Darth Wiki / As One Star Sets Another Rises

"The events of this film have convinced me of what I already believed, Kuribayashi-san. The kami themselves were responsible for the Transition. They brought Japan back to this year so that the war could be avoided and so that our nation could become a greater power, but at the same time the memory of the defeat in that other time would serve as a warning to our people for generations to come."

— General Masaharu Homma, upon viewing Letters from Iwo Jima. 10 November 1939, Transition +48 days

As One Star Sets, Another Rises is a timeline and novel posted on AlternateHistory.com written by theg*ddam*hoi2fan, in which on 21 May, 2015, all the territories currently belonging to the State of Japan with everyone and everything on them, finds itself inexplicably ISOT back to the year 1939, two years after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, and two years before the Attack on Pearl Harbor.

Needless to say, having a militaristic and expansionist Imperial power suddenly replaced by a pacifist conservative democracy that is over 70 years more advanced compared to the rest of the world will fundamentally change history in unpredictable ways...

The timeline follows various individuals both up-time and down-time, both inside Japan and beyond, and examines the political, social, and economical impact that the Transition has on the world from their perspectives.

The story is currently ongoing, with it's discussion thread can be found here and here (the original thread was over 500 pages, so it was locked, a fate that the second thread would share in late 2021), and it's story-only thread here (requires free membership to view).

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This story provides examples of :

