Good morning, afternoon or evening, fellow Nationstates Enjoyers. Today I will be discussing my thoughts on Alternate History from a meta textual and narrative standpoint. I’ll be looking into some of the tropes that comes with Alternate History, meta categorization of Alternate History along with my general understanding on why Alternate History is so popular and what allows authors of such alternate universes such as myself give such joy and pride to write this.
Alternate History is storytelling. This is a fact and something that I think modern education overlooks. History has been told through stories not through necessarily rigorous archaeological discoveries or combing through historical records, a majority of our history derives from the stories we tell. You look at famous historical records for this instance, I will use the Alexiad as an example, it is a story, grand epic and poem all rolled into one. Obviously historians recognize this bias as it was written by an Eastern Roman Princess but the story that it tells outweighs the bias. Alternate History specifically so, requires that storytelling aspect of History itself. You are essentially creating a new story or new history. That’s why when you look at a lot of Alternate History content, whether it be in video or written. It is generally a first person if not third person narrative.
The third person narrative approach to Alternate History is the most popular form of telling Alternate History. I think the reason behind this narrative approach is that it allows us to easily tell the audience of everything that is happening unlike a first person narrative which will inevitably force the author to keep some information private. You could argue that this approach is lazier as it weakens the narrative quality or storytelling quality but I would argue any decent author can make up that shortcoming while retaining all the benefit of a third person narrative.
As an avid reader and enjoyer of Alternate History, there are a lot of tropes that come to mind when writing or reading Alternate History. The first one, which I am a bit guilty of is the “Great Ruler” trope in which alternate history stories follow only the royal family of a state, and its respective drama so whether it is the royal marriages, sudden illnesses, foreign wars and etc. This is a trope that most alternate history writers do and a lot of historians use this style of recording history although it is more written as the Great Man Theory.
A second trope which is used fairly often and arguably is even more of a criticism is the “All goes well” trope. In which, after the initial flurry of events, everything goes particularly well for this alternate state. Nothing too major is lost and no actual disasters, diseases or anything that would ruin the nation. Arguably this is due to a lack of historical research but it can be very clearly seen as a form of bias to create a good ending story that the author would like to tell.
A final trope I would like to discuss is the “Too unrealistic” quote, in which many authors only take the safe and most likely outcome of an event rather than allow the alternate history to enjoy a bit of luck and a bit more unfavourable outcomes occur. This creates a very boring and to me a very predictable scenario kinda like a robot conducted history but history is written by humans and adding in that luck and that chance in alternate history allows it to be more fun.
So alternate history is so popular because stories have always been incredibly popular and it is very difficult to create a fictional world, to come up with new rules, ideas and backgrounds. That is a fine line to walk without ruining its continuity or creating plot holes within the story. The appeal of alternate history is that all the worldbuilding already exists, and you can draw from a near infinite source of inspiration because the world is so realistic and so similar to our own. I remember my first alternate history video I watched, it was what if Germany won WW1 and even now that I look back at it, I think it was really well made with no explicitly known plot holes or breaking the rules of said world. Yes some alternate histories do change the rules of the world a bit, and leave a lot of questions as to how exactly does this world but these ones are consistent, and their rules are understandable. I think alternate history is the first stepping stone into fictional writing and by extension storytelling. It is both of those on easy mode and that’s why I think it is so appealing because we can relate very easily to alternate history, whether we have the same questions or whether we relate to the new human characters we see in this alternate history.
Thank you for reading my meta analysis on Alternate History. I do hope you enjoyed this article and I’ll see you all later in probably another UTEP piece. -Arleat 