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Least favorite alt-history story?

Stikfigur said:
Green Antarctica ruined my day when I learned about it. The part about the monkeys, yeesh.
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For me it was the xenomorph-koalas.

Redshank Galloglass said:
Green Antarctica is by far the most racist shit I've ever read.
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Yeah, the entire "story" is nothing but a description of an entire people that are inherently monstrous and cruel and sadistic in the extreme even when it makes absolutely no sense and even though a single actually human culture would have sent the edgelords packing.
 
Coiler said:
Yeah, the entire "story" is nothing but a description of an entire people that are inherently monstrous and cruel and sadistic in the extreme even when it makes absolutely no sense and even though a single actually human culture would have sent the edgelords packing.
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Right. An entire cultural group that act like a perverse fusion of Orcs, Reavers, and Crossed, only those at least are simply murderous plague infectees/demon analogues.

The fact that the author tries to pass it off as "cultural differences" and "beneath the veneer they're just like us" is what makes me actually angry.

No you dumb motherfucker, extreme sadism, willingness to murder even little ones, and fucking necrophilia are not "cultural differences" those are fucking dangerous mental disorders and people who suffer from them cannot function in society. An entire culture predicated on those atrocities would collapse within a week.
 
Charles EP M. said:
From description, I'm wondering if this was written  after Kieron Gillen's Crossed story about a prehistoric extreme-horror civilisation called Homo Tortor (which is neither meant plausibly and the reveal is the entire thing is a story-in-story).
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Speaking of Crossed, the same comic's Thin Red Line arc qualifies as alternate history as it makes the outbreak canonically set in 2008 (when the first Crossed comic was released). It doesn't warrant a mention here, though, as it is actually one of the better Crossed volumes.

What does warrant a mention here I think is The Churchill Memorandum by Sean Gabb. This novel basically depicts a world where World War II as we know it is avoided by Hitler and Churchill dying. Nazi Germany is taken over by Goering who goes neoliberal (I'm not even kidding-he relaxes the Nuremberg Laws and implements Austrian economics on the advice of Hayek and von Mises, which are credited with boosting the economy) and both Britain and Germany are semi-aligned against the USSR. In-universe, this is treated as almost a good thing as the bloc stands against communism. Oh and Britain is still a powerful empire which also appeals to the so-called 'libertarian' author.
 
Anarcho-Occultist said:
Speaking of Crossed, the same comic's Thin Red Line arc qualifies as alternate history as it makes the outbreak canonically set in 2008 (when the first Crossed comic was released)
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Prime Minister Gordon Brown's two big comic appearances are Captain Britain & MI:13 and Crossed: The Thin Red Line, both dealing with major global crises but in very different ways!
 
Anarcho-Occultist said:
Speaking of Crossed, the same comic's Thin Red Line arc qualifies as alternate history as it makes the outbreak canonically set in 2008 (when the first Crossed comic was released). It doesn't warrant a mention here, though, as it is actually one of the better Crossed volumes.

What does warrant a mention here I think is The Churchill Memorandum by Sean Gabb. This novel basically depicts a world where World War II as we know it is avoided by Hitler and Churchill dying. Nazi Germany is taken over by Goering who goes neoliberal (I'm not even kidding-he relaxes the Nuremberg Laws and implements Austrian economics on the advice of Hayek and von Mises, which are credited with boosting the economy) and both Britain and Germany are semi-aligned against the USSR. In-universe, this is treated as almost a good thing as the bloc stands against communism. Oh and Britain is still a powerful empire which also appeals to the so-called 'libertarian' author.
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You forgot Michael Foot's acid baths.
 
Anarcho-Occultist said:
To be fair to The Thin Red Line’s Brown, the Crossed have more plot armor than the Draka. He was doing pretty well all things considered until the very end!
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Honestly TTRL had to rework most of the previous lore to have a story at all. Basically everything before or around it had the Crossed happen everywhere simultaneously even aboard airlines and most capitals and governments were in collapse within a day or so with the last organised resistance crumbling over the course of a week.

Wish You Were Here had the Crossed overrun London on the first day for example.

Whilst in TTRL it's a localised issue in one village with one patient that slowly turns out to be one of many around the world with days to organise a response and missed opportunities to stop it all in it's tracks.

So on the one hand the Crossed do have plot armour because the apocalypse needs to happen and the government needs to be wiped out early on and the SAS team need to be to their knowledge the last active organised military unit in the UK. On the other it's not much of a story if everyone shows up to work and gets murdered or turned within a few panels.
 
Death's Companion said:
Honestly TTRL had to rework most of the previous lore to have a story at all. Basically everything before or around it had the Crossed happen everywhere simultaneously even aboard airlines and most capitals and governments were in collapse within a day or so with the last organised resistance crumbling over the course of a week.

Wish You Were Here had the Crossed overrun London on the first day for example.

