Well... Russia's little adventure in what is now Djibouti wasn't an "official" colonization attempt... just an ambitious... entrepreneur (from Odessa, IIRC) who got run off by a French gunboat
What is a common thing or trope that always seem to happen?
- Thread starter Viking25
- Start date
Improving technology is fun I think and having some things go slower is a way to balance it out
I do wanna pull a page from isekais and write one "technology doesnt advance at all because everything is powered by dragons" though, dunno if it has been done before
Deleted member 163405
People who “reform” the Soviet Union seem to always go to a parliamentary system that isn’t really Soviet in nature at all anymore.
or instead of attempting to look at different models of central or even decentralized planning, or even market socialism the Soviets go full scale authoritarian capitalism or free market.
or instead of attempting to look at different models of central or even decentralized planning, or even market socialism the Soviets go full scale authoritarian capitalism or free market.
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I'd like to see that, if you can be rigorous about the dragons. It's too easy to end up writing 'the industrial revolution, with MAaaAaaagiiiic' otherwise.
There was this notion kicking around that Qing China didn't industrialize in time because the non-industrial methods they had were good enough until suddenly they weren't. Something similar might happen with--I dunno--elven weavers being good and industrious enough that early power looms couldn't compete. So you end up with a setting where the quality and quantity of goods is higher than the technology would suggest, mostly, but where industry has stagnated because the super-cottage industries choke out mechanization before it can get off the ground.
The resident 'burn down the setting' event being that one weird place where only the orcs or the humans can bear to live, split by the geography into small, centralized states scrambling for any sort of advantage, who end up sticking it out until they hit the inflection point where mechanized industry is genuinely better than super-cottage industry on every point that matters. At which point you get your pick of 'colonization with MAaaAaaagiiiic', 'industrial revolution with MAaaAaaagiiiic', etc etc.
I feel so called out
I mean, yeah I do want to write a "Magical Revolution" of sorts
Not a "industrial revolution with magitech" though, but like you said;
I had once read the theory China did not industrialize because it had lower wages. Though non-industrial labour being more productive could have the same effect I suppose.
the Russians annex the world.
Speaking of ww2, the Germans are either incompetent or unbeatable (except for the American protagonist). The Russians are the same (extra points if it's in the cold war, and the guy names is igor/boris)
The empire is evil and the republic is good. The republic was so good it collapsed and the empire was born out of it. But everyone thinks the republic is better and the empire doesn't have a true supporter.
Same thing with kings, they are either very good or terrible. Jake, the ok king doesn't exist. The king is never talented but not like his father and that's why he can't keep things up. The heir is either a brainless or a genius. The king, if he is good, is tolerant, hardworking, etc. His fault is that he cares too much.
It doesn't have a pragmatic and merciless king, who is adored by the kingdom for being efficient. if he's good, he only does really good things, even if is stupid. If the crown prince is pragmatic it's the same thing. The second prince has to go to the throne because the crown prince doesn't apologize for every blade of grass he steps on.
Disputes are simple and easy to resolve
Be them:
Different ethnicities
clans/families/tribes multigenerational rivalry can be easily resolved
Disturbances by vital geographic areas- (they will split even if it's bad for both of them)
Etc
Monarchy in general is either horrible or wonderful (it's parliamentary). Where is the monarchies that are like prussia, brazil, japan, ottomans, france, austria (with various ethnicities and kingdoms).
PS: Give me a show of the napoleonic victory. There is a great story made by KingSweden24 of the victory of napoleon. A show of reconquest would be good too.
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"Because of course, who would want to support a political system that is based on the idea that you can't elect the guy who sits in a palace getting fat on your taxes. I want to be able to choose that guy! Even if in practice I won't because I have better things to do than go to the polling station to vote." - Your average Republic partidary.
I blame this on all fiction written about royalty and palace intrigue. Usually this type of fiction requires the antagonists to be ridiculously stupid for the protagonist to defeat them, and ridiculously evil for the protagonist to look good by comparison. When in reality it is probably something less "exciting".
"Look, it's very easy to fix this. You just have to make a couple of concessions to them. Preferably very small ones, the kind that would only have value in the 21st century, and that are purely symbolic. Something like, I don't know, allowing them to use their stupid and barbaric dialect in their local schools. Who cares if you then force them to do all the red tape in your beautiful cultured language. They'll be most grateful for such a small concession." - the average SI.
No, you got it wrong. Being a parliamentarian is not enough. The monarchy has to have the Westminster system. Even if it's a pagan Asian country where the only Anglo-Saxon present is Britain's ambassador and has spent the last 300 years being a sworn enemy of Britain.
And "as everyone knows", multiethnic monarchies only exist so that the leading country can destroy them into their component ethnic groups with the excuse of "liberating" these nations from "oppression." Of course, the massive ethnic cleansing of these nations into pure ethno-states will be treated as "a much-needed step to ensure the security and freedom of these nations."
About Fantasy:
Vampires or other creatures are always silly. Why can't you have a kingdom that is well managed by vampires?