• Action Girl: Patsy Spencer, flying ace, has upgraded to a powerful ground combatant in recent updates.
• Adaptational Badass: Winston Churchill is determined to ensure that the United Kingdom retains its power and prestige this time around, even if it means turning some British colonies into protectorates.
• Alas, Poor Villain: General Zhukov leads the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, and is killed by the Japanese counterattack. However it's clear that he commanded the invasion only because it was his duty to do so, and not because he himself wanted to go to war. It's made even sadder when the general knows that he can neither retreat, surrender, or even refuse his orders, as doing so would risk the lives of his family. To make things worse, even though his family isn't targeted in the aftermath, Stalin decides to use his staff as scapegoats and has their families arrested.
  • Karl Hanke, to a certain extent. Yeah, he's committed terrible crimes, but he honestly felt he was fighting for a stronger Germany, and he knows he'll be too hated to be allowed to live.
• Alien Space Bats: How Japan gets transported though time, how the force behind it works, and why Japan still manages to keep it's orbiting satellites is left completely unexplained as of right now, with the story much more focused on the social and political aftermath of the Transition instead of the cause behind it.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: The story suggests that with Uptimer support, Howard Hughes becomes much more successful his ambitions. His company develops drones for the US Navy, he branches into media, pharmaceuticals (especially medication used to treat mental illness such as his own); and there are even hints that he successfully develops this timeline's version of the H-4 Hercules, the Atlas.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Prime Minister Abe to the ambassador from the People's Republic of China.
  Abe: Are you in such a hurry to meet Chairman Mao, Ambassador - you with your Armani suit and Rolex watch, your BMW and the slim, expensive mistress you maintain in the apartment in Nihonbashi?
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: In-Universe, Astray's letter to Mussolini is allegedly in Italian.
• The Baroness: Silver-Gun Wu, whether as jumped up bandit/petty warlord or provincial police commissioner, is the sort of person who gets "creative" with any enemies that live long enough to be captives.
• Badass in Distress: Patsy Spencer, a young British flying ace in the "all-Jewish" (some members changed their names and pretended to be Jewish to get a chance to fly) Maccabeus Squadron, is shot down over the Occupied Netherlands and caught by an SS patrol. Fortunately, she's rescued by Simo Häyhä before the SS officer can kill her.
• Badass Normal: Audie Murphy, now a Marine. A one-man racist-punching Nazi-killing machine of pure courage.
• Bad Boss: If you fail Josef Stalin, no matter how inconsequentially, you are better off just shooting yourself and saving everyone the trouble.
• Beware the Silly Ones: J. Edgar Hoover initially seems like an obnoxious jerk whom the uptimers give little actual respect to. But when a spy starts sending information to the Nazis, Hoover manages to figure out who it is all by himself through a series of very well-made deductions. He then has the spy, Jesse Wayne, arrested and tortured with pillow cases stuffed with phone books in order to avoid leaving marks.
• Big Bad:
  • Adolf Hitler, for obvious reasons.
  • Josef Stalin, in the longer term (i.e. at least for the rest of the '40s and probably the '50s). The British have been warned about his OTL actions by the Japanese, and have significantly altered their approach to the Germany problem as a result. Stalin still manages to build up and hastily modernize some of his military by 1941.
• Boring, but Practical: Mexico, under Lázaro Cárdenas, makes as little waves as possible in international politics and starts developing its oil industry and raising standards of living under the auspices of the Japanese.
• Born in the Wrong Century: Doctor Watanabe Midori, a young woman living by herself and practicing medicine on Toyohara. In 1939, it was absolutely scandalous for a single women like her to live alone away from family, being a doctor and treating Koreans.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Surprisingly, Josef Stalin doesn't have Lavrentiy Beria killed, likely for this reason. He does blackmail him into ceasing his sexual predations, though.
