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Least favorite alt-history story?

For both of Greenhorn's TL's (although I mainly only read the first one), I'd say it's a mix of two main things. The first is an inherently dubious premise, magnified considerably by it being told as a "history" and not as a story. The second is a very clunky attempt to be "evenhanded", let down by both the authors bias and lack of skill.

Right. Greehorn tries to get his bullshit through by "Both sides"ing a storm, and like most of that sort, the awfulness of the Right Wing side in the conflict is generally painted as ultimately being the "fault" of the Left who have alienated right-thinking sorts with their radicalness, and forced good people into extreme actions.
 
After a partial re-read The Blunted Sickle is blatantly ridiculous with the Battle of France. There are second order counterfactuals without basis, the Germans becoming total idiots who abandon all doctrine for no reason, which leads to magical handwave solutions to other problems and the general ability of the Anglo-French to just magically figure out ideas that took years IOTL to develop.
 
After a partial re-read The Blunted Sickle is blatantly ridiculous with the Battle of France. There are second order counterfactuals without basis, the Germans becoming total idiots who abandon all doctrine for no reason, which leads to magical handwave solutions to other problems and the general ability of the Anglo-French to just magically figure out ideas that took years IOTL to develop.

Just having the German advance in the Battle of France sputter out is something that can be done without too much trouble or contrivance. How much worse does The Blunted Sickle get in that regard?
 
Just having the German advance in the Battle of France sputter out is something that can be done without too much trouble or contrivance. How much worse does The Blunted Sickle get in that regard?
The Dutch fall back to the Waterline and the Canadians get a division in there without meaningful problems which is a flawed idea at best.

When the offensive stalls the German Panzers do a straight line drive directly to Paris with no following forces, they take the city where collaborators instantly take over the city government but because there's no follow up the so a huge chunk of the German Armored forces are lost and when the French prevail the shock of the Paris City Government solves all political issues in the country.

It also simply ignores issues like French Communication being nearly entirely Telephone based.
 
The Dutch fall back to the Waterline and the Canadians get a division in there without meaningful problems which is a flawed idea at best.

When the offensive stalls the German Panzers do a straight line drive directly to Paris with no following forces, they take the city where collaborators instantly take over the city government but because there's no follow up the so a huge chunk of the German Armored forces are lost and when the French prevail the shock of the Paris City Government solves all political issues in the country.

Well, that's disappointing.
 
Well, that's disappointing.
I feel like most tls of the Battle of France always devolve into some sort of overdone effort to restore French Honor. I'm on the record here for my problems with France Fights On too for similar handwaving of political, social and military command issues. This kind of does the same.
 
so because I just utterly despise my mental health or something, I read a significant chunk of this thread tonight and

man, I'd love for someone to pick apart anything I wrote as thoroughly as you people ravage things you didn't even have to read
 
After a partial re-read The Blunted Sickle is blatantly ridiculous with the Battle of France. There are second order counterfactuals without basis, the Germans becoming total idiots who abandon all doctrine for no reason, which leads to magical handwave solutions to other problems and the general ability of the Anglo-French to just magically figure out ideas that took years IOTL to develop.

The Germans were notorious for losing sight of the real prize, or losing their senses altogether, when there was glitter or personal glory to be had, this was the case at Warsaw, Leningrad and Stalingrad. Only the latter ended in outright catastrophe but the previous two could have been if the Poles/Soviets had been able to exploit those opportunities. I don't think their mad dash at Paris and it turning into a debacle is particularly incongruous.

That said the Heer does act uncharacteristically in other ways, elements of the senior leadership lapsing into hysterical panic after Paris felt out of place, that sort of thing never happened IOTL even when the situation was far more desperate. By the same token I actually think they then gain a bit too much willingness to think outside the box when it comes to Gelb 2.0 and the mass import of ZIS trucks to try and work out their logistical problems, even if it did make for a nice little twist


I feel like most tls of the Battle of France always devolve into some sort of overdone effort to restore French Honor. I'm on the record here for my problems with France Fights On too for similar handwaving of political, social and military command issues. This kind of does the same.

That's definitely there to a certain extent, although I'd say it's played up more by parts of the readership rather than the actual TL. With the Germans being thrown back it is possible that the French army might have been freed of much of the fatalism that was such an albatross IOTL and that German atrocities could help bring the country together. Does this magically iron out the structural problems with the French army (and the Commonwealth for that matter)? No, but I think it does help explain why they're able to use their reprieve to better effect before than the Germans before Gelb 2.0, clearing out the deadwood and developing on the (admittedly somewhat clairvoyant) doctrine that happened to work in 1940.

Ultimately, no matter how lucky the Germans were IOTL in the Battle of France, I don't think the Anglo-French had much hope of holding off the Wehrmacht in the long-run. With or without the success of Sickle Cut, France would have fallen (although probably in 1941 rather than 1940). Using licence to make Holland a sink for the Germans rather than a back door, and turning Sickle Cut into a total flop, are novel ways of allowing the Entente to survive, at least as long as the subsequent TL is basically interesting. Personally I'd say it is, not a fan of the gearhead stuff (and the endless discussion it entails in-thread) but it is interesting to see how the Entente develops. It think pdf's a good writer as well and that this is important to any TL, plausible or otherwise. I've never seen a WW2 TL segue into a TL about the 1940 Tour de France but he made it work.
 
