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Alternate History General Discussion

A Utopian AH is arguably in some ways darker and more depressing than a dystopian one - we've missed an opportunity in real history, and we can never get it back - they've dodged a bullet we've taken. This clashes with the tone of the story, which is very likely to be upbeat because, well, good things are happening. Done well it can be bittersweet, but done wrong it's just hollow.
I think games avoid this problem because "outperform OTL" is a natural goal.
 
@Charles EP M. said
Can't agree with neither, sorry.
We can always go balls to the wall with negatives, but for some reason, the opposite is frowned upon.
Paint a better world, go wild for heaven's sake.
We have more than enough darkness in the world as is, i crave sunlight.
 
Can't agree with neither, sorry.
We can always go balls to the wall with negatives, but for some reason, the opposite is frowned upon.

Is it? Which circles are you talking about here? People won't buy positive AH or that on online forums people won't read it?

I don't really recognise that if only because 'Male Rising' and the like (the third world was fucked over in otl, lets not have that) has been my primary reading material on online forums.

If I start to read a story about South Africa for instance, I expect that country to finish off in a better position than in our timeline because that's almost always how those timelines go (see @Sulemain's recent very good ongoing TL as an example of that).

Likewise I've seen plenty of 'what if the left does better in the UK' takes written by leftists. 'Reds' and it's imitators would be another example of that.
 
I really can't stand you people, lol.

Fair enough. My advice would be that life's too short to post on a forum where you hate everyone and aren't enjoying the experience.

Football's on at the moment so you know you could always watch that with a pint instead. That's my plan when I finish work.
 
Between Footprint of Mussolini, Twilight of the Red Tsar, Our Struggle, Der Kampf, and Zhirinovsky's Russian Empire, I think I've found a good formula to make a TL popular: have a guy, preferably one that everyone knows about, be at the center stage and act as sort of a main character. I don't know why that is but TLs where one guy is at the center of events are more popular than TLs where it is just events happening.
 
Between Footprint of Mussolini, Twilight of the Red Tsar, Our Struggle, Der Kampf, and Zhirinovsky's Russian Empire, I think I've found a good formula to make a TL popular: have a guy, preferably one that everyone knows about, be at the center stage and act as sort of a main character. I don't know why that is but TLs where one guy is at the center of events are more popular than TLs where it is just events happening.

Well, yeah. Characters are an important part of fiction. Good characters give you something to follow and be invested in.

This seems quite basic.
 
I wouldn't say my work is popular but I am having a lot of fun having one (alt-historical) narrator for my timeline on AH.com because he basically functions as a character and I'm able to lay down his own bounded knowledge as part of the narrative process. Definitely different between trying for either multi-source multi-POV documentary timelines or god's eye view timelines.
 
Limited perspective, whether first- or third-person, works better for speculative fiction, in my mind, because the comparison between the narrator's view and the reader's understanding does a lot to build setting.

I don't disagree. I think one of the weaknesses of online AH just generally is that everyone expects to be told everything and they expect TL authors to have an answer immediately on everything rather than having it be revealed (or not) through the text. I don't know if that is the history inclined nature of the genre or the culture of being on a message board, but I enjoy that I can say "the author is writing about his experiences in *America and doesn't know or care about what is going on in *Russia".
 
I don't disagree. I think one of the weaknesses of online AH just generally is that everyone expects to be told everything and they expect TL authors to have an answer immediately on everything rather than having it be revealed (or not) through the text.

To me that sort of "what about this?" approach just takes all the wonder out of it.
 
To me that sort of "what about this?" approach just takes all the wonder out of it.

Asking a question isn't bad necessarily, but it certainly is if you do it in a way that deflates the narrative or forces the author to come up with answers that don't satisfy them because, say, you keep asking about the fate of the Communist Party in southeast Serbia every time they update their AH Beatles pop cultural retrospective newspaper article series.

To an extent, wondering about how what's been written affects things that haven't been written about can be a positive engagement with text and the author, but there's a fine balance to it. You might speculate in a way that's sufficiently related to what's being talked about that broadens the author's interests or understanding of something they weren't already thinking about, but you can also absolutely step on their toes when you're doing it.

This is one of the ways that internet AH differs from published AH, because we're considering interactions with the author. Jumping into the middle of a TL to ask 'IS THIS GUY GOING TO BE THE HITLER CHARACTER, HE'S ACTING A LOT LIKE HITLER' five or six times where the author and other readers can see you before the story is over is different from speculating about it in a chat group between the publications of books two and three in the series.
 
I’m currently writing an alternate history story which is quite local and is mainly centred around the perspective of David, a Gay stoner activist who works in a bookshop, with appearances from other folks to allow a sense of the wider world.

Whilst there is brief mentions of the wider world beyond Britain it’s mainly Nottinghamshire focused, as an effort to do something more, low key.
 
Asking a question isn't bad necessarily, but it certainly is if you do it in a way that deflates the narrative or forces the author to come up with answers that don't satisfy them because, say, you keep asking about the fate of the Communist Party in southeast Serbia every time they update their AH Beatles pop cultural retrospective newspaper article series.