• Character Development: FDR initially avoids being too pro-uptimer and pro-interventionist, in order to avoid alienating the isolationist and Southern wing of the party. But gradually, he becomes less and less tolerant of the injustices of racism and sexism, being willing to publicly call out these injustices, especially when they threaten uptimers, and sends troops to put down the Oregon uprising, and send troops to defend black Mississippians from racist rioters.
• Colonel Badass: Chesty Puller, Mad Jack, and Patton, much like their OTL selves. The latter responds to a racist rebel movement in Oregon with overwhelming military force, crushing them in about a month.
• Cool Boat: Many, many examples in the story, including the US Seventh Fleet stationed at Japan at the time of the Transition, and Japan's own down-time warships that was out at sea at the time.
  • The Nimitz-class supercarrier deserves special mention, being effectively a One-Ship Navy due to its sheer size and the raw firepower of its jet aircraft.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The Soviet incursion into Manchuria and Karafuto resulted in the sinking of it's entire Pacific Fleet, and all tanks stationed in the Far East.
• Deadpan Snarker: Theodore Bilbo extols the virtue of poverty and hard work above any convenience uptime technology could bring to anyone in the South. A very poor farmer is quoted as saying that if those things are so wonderful, he's welcome to leave his luxurious office, hand over his considerable pay, and work in his farm - there's plenty of those things there.
• Defusing the Tyke-Bomb: Abd al-Ilah, Regent of Iraq, plans to turn a certain child in Tikrit into a loyal follower of the Iraqi monarchy.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Oh yes. Uptimers are confronted with countless acts of bigotry, misogyny, and homophobia.
• Didn't See That Coming: The little-mentioned Mexico subplot. The president at the era when the story takes place is Lázaro Cárdenas, under whose rule Mexico expropriated the nation's oil reserves, but was consequently punished for it with an international boycott. Here, he instantly enters talks with the Japanese, selling them the oil nobody wanted to buy, kickstarting Mexico's development as a first-world nation.
• Different World, Different Movies:
  • The anime industry booms after the Transition, producing films based on Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, a Castlevania franchise, popular though controversial adaptations of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, Catherine, and a Madoka Magica prequel. Other movies include a Godzilla film and a Stargate remake.
  • With many iconic films from OTL being pre-made, many Hollywood actors are free to expand their choices of film roles.
• Enemy Mine:
  • The Chinese uptimers have no choice but to throw their lot in with Chiang Kai-shek because Mao Zedong would never accept modern China's economic policies, whereas Chiang would gladly do so.
  • Mussolini joins the Allies this time around, but they can barely restrain their contempt for him.
  • The Republican Party forms a coalition with Southern anti-uptimer groups, but their presidential nominee, Thomas Dewey, treats said groups with barely concealed loathing, and internally admits that he hates Jim Crow and wants it abolished—on a state-by-state level, as he feels that a federal law against it would be too autocratic.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Strom Thurmond is an unabashed racist, but despite his disagreement with Sam Rayburn, he was appalled when a fanatic tried to shoot him. Subverted with Theodore Bilbo who only thought the murder of a respected politician would be detrimental to his cause.
  • Josef Stalin does not approve of Lavrentiy Beria's sexual predations, and uses knowledge from OTL to make him stop.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Reinhard Heydrich and even Adolf Hilter thought Jessie Wayne's antisemitic propaganda was a load of bull. Yes, the fathers of the most racist ideology ever thought an uptime Neo-Nazi's fears about minorities were a rambling, incoherent mess.
  • While most uptime Japanese are not known for their tolerance of other Asian people, many are horrified by the crimes committed by their ancestors against the Chinese.
  • A mafioso condemned to an Italian penal unit is horrified at the Nazi use of Child Soldiers.
  • While Southern society believes that women should Stay in the Kitchen, they also feel that men should always be polite to women. So, when an ultra-chauvinist uptimer publishes an article describing how women should be "handled", everybody in the United States condemns it.
• A Father to His Men: Admiral Nimitz and Chesty Puller both fall here, making a point of nipping any downtimer abuse of uptimers in the bud.

