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Least favorite alt-history story?

Coiler said:
I'd say it's fair to give even the worst work credit where credit is due. William Lind's Victoria, for instance, actually has a few decently-written passages and its pacing is smooth, certainly smoother than some other (and otherwise far better and far less creepy) books. Compare this with say, Tom Kratman and his clunkfests (his first book had to be broken into two giant volumes because it was too big to print as a paperback and I was able to skip a full-length Carrera novel without missing anything in the overall plot).

Sometimes it makes it disappointing instead of just bad (ie "they can write well, so why are they writing this slop?" . Sometimes, as with Lind and Victoria, that one strength amplifies the rest of the issues (ie, you get this constant parade of crazy as opposed to having to wallow through five inane chapters to find one crazy one). And sometimes, especially in stories that don't have any political baggage, it can just be a redeeming quality in an otherwise dubious tale.
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Exactly. If it seems like a bare-bones compliment, well, it is--Rumsfeldia can be damn painful to read at times. But the prose is at least serviceable and occasionally inspired, and while, yes its versions of Cheney and Rumsfeld are essentially caricatures of the actual men, those caricatures behave in a consistent way within the story.

This is opposed to Queen Nixon in all its volumes, where characters can twist around on the author's whim, and the prose just plods, plods, plods on.
 
Why is it called Queen Nixon?

Elektronaut said:
I can't actually recall anyone doing anything where Hitler ends up being just That Bloke In The Pub, which is actually the most likely outcome, given he was a complete nobody for the first thirty plus years of his life. He always has to end up as a somebody. The nearest thing I can recall is his fate in Fight and Be Right, and even then he ends up as a famed revolutionary martyr.

Has anyone ever done anything where he just ends up living out his Vienna years of marginal subsistence existence permanently?
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Alan Moore in a Future Shock about a wheeler-dealer who can travel sideways in time. He gets this mediocre painter in Austria a swanky deal playing all the Hitler roles in the multiverse's film
 
Space Oddity said:
Rumsfeldia is an awful political screed, but well-written with gems shining in the sewage of even the most awful parts.

The Queen Nixon series is well, just awful. The Congressman's writing is dull, plodding, and unengaging, which only highlights the improbability of what happens, and the petty spite that seems to fuel it.

And its fans are terrible, so their "expansion" of the TL gets you things like Pinochet dying while pushing a "communist" out of an airplane.

...

Yeah.
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The point I was making there was that we should be rigorous about serious timelines written by middle-aged guys because these things filter down. People being a little partial on Rumsfeldia because of its political message, which tbh I think people were in the original thread, is double-edged because then you're licensing other authors to use parts of it as a 'plausible' far-right wank. As indeed, it was by a certain individual. The only people who really had standing in respect of rebutting 'Well, you guys let it go in Rumsfeldia' were the people who did indeed criticise Rumsfeldia at the time. I know NDCR is a Corbis timeline for the alt-right generation and the politics of it are diabolical, but it's still a kid's timeline with kid fans and was never in danger of being celebrated as a masterpiece by AH in general like Rumsfeldia was.
 
Elektronaut said:
The point I was making there was that we should be rigorous about serious timelines written by middle-aged guys because these things filter down. People being a little partial on Rumsfeldia because of its political message, which tbh I think people were in the original thread, is double-edged because then you're licensing other authors to use parts of it as a 'plausible' far-right wank. As indeed, it was by a certain individual. The only people who really had standing in respect of rebutting 'Well, you guys let it go in Rumsfeldia' were the people who did indeed criticise Rumsfeldia at the time. I know NDCR is a Corbis timeline for the alt-right generation and the politics of it are diabolical, but it's still a kid's timeline with kid fans and was never in danger of being celebrated as a masterpiece by AH in general like Rumsfeldia was.
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Trust me, I was dunking on Rumsfeldia BEFORE it was cool, so yeah, I get what you mean.
 
I've always exercised a lot of restraint when it comes to criticising teen writing because, to be honest, most of us write very poorly when we're young, and also I find it's hard to really push people in a constructive direction unless you actually have an established rapport with someone. I think people also become more able to process criticism as they get older, so there's a reticence about how a teenager will process a critique.

I think most other people operate on a similar sort of understanding. It's pretty hard to critique a 15 year old's wikibox timeline without it ultimately all coming down to 'you just have another ten or fifteen years of developing before this is going to be of any worth or merit'. And that's basically as good as saying 'Stop writing'. I find it hard not to believe there's an inherent obnoxiousness about criticism from me to them.

NDCR was certainly a deeply unlikeable phenomenon for a whole host of reasons, but I held back on it and let posters who were closer to the age of the people involved with it deal with it directly, and they did in a very effective way.
 
