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AlternateHistory.com - TV Tropes

  • ️Tue Apr 16 2024

AlternateHistory.com is the internet's largest Alternate History site since the collapse of Soc.history.what-if. Revolves around a discussion forum that has been in existence since 2000 and in its current form since 2004. Has produced a great deal of AH fiction output; a full list of timelines with links can be found here on the site's wiki.

AH.com has also produced some AH, science fiction and fantasy stories in the form of prose, which can be found here.

However, the forum's Off Topic section is also notable for having developed its own subculture over the years, filled with Running Gags and Memetic Mutation.

In addition to the main Series, there have been several other similar productions, such as Luaky Commer and AH.com Wars (parodies of Harry Potter and Star Wars starring the characters from the Series), the Spin-Off AH Dot Com The Next Generation, and others.

As a disclaimer, however, much of the content, including the Future History, ASB and Off Topic sections, on the forum is accessible only to logged in members. The main logic behind it (according to the moderators) is so that it would encourage people to sign up for the more "serious" discussion threads, with the rest available afterwards (with a Writers' Block section sensibly restricted for copyright reasons).

It also has a Shared Worlds section divided up into Shared Worlds, Moderated Games, Nation Games, and Map Games.

In addition to their main wiki, they have also created their own variation on TV Tropes, titled (of course) AH Tropes.

Tropes appearing in AH.com board culture include:

