Indeed, that is a very good example. Your scenario, of course, was about him going into politics, but you could make a whole TL just out of the consequences of there being a Hugh Laurie-shaped hole in British comedy.
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"For Want of a Nail" consequence streams (and webs)
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Indeed. But the politics was me sticking a thumb on the scales. It could happen, but he could have gone in a hundred different directions.
In contrast, the comedy and media changes would happen; and the sporting ones have, imho, a better than random chance.
They're consequences of the PoD. Laurie as an MP was a narrative choice based on my PoD.
Come to think of it, those 'Comedy Connections' programmes about exactly this sort of thing, would be great material for coming up with webs of consequences.
Rock music family trees, too. How many 1970s UK rock bands could be wotsitted out of existence by the wrong twelve-year-old getting knocked over in Birmingham?
- Location
- Derbyshire
Similarly Saint-Saens was not just a composer of note, but also a highly influential music tutor, including Faure, who was equally prolific and counted Nadia Boulanger (who herself was one of the most significant tutors in 20th Century France) and Ravel (who went on to teach Vaughn Williams).
Hello, new best friend.
I thought of another of these the other day, but it needs a few more steps to have that WTF factor.
- Pronouns
- he/him
Paul McCartney famously came up with the melody of 'Yesterday' well before he had lyrics, and so for months he tinkered with the song using the placeholder title 'Scrambled Eggs.'
It even had temporary lyrics to match- 'scrambled eggs/oh baby how I love your legs/ not as much as I love scrambled eggs.'
Let's say that inspiration doesn't strike, and the Beatles eventually throw the song into the back of an album as one of their jokey asides.
That removes one of the most successful and most covered songs of all time. The effect on the Beatles themselves might be quite small, but at a stroke you're altering thousands of breakups, parties, concerts and music classes.
I like this POD as it would be quite disconcerting for a traveler from our timeline- a lot of tiny things would be different, but it would probably take quite a while to work out why.
It even had temporary lyrics to match- 'scrambled eggs/oh baby how I love your legs/ not as much as I love scrambled eggs.'
Let's say that inspiration doesn't strike, and the Beatles eventually throw the song into the back of an album as one of their jokey asides.
That removes one of the most successful and most covered songs of all time. The effect on the Beatles themselves might be quite small, but at a stroke you're altering thousands of breakups, parties, concerts and music classes.
I like this POD as it would be quite disconcerting for a traveler from our timeline- a lot of tiny things would be different, but it would probably take quite a while to work out why.
- Pronouns
- he/him
There's always something I've wondered about Yesterday which is what if someone else had done it? Paul came up with the melody and couldn't remember if it wasn't a original song or not. So he played the melody, without words, to various people in the business to find out if they recognised it, one of whom was Alma Cogan, the great singer of the 1950s.
Now Alma originally thought he was playing it to her because he was offering it to her, the way he'd written songs for Cilla Black because it obviously wasn't a rock song. But he never intended that, it was always a song he wanted for himself, he was obsessed with it to the point that he kept talking about it for months and it annoyed the other beatles because it wasn't a beatles song.
I can't see him not finishing it. I actually think it's more likely that he'd give it away to someone else then it become a joke song.
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Tom Colton
domesticated humans?!
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- he/him/his
There's of course the infamous "Seven of Nine led to President Obama" chain:
'Barack Obama’s path to the Presidency started when he was a Senator, and he had to win that seat first. The man Obama ran against was Jeri Ryan’s husband, Jack Ryan. It is hard to say whether he could have beaten him or not on his own but because Jack Ryan tried to get a little pervy with his wife, he did not have to.
During the election, the Ryans’ divorce papers got out to the press, revealing that Jack Ryan had tried to take his wife to some less-than-wholesome clubs. “It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling,” Jeri Ryan described in the divorce. Jack, she said, “wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused.”
In the ensuing scandal, Jack Ryan dropped out of the election, and with him out of the way, Obama won handily. With his spot as Senator, he started moving toward becoming the first black President all because someone tried to take Seven of Nine to a sex club.'