  Admiral Nimitz: Well I don't see the problem. Damn it, man, you've served your country! If your country can't look after you and yours for the service you've done it - and what you'll be bringing with you - then it's not the country I thought it was.

• For Want Of A Nail: Due to the Japanese intervention, the British Empire quietly begins preparing for a post-war disassembly, allowing for largely peaceful transitions of power. However, this has the unintended side effect of leaving the royal houses of several Arabic states standing and leaving India a nation separated into the Princely States. Churchill argues that this is a good thing: he convinces the up-timers that the royal houses will ensure that al Qaeda and ISIS will not come into existence; and that unified India was a chaotic mess, anyway—though he really just wants to stick it to Gandhi.
• Friendly Sniper: Simo Häyhä.
• Future Me Scares Me: In one interlude we see a certain Margarita Carmen Cansino view a Rita Hayworth movie in Futureville; then promptly find a lawyer, sue for divorce, and secure leverage to renegotiate her contract with Columbia Pictures spurred on by horror over seeing her face being "replaced by a mask."
• Going Cold Turkey: Downplayed with King George VI of the United Kingdom. Having been informed that his smoking addiction led to an early death in OTL, his family forces him to toss the cigarettes (which nearly sets his stammer back again) until he finds a less damaging replacement: vape. Winston Churchill shows mixed feelings about this: on one hand, he's glad that it's less damaging to the king's health; but on the other hand, he dislikes the smell of butterscotch (which seems to be George's favorite flavor) that goes with it.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Colonel Patton forces this trope upon himself when he gets a new, female aide. She bluntly tells him that it won't offend her if he swears, but he refuses.
• Grandfather Paradox: Discussed, with people from up-time meeting their own grandparents and parents before the latter was even married, and the butterfly effect meaning that anyone who was not conceived by the time of the Transition being automatically removed from the timeline.
• Grass is Greener: Many of the Soviet refugees who end up under Japanese rule more or less can tolerate Japanese xenophobia if it means not living under Stalin. As one refugee puts it:
  Baranov:"Boy, we lived in Stalin's Soviet Union. Country that we can buy three square meals a day in and where Black Marias don't come to door at midnight is paradise by comparison. Even if yellow people hate blonde Slavs, as long as they let us make living and eat decent food."
• Gratuitous Japanese: The story features a lot of Japanese sprinkled in it. Most of it is… Questionable.
• Heel–Face Turn: Rommel, after his family is liberated from Nazi custody and the Allies save him from his SS "bodyguard"/assassin.
• Heel Realization: Many of the German people upon finding out about the OTL atrocities that the SS performed. Which eventually leads to an uprising which results in Hitler getting torn apart by the very people he had claimed he was trying to help.
• The Hero: Legendarily talented Japanese admiral Yamamoto Isoroku is probably the closest the series has to a central protagonist, as his efforts to build a proper alliance system for Japan and avert the tragedies of the 20th century drive most of the protagonists' actions.
• Hide Your Gays: Outright defied by the uptimer Americans, who are generally accepting of homosexuals being out of the closet and even married. It's a huge source of tension with the 1939-40 Americans.
• Historical Domain Character: Far too many to list. Many of them appear in just a single entry.
• Historical Hero Upgrade:
  • Mussolini attempts to invoke this. It's debatable how successful he is, and even Winston Churchill is disgusted by his naked attempts to grab more land, but so far he's managed to make himself a useful link in the chain holding back the Soviet Union.
  • Shinzo Abe supports right-wing groups, several of whom claim that the Rape of Nanjing never happened.
  • Erwin Rommel and his Afrikakorps committed war crimes like every other German unit in World War II, up to and including handing Jews over to the SS. This video sheds more light on that. Historians also tend to agree that his misdeeds get less focus not because he was against them, but because he was just in an area where he couldn't perform them as often as his cohorts—Rommel did not participate in the Eastern Front.
  • Walt Disney was notoriously stingy when it came to complimenting others, preferring to tersely say "That'll work" and express his approval via giving the employee(s) who pleased him a bonus when pay day rolled around. Possibly justified in that he's so awed by how massive his company became in OTL that he can't hide it.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: Fascist Spain briefly undergoes this after Franco's death and replacement by the considerably less stable Milan Astray. Invasion on three fronts coupled with a major Catalan uprising, Italian support to said uprising, and the historical severe famine all end this phase and effectively break Spain itself.
• Honor Before Reason: The Kwantung Army stationed in China refuses to back down when ordered by up-time Japan to withdraw, launching the ‘Temporal Mutiny’. Despite the fact that they are cut off from supplies and reinforcements, have equipment that is 70 years less advance compared to the JDF and Japanese-based US forces, and is being attacked by the Soviets from the north.
  • Played with by General Kuribayashi Tadamichi at first, before the Imperial forces on mainland Asia learn of the Transition and suspect that the loss of contact with Japan was caused by a coup, with the general willing to obey the new government, but not necessarily support it. Ultimately subverted however, as General Kuribayashi along with Generals Masaharu Homma and Yamashita Tomoyuki backing the up-time government against the mutinying Kwantung Army.
  • Averted when General Masaharu, who believes himself to be a potential embarrassment to up-time Japan and requests that he be granted the opportunity for honorable suicide. The Emperor quickly and firmly expresses his disagreement with the general's sentiment.
  • Justifiably played straight by General Yamashita, who while agreeing that war criminals would be tried, insists that the trials should be fair and the accused properly-represented, and threatening protest by honorable suicide otherwise. Prime Minister Abe assures the general that Japan would not hold show trials, as it is a democratic nation and not the Soviet Union.
• Humble Hero: Simo Häyhä, as he was in Real Life.
• I Hate Past Me: An extremely elderly man ends up testifying to his as-yet-unrepentant younger self's war crimes.
• Irony: "Auferstanden aus Ruinen", the national anthem of the GDR, becomes the anthem of the Hohenzollern restoration.