To an extent, wondering about how what's been written affects things that haven't been written about can be a positive engagement with text and the author, but there's a fine balance to it. You might speculate in a way that's sufficiently related to what's being talked about that broadens the author's interests or understanding of something they weren't already thinking about, but you can also absolutely step on their toes when you're doing it.

This is one of the ways that internet AH differs from published AH, because we're considering interactions with the author. Jumping into the middle of a TL to ask 'IS THIS GUY GOING TO BE THE HITLER CHARACTER, HE'S ACTING A LOT LIKE HITLER' five or six times where the author and other readers can see you before the story is over is different from speculating about it in a chat group between the publications of books two and three in the series.

To some extent, I think the author needs to just ignore shit that isn't relevant.

It's hard because as amateur writers we're suckers for positive reinforcement, the only reason we're posting stuff on forums like this is so we can get readers saying stuff about our work, which is the dream. Otherwise we'd just send it out into the void of amazon and never hear from any readers at all.

But if a writer makes their story worse because they're pandering to readers rather than sticking to their planned story, that's on them. That's them being a bad writer.
 
And to be clear I have enjoyed getting feedback from readers- and I think that one of the cool things about writing for message boards is kind of that dual function of audience/participant- I just think that sometimes it can detract from AH as storytelling if taken too far.
 
I suppose its really a case of "I know it when I see it".

It is. To me there's a difference between taking in feedback after something is complete and providing feedback/making requests for an in-progress work. The latter, granted, is part and parcel of online serial fiction in general. I think the nature of online alternate history specifically exacerbates this. If there isn't a conventional narrative, then it's a lot harder to give conventional narrative critiques (not that there's even a lot of interest in doing so).

Trinketization makes things worse, to the point where I called this kind of AH question-asking "what about the thing?" It is something that, as @Gary Oswald said, should be the author's responsibility. If you didn't think of what would happen to [C-list OTL figure] in the TL, then you should just politely say "well, what do you think their life/career would be like?" if asked.

(Look, I was in a phase where I was the one requesting/adding to/asking about stuff that was not relevant to the main focus of the TL. I still can understand its appeal, particularly to people who aren't as knowledgeable).
 
I think there is a difference between stories and world building exercises in terms of feedback, too.

If I'm doing a world building exercise like say 'Lands of Ice and Mice' which is literally just hundreds of pages of essays about crops and ways an agricultural society could theoretically form in the arctic, feedback is more useful. There's pages of that thread which is people riffing off ideas and looking at different areas of the world and that's fine because it's essentially a group world building exercise/history chat. In which 'hey, so this might effect this, what about doctor who' is part of the joy of the exercise.

If there's a narrative (even if it's a timeline format) then that can't happen. A narrative is much more of a story being told.

There is something of a culture clash in online AH forums where people who are trying to tell stories run up against an audience who are used to talking about history. Like on ah.com a thread that goes 'what if [this happened]' which requires reader input of that kind is in the same forum and with the same format as 'timeline: [this happens]' which doesn't.

But, I do think a lot is the author's fault. If you write an actual narrative with characters and plot twists, you clearly make it distinct as to what you're doing. Whereas if you borrow the tools used to talk about history, the faux history book, the timeline structure, the wiki box etc then you're inviting readers to engage it on a conversational world building level.

You're also, as @Coiler says, not giving them an obvious narrative to engage with in terms of comments about characters and plot instead. Though to be fair, most of us are more knowledgeable about history than writing (I would 100% say that about myself) so it's natural that we're confident in critiquing or praising the former rather that latter even when there is a plot.

(Though, I do think well written characters absolutely will chime with this audience and get you comments about them rather than their historical role see the comments @Sideways or @Polyphemus get for instance. The comments on Lexie are very much about her as a character and so traditional writing group/fanfiction feedback.)
 
Which takes us back to the initial statement that started this conversation. Which is 'a timeline with a central character that anchors the action around their personality is more likely to attract an audience than one where it's just things happening without that person to emphasise with'.

Vivid characters are key to engaging with stories and if you don't have them, your audience is likely to not engage it as a story but rather as something else. I do think every memorable AH has memorable characters within it, rather than just a list of names.

'King Theodore's Corsica' which, as I have said before, is my gold standard for traditional 'for want of a nail' faux history timelines is very canny in cantering itself around a larger than life memorable historical character so even at it's driest you have someone to follow and emphasise with.
 
I do think every memorable AH has memorable characters within it, rather than just a list of names.

The Kirov series, which is overlong, convoluted and has about 75% of its content (at least!) literally being descriptions of someone playing a video game, still has main characters who range from "serviceable" to "great", in the case of Ivan Volkov, the main non-historical antagonist (I like that, in a genre of isekai munchkins, he's a wannabe isekai munchkin whose schemes unravel, relies entirely on his future tech and limited foreknoweldge, and credibly comes across as someone who can only conceive of intervening in crude, destructive ways. That and he's fun in a Raul Julia's Bison manner, doing things like lowering his airship to pick up pet wolves, like his namesake).

The difference between dry TLs and even something like that is really something.
 
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