Cowslips Warren posted:

I wonder how much detail they would have used for the first few seasons before cramming everything into a finale of a wet poo poo.

I still have never received a real answer as to The South Shall Rise Again in terms of...and then what? Every black person in the south is enslaved again? What about outside the South? What about non-blacks that are POC? Will Hispanics become slaves? You guys gonna go back to growing nicotine and cotton?

Cowslips Warren posted:

I wonder how much detail they would have used for the first few seasons before cramming everything into a finale of a wet poo poo.

I still have never received a real answer as to The South Shall Rise Again in terms of...and then what? Every black person in the south is enslaved again? What about outside the South? What about non-blacks that are POC? Will Hispanics become slaves? You guys gonna go back to growing nicotine and cotton?

christmas boots posted:

I mean they sorta did already, right? They lost the war but it seems like they basically won the peace

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Yeah, the whole Lost Cause narrative is all about laundering the heritage of traitorous slavers who started a war rather than stop keeping human beings as property to kill and gently caress at their leisure.

Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:

Ellie Trashcakes posted:

Yeah but the thing is you can turn down jobs

It's a safe, legal thrill

Macdeo Lurjtux posted:

I'm not arguing that, I'm just saying there's a difference between a pair of White Ivy Leaguers saying 'We want to envision an America where the South won.' And a pair of Black producers asking a pair of white guys to 'Envision an America that's worse for Black people.'. The second seems almost like an academic experiment to see how close to the truth they end up getting.

Macdeo Lurjtux posted:

I'm not arguing that, I'm just saying there's a difference between a pair of White Ivy Leaguers saying 'We want to envision an America where the South won.' And a pair of Black producers asking a pair of white guys to 'Envision an America that's worse for Black people.'. The second seems almost like an academic experiment to see how close to the truth they end up getting.

GreenMetalSun posted:

I mean, it feel like it’s possible to write a series like that. Man In The High Castle got made, after all. Though I admit I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know if it’s widely considered super offensive or anything.

Fish of hemp posted:

What if the confederacy won? Well they have a civil war of their own in a couple of decades and after that come running back to the USA.

Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:

its fruitless to try to game out a 'what if the south won' counterfactual because the outcome you get is going to be entirely tailored to support what it is you want to say about racial relations in the modern united states through the lens of confederate and lost cause framing, which is bound to be horrific and offensive no matter what. its like making a true crime series where ted bundy, john wayne gacy, never got caught. either they end up caught in the end and we're back to the standard timeline but with more bodies, or its just murder porn and they keep going on stacking victims

Henchman of Santa posted:

I don't think it is considered offensive but the marketing move of covering NYC trains in Nazi imagery sure was.

christmas boots posted:

TBH I'm way less interested in "what would happen if the Confederacy/Nazis/Etc. won" than I am in the nuts and bolts of what it would have taken materially for those things to happen.

sweet geek swag posted:

The Confederates had some chances to win the Civil War due to bad northern generalship. It's easy to cop out and say "What if Lee won at Antietam/Gettysburg?" which doesn't really engage with your question at all. But the Nazis were never going to win a long term war in Russia with the military they had. Ultimately though I can't think of a reason to tell either of these stories. I don't want to watch the Confederates/Nazis win.

sweet geek swag posted:

This is any historical counterfactual; they tell morality tales. It would be entirely possible to do a 'what if the South won?' story that is about how ultimately things wouldn't be as different today as we think they would be. There's an assumption I constantly see that assumes that any form of this story would be based on Lost Cause ideology, but if the South had won the Lost Cause myth wouldn't even be a thing, and should not appear in such a story at all.

That being said it would be staggeringly difficult to pull off, and I don't think there are any white writers/producers/directors who have the necessary context to do it. Certainly not the guys who dropped the ball on the tits and dragons show.

christmas boots posted:

Well that's what I mean. Like, I assumed the Confederacy just didn't have the infrastructure to win so I'm interested in learning that there were some key moments where that might have been the case. You're right with the Nazis, and I especially enjoyed learning about all the poo poo with the uniforms or why the Panzer was a total piece of poo poo.