• I Want My Mommy!: Eva Braun heard Hitler calling for his mother, right before his own men shot him dead.
• Jerkass: Private Jesse Wayne, a Neo-Nazi US marine that seeks to help Nazi Germany win the war by giving them an iPad containing information from 2015, and destabilize the US internally so that a far-right government can take power.
  • Father Coughlin, a notable downtime right-wing radio preacher, infamous for his bigoted tirades, experiences a revival as part of the culture clash, and proceeds to be as much of a Politically Incorrect Villain as he can.
  • Theodore Bilbo, who also tries to whip up public anger in the South against uptimers.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Many downtimers have legitimate grievances about modern America-deindustrialization, crime, the military industrial complex-but they only use those facts to reinforce their bigotry.
  • Jan Smuts poses this question to the uptimer South African ambassador:
  Jan Smuts: “...the Cape Coloured population, I assume, also benefited from your Rainbow State?” He chuckled to himself as he saw the woman fume, and saw the British representative – a Mr Mackenzie – wince a little.
  • Joe Kennedy, Sr. points out that granting too many concessions to up-timers too quickly could split the Democratic Party and lead to Franklin D. Roosevelt losing the presidency to a more bigoted individual. Even Caroline Kennedy can't deny that he's absolutely right.
• Kaiserreich: The British have decided to back the eventual restoration of the House of Hohenzollern, though it's implied that Wilhelm II will not be restored, and his grandson Louis Ferdinand the Prince of Prussia will be the new Kaiser. Justified as if the Allies succeed in defeating Germany quickly and prevent The Holocaust from happening, it's likely that Nazism could eventually gain a second wind a couple of decades down the line. With the Hohenzollerns historically opposed to the Nazis (with Wilhelm II once describing them IRL as gangsters), and the strong dynastic loyalty still existing in Germany to the Hohenzollerns, the Allies hope that the Kaiserreich can sway people's allegiances away from the Nazis and keep them down.
• Karmic Death: Adolf Hitler, beaten to death by his own people. Something similar happens to Klaus Barbie when he's setting Jewish houses on fire.
• Mass Teleportation: How 2015 Japan ended up in 1939.
• Morality Kitchen Sink: The story is full of it. The story runs the morality gamut from the socially tolerant uptimers and their idealistic downtimer supporters, to violent racists and segregationists like Theodore Bilbo, and, of course, the Third Reich. In the middle are normal people who are wary of uptimer values, morally ambiguous and opportunistic politicians like Jan Smuts and Joe Kennedy Sr. who have to the placate the more hateful aspects of their society, to businessman and statesman seeking to profit from uptime technology.
• Nice Guy:
  • Texas Representative Sam Rayburn, who risks his reputation to defend the uptimers, even calling out the American people when an uptimer Chinese American family is forced to flee to colonial Singapore after countless acts of discrimination.
  • Audie Murphy is a genial guy, just don't piss him off.
• Nostalgia Filter: Jessie Wayne's has a naive view of pre-Civil Rights America. He gets a nasty surprise when he discovers that the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover is no less vicious about prying information from him than present day law enforcement.
• Other Me Annoys Me:
  • Anne Frank, who in this timeline was rescued before she had to go into hiding, says in an interview that she hates her original self because up-timers keep treating her like a hero for something she hasn't done, and feels guilty for not having gone through the horrors the other Anne did.
  • Audie Murphy feels this way at first, too.
  • Douglas MacArthur feels like he'll have to spend the rest of his life in the shadow of his alternate self's accomplishments, since he can't perform them here.
  • Averted with Christopher Lee, who is perfectly satisfied with how his life played out in OTL.
• One-Man Army: Several.
  • Sir Christopher Lee solos a bunch of Nazis to rescue the Bavarian royal family. He later does the same for Rommel's family
  • Mad Jack Churchill and the White Death take out an entire SS platoon that's about to execute an entire village in Holland.
  • Two words: Audie Murphy
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • Mussolini, to an extent. When he sees just how overpowered uptime technology is, and how badly he was screwed in our timeline, he withdraws his support of Germany and makes token moves to undo his Nazi-inspired anti-Jewish policies. He's still an arrogant dictator who buys into his own propaganda, though.
    • Pays off big-time when his restructured military pushes easily into Austria and swiftly defeats hastily-levied infantry under the command of SS officer Odilo Globocnick.
  • The downtime leadership of South Africa, too, acknowledging that they'll have to give the native population a few carrots while also trying to keep limited minority rule around for as long as possible.
  • Stalin to an extent, sitting back and frantically trying to unscrew himself while playing the Nazis for chumps and eventually landing a good slice of eastern Europe.
  • Reinhard Heydrich, as in Real Life. He even starts a civil war between Hitler and Himmler when the cause is obviously lost, so as to gain Mussolini's favor and prove himself useful to any unscrupulous fellows on the other side.
  • The Mexican government quietly purges several people who would have gone on to father key figures in the narcotics trade. This was later retconned to them tracking down these families and offering them comfortable lives and opportunities for their children in hopes of keeping them law-abiding citizens.
  • While some isolationist politicians in the United States want to reduce military spending, others recognize that this is a bad idea and are all for modernizing the Armed Forces—purely for defensive measures, though. Some of them are even willing to accept de-segregation of the military because they feel that America becoming a military juggernaut is worth the "sacrifice".
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Mad Jack's team, consisting of a Crazy Is Cool Englishman, a cheerful Finnish god of war, a plucky air-ace turned resistance fighter, and an uptime intelligence officer. Together, they kick Nazi ass.
• Rape and Revenge: After up-time revelations about clerical abuse are disseminated in Ireland, a Pedophile Priest is shot dead by an enraged father.
• Rousing Speech: Kaiser Wilhelm II gives one on radio, marking the beginning of a dedicated broadcast campaign meant to convince Germans of the utter vileness of the Nazi regime, and to explain why he is in Britain and standing in opposition to the Nazis despite the ongoing Allied invasion of Germany.