Gerry Conway or Archie Goodwin stay longer than their handful of issues on Marvel's Tomb Of Dracula, so Marv Wolfman doesn't join and go nuts with it.
1) Teenager Dave Olbrich has one less comic in the handful keeping him interested and he drifts away from the hobby. Olbrich never joins the nascent Fantagraphics:
ai) Without someone of Olbrich's skill as sales manager, Fantagraphics may not last too many years in a difficult industry - that means The Comics Journal to continue banging the drum against how creators are treated in the 1980s and specifically about how Jack Kirby is treated, and less force to help undermine Jim Shooter & cost him the EIC job.
ii) Jim Shooter's continued presence at Marvel means no Valiant Comics, which may also mean less other publishers going "hey we should do that"; he'd also be more likely to resist the demands from on-high for uber-variants and eternal crossovers, which delays the speculator crash a few years.
iii) Marvel under Shooter found it harder to bring in or retain the more flashy or odd creators, and if this goes on for a few years it means Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld etc end up/stay at DC. No X-Force or X-Men "Gold"/"Blue" era in the 90s, no Cable or Deadpool - thus
iv) No Deadpool and Deadpool 2 in the cinema right now, so no irreverant R-rated hero-comedy to influence other franchises
bi) No Fantagraphics - comics like Love And Rockets will fall out of print until someone else picks them up.
ii) No large, obvious publisher waiting to publish Chris Ware's works - they may not exist - or My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Black Hole, Hip Hop Family Tree etc. A lot less variety.
iii) Fantagraphics doesn't pick up Usagi Yojimbo, so it doesn't last long. No Usagi Yojimbo to appear in Ninja Turtles
bi) The 1980s saw less drum banging for creator's rights. That means the artists that would form Image Comics as far less likely to because it's just not in the air. Thus no Spawn, Youngblood etc...
ii) No McFarlane Toys to influence on the collector's market
iii) No Image Comics means The Maxx, if it exists, isn't from a big company. Thus no cartoon of The Maxx on MTV, thus its influence is cut down.
iv) No Image means no The Walking Dead which means no huge success for AMC from The Walking Dead TV show, also a few less zombie stories in pop culture.
v) No Image means a lot less independent creators working.
c) Olrich started the Eisner Awards. They're gone.
di) Olrich was poached from Fantagraphics to help Scott Rosenberg create Malibu Comics. They don't exist
ii) This means Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones don't have a career break writing a comic for Malibu, which upends their careers and means Men of Tomorrow is never written, and a lot of what is known about the history of Golden Age comics is not. (They're fine at Lampoon though) Potentially not being a big man in classic comic circles means Jones is less able to get away with paedophilia for so long.
iii) Malibu never publishes Evil Ernie and begats Chaos! Comics, thus no Lady Death et al and the "bad girl" comics of the early 90s are far less of a thing.
iv) Malibu helped drive computer colouring - it distributed early Image and ran a colouring program that Marvel really, really wanted. It'll win out eventually but take longer to be ubiquitous, changing how a lot of comics look
2) Blade is never created
a i) No Blade film, so no successful Marvel comic film in the late 90s that likely makes people think "I can make a bit more cash here" and leads to other films
ii) Less superhero films in early 2000s means no Marvel Studios and their cinematic universe in later 00s - thus entire direction of Hollywood is changed.
b i) Blade II is Guillermo del Toro's second US film after Mimic and is what really brings him to Hollywood's attention, so Pan's Labyrinth is a much cheaper film without Doug Jones in it, there's no Pacific Rim, Shape of Water etc and del Toro is still mostly doing Mexican horror. Any influence he has in the industry is undone.
ii) Del Toro is never attached to The Hobbit, which means the studios (as it appears) don't get cold feet about his approach - whoever they do get is more inline with what they want. Peter Jackson is not forced at the last second to come in and do it, so production goes a lot smoother
iii) Smoother Hobbit production = earlier production. This may mean the studios can't imply they'll take production away from New Zealand over a union dispute (they're already making it!), so the New Zealand government doesn't alter the law of the country to placate Hollywood companies, which means NZ production crews may or may not get less work in total but they'll get better pay & conditions for their work, making their lives a bit more stable. This might benefit the local film industry as Hollywood isn't competing with it for all the resources, or may not.
iv) If less work in total, some other country is getting that work and a lot of jobs are happening.