  • 419 Scam: Often referenced due to similar scams being attempted by spambots invading the forum occasionally. The name 'Charles Akawele' for an archetypal Nigerian spammer is a Running Gag. By The New '10s, spammers became much less common on the board than they once were, partly due to gradual forum software upgrades.
  • Alien Space Bats: The Trope Namer is soc.history.what-if, of which AH.com is a spiritual descendant.
  • Alternate-History Nazi Victory: The "Nazi Victory" is generally seen as Cliché, not only because it's primarily popular for newbies to the forum, but because it's very prone to Alternate History Wank and Artistic License – History for the sake of Rule of Cool. In particular, positing "Operation Sea Lion", the planned Nazi German invasion of the United Kingdom in 1940, as a Point of Divergence has become a meme on the forum for being one of the most ill-conceived invasion plans in recorded history and highly unlikely to result in a Nazi victory. Still, there are a few timelines that have gained some acclaim for being well-written/researched:
    • The Anglo/American – Nazi War: Nazi Germany succeeds in subduing the Soviet Union in 1943 after several lucky breaks, but doesn't conquer Britain. Eventually, the United States gets involved in the Battle for Europe and they get defeated anyway, basically a repeat of how World War I ended.
    • Weber's Germany: The Veterinarian Totalitarian reinterprets "victory" as "prolonging its existence in an increasingly moribund fashion no further than the 1960s".
    • Thousand-Week Reich, as its name implies, also features a short-lived Nazi victory; after barely edging out the Soviets, the Third Reich gets to work carrying out Generalplan Ost (i.e., mass genocide and enslavement of Slavs in Eastern Europe to make way for German settlers) and suppressing dissent, which, as you can imagine, is prevalent. Unable to hold on to power, the system quickly unravels after Hitler's death in 1952, losing client state Vichy France to a popular rebellion, before ultimately succumbing to its own civil war and collapsing entirely in 1958.
  • Argentina Is Nazi-Land: Averted. The board has long deemed this an overblown cliché, whether in AH works or real life (the idea of Nazi emigres setting up a Fourth Reich in South America is ridiculed in particular).
  • As You Know:
  • Ban on Politics: Expressing political opinions (especially on current events) outside of the Political Chat sub-forum (which is specially zoned for discussion of current politics) is very frowned upon by the site's moderators.
  • Brain Bleach: AH.com's version is to scream and call for "THE FORKS! THE FORKS!"
  • Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Justified Trope, given the Alternate History settings the board's authors create and tackle. Here's the specific wiki page that lovingly maps the whole phenomenon.
  • Cosmic Horror Story: Parodied with "The Underboard" running gag.
  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Alternate history maps posted on the website tend to (but not always) use conventional colour schemes with France being blue, Britain being pale red, Japan being yellow, and so on. Different governments are sometimes represented by different colours, with communist China being magenta, and a non-communist China being green.
  • Different World, Different Movies: Naturally, alternate pop culture is a frequent feature of many of the board's AH stories and projects. Pages compiling some discussions on these topics can be found here and here.
  • Double-Blind What-If: Naturally, some forum games will ask for an "alternate timeline" that produced an event in real history, with the forum members coming up with both a timeline without it, and then determining how residents of that world would write the original request.
  • Doorstopper:
  • Eagleland: When "Ameriwank" scenarios come up, generally their authors have flavor #1 in mind and everyone else is pointedly reminded of flavor #2.
  • El Spanish "-o": A Running Gag on the site, started by member Thermopylae, who refers to map updates to his timelines as "El Mappo!", and later used by the Heterosexual Reconquista.
  • Fake Movie Real Trailer: This thread.
  • Fan Sequel: Many published works of alternate history have received this experimental treatment over the years in various scenarios posted on the board.
    • Decades Of Darkness was explicitly created as an attempt to make a realistic timeline with an evil empire in the vein of The Draka, making it an Inspired by… re-imagining of sorts.
    • There's even an unofficial continuation of Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 series.
  • Horse of a Different Color: In the board's less serious moments you will occasionally find mention of Bear Cavalry and the like for sheer Rule of Cool. Though outside the Alien Space Bats area of discussion, expect to see some deconstruction of the possibility for less likely animals.
  • Inexplicable Cultural Ties: Criticised and dubbed the "Citroen DS Incident". The latter was based on how a former forum member once criticized the use of too much real world iconography on the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and in AH fiction.
  • Intentionally Awkward Title: There's a timeline called "The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies".
  • Istanbul (Not Constantinople): As with the alternate terminology seen in many timelines, alternate geographic names are equally common.
  • Lost Episode:
    • In an infamous 2011 case of moderator powers abuse, now-banned board member maverick hard-deleted several threads from the discussion board, most of which were his own extensive timelines, projects and stories, an event that would become known as the Maverick Mutiny. Though some efforts have been made to recover them via the Internet Archive and similar sources, most of them have been permanently lost.
    • By the early 2020s, due to some activities of already banned ex-members or nearly-banned members, aimed at digging up personal details on other board members from years ago, and spreading them elsewhere online or abusing them for slandering board members for petty reasons, it was decided that most of the Non-political Chat and Political Chat forum discussions would be regularly, gradually deleted, every few years, to avoid this potential risk. Ever since the board's inception twenty years ago, threatening board members has been a ban-worthy offence. Many members who left the site due to a Single-Issue Wonk, not following the site's rules of good behaviour and civility in the process, wanted to enact petty "revenge" on other board members, were banned for these wannabe-blackmailing activities, and it was decided that regularly thinning down the fora that might contain sensitive personal information would be adequate prevention of future attempts at abusing other people's personal information. Whatever Non-political Chat and Political Chat forum discussions planned for eventual deletion aren't saved offline, eventually become 'Lost Episodes' due to these personal information safety measures.
  • Mad Mathematician: Zyzzyva jokingly received this kind of reputation.
  • Mass Teleportation: Quite common in scenarios involving Alien Space Bats. The local term is ISOT, a verbed abbreviation derived from the initials of S. M. Stirling's novel Island in the Sea of Time. (E.g. "I'll ISOT myself/country XY/person XY to the year...").
  • Middle Eastern Coalition: Routinely spoofed and skewed. Popular joke names include "the Randomid Caliphate", "Implausiblid Caliphate", "The Obligatory Supercaliphate", and "the Inevitablid Caliphate".
  • Mind Screw / Mind Screwdriver: Discussed by a board member who is very knowledgeable about the history of Doctor Who, as part of a criticque on writing and storytelling in the late 'classic era' of the series. He noted that the Seventh Doctor era serial Ghost Light suffered from a serious lack of clarity and focus, and joked that it should be considered a lost episode, because...

    "It lost me. Any story that you need to watch six times, listen to the commentary track, and surreptitiously phone up the writer at three in the morning in order to have even a bare understanding of, deserves to be lost."