  People of Germany, I am Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albrecht von Preußen, head of the House of Hohenzollern and formerly Kaiser of the German Reich. I realise that many of you will question why I am in Britain. Why I am speaking to you from an enemy nation, when the Fatherland is invaded. Many of you will think I have turned traitor. Indeed, Herr Hitler and his gang will call me such. To all the people of Germany, I say that I am no traitor. I am here, in Britain, to save Germany from the darkness into which the mad Austrian and his jackals wish to lead it. In the other history, the history from which Japan was sent by the intervention of God Almighty, he succeeded. In that other history, the Nazis slaughtered over eleven million people in great 'extermination camps'. In that other history, they killed millions of their fellow-Germans, and of foreign civilians unlucky enough to fall into their hands. Why? Simply because they disagreed with their religion or their convictions. I realise that this is hard to believe. Many of you will think this is a lie. A lie perpetrated by our enemies. Which is why I am telling you, much as it pains me. I love Germany, and I love the German people, more than I love my own life. I would never tell such a damning lie about them. As time progresses, you will hear from others, men and women who studied this horror in that other history. You will hear evidence. And I pray that learning this fact will lead you to reject Hitler, to reject the man who - if he is successful in his aims again - will blacken the name of Germany for decades to come.

• Rousseau Was Right: Many, many Germans, from the Hohenzollerns, to Sophie Scholl, begin resisting the Nazis once they learn about their OTL atrocities. In one epic moment a German mob, lead by man old enough to remember Bismarck attack a group of SS soldiers trying to kill Berlin's Jews.
• Rule of Cool:
  • Nintendo realizes that they're exceedingly unlikely to survive as a company in a world that has neither the capacity to create or interest in videogames. So they decide to finally enter the filmmaking business, and team up with Studio Ghibli to produce films based on Donkey Kong, Metroid, and The Legend of Zelda - and they later decide to further team up with Disney. Konami later follows up with a Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin animated adaptation starring Bela Lugosi, Jimmy Stewart and Conrad Veidt. Later on, a two-bit actor, Ricardo Montalbán, is tapped by Howard Hughes himself to star in a Star Trek film.
  • Britain forms the SAS a couple years early, fielding a commando unit that includes up-time personnel, David Stirling, Mad Jack Churchill, and Simo Häyhä. They even team up with Christopher Lee at one point.
  • Everything involved with Age of Godzilla, whose cast includes Toshiro Mifune, Ai Hashimoto, Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Raymond Burr, Orson Welles, Robert Oppenheimer, and Albert Einstein (the latter two playing themselves as prominent characters), plus cameos from Charlie Chaplin and Isoroku Yamamoto. It is also mentioned that Einstein becomes a regular participant in Godzilla movies.
• Sanity Slippage: Adolf Hitler wasn't all that sane to begin with, but losing World War 2 so badly is making it worse. Not helped by Heydrich's treachery.
• Schizo Tech: Because of the Transition, countries allied with, or friendly to, Japan see everything from direct transfers of serviceable 2010s-era technology, to ersatz repurposings of 1970s-1990s technology for the 1940s. As one example, Toyota tools up to produce 1970s Corollas for export based on the E20 line from our era.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Stalin can get away with smoking around aircraft equipment—which is a safety hazard—because nobody working at the factory wants to tell him what he can and can't do.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Stalin has Nikita Khrushchev arrested, tortured, and sent to the gulag to keep him from becoming a threat, having apparently decided that such a fate is more cruel than simply shooting him. Unfortunately, Khrushchev managed to learn about what happened to the Soviet Union in OTL and becomes utterly determined to survive and take vengeance against his former boss. And with Stalin having just sent the bulk of his more competent officers and foot-soldiers to the exact same gulag (because he thinks they're not sycophantic enough), which Khrushchev has secretly taken control of, he might just be able to pull it off.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: So many examples, from Jan Smuts is trying to preempt South Africa's slide into pariah status by slowing expanding enfranchising black natives, to Caroline Kennedy trying to save her aunt from lobotomy. Of course, people can have very different ideas of what "went wrong."
• Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility: Type X due to the Transition, but afterwards a rigorous type I.
• The Sociopath: Reinhard "The Butcher of Prague" Heydrich is evil even for a Nazi, having no qualms about using horrific weapons of mass destruction, betraying both factions within his government, and even mass murder if they get him political power. A crazy neo-Pagan SS officer in the occupied Netherlands also earns the moniker "the Beast of Veenendaal" for extremely sadistic war crimes.
• Stay in the Kitchen: Patsy Spencer's mother, who even looks down on her becoming an acclaimed fighter pilot because it's "unladylike."
• Straight Gay: Roosevelt assumes that the 6'7", muscular Colonel Ransom must be vehemently defending having homosexual people in the army because he has a gay friend.