1) Teenager Dave Olbrich has one less comic in the handful keeping him interested and he drifts away from the hobby. Olbrich never joins the nascent Fantagraphics:
ai) Without someone of Olbrich's skill as sales manager, Fantagraphics may not last too many years in a difficult industry - that means The Comics Journal to continue banging the drum against how creators are treated in the 1980s and specifically about how Jack Kirby is treated, and less force to help undermine Jim Shooter & cost him the EIC job.
ii) Jim Shooter's continued presence at Marvel means no Valiant Comics, which may also mean less other publishers going "hey we should do that"; he'd also be more likely to resist the demands from on-high for uber-variants and eternal crossovers, which delays the speculator crash a few years.
iii) Marvel under Shooter found it harder to bring in or retain the more flashy or odd creators, and if this goes on for a few years it means Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld etc end up/stay at DC. No X-Force or X-Men "Gold"/"Blue" era in the 90s, no Cable or Deadpool - thus
iv) No Deadpool and Deadpool 2 in the cinema right now, so no irreverant R-rated hero-comedy to influence other franchises
bi) No Fantagraphics - comics like Love And Rockets will fall out of print until someone else picks them up.
ii) No large, obvious publisher waiting to publish Chris Ware's works - they may not exist - or My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Black Hole, Hip Hop Family Tree etc. A lot less variety.
iii) Fantagraphics doesn't pick up Usagi Yojimbo, so it doesn't last long. No Usagi Yojimbo to appear in Ninja Turtles
bi) The 1980s saw less drum banging for creator's rights. That means the artists that would form Image Comics as far less likely to because it's just not in the air. Thus no Spawn, Youngblood etc...
ii) No McFarlane Toys to influence on the collector's market
iii) No Image Comics means The Maxx, if it exists, isn't from a big company. Thus no cartoon of The Maxx on MTV, thus its influence is cut down.
iv) No Image means no The Walking Dead which means no huge success for AMC from The Walking Dead TV show, also a few less zombie stories in pop culture.
v) No Image means a lot less independent creators working.
c) Olrich started the Eisner Awards. They're gone.
di) Olrich was poached from Fantagraphics to help Scott Rosenberg create Malibu Comics. They don't exist
ii) This means Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones don't have a career break writing a comic for Malibu, which upends their careers and means Men of Tomorrow is never written, and a lot of what is known about the history of Golden Age comics is not. (They're fine at Lampoon though) Potentially not being a big man in classic comic circles means Jones is less able to get away with paedophilia for so long.
iii) Malibu never publishes Evil Ernie and begats Chaos! Comics, thus no Lady Death et al and the "bad girl" comics of the early 90s are far less of a thing.
iv) Malibu helped drive computer colouring - it distributed early Image and ran a colouring program that Marvel really, really wanted. It'll win out eventually but take longer to be ubiquitous, changing how a lot of comics look
2) Blade is never created
a i) No Blade film, so no successful Marvel comic film in the late 90s that likely makes people think "I can make a bit more cash here" and leads to other films
ii) Less superhero films in early 2000s means no Marvel Studios and their cinematic universe in later 00s - thus entire direction of Hollywood is changed.
b i) Blade II is Guillermo del Toro's second US film after Mimic and is what really brings him to Hollywood's attention, so Pan's Labyrinth is a much cheaper film without Doug Jones in it, there's no Pacific Rim, Shape of Water etc and del Toro is still mostly doing Mexican horror. Any influence he has in the industry is undone.
ii) Del Toro is never attached to The Hobbit, which means the studios (as it appears) don't get cold feet about his approach - whoever they do get is more inline with what they want. Peter Jackson is not forced at the last second to come in and do it, so production goes a lot smoother
iii) Smoother Hobbit production = earlier production. This may mean the studios can't imply they'll take production away from New Zealand over a union dispute (they're already making it!), so the New Zealand government doesn't alter the law of the country to placate Hollywood companies, which means NZ production crews may or may not get less work in total but they'll get better pay & conditions for their work, making their lives a bit more stable. This might benefit the local film industry as Hollywood isn't competing with it for all the resources, or may not.
iv) If less work in total, some other country is getting that work and a lot of jobs are happening.
