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A Matter of Character

I like the use of also-ran figures as prominent in an AH but for it to work properly, best if they're an also-ran we the target audience know (or a background gag that we can appreciate if we know) so we can get what's happened. "Jeffrey Archer is mayor in 2002" says dark and terrible things about the state of London to a chunk of British readers! "Kam Balayev is mayor in 2022", not so much because he's a titchy fifth-party candidate that  isn't infamously weird and nobody remembers him. (Maybe if you did it as an in-joke, I once said a porn director who failed to win election as a Lib Dem was a Cabinet minister because I remembered coverage of her and the idea made me laugh)
 
On well-known people: I remember reading a near-future invasion literature book from 1916, whose gimmick was to show a post-WW1 German invasion to encourage US intervention into WW1 then and there. The strange part is that every time the Germans capture a city, the author gives a big long list of all the prominent people from the city whom the Kaiser's men have taken as hostages. I suppose he was just trying to bring it home to people, but it looks uncannily like it was written now and some online hack writer just copy-pasted the Wiki page for 'list of prominent people from Philadelphia' or whatever.
 
I like the Hipster PMs-n-Presidents thing for Internet TLs because it feels more plausible and is a good way to learn and get creative - obviously it can go wrong with only wikipedia level research, but if you do some digging you can usually find some genuinely interesting people that the (history nerd) audience will enjoy finding out about. Obviously might not work as well for general-audience fiction.

I am, however, an absolutist on births being butterflied after the POD. It just feels silly to me to have JFK as the leader of the Fenian resistance in British North America or whatever.
 
I like using a combination of logic and vibes when I used historical characters and the like. Logic is for example ‘If Nixon loses to Humphrey, then Reagan would be the most likely candidate for the Alt 72’ as it were, as there’s plenty of evidence

Vibes is a bit more esoteric, but it’s when you pick someone who fits the vibe of the piece & period and is less evidence based over whether it works in a logical fashion. This is because sometimes, logic can lead to really boring ideas (the ones where the changes are so dull and minor that it boggles why would make it into a timeline) and so sometimes, vibes helps pave over what could be a dull piece.

That’s when hipster PM and Presidents come I think.

Additionally sometimes as in otl the boring, logical option doesn’t always occur and instead the one of vibes wins out etc.
 
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