  • No Name Given: The Sealion World Tour featured a stuffed toy sealion called... Sealion, because nobody could think of a suitable name. He was eventually dubbed "Silas" by the Brazilians, a Punny Name that only works in Portuguese.
  • People's Republic of Tyranny: A number of examples appear in various timelines.
  • Person as Verb: The mapmaking style of member B_Munro (minimalism coupled to snarky annotations) has become so popular that other mapmakers often refer to taking an older map and "B_Munrofying it".
  • Play-by-Post Game: The Shared Worlds section contains a variety of them (map games, Alternate History RPGs, etc.). A good deal of them become complex stories or universes given enough time.
  • Podcast: The AH.com Podcast.
  • Point of Divergence: Great care is usually taken by writers of counterfactual timelines in the choice of the point of divergence.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: Every now and then somebody makes a thread in the vein of 'Which things which happened in real history would you complain were unrealistic if you read them in a timeline?', if this discussion ends up long enough they end up with an enormous list ranging from Genghis Khan to Donald Trump, from Joan D'arc to Catherine the Great, from the Aztec Empire to San Marino, from Nationalism to Marxism. Then somebody concludes that real history is, in fact, unrealistic from top to bottom and less plausible than many timelines on AH.com.
  • Running Gag:
    • In addition to using some mainstream internet memes, AH.com has its own set.
    • There are various related memes about the most common clichés seen in timelines (especially those of newbie authors preferring Alternate History Wank).
    • At one point, there was a tendency to give really sadistic Crapsack World scenarios the "Vlad Tepes Award◊" (aka Vlad Dracula, Vlad the Impaler). That name alone explains itself. Due to increasing overuse, this meme is now frowned upon.
    • "If I see that damned Kazakh border one more time..."
    • The collection of silly names for an "Eeebiiiil Muslim Middle Eastern Coalition". A variant is the "Boat People's Caliphate", a mocking name for a hypothetical Indonesia-led alliance of south Asian Muslim countries (a staple of the already cliché scenario "random near future war between Indonesia and Australia").
    • Another notable running gag is that all the German members on the forum actually constitute a Hive Mind - despite their constant political arguments, which are held to be only an elaborate cover.
    • Someone is bound to bring up the infamous "China need not democracy, need not throwing banana" statement by pro-Red China troll "kahing" every time there's a thread on said country.
    • Trolls in general are often regarded as a rich and treasured source of memes among AH.commers.
    • Occasionally, a discussion will bring up this obligatory string of statements:

      "X needs a warm water port!"
      "And Alsace-Lorraine!"
      "And a transcontinental railroad to connect them!"
      "With blackjack! And hookers!"

    • Every once in a while, someone will happen upon a particularly atrocious world map and end up posting it to the "Horrible Educational Maps" thread, to the point that long-time posters in that thread are sick of it. Every re-post brings some laughs as well, though, when the typo reading out as "Caspian Sean" is mentioned.
    • And, of course, "Blaming Thande". The member in question has remarked that "back in 2007, it was everywhere and part of the site culture's canon - by now, it's gone borderline meta...".
  • Scrapbook Story: Many of the best works on the site.
  • Shown Their Work: Because of their love for the genre, the members of the board try to do this as much as possible - even when writing deliberately silly and Rule of Fun scenarios and timelines.
  • Silly Reason for War: While some of the on-board disputes have an amount of seriousness to them, they've been mostly jocular in nature.
  • Single-Issue Wonk: One of the commonest reasons, along with incivility to others or bigotry, for ex-members' banning from the board, due to their conduct. Note that though the site has fairly strict moderation, a fair bit stricter than on many other Internet forums, but this is done to guarantee civility on the board, and a welcoming atmosphere for everyone interested in discussing history, alternate history, writing and other topics. Trying to get away with bullying or slandering board members, or demanding preferential treatment based on someone's political opinions or "seniority" on the board is an absolute no-go for anyone. The rules on the site apply to everyone and everyone is required to be civil in their interactions with others.
  • Small Reference Pools: Actually purposefully averted by most of the writing on the site, whether it be stories, story series, timelines or other formats. Instead of focusing on the same few eras and topics over and over again, in a sensationalist manner, many board members prefer to focus on highly original (but usually generally plausible/believable) scenarios focusing on overlooked geographic regions, overlooked points of divergence, even whole overlooked eras. Though in the early 2000s, there might have been some lingering focus on stories based on topics popularized by AH writers of the previous decades (1970s, 1980s, 1990s), part of a trend of AH dot com maturing was about showing just how varied, creative and imaginative alternate history could be as a literary genre, and that newer writers, including those on the board, are not indebted to the 'old guard' of writers. Tellingly, by The New '10s, some of the more notable AH dot com works started getting published, and some even won a Sidewise Award for Alternate History or were nominated for it.
  • Testosterone Poisoning: At one point a beard-growing contest was held, with the winner being given the title of "Ultimate AH.com Macho Manly Mountain Man In The Height Of His Manliness".
  • Zeppelins from Another World: Generally seen as a codeword for "this timeline shouldn't be taken entirely seriously." They've been sporked as a cliche, but everyone still admits that they're too cool not to put in somewhere.