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Least favorite alt-history story?

I feel that the Draka, or at least the idea of an “anti-America” empire, is an interesting thought experiment but the finished product is just one of the worst caricatures of what someone on The Other Place once christened “Grimderp.”

I love edgy AH, I can’t really deny that at this juncture, but when you’ve become so obsessed with your evil empire that you’re treating them like a wounded bird from any criticism of their many implausibilities it’s just self-indulgent nonsense. And lazy in the Draka’s case as well.

It’s kind of a shame that it was a lot of people’s first introduction into AH, as it gives Stirling a place in the AH pantheon that he doesn’t deserve yet nonetheless can’t really be shifted from for some time.
 
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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Closest I can think of is Harry T himself portraying him as a grumpy antisemitic adjutant to alt-Guderian when the latter visits the US. It's not exactly what you're after but 'he just stays in the Army and is nobody' in a Central Powers Victory world is pretty plausible.
 
The Red said:
I realise the Kriegsmarine didn’t achieve the maximum tonnage outlined by the Anglo-German naval agreement IOTL but I’m fairly sure the British would have taken exception to that?
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Slight derail, but what exactly would we have done that we didn't do when Adolf decided to send lots of The One Tank The Boys Rifle Would Actually Make Mincemeat Of into the Rhineland?
 
Meadow said:
Slight derail, but what exactly would we have done that we didn't do when Adolf decided to send lots of The One Tank The Boys Rifle Would Actually Make Mincemeat Of into the Rhineland?
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Personally I think it’s hard to say. I know a lot is made of Hitler’s comments afterwards but it’s always easy to say you were terrified of losing after you’ve won. Hitler did back down over Austria in 1934 but if he had already developed the virulent attitude he displayed in regards to the Sudetenland in 1938 then it’s hard to say what would have happened. No-one was ready for war in 1936 and though you could argue that Germany was least prepared I’ve also read that mobilisation would have bankrupted France and potentially exacerbated the political crisis there as well. It would be an interesting scenario to pursue.
 
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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Nobody has forgotten Enoch's National Front.

The one thing about that timeline that continues to amaze me is that it continued right up to the point when they had an international conference in London more or less establishing it as a scientific truth that white people were superior to all other races.
 
Makemakean said:
Nobody has forgotten Enoch's National Front.

The one thing about that timeline that continues to amaze me is that it continued right up to the point when they had an international conference in London more or less establishing it as a scientific truth that white people were superior to all other races.
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BORINGLY. That was what really hit me about ENF. It was so, SO dull. The UK was saying 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts!', and it was tedious.
 
Makemakean said:
Pardon me, that has got to be the most hilarious reaction anyone has had to that timeline.
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Oh, I hated the racism and found the whole thing creepy as hell. But it was also strikingly dull. It was like watching a man deliver what was technically a racist rant, but doing so in the tones of a man talking about cleaning his rain gutters. It manages to be both tiring and unnerving.
 
Space Oddity said:
Oh, I hated the racism and found the whole thing creepy as hell. But it was also strikingly dull. It was like watching a man deliver what was technically a racist rant, but doing so in the tones of a man talking about cleaning his rain gutters. It manages to be both tiring and unnerving.
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Exactly like 'Rivers of Blood' then.
 
The Red said:
I feel that the Draka, or at least the idea of an “anti-America” empire, is an interesting thought experiment but the finished product is just one of the worst caricatures of what someone on The Other Place once christened “Grimderp.”

I love edgy AH, I can’t really deny that at this juncture, but when you’ve become so obsessed with your evil empire that you’re treating them like a wounded bird from any criticism of their many implausibilities it’s just self-indulgent nonsense. And lazy in the Draka’s case as well.

It’s kind of a shame that it was a lot of people’s first introduction into AH, as it gives Stirling a place in the AH pantheon that he doesn’t deserve yet nonetheless can’t really be shifted from for some time.
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@Jared did the whole thought experiment better though.

Even with 850 updates about the integration of Switzerland into Germany.
 
David Flin said:
It will come as no surprise to anyone that I agree almost entirely with this. I've always regarded there being three elements to AH: there's the TL, which is the setting for the story; there's the plot; and there's the characters.

A good AH can get by if two of the three elements are strong, and can carry the third along with them. Ideally, all three elements would be strong.

If you've just got the TL, you've got a rather dull history book of what might have been.
If you've just got the plot, then you've got a 2-dimensional tale.
If you've just got the characters, then you've just got an interview.
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Elektronaut said:
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.
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I'll be turning 18 within the month, and when I made my first attempt to post a timeline on here, I was met with some rather harsh (but mostly well-warranted) criticism from a member who criticized my characterization and slammed my prose as overstuffed to the point of unwieldiness. Blunt as it was, this criticism did make me realize that my writing skills simply aren't up to the task of penning an entire story in narrative form as I originally intended, and I'm certainly not yet capable of writing anything worth being published on SLP. So I had a mod lock the thread. But since I had already poured 8+ months of research into the scenario, I didn't want to just throw it all away. So I changed the format into a fairly dry, history-book style (punctuated by some narrative interludes) and moved it to AH.com, and there it's received predominantly positive reviews (and not from fellow teens like on my earlier, trash timeline, but from AH.com "celebrities" including Gonzo, lord caedus, Bookmark, and even (sharp intake of breath) The Congressman.

I'm very happy with the timeline so far, both because of these positive reactions and for how fun and gratifying it has been to research and write. Still, I know it's not nearly as entertaining as it could be if I were doing it narratively with a well-developed set of literary skills. I think I've gotten the TL and plot elements down pretty well (I've worked in a lot of surprising twists and turns into the plot, and the few Mexican posters I've interacted with approve of my portrayal of their country), but the timeline's "characters", such as they are, don't have much in the way of narrative exposition, and I don't think I have it in me to change that yet (oh, and it's also a wikibox TL). That's that sad part about approaching alternate history from such a young age: unless you have abnormally good writing skills, the best you can hope for is a well-researched, plausible, and fairly interesting project that nevertheless isn't much good for consumption outside of a very niche audience.
 
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