Alhazred posted:

There actually was a pretty decent movie about that:

Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:

basically the only chances for the CSA to win would be to undermine and destabilize the union's ability to press the war. the CSA would never be able to wrestle the USA into submission, so it would have to be some kind of weird hail mary stroke of luck. there are two commonly regarded opportunities here

first would be seizure of washington DC and displacement of the federal government. this would not necessarily disrupt the north's ability to fight, but it would serve as the symbolic turning point that would cause northern anti-war politicians to gain support and the overall northern public to lose confidence in the ability of the USA to win. this is basically not feasible outside of the first six months of the war because washington becomes massively fortified, beyond the ability of the CSA to lay siege to and capture the city (unless they counterfactually capture a ton of food and weapons). it's gotta be a sudden, swift capture - possibly during the initial days of mobilization or after first bull run. some historians, famously harry turtledove in the timeline-191 series, propose that lee's "lost orders" in antietam could be a turning point. in reality, a copy of lee's entire battle plan was found in the field and provided to union intel. this allowed the northern troops lead by the famously hesitant mcclellan to catch up to and eject the southern army at the battle of antietam, ending lee's first invasion of the north. its possible to speculate from here that if this had not happened, lee might have been able to trap and destroy the northern forces around washington long enough to sack the city, but at this point we are well into making-things-up-land

second would be an electoral loss for lincoln in the national election of 1864. obviously the southern states did not participate in this election but in the north, public sentiment was turning pretty sour as bodies kept getting stacked and the war that was supposed to be over in 90 days ground on through its fourth year. sherman's capture of atlanta gave the pro-war faction in the north a huge boost - at the time, atlanta was a tiny and inconsequential town, but it was also a vital hub of the minimal confederate rail network, and its capture demonstrated that the confederacy had no ability to keep union armies out of the confederate heartland, away from critical war infrastructure. now there was no way at all sherman would fail to capture atlanta in time, as the city surrendered in september after the defenders were forced out after a brief siege and the cutting of all rail lines to the city. we could open our movie in media res in the hills of north georgia, june 1864, as sherman lay dying of camp fever or something and george thomas gets thrown from his horse or something, idk but you'd have to kill both those dudes at minimum to make the capture of atlanta even a little in doubt. you'd also have to elect mcclellan (this guy again), lincoln's opponent, somehow - maybe another shocking confederate victory near washington? - and he'd have to be a lot more anti-war than he was in reality, because the 1864 democrats were split between "defeat the CSA" and "just end the war already" factions and mcclellan, for his other faults, wanted to keep on with the war

there are lots of other little nitpicky what if scenarios that are more like favored extrapolations of milhist nerds - what if lee had won the sixth of the seven days, what if lee went west to face sherman in tennessee - but they all boil down to similar strokes of luck and convincing the northern people to give up the fight, because the total tldr is that the south was never going to win the war through sheer force of arms, and was never going to be able to field the number of troops necessary to simply batter the north into surrender, the way that the north did to win the war

Baudolino posted:

A more plausible story is what if the civil war had been over before the emancipation proclamation with Lincon dying to an assasin soon after. Does the 13th amendment even happen with northern whites now more concerned with healing wounds of the war and building a new consensus? And if you then have a massive rising of angry and disappointed slaves what would the union army do? Almost certainly they would be ordered to suppress the rebellion and would carry out that task without any hint of mercy. Instead of killing slavers son`s they would be busy kiling the slaves themselves .That`s a version of America that migth be worse than if the confederates had somehow defeated the union. At least the CSA was inherently unstable and so migth plausible collapse within a generation.

Magic Hate Ball posted:

Versailles being the 17th century equivalent of a nerd convention is extremely funny to me and I'm sad I've never seen a movie capitalize on that, because it's always depicted as being sort of austerely classy.

Nameless Pete posted:

Proposed compromise: A world where the CSA repels the Union only to get swallowed up by Mexico afterwards.

pentyne posted:

The CSA wins, then as the only proud slave owning "modern" nation no other world power will trade or do diplomacy with them, also their economy was basically a mono-culture that by the late 1850s was quickly becoming obsolete and unable to compete with India and China.

pentyne posted:

The CSA wins, then as the only proud slave owning "modern" nation no other world power will trade or do diplomacy with them, also their economy was basically a mono-culture that by the late 1850s was quickly becoming obsolete and unable to compete with India and China.

Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:

iirc in this movie (been at least a decade since i've seen it) the turning point is that the CSA somehow persuades britain and france to send military aid, causing an insurmountable defeat. which is pretty much the historian's way of firmly grabbing the wheel and veering off into allegory land, because in reality neither of those powers were more than politely dismissive of confederate attempts to attract intervention in what the europeans viewed firmly as an american domestic conflict

Cowslips Warren posted:

That's why it's so hilarious when movies show early America or Civil War era, and justify the hero owning slaves because he's a Good Master or pays them secretly or something insane like that.

I mean, aside from everything else in the last season of Game of Thrones, did no one else loving laugh until they pissed themselves with the whole "we will elect our ruler from now on" bullshit they tacked on at the end?

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I've read somewhere that in Arabic monarchies the position would be passed to the oldest male member of the family, rather than strictly down one line of succession. Which seems like it has its own ups and downs.