Alternate History PODs that go hard
- Thread starter Strategos' Risk
- Start date
I once saw a tweet a long time ago about what if Fonzy didn't jump the shark in that episode from Happy Days. That would make an interesting POD.
For one thing, we have the opportunity to speculate what other high-profile jumping the shark moment would have replaced it as the go-to metaphor.
Mork from Happy Days
Beelzebub from Happy Days
"Bionic Bigfoot" from the Six Million Dollar Man.
"Scrappy Doo"
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Maybe this is just going to be reposts of Tweets screenshotting Reddit.
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You guys can submit things (especially non-tweet things) to this thread too
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So I looked at this new mod called called "Another World", but the desc was in Russian so I had to translate it and this might be one of the weirdest concepts for an alternate history mod
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american alt-history : what if the president peepee'ed instead of poopoo'ed on the 27th of march 1912 ??
Russian alt-history : what if meteors rained upon the earth in the 14th century
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american alt-history : what if the president peepee'ed instead of poopoo'ed on the 27th of march 1912 ??
Russian alt-history : what if meteors rained upon the earth in the 14th century
Revising the thread to be more than PODs that exist "Online", even if they are most likely predominately going to be found online (namely from Twitter). For example, this 1870s Hungarian book:
hu.wikipedia.org
A jövő század regénye – Wikipédia
Case in point, even the title of this 1945 novel goes hard. (Has any other work awkwardly employed the majestic plural in such a manner?)
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I suppose timelines that take a POD and turn the ramifications up to 11 also qualify. Tony Jones' Puritan World but in Space right here:
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Henry VIII being killed by the Pilgrimage of Grace in Kingsley Amis's Alteration and Tudor England re-Catholicizing under Catharine of Aragon rather than Mary I; he's known as "Henry the Abominable," killer of priests, monks, and his own wife, destroying the shrines to pay his bootlickers, basically "Stalin if he wasn't as good a husband"
Idk if it goes hard per se, but this one seems pretty interesting:
HHH being given the Eisenhower “he could run for either party” treatment is funny and unexpected, that works
Speaking of Ike, GOP Humphrey could an interesting VP choice
Never considered bunnies getting that disease, but at least it's more novel a POD than Bush choking on that pretzel. And, well, empires have been stillborn from animal bites.
The Monkey Bite
That Changed History
While the Eastern Roman Empire died an overdue death in 1453, in the 1920s there were Greek nationalist dreamers who made a pretty serious attempt to revive it. Or at least a semblance of it; while the Empire’s political system would remain dead, they hoped to greatly enlarge the Greek state.
Alexander I. Killed by a monkey bite.
Yes, really.
The result was a vicious war fought in Anatolia between the Greek regular army and the Turkish nationalist forces of Mustafa Kemal, soon to be re-named Ataturk. The Greeks landed at Smyrna in May 1919 with Allied support, but this disappeared in October when King Alexander died of sepsis after being bitten by his pet monkey, and his father, Constantine, resumed the throne. Constantine had favored the Central Powers during the First World War and lost his throne in a French-sponsored coup. Despite the loss of foreign aid, Constantine continued the war for three more years. Kemal’s “Büyük Taarraz” offensive in the late summer of 1922 drove the Greeks out of Anatolia. Peace was finally made in July, 1923 but deep hostility between the two nations remains to this day.
To fulfill their wildest dreams, the Greeks would have required a resounding military victory in Anatolia, political harmony among their own leaders, acceptance of their dreams by the Bolshevik faction in the Russian Civil War, and cooperation form the French, British and Italians. Of those six pre-requisites, they achieved zero. Without the monkey’s bite, all of them were possible.
Constantine I. Restored by the monkey’s bite.
Romania and Serbia managed to fulfill equally ridiculous claims, so it’s not completely out of bounds to posit Greek success under different leadership. It’s certainly no more odd an outcome than the historical one, with Kemal forging a united, secular Turkey out of the Ottoman debris. Had something happened to the Father of Turks even with the monkey’s bite, this outcome is far more likely than the birth of modern Turkey.