• Stupid Evil: Many Southerners are so vehemently racist that even the offer of 21st-century technology isn't enough to make them reconsider their views. Oregon even starts a rebellion to try to maintain their sickening beliefs. It gets even worse when this conduct drives many up-timers to leave for other countries that, while racist to an extent, are at least willing to restrain their bigotry in exchange for modernization. It's described as many Americans "being on brain-drain".
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Or would ensue, in any case. Japan might have a leg up on everybody else at the beginning of the story, but as both Prime Minister Abe and, later, Admiral Yamamoto's aide point out, Japan still doesn't have any oil reserves of its own, so its modern fleet would quickly run out of fuel; the US 7th Fleet poses a serious threat and could potentially ensure that Japan's oil supply would be blocked—and, unbeknownst to the Japanese, has three nuclear warheads; America has vast oil reserves that it hasn't tapped into yet, and thanks the up-time information, the federal government has made modernizing the US Armed Forces a top priority. In short, even with everything it has now, Japan would still likely lose if it tried to launch an aggressive war of conquest.
  • When down-timer teens and young adults are introduced to slasher movies, a good number of them are hostile, and not just because of anti-uptimer propaganda spouted by bigots: some of them are simply unimpressed, with one guy proclaiming that slasher films just aren't scary to him, and that the characters are too flat to get invested in.
  • A journalist visiting Japan has a pro-gay story published back in the United States, thinking that at least the oppressed minorities will like it. Much to her surprise, the book is condemned almost universally by downtime Americans—making it the one time that the Klan and the NAACP actually agree on something.
  • When Richard Nixon campaigns for the construction of other cities like Futureville, where minorities and their sympathizers can live away from segregationist communities, but with full civil rights, he gets a good amount of support, and not just from white supremacists: some of the oppressed groups don't want to fraternize with white people.
• Take a Third Option:
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Winston Churchill and a Mossad agent are not happy about having to work with Mussolini to accomplish their goals.
• This Is Unforgivable!: Revelations about the Holocaust in OTL causes every Jewish community in the United States to become viciously pro-war, even leading to violent confrontations between pro-war and isolationist factions in the streets.
• Time-Travel Romance: Well, yes.
  • Hokkaido-born JSDF volunteer courting Karafuto doctor and downtime Negro reporter moving in with uptime Brazilian-born hāfu factory worker are just the tip of the iceberg.
  • Judy Garland begins a secret relationship with a Japanese voice actress.
  • Rita Hayworth marries her female attorney after netting an Oscar.
  • Audie Murphy is implied to be starting a relationship with Admiral Flannagan's granddaughter, Nikki.
• Token Good Teammate: Erwin Rommel to Those Wacky Nazis, as in Real Life. However, recent updates have hinted that he is considering a Heel–Face Turn.
• Tranquil Fury: Stalin could send countless soldiers to their doom after a catastrophic military defeat, and the only sign of annoyance would be the scratch of his pen.
• Uriah Gambit: The decision of the Australian Cabinet to promptly send the ship they inherited from the 21st century to the defense of Britain had elements of this. If HMAS Sydney comes home dripping in honor, glory, and the political capital needed to introduce it's skipper^note LCDR Karen Doan, born in Darwin to Vietnamese Immigrants to White Australia it is all to the good; if possibly undesirable elements aboard cannot hack it and gets the tub sunk... it makes things less complicated.
• Villainous Breakdown: Adolf Hitler, like OTL, loses it over the Reich's failures. When he's torn apart by a mob, his last words are begging for his mother.
  • Klaus Barbie spectacularly falls apart after getting kneecapped.
• Western Terrorists: The Defenders of Oregon blow well past the line on this with the insurgency launched after the rapidly suppressed riot in Futureville.
• Wham Episode: Chapter Forty Eight of Part One of the TL, December 1-16, 1941, is a pretty normal chapter until the very end, where the Nazis detonate a fuel air bomb filled with coal dust and radium in Bruchsal, killing over ten thousand French soldiers and fifteen thousand German civilians.
• A World Half Full: Despite the violence and confusion created by the Transition, overall, the world its getting better thanks to uptimer history and technologies.
• Willfully Weak: Consciously invoked by Japan, with the intent of showing they are not the brutally aggressive sorts the world needs to unite against given the tech disparity (and the sincerity helps).
• Worth It: The state of Israel is still established, albeit smaller, still surrounded by Muslim countries, and will have to rely heavily on British support. On the other hand, said neighbors are less inclined to be hostile thanks to also getting help from the British, so Israel's inhabitants—including the uptimers—figure it's worth the price since their nation will still exist and won't have to spend all its time and resources fighting to survive.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Using uptimer information, Hitler decides to have Rommel killed, after the guy secures his victory.

