• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Alternate World War 2

I've got to be honest, I'm very jaded when it comes to discussion how Germany could win. Too often there's a creepy undertone of wish-fulfillment, but mainly it's just that these are discussions that have been had a hundred times before.

I'd love to see an alternate WW2 that focused on changes stemming from, I dunno, the East African campaign.

Probably the last WW2 timeline that I loved was Dvaldron's completely bonkers 'Axis of Andes' story, which is a masterclass in starting with small plausible changes and then slowly taking you to wonderfully bizarre places.

Story telling beats plausibility, but best of all is story telling that convinces you in the moment that it's plausible.
 
SenatorChickpea said:
I've got to be honest, I'm very jaded when it comes to discussion how Germany could win. Too often there's a creepy undertone of wish-fulfillment, but mainly it's just that these are discussions that have been had a hundred times before.

I'd love to see an alternate WW2 that focused on changes stemming from, I dunno, the East African campaign.

Probably the last WW2 timeline that I loved was Dvaldron's completely bonkers 'Axis of Andes' story, which is a masterclass in starting with small plausible changes and then slowly taking you to wonderfully bizarre places.

Story telling beats plausibility, but best of all is story telling that convinces you in the moment that it's plausible.
Click to expand...

'Axis of Andes' is glorious, and one of the few timelines that does convince me that actually there are still interesting things to do in WW2.

It did become a bit fascist apologetic near the end, I thought mind.

Re: The East African campaign, I'm not sure there's much you can do post 1940 that's that compelling. I think the most interesting things you can do are 1920s and 1930s PODS. Especially if you can break up the incredibly effective Anglo/Franco/Italian weapons embargo to Ethiopia which was undoubtedly one of the Italian government's biggest foreign policy triumphs. Nazi Germany had some interest in disrupting this and supplying weapons to Ethiopia but you really need an early break between France and Italy for it breakdown entirely.

Then you end the Second Italo-Ethiopian war with the peace offer Mussolini was prepared to retreat to where Ethiopia is trimmed rather than conquered and then Selassie declares war in 1940.
 
@Youngmarshall beat me to it.

It's clever enough to avoid tying in too directly to the broader war- the USA could come down and stomp on anyone, and Germany can't do anything except throw a little surplus equipment to some fascist pre-war. Their respective governments get quite surprised in the mid 40s when they realise that somehow they've each picked up some South American allies who are kicking the hell out of each other.
 
SenatorChickpea said:
@Youngmarshall beat me to it.

It's clever enough to avoid tying in too directly to the broader war- the USA could come down and stomp on anyone, and Germany can't do anything except throw a little surplus equipment to some fascist pre-war. Their respective governments get quite surprised in the mid 40s when they realise that somehow they've each picked up some South American allies who are kicking the hell out of each other.
Click to expand...

I think the story is very good at keeping the focus on South American politics rather than European ones. It's always fun when we get a look at how Hitler and FDR are reacting but primarily its the local rivalries that drive the plot.

It's especially clever in the way the fascist counties have the german agenda localised, angry at Indians rather than jews etc.

The way the larger war happens largely the same in the background just drives home what a small pond this is.

The ending is very rushed though and I suspect the writer fell too in love with his fascists and forgot some of the worst things he had them doing. Certainly the audience seemed to.
 
You're not wrong about the apologetic tone, but as I recall DValdron admitted that he didn't have time to finish things properly so he was going to race to the ending.

Frankly, I'll forgive all manner of sins for the timeline convincing me for a good two minutes that there was a plausible 1940s path to

A goddamn Neo-Inca restoration. I laughed like a madman when I got to that point.
 
SenatorChickpea said:
You're not wrong about the apologetic tone, but as I recall DValdron admitted that he didn't have time to finish things properly so he was going to race to the ending.
Click to expand...

Yep the Tl was started in 2010 and in 2013 D Valdron decided he'd give up on Alternate History and so he needed to quickly wrap it up, which he did by 2014.

Of course it's 2020 now and he's still writing and publishing AH so I assume he changed his mind.

Agree very much on your Spoiler. D Valdron is one of my favourite AH writers because he's imaginative. There's often too much focus on is this change plausible and not enough of this change interesting. With Valdron you never have to worry about that, he's written bad stuff but he always at least tries to flip the board and do interesting things that nobody else is doing.

Bear Cavalry, by him, is probably my single favourite non sea lion published AH.
 
I never got into that because the whole thing was a spite TL he started because Maverick said that cheap Axis Argentina and Axis Brazil TLs were stupid.
 