Whilst in TTRL it's a localised issue in one village with one patient that slowly turns out to be one of many around the world with days to organise a response and missed opportunities to stop it all in it's tracks.

So on the one hand the Crossed do have plot armour because the apocalypse needs to happen and the government needs to be wiped out early on and the SAS team need to be to their knowledge the last active organised military unit in the UK. On the other it's not much of a story if everyone shows up to work and gets murdered or turned within a few panels.
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Honestly a work like Crossed TTRL that focuses mainly on what we get in that volume (basically World War Z style war with the Crossed only with higher stakes because they can think more than a zombie) would’ve been super interesting.
 
Death's Companion said:
Honestly TTRL had to rework most of the previous lore to have a story at all. Basically everything before or around it had the Crossed happen everywhere simultaneously even aboard airlines and most capitals and governments were in collapse within a day or so with the last organised resistance crumbling over the course of a week.

Wish You Were Here had the Crossed overrun London on the first day for example.

Whilst in TTRL it's a localised issue in one village with one patient that slowly turns out to be one of many around the world with days to organise a response and missed opportunities to stop it all in it's tracks.

So on the one hand the Crossed do have plot armour because the apocalypse needs to happen and the government needs to be wiped out early on and the SAS team need to be to their knowledge the last active organised military unit in the UK. On the other it's not much of a story if everyone shows up to work and gets murdered or turned within a few panels.
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Anarcho-Occultist said:
To be fair to The Thin Red Line’s Brown, the Crossed have more plot armor than the Draka. He was doing pretty well all things considered until the very end!
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I think the Crossed comics are mostly obnoxious torture porn but I found the premise in of itself excellent.

That particular take on "murderous plague of maniacs" is legitimately fucking terrifying and the thought of it kept me up at night when I first discovered the series as a teenager. Add in the simplistic yet unnerving cross-shaped facial rashes and you get a rather striking poster-child for the next generation of "zombies but scary"; even more so than the Rage Virus IMO due to how distinctive the faces of the Crossed are.

shame it was mostly juvenile torture shlock and Ennis railing against religion for the nth time.
Anarcho-Occultist said:
Honestly a work like Crossed TTRL that focuses mainly on what we get in that volume (basically World War Z style war with the Crossed only with higher stakes because they can think more than a zombie) would’ve been super interesting.
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There was a good story on AH.com called The 120 Days of Blood, but as the title suggests the actual epidemic was rather short and didn't quite have the reach of the zombie war in WWZ.

It would be awesome to see a Crossed fanwork in the vein of the WWZ book though.
 
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Redshank Galloglass said:
I think the Crossed comics are mostly obnoxious torture porn but I found the premise in of itself excellent.

That particular take on "murderous plague of maniacs" is legitimately fucking terrifying and the thought of it kept me up at night when I first discovered the series as a teenager. Add in the simplistic yet unnerving cross-shaped facial rashes and you get a rather striking poster-child for the next generation of "zombies but scary"; even more so than the Rage Virus IMO due to how distinctive the faces of the Crossed are.

shame it was mostly juvenile torture shlock and Ennis railing against religion for the nth time.


There was a good story on AH.com called The 120 Days of Blood, but as the title suggests the actual epidemic was rather short and didn't quite have the reach of the zombie war in WWZ.

It would be awesome to see a Crossed fanwork in the vein of the WWZ book though.
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I read and enjoyed 120 Days of Blood.

The other site actually also has a TL by me called World War C that is basically a Crossed/World War Z hybrid. It kinda fizzled after two updates but I might revisit it at some point.
 
Death's Companion said:
Wish You Were Here had the Crossed overrun London on the first day for example.

Whilst in TTRL it's a localised issue in one village with one patient that slowly turns out to be one of many around the world with days to organise a response and missed opportunities to stop it all in it's tracks.
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It's definitely a continuity clash, though I could see 'Shaky' being callously oblivious that the Crossed are all over Yorkshire!
 
Charles EP M. said:
It's definitely a continuity clash, though I could see 'Shaky' being callously oblivious that the Crossed are all over Yorkshire!
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There’s a few continuity snarls in Crossed that only really can be semi-reconciled if you headcanon that the Crossed do not actually appear everywhere on one singular C-Day and a lot of areas get hit and overrun without the public noticing until things get really bad-for instance Yellow Belly has the outbreak start in May when other issues have it in the mid to late summer (+100 has Beau Salt reading about the financial crisis getting serious in a newspaper on the day the Crossed show up) and Lesser of Two Evils has the US government still in semi functioning order days into the outbreak and the original volume mentions Air Force One going down over Oklahoma weeks or months into the outbreak while TTRL has the White House fall pretty early on.

The real explanation though is every Crossed author just kinda did their own thing and they didn’t cross-check(lol) the other writers’ chronologies. Hell there’s even bigger continuity issues (Pakistan getting nuked in Quisling contradicted by TTRL, Garth Ennis’ 2011 comic Stitched appearing in Anti- Crossed, etc)
 
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