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YMMV

• Broken Base: The "man in the charcoal suit" and his organization have inspired a bit of this, recently—some people think he and his group are cool, while others have alleged that they're annoying vigilantes. Perhaps exacerbated by Word of God stating that the organization is Palestinian; at least one poster found this to be illogical, as the organization's actions read more like a Mossad vigilante
• Complete Monster: Johann Ratka, despite being a minor villain, stands out as among the worst of the Nazis. An SS officer in occupied Netherlands with a fanatical devotion to Hitler and the pagan Germanic deities, he's introduced sadistically taunting a group of forced laborers about how their "Jew-boy" hasn't come to save them. Just the week before, he had a group of clergymen, along with their families, tortured to death when they said they couldn't work on the Sabbath. When a group of laborers tried to take a stand, he has them all shot and tells the rest that if they rebel, he'll have their whole families murdered. In addition to murdering those who refuse to work, any rebellion is dealt with by means of extreme brutality. He particularly enjoys preying on the Christian population, due to his belief that Jesus was a "cowardly Jew" unworthy of worship. Remembered as a "modern day Herod" in the Netherlands and considered an example of a Serial Killer given a high position, Johann Ratka was the perfect representation of the evils of the Nazis. In-Universe Fridge Horror ensues with the knowledge that in the original timeline, whatever atrocities he committed didn't stand out at all.
• Eviler than Thou: Reinhard Heydrich pulls this off on the rest of the Nazis by starting a civil war.
• Funny Moments: Someone thinks it's a good idea to show Admiral Yamamoto a Navy recruitment ad featuring KanColle shipgirls.
• Moment of Awesome: The SS are going to kill a hundred Dutch civilians in retribution for the assassination of Heinz Guderian at the hands of Simo Häyhä. Fortunately, Mad Jack shows up with Simo Häyhä, and opens fire on the SS. The entire firing squad and the machine-gunners that were covering them are killed in seconds without civilian fatalities.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Third Reich crossed it, if not by massacring Jewish civilians in Poznan and in Berlin, then they certainly crossed it when they dropped a radium-laced bomb on a German town, just because the French invaded it, killing and poisoning French and Germans alike.
• Nightmare Fuel: The aforementioned radium-laced bomb used on the town of Bruchsal. Not only is radiation poisoning an awful way to go, the idea of a government willing to murder its own people just because an enemy army invaded the town they lived in is utterly horrifying.
• Shout-Out:
  • The in-universe movie Castlevania: Portrait of Shadow, directed by Gen Urobuchi with a score by Yuki Kajiura, contains a scene where the female lead uses magically summoned swords to destroy an enemy, laughing maniacally all the while.
  • Otto Skorzeny uses the name Albrecht Detweiler while trying to escape Germany.
• Stupid Evil: The "man in the charcoal suit" seems to be falling here of late, in a recent update where his nebulous organization gives advanced guns to the KKK.
• Values Dissonance: The biggest problem between Up-Timers and Down-Timers is the up-Timers much more tolerant and open minded views concerning almost everything from race, religion and sexuality to music, media and fashions.

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