- Location
- Derbyshire
That one's a fantastically weird one.
Sam Keith is definitely an original
Burton K Wheeler
The G.O.A.T. That Can't Be Got
- Location
- Tr'ondëk
I think the bazooka came from a Popeye cartoon. The name, I mean, not the rocket launcher.
Good one--the way I heard it, the divorce started (or so he claimed) as a consequence of her being away for long periods due to her role as Seven of Nine. Assuming (for the sake of argument) they would have stayed together (at least for a while longer) without this, you can therefore abort the Obama presidency by having Hudson Leick cast in the role instead (as was considered).
Crazy.
Great example!
- Location
- Toronto, ON, CA
During the 2001 election, Jack Straw (in his capacity as Home Secretary) gave a rather poorly-received speech to the Police Federation. He was repeatedly heckled and booed, and because it was the middle of an election he could not be joined or defended by any senior police officers onstage. Straw recounted in his memoirs that on the train back to London he was despondent, expecting the headlines to be dominated by his disastrous speech, police unions briefing against him and maybe even Number 10 throwing him under the bus. Then one of his aides got off the phone, laughing, and told him: "it's okay, no-one's going to care about the speech. John Prescott just punched a voter."
Suppose when Prescott got egged that day, he doesn't rise to the bait and keeps walking. A day or two of negative coverage about the Home Secretary is unlikely to sway the election either way. But considering how unexpected Straw's appointment to the Foreign Office was (the man himself expected to get demoted), his briefly becoming a electoral liability could easily butterfly his promotion. And if Cook remains Foreign Secretary (or someone less able than either of them takes the job), the push to invade Iraq could very easily get a lot trickier.
At his lowest moments in the 2003-04 period, could Blair survive the resignation of a Foreign Secretary- either due to Cook's principles or another candidate's incompetence? And Blair going at the height of that conflict gives a lot less legitimacy to Bush's decisions going into the 2004 election, and drastically changes the course of both New Labour and the Labour party.
For want of a punch.
Suppose when Prescott got egged that day, he doesn't rise to the bait and keeps walking. A day or two of negative coverage about the Home Secretary is unlikely to sway the election either way. But considering how unexpected Straw's appointment to the Foreign Office was (the man himself expected to get demoted), his briefly becoming a electoral liability could easily butterfly his promotion. And if Cook remains Foreign Secretary (or someone less able than either of them takes the job), the push to invade Iraq could very easily get a lot trickier.
At his lowest moments in the 2003-04 period, could Blair survive the resignation of a Foreign Secretary- either due to Cook's principles or another candidate's incompetence? And Blair going at the height of that conflict gives a lot less legitimacy to Bush's decisions going into the 2004 election, and drastically changes the course of both New Labour and the Labour party.
For want of a punch.
That's also a good one, though the starting context is already political - still, it fits the pattern of a relatively trivial thing having such a big impact.
I'd be interested in seeing a TL where something like that happened - I recall @Meadow (I think) doing a list many moons ago where there's no Granita Pact and Brown tactically resigns over Iraq, but this results in, er, nothing happening because Blair's position is so secure - in fact he ends up lasting even longer in power and then handing over for David Miliband to win the 2010 election.
That's probably the other end of the spectrum of possibility, but I think the issue is that it took months and years of occupation and soldier deaths for Iraq to become a really deep-seated issue* so a high-profile resignation couldn't be that decisive at the time. A surviving Cook on the backbenches as a critic might well shorten Blair's remaining time in office though. (Or imagine if his heart attack came on early and actually hit him while he was giving a resignation speech... )
* I'm not sure of the right word to use here--'mainstream' wouldn't be appropriate given the number of people who were involved in protesting against it at the time, but 'reached the level in which it could potentially decide an election', i.e. the threshold in which an otherwise secure and popular PM with a historically gigantic, largely lockstep-loyal majority might face resignation pressure.