- Location
- Toronto, ON, CA
It's a common trope in alternate history that a point of divergence or a plot point will be an OTL figure or ATL leader meeting a premature, unnatural end. However, unless this early death is based on something that really happened OTL, it comes across as random or arbitrary. You could have Barack Obama die in a plane crash before the 2008 primaries, but unless it's is linked to or based on a real-life incident or near miss involving Obama and/or aviation, you might as well kill him off by having a grand piano fall on top of him. So what are some OTL near-misses that could make for interesting PoDs?
I have one example to start us off: this infamous photograph of the 2000 crash of the Concorde was taken from a Boeing 747 waiting on the tarmac that had then-French President Jacques Chirac as a passenger, returning from a G8 summit in Japan. The burning Concorde, struggling to take off, only narrowly avoided colliding with the plane. And Chirac dying in 2000 has profound consequences for French and European politics (for one thing at this point Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was still at the height of his popularity and likely would've won the resultant early election). The imagery of a French president being killed by an icon of French engineering might seem absurd, even farcical; but it could very well have happened.
I have one example to start us off: this infamous photograph of the 2000 crash of the Concorde was taken from a Boeing 747 waiting on the tarmac that had then-French President Jacques Chirac as a passenger, returning from a G8 summit in Japan. The burning Concorde, struggling to take off, only narrowly avoided colliding with the plane. And Chirac dying in 2000 has profound consequences for French and European politics (for one thing at this point Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was still at the height of his popularity and likely would've won the resultant early election). The imagery of a French president being killed by an icon of French engineering might seem absurd, even farcical; but it could very well have happened.