A Magocratic realms is always silly . Just because Bob that has been trained with the sword to the extreme he can certainly fight a person who throws fireballs. No he can't, Bob dies. In this kind of realm if you don't do magic you'll never be an equal. It even makes sense for magicians to feel superior, because they are.
the fact that worshipers of god X, discovering that he actually exists does not cause a crusade/jihad to convert the world.
Something that bothers you about fantasy. But talking about races, governments, magic, industrialization etc.
Vampires or other creatures are always silly. Why can't you have a kingdom that is well managed by vampires?
A Magocratic realms is always silly . Just because Bob that has been trained with the sword to the extreme he can certainly fight a person who throws fireballs. No he can't, Bob dies. In this kind of realm if you don't do magic you'll never be an equal. It even makes sense for magicians to feel superior, because they are.
the fact that worshipers of god X, discovering that he actually exists does not cause a crusade/jihad to convert the world.
Something that bothers you about fantasy. But talking about races, governments, magic, industrialization etc.
I am honestly perplexed as to why stuff like this isn't more common in fantasy......I mean a Knight kind of becomes obsolete if a Mage can one shot from a mile away?
Warhammer Fantasy does that.
Oh, another cliches thread.
This an AltHistory Wikia thing, mostly?
Yeah, that's definitely been an issue with CSA TLs-I've been meaning to cover the issues with that in another thread, btw, for what that's worth.....
This is.....not something I've seen very much of, actually. Which is a shame because it can be more plausible than many think. (Now, the "Genuinely outright bad-and not just flawed-people as great leaders" trope, on the other hand, really is way overused, to the point where it's arguably hard to take it seriously.
Yeah, that does tend to be an issue. No dispute about that.
Good point here, too-some folks do tend to oversimplify these things-like, for example, with the Soviet Union IOTL: yeah, the economy wasn't doing as well as it once had in the 1980s thru to 1991 but this wasn't just problem of Andropov/Chernenko/Gorbachev: many of the problems were structural and had to do with the Communist system itself.
Yeah, that's true. Plausibly avoiding a Civil War-type scenario is really hard to do and even then you might have to really stretch some things.
Yeah, there's definitely some element of truth here. The problem isn't so much with phrases; for what it's worth, patriarchy and institutional racism are both real phenomena (which are also largely self-explanatory) which have done real harm.....and reactionary is a really qood-quality descriptor for those who generally hold to the most backwards, etc. positions in any given society(yes, that differs from the classical left's original use of the term, but still.....). And the working class is also a real thing in just about any modern society.
Yes, but the truth is, one thing that does make me scratch my head is-why do very few, if any, TLs centered on the United States barely make any mention of extreme-right/reactionary/etc. domestic terrorism(apart from occasional mentions of the KKK)? That easily could have been a majorly bad problem IOTL(like, at least a few 9/11s' worth of deaths overall, if not several, or even more), and yet nobody really covers it for the most part.
Eh, if anything, that first thing cuts both ways, and I've seen a fair number of TLs in which liberal democracy just fails miserably even though-in pretty much every case I've found-there was no reason for that to occur.
This is kind of a thing, yes......but not really as much as some think. And there is definitely a problem-a seemingly more widespread one, I'd add-with whole societies, or at least characters meant to be representative of them, in a setting being at least somewhat too culturally conservative even for their time and place and sometimes far more so(to the point of being significantly culturally insensitive, if not outright racist, when it comes to some authors portraying cultures outside their own).
To be fair, there are a few timelines that do take things a little too far here-liberal democracy truly is a great thing, but if a country still has issues with corruption, or with a 4th estate that's too timid to take tough stances on tough issues and/or with portions of it often overly pleasing to one side, etc. then yeah, there's liable to be some real problems.
Well, hmm. Though fancifully implausible-if I may-I suppose I wouldn't mind giving it a read if you ever get around to posting it.
Generally agreed on this-how well climate change and other things are understood in a given period will depend on the POD and developments since then, etc., especially in regards to certain scientific factors.
Yeah, I can see why there would be complications in some cases, for sure.....but in American scenarios it does make sense, and you could even see this applied (at least to some degree) elsewhere as well, depending on the circumstances.
I've seen a few where tech slows more on the whole than IRL, TBH-but outside of certain works(like The Peshawar Lancers), I can't recall any that seem to have done a particularly spectacular job justifying this(granted, not always really poorly, either, but.....). But I have seen TLs which do well with a mixture of both, and even faster than OTL(to be fair, I do know of one TL that might arguably have taken the latter a little bit too much over the top-Tony Jones's Gurkani Alam. Fun read-and one I've revisited with some regularity-but gets a little heavily punk-ish at times, as I recall).
This an AltHistory Wikia thing, mostly?
Yeah, that's definitely been an issue with CSA TLs-I've been meaning to cover the issues with that in another thread, btw, for what that's worth.....
This is.....not something I've seen very much of, actually. Which is a shame because it can be more plausible than many think. (Now, the "Genuinely outright bad-and not just flawed-people as great leaders" trope, on the other hand, really is way overused, to the point where it's arguably hard to take it seriously.
Yeah, that does tend to be an issue. No dispute about that.
