Dawn of Victory
is a Canadian web series and worldbuilding project on YouTube created in 2023 by Marc Gerst, creator of the Analysis Channel The Templin Institute. A reboot of Dawn of Victory 2289, an old Sins of a Solar Empire Game Mod/worldbuilding project that he had created in the early 2010s (now called Dawn of Victory Classic), this was intended to take the experience he'd gained analyzing fictional sci-fi and fantasy worlds with the Templin Institute and apply it to a wholly original science fiction universe, in a manner akin to the Templin Institute's previous project Stellaris Invicta but without having to work around Stellaris' built-in gameplay limitations. By Marc's description, it is intended as a mix of Military Science Fiction, Alternate History, and a dash of Lovecraftian horror.
Set in 2289, the world is an Alternate History that diverged from our own in 1933 with the emergence of the Scinfaxi, an alien force that started mutating Earth's biosphere and forced the world's nations, in a time of great geopolitical and ideological strife, to put their differences aside and unite against a common enemy — and in the long run, even this was not enough to stop the mutation of Earth's biosphere to render it inhospitable to human life, especially as Earth's "United Front" was still beset by national and political rivalries. Technological progress made during the long Scinfaxi War allowed humanity to discover and colonize numerous habitable worlds near the Sol System, such that, as Earth's biosphere continued to fall apart, the world's nations were able to evacuate Earth before bombarding it into a lifeless husk in order to destroy the Scinfaxi once and for all.
Without the unity provided by the war against the Scinfaxi, humanity, now an interstellar, multiplanetary species that's colonized a region of space it calls the Orion Arm, once more fractured into multiple competing geopolitical and ideological blocs, setting up a multipolar Space Cold War. After decades of proxy conflicts, economic rivalries, and ideological struggles, hot war between them seems inevitable. However, space is far bigger than just the Orion Arm, and there are indications that, beyond the reaches of explored space, humanity is not alone... and that the Scinfaxi, or their creators, may still be out there.
Links: Initial Concept, Introduction, Wiki
This universe contains examples of the following tropes:
- Absent Aliens: Zig-zagged. While the Scinfaxi are generally acknowledged to have been most likely an Alien Kudzu, there are still some people who think that they were either an Earth-based mutation that got out of control or a supernatural menace. Whatever they were, they were successfully destroyed along with Earth itself, and as far as humanity is concerned, they are the only spacefaring race. However, the ruins of fallen alien civilizations have been found across the Orion Arm, and stories from the edge of colonized space indicate that there may well be something out there, including, quite possibly, whatever force created the Scinfaxi.
- Alien Kudzu: The Scinfaxi, if left unchecked, would have destroyed all indigenous life on Earth and replaced it with its own twisted monstrosities. It did ultimately lead to the destruction of Earth's biosphere, as humanity evacuated Earth and then hit their homeworld with enough nuclear weapons to leave it a lifeless rock in order to eliminate the Scinfaxi for good.
- Death World:
- The Scinfaxi's Hostile Terraforming was turning Earth into this before humanity simply abandoned the planet and nuked it from orbit.
- Roseau is described as a world of hostile jungle where the only habitable land was around the Bodie Coast, where the Americans had their main base Firebase Hector in the Stan Valley. Its natural caves made it a major logistical base for the Acadian National Army, where they inflicted a devastating defeat on the Americans that drove them off the planet entirely.
- Earth That Was: Humanity nuked Earth into oblivion in order to deny it to the Scinfaxi. The planet has been quarantined ever since, although pilgrims are occasionally allowed to pass through the Sol system.
- Enemy