Fascist propaganda is bad and deserves to be criticized regardless of whether it's written by a child or an adult. However I always found the obsession with NDCR on here to be a bit strange. Maybe it would've been different if I'd been an active AH.com poster at the time.
 
d32123 said:
Fascist propaganda is bad and deserves to be criticized regardless of whether it's written by a child or an adult. However I always found the obsession with NDCR on here to be a bit strange. Maybe it would've been different if I'd been an active AH.com poster at the time.
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I think the fact that it keeps almost winning Tutledoves is part of why everyone hates it so.
 
d32123 said:
Fascist propaganda is bad and deserves to be criticized regardless of whether it's written by a child or an adult. However I always found the obsession with NDCR on here to be a bit strange. Maybe it would've been different if I'd been an active AH.com poster at the time.
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As @Skaven says, the fact that quite a lot of people treat as a work of genius is grinding, like when it went are own @Callan's Presidential and people were acting like NDCR was anywhere near that works league.
 
d32123 said:
Fascist propaganda is bad and deserves to be criticized regardless of whether it's written by a child or an adult. However I always found the obsession with NDCR on here to be a bit strange. Maybe it would've been different if I'd been an active AH.com poster at the time.
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I think it's because it manages to push people's buttons and compresses almost everything bad with After 1900's board culture into one target. There's the "lots of content = good" thought. There's telling things through wikiboxes and stock photos. There's the sloppiness about even basic details (For one, Pakistan seizing Gujarat?). The seizing on bandwagons and copying cliches (like the World War III and President Bundy). The constant questions (and attempted answers) about what happened to every single OTL figure of even minor note. The fan participation as everyone wants to leave their mark, often with dubious results. And, oh yeah, having what seems like every prominent far-right postwar figure be powerful and cheered on in some fashion.

I don't think all or even a lot of the people who voted for it in the Turtledoves are far-right trolls, and I also think it does get hit a little too often (although I'm probably hypocritical because I've criticized it a lot too). But I can understand why it has so many arrows aimed at it.
 
In addition to what @Skaven and @Coiler have said, there's also the fact that NDCR is ongoing and still popular. I imagine if this board was around 8-9 years ago we'd be talking a lot about Enoch's National Front or The Raid on Scapa Flow, and by the same token I imagine that if this board is around in 8-9 years NDCR will have been largely forgotten and we'll be focused on a new terrible piece of AH.
 
napoleon IV said:
In addition to what @Skaven and @Coiler have said, there's also the fact that NDCR is ongoing and still popular. I imagine if this board was around 8-9 years ago we'd be talking a lot about Enoch's National Front or The Raid on Scapa Flow, and by the same token I imagine that if this board is around in 8-9 years NDCR will have been largely forgotten and we'll be focused on a new terrible piece of AH.
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Having been on a shit ton of the very smart people boards over the years, can confirm this is pretty much how it works.

Though I don't recall anything about this Raid on Scapa Flow, how bad is it?
 
Japhy said:
Having been on a shit ton of the very smart people boards over the years, can confirm this is pretty much how it works.

Though I don't recall anything about this Raid on Scapa Flow, how bad is it?
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Germany manages to destroy much of the Home Fleet. It's a pretty standard Wehraboo TL, and it's only really noteworthy because it generated a lot of discussion and hatred.
 
Japhy said:
Having been on a shit ton of the very smart people boards over the years, can confirm this is pretty much how it works.

Though I don't recall anything about this Raid on Scapa Flow, how bad is it?
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Only ever got to two or three updates IIRC, so hard to properly compare. The real meat was the increasingly irate discussions between almost the entire board and the author, backed up occasionally by some of the hard core anglophobes.
 
Coiler said:
I think it's because it manages to push people's buttons and compresses almost everything bad with After 1900's board culture into one target. There's the "lots of content = good" thought. There's telling things through wikiboxes and stock photos. There's the sloppiness about even basic details (For one, Pakistan seizing Gujarat?). The seizing on bandwagons and copying cliches (like the World War III and President Bundy). The constant questions (and attempted answers) about what happened to every single OTL figure of even minor note. The fan participation as everyone wants to leave their mark, often with dubious results. And, oh yeah, having what seems like every prominent far-right postwar figure be powerful and cheered on in some fashion.

I don't think all or even a lot of the people who voted for it in the Turtledoves are far-right trolls, and I also think it does get hit a little too often (although I'm probably hypocritical because I've criticized it a lot too). But I can understand why it has so many arrows aimed at it.
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Also the complete inability of the author or the fanbase to process any degree of criticism of it whatsoever, and their general massive cognitive dissonance about the quality of it as a timeline. I think I mentioned this upthread, but the one thing that nearly got me wading into direct posting against it is when one of the fanbase claimed you can't say it's a bad timeline, only a timeline that you don't like. So apparently in some people's minds, it's attained a status of such grandeur it's above earthly critiques.

I'm honestly not sure about the number of far-right fans. Ostensibly it seems plausible and intuitive that most of the fanbase aren't far-right, OTOH it's pretty clear that the fan hardcore certainly were. And it's not like there's not even better low-level, easily accessible wikibox timelines on the board. So to me there's always been a significant 'why this piece of trash' factor, which can only really be answered by the alt-right helicopter meme-posting fanbase. I think we've lost sight of the fact that alternate history generally does attract quite a lot of Third Reich fanboys.
 
To shift to another horrible TL, the writer of the awful Second Civil War TL that was posted on AH.com Chat is writing a more conventional TL on the American Civil War, involving Maryland joining the Confederacy.

It is of course, Confedaboo shit with every damn cliche imaginable, right down to Bizarro-Lincoln.

Oh, and he also was writing a Federal Victory Version of his Second Civil War TL but stopped, probably because too many people called him on his bullshit there.
 
David Flin said:
The ones that annoy me are the nonsense TLs where plausibility and etc are out of the window, but the author thinks it's a great work and defends it as being realistic and possible. Yes, I'm looking at the Draka series by Steve Stirling. It wasn't so much that it was badly written and about as plausible as my becoming President of the USA, but that he would defend it from criticism as though he actually thought it made sense.
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The Draka series also gives one the horrible suspicion that for all his protests, Stirling is much, much too fond of his idiot evil empire.
 
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