Good point here, too-some folks do tend to oversimplify these things-like, for example, with the Soviet Union IOTL: yeah, the economy wasn't doing as well as it once had in the 1980s thru to 1991 but this wasn't just problem of Andropov/Chernenko/Gorbachev: many of the problems were structural and had to do with the Communist system itself.
Yeah, that's true. Plausibly avoiding a Civil War-type scenario is really hard to do and even then you might have to really stretch some things.
Yeah, there's definitely some element of truth here. The problem isn't so much with phrases; for what it's worth, patriarchy and institutional racism are both real phenomena (which are also largely self-explanatory) which have done real harm.....and reactionary is a really qood-quality descriptor for those who generally hold to the most backwards, etc. positions in any given society(yes, that differs from the classical left's original use of the term, but still.....). And the working class is also a real thing in just about any modern society.
Yes, but the truth is, one thing that does make me scratch my head is-why do very few, if any, TLs centered on the United States barely make any mention of extreme-right/reactionary/etc. domestic terrorism(apart from occasional mentions of the KKK)? That easily could have been a majorly bad problem IOTL(like, at least a few 9/11s' worth of deaths overall, if not several, or even more), and yet nobody really covers it for the most part.
Eh, if anything, that first thing cuts both ways, and I've seen a fair number of TLs in which liberal democracy just fails miserably even though-in pretty much every case I've found-there was no reason for that to occur.
This is kind of a thing, yes......but not really as much as some think. And there is definitely a problem-a seemingly more widespread one, I'd add-with whole societies, or at least characters meant to be representative of them, in a setting being at least somewhat too culturally conservative even for their time and place and sometimes far more so(to the point of being significantly culturally insensitive, if not outright racist, when it comes to some authors portraying cultures outside their own).
To be fair, there are a few timelines that do take things a little too far here-liberal democracy truly is a great thing, but if a country still has issues with corruption, or with a 4th estate that's too timid to take tough stances on tough issues and/or with portions of it often overly pleasing to one side, etc. then yeah, there's liable to be some real problems.
Well, hmm. Though fancifully implausible-if I may-I suppose I wouldn't mind giving it a read if you ever get around to posting it.
Generally agreed on this-how well climate change and other things are understood in a given period will depend on the POD and developments since then, etc., especially in regards to certain scientific factors.
Yeah, I can see why there would be complications in some cases, for sure.....but in American scenarios it does make sense, and you could even see this applied (at least to some degree) elsewhere as well, depending on the circumstances.
I've seen a few where tech slows more on the whole than IRL, TBH-but outside of certain works(like The Peshawar Lancers), I can't recall any that seem to have done a particularly spectacular job justifying this(granted, not always really poorly, either, but.....). But I have seen TLs which do well with a mixture of both, and even faster than OTL(to be fair, I do know of one TL that might arguably have taken the latter a little bit too much over the top-Tony Jones's Gurkani Alam. Fun read-and one I've revisited with some regularity-but gets a little heavily punk-ish at times, as I recall).
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Basically that, even though the country was founded by a monarchy and the royal family X is basically part of the culture of the nation. You ripping off part of the culture won't cause problems in the future
give me an interesting antagonist, twyin was interesting even if he was a bit caricatured
The power of a hug solves everything
Avatar the legend of korra has this problem. the show's successor the legend of aang has a new york in the middle of the world called guess what. republican city
sad noises of most of the earth empires
Deleted member 163405
Multi ethnic states are looked on with disdain in the third world as doomed to fail, while multi ethnic first world states develop a strong and cohesive national identity. Being pulled away from disaster or collapse by ingenious (usually western) rulers who are just so much more enlightened than the third world.
IMO probably one of the few things the Show did better over the books was actually making Tywin a bit more grounded and less of a moustache twirling bad guy and actually making it so that he actually you knows care about the family he goes on about countlessly. Still have no idea why people complain about that off all things.....
Completely ignoring the fact that something like France or Germany was divided into just as many warring ethnic groups, religions and kingdoms as any one else before they consolidated into their modern forms.
Deleted member 163405
Even then it’s like they ignore modern states like Tanzania, India, and other multi ethnic countries that do survive especially in the third world. It’s just frustrating as someone who’s put a lot of time into a concept
yes the closest battle in the world. On one side bob, he has a sword (it's always a sword). On the other hand, Jerry, Jerry can literally shape the universe to his liking.
If the kingdom is a magocracy, an encounter with an apprentice mage working for the nation should be a frightening thing, here we have a 15 year old boy who can destroy a legion of soldiers single-handedly. Encountering a powerful mage should be a near-apocalyptic event for non-mages.
Yes, I really like the universe. One thing I like about warhammer 40k is that humanity is the old and decrepit entity that newer races look on in horror. Fanatical, cruel and simply monstrous. I think that's why I like imperium. I wish there was a 40k show of the encounter between imperuim and a coalition of forces like the star trek federation.
which is also stupid. Show me a world of different ideas with their positives and negatives. Different religions and the problems involved
in latin america (literally on the side) is full of examples of one group helping to suppress others. The Middle East and Asia are also full. I always find it so disrespectful that jerry and bob are going to be friends and have the same principles because they have the same color. Or that yong will totally care about what bob wants.