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The Germans were notorious for losing sight of the real prize, or losing their senses altogether, when there was glitter or personal glory to be had, this was the case at Warsaw, Leningrad and Stalingrad. Only the latter ended in outright catastrophe but the previous two could have been if the Poles/Soviets had been able to exploit those opportunities. I don't think their mad dash at Paris and it turning into a debacle is particularly incongruous.
Honestly I'm not sure I'd agree with the comparison of those with the Market Garden like madness of the push on Paris in the TL.
 
Honestly I'm not sure I'd agree with the comparison of those with the Market Garden like madness of the push on Paris in the TL.

The lunge towards Warsaw fits quite well IMO and I think that Von Leeb really did want to be the one to take Leningrad regardless of stiffening Soviet resistance, logistical issues, and questions from both the Nazi leadership and the Wehrmacht of conquering rather than starving the city when they were just going to murder the population anyway. Granted the comparison with Fall Blau is more of a stretch as the decision to take Stalingrad was never the main priority of the operation nor was it made on a whim but, like Monty in 1944, the decision to split AGS in two was predicated on the assumption that the enemy was basically finished and what mattered was to end the war as quickly as possible.
 
My issue with A Blunted Sickle isn't the way the French rapidly solve their issues. If it's too neat, Pdf is at least well aware of their existence, and I don't mind an author the occasional handwave to get the story to where they want to go.
As far as I can tell the story he's interested in is 'what does Europe look like if the post-war settlement excludes the Americans, and even the Soviets?'

Which is fine. I certainly think there's a discrepancy between the loving, painstaking rivet-counting of the engineering updates and the way that politics, as you observe, just gets to the result where he wants. And as I have said earlier in this thread, weapons specifications have no interest to me whatsoever. But writers have to follow their own interest if they want to keep engaged with their work, I suppose.

My problem is that in the background of the work, and it's increasingly coming to the foreground, is a sense that this is going to be a timeline where the US remains isolationist forever and the British and French keep on leading their empires- sorry, commonwealths. I and a couple of other users pointed out that Australia and Canada, for example, were already forging strong links with the USA and were basically brushed off.
India is, barring a dramatic plot twist, going to end up as a unified federal Dominion. Now, I credit Pdf27 with being clever enough to understand that this going to carry serious problems even if it avoids the violence of partition. But I have a worried feeling that the entire timeline is going to turn into just another long-winded conservative fantasy about surviving colonial empires leading to a happier world.
 
I don't think the overall tone of this thread is excessively negative or nitpicky. Most of the stuff that we talk about is the major flaws in otherwise promising stuff.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing (except sometimes it might get a little excessive when y'all hit on a bugbear like NDCR), indeed quite the opposite

I wish something I wrote was someone's least favorite AH, because seeing you guys go at it the way you do in this thread would actually teach me something useful
 
I'm not saying it's a bad thing (except sometimes it might get a little excessive when y'all hit on a bugbear like NDCR), indeed quite the opposite

I wish something I wrote was someone's least favorite AH, because seeing you guys go at it the way you do in this thread would actually teach me something useful
Write a story in which the 2003 invasion of Iraq is a massive success, Obama is exposed as a Kenyan Muslim, and President Ted Cruz makes America a perfect utopia. I guarantee that you'll end up here.
 
I'm not saying it's a bad thing (except sometimes it might get a little excessive when y'all hit on a bugbear like NDCR), indeed quite the opposite

I wish something I wrote was someone's least favorite AH, because seeing you guys go at it the way you do in this thread would actually teach me something useful

Gryph, you’re one of the best writers I’ve ever come across whether it’s SLP or The Other Place. You don’t need your writings picked apart, you’re already there.

That said, if there’s anything you feel you want read over I’d be happy for you to send it my way.
 
About A blunted sickle and France fights on...

In Shrek when the ogre and Donkey first see Duloc huge castle, Shrek wonder loudly whether Lord Farquad is "compensating for something". Well seems that we French have, too, something to compensate... not a tiny prick, but the horror and shame of Vichy. That, and also the fact that the 1940 defeat not only was the worse since Crecy and Azincourt half a millenia before, but also it was a nazi-wank and perfect case, of everything going perfectly. Finally, greatly helped by the supreme dumbness of Generalissime Maurice Gamelin, which brain was terminally ill with Syphilis - no kidding.
Recently on the FFO forums somebody wrote a vignette on Andre Corap, the general commanding the 7th Army that was guarding the Ardennes and was crushed by the sickle cut. Before the war Corap was all too aware the defensives lines on the Meuse were fucked up, so he went to see Gamelin for some reinforcements.
And Gamelin told him, straight in the eyes
"La Meuse, ça ne m'intéresse pas"
"I'm not interested by your sector, La Meuse. I don't care about it." That exchange happened in spring 1940, exactly two months before the Germans broke out at this exact place.

The point I'm trying to make is that the authors of FFO are all too aware of that "revenchist" trend - of too much enthusiasm and that feeling "we have to clean the shame of Vichy".
Well,
They have stated many times they don't want to hear about it and are taking special care for that NOT to permeate their work. They are carefully war-gaming every major battle so that it does not become a French wank, particularly in July 1940.
For example, last stand in the Metropole happens in banyuls, near the spanish border, on August 7, 1940. I can tell you the varied options were war-gamed and the final scenario that was retained was not a wank or best case. That would have been a pocket around Marseille resisting until mid-september 1940.
More generally, the major trend of France staying in the war, even with a broken back, is that it greatly helps the British until the USA entry in the war late 1941. Kind of "half" of a major power trying to help. The most imediate impact is on the North african theater (the italians are doomed long before the AK) and in the Mediterranean (where the French navy makes a big difference)
The FTL authors certainly take a lot of fun and pleasure writing that saga but it stops there. This is not an avenge Vichy fantasy.
 
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