Japhy said:
I never got into that because the whole thing was a spite TL he started because Maverick said that cheap Axis Argentina and Axis Brazil TLs were stupid.
Click to expand...

I think calling it a spite TL is a little harsh. Basically it's trying to do a thing written off as stupid in a plausible and interesting way.

I never read the initial conversation but the Timeline comes across as written by someone who is very aware that there's bad ways to do this thing and is stepping very carefully as a consequence.

It's a bit like the sealion vignettes book in that respect. This is stupid, how are we going to make it not.
 
Also, tastes vary of course, but I think the post you're referring to actually worked in context.

There'd been update after update of various characters making overly complicated plans for how they were going to win the unwinnable war, right up to thinking that allowing Japanese vessels to visit their ports (or something) was a good idea.

So an update that just read:

PEARL HARBOR

I think was actually quite an effective way of puncturing the dreams and ambitions of the tinpot little dictators.
 
SenatorChickpea said:
Also, tastes vary of course, but I think the post you're referring to actually worked in context.

There'd been update after update of various characters making overly complicated plans for how they were going to win the unwinnable war, right up to thinking that allowing Japanese vessels to visit their ports (or something) was a good idea.

So an update that just read:

PEARL HARBOR

I think was actually quite an effective way of puncturing the dreams and ambitions of the tinpot little dictators.
Click to expand...

Selling basing rights in the Galapagos to the Japanense Navy, IRRC.

The real thing that might well stop you taking it seriously was that one of the most crucial chapters, where the main fascist dictator faces the riots that overthrew him in otl and is saved by the intervention of the military leader and political orater who become his main supporters ittl, had a typo it and when DValdron tried to edit it he accidentally deleted that entire post.

And then he just didn't fucking retype it and the story has a fucking missing bit.

Which is astonishingly amateur even for a story written on an online forum. And I still can't quite believe happened.
 
SenatorChickpea said:
I've got to be honest, I'm very jaded when it comes to discussion how Germany could win. Too often there's a creepy undertone of wish-fulfillment, but mainly it's just that these are discussions that have been had a hundred times before.

I'd love to see an alternate WW2 that focused on changes stemming from, I dunno, the East African campaign.

Probably the last WW2 timeline that I loved was Dvaldron's completely bonkers 'Axis of Andes' story, which is a masterclass in starting with small plausible changes and then slowly taking you to wonderfully bizarre places.

Story telling beats plausibility, but best of all is story telling that convinces you in the moment that it's plausible.
Click to expand...
The most frustrating thing about WW2 is that there's a literal world full of potential PODs, but 99% of discussion is about the same 5 or 6. Same with the ACW and to a lesser extent WWI.
 
napoleon IV said:
The most frustrating thing about WW2 is that there's a literal world full of potential PODs, but 99% of discussion is about the same 5 or 6. Same with the ACW and to a lesser extent WWI.
Click to expand...

Is that not mostly cos like there's various ways to have the allies win differently and so have different people die and different choices made in the post war that are interesting to nerds like us but most people aren't.

And if you want to present a different world entirely, a funhouse mirror of our own reality, then you kind of have to go Nazi win and that takes you to the same PODs again and again.

I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to look at wars as fundamentally binary in outcome. Either the CSA wins or it loses, either the Nazis win or they lose.

I don't disagree that it's be nice to see more stuff that looks primarily at how different course of the wars, could still produce allied victories but very different post war situations. Both @SenatorChickpea and @Charles EP M. have written such actually, Charles re: the politics of the colonial empires without the fall of France and Senator re: Churchill winning in 1945.

But then I generally wish society as a whole was more interested in wars for their cultural effects and less for tactics and battles.

Re WW1, I think you'd be pleasantly surprised by the recently released WW1 vignettes collection. I haven't finished it yet, but so far it uses very different pods to what you'd straight away think of.
 
Youngmarshall said:
I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to look at wars as fundamentally binary in outcome. Either the CSA wins or it loses, either the Nazis win or they lose.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure that you can. For example, in World War 2 only two parties can truly claim to have won, and those were the United States, and possibly the Soviet Union due to the puppetisation of Eastern Europe and the destruction of Germany. The Axis lost of course, but then Britain and France were crippled by the war and China turned Communist, and yet they are still considered to have "won".

Youngmarshall said:
Both @SenatorChickpea and @Charles EP M. have written such actually, Charles re: the politics of the colonial empires without the fall of France and Senator re: Churchill winning in 1945
Click to expand...

Could I please have links to these?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top