to explore the social effects or politics, its just people shooting at each other. Trinkets.

I think @zaffre pointed out that civil war timelines seemed way more interested in british interventions than in black american social changes.

To be fair, wars and suchlike are more interesting than social change, at least to the newcomer.

Chris
 
That probably depends on the story you're telling and the market (and who's written it). A US civil war alternate history about the social changes for black Americans, written by a black American, and marketed properly to black Americans, that's probably going to sell.
Case in point: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.
 
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