Greater Greece at its greatest extent would include:
• Western Thrace. The southern coast of Bulgaria, hexes 2922 and 3021 on the Third Reich map. Greece actually acquired this region.
• The Dodecanese Islands. Taken from Turkey by Italy in 1912, these consisted of Rhodes (hex 3524) and some smaller islands in 3324 and 3424 that are not shown at the scale of Third Reich. Italy agreed to hand these over to Greece following the First World War, but reneged during the Corfu crisis. These islands did become part of Greece after the Second World War.
• Eastern Thrace. The European part of Turkey, including Constantinople (Istanbul). The Allied powers wavered on this one; they preferred not to see the Greeks acquire the ancient capital but were no more eager to give it back to the Turks. This would have been an enormous coup for any Greek government, but a Greek annexation of the great city would doubtlessly have led to rioting and massacre in its streets.
• Ionian Greece. The eastern shore of the Aegean, centered on the commercial center of Smyra (Izmir). The Greek expulsion from Smyrna led to widespread massacres by the victorious Turkish army. On the Third Reich map, this region would include hexes 3221, 3322, 3323 and 3423.
• Cyprus. Britain took over “administration” of the island in 1878, and annexed it outright in 1914 when war broke out with Turkey. The Greeks did not press “enosis,” or union between Greece and Cyprus, very hard at the time, but every Greek government since 1820 has cast its eye at the lovely island. And there was precedent for British gifts of territory, as the “Seven Isles” including Corfu had been transferred from Britain to Greece in 1863.
• Crimea. This goal lay only in the eyes of the truly insane among the Greek leaders. Unfortunately for Greece, in the early 1920s this definition covered most of them. A large minority known as “Pontic Greeks” lived in Crimea and on the northeastern shores of the Black Sea, numbering over a million at the time. Many of these people were forcibly expelled in the 1960s and 1970s and settled in Western Thrace. Two Greek divisions fought alongside the French interventionists in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, and as a reward some in Greece hoped to claim the Crimean peninsula, on the grounds of the Pontic Greek presence and its historical standing as breadbasket of ancient Greece.
In early 1921 Budenny’s Konarmiya stormed the Parpach Isthmus separating the Crimea from the Ukrainian mainland, and captured the peninsula from the White faction. Would they have done the same had it been held by Greeks? The Red Army avoided confrontation with the Romanian army over Bessarabia, despite the desires of some to fight for all of the old empire. For the purposes of this variant, we’ll assume the same policy holds true. The Crimea consists of hexes 3213, 3214, 3314, 3315, 3316 and 3413.
• Northern Epirus. Some Greeks still haven’t given up on this one, a claim to parts of what today is southern Albania on ethnic grounds. Albania could not have stood up to those claims, had Italy allowed them, and since we’ve already posited Italian connivance in creation of Greater Greece, this is one of the easier conquests. On the Third Reich map, this region comprises hex 2724.
Greater Greece would not have been a stable state. It’s likely that the expulsions of its Turkish minority would have been carried out as they were in reality. In some of these areas, Turks would have been the majority. [...]
(Hurray, my first contribution from a different website)
Looks like Synco by Jorge Baradit was mentioned a few times on this forum, but close enough
en.wikipedia.org
Project Cybersyn - Wikipedia
President Fred Karger.
On a slightly more serious note, Joe Lieberman getting the Democratic nomination in 2008, which leads to him snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and resulting in Ron Paul becoming president as an independent, as liberal activists rally to him as an anti-war candidate and he uses Lieberman and McCain's friendliness as proof that the two-party system is broken (Came up with that one myself).
On a slightly more serious note, Joe Lieberman getting the Democratic nomination in 2008, which leads to him snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and resulting in Ron Paul becoming president as an independent, as liberal activists rally to him as an anti-war candidate and he uses Lieberman and McCain's friendliness as proof that the two-party system is broken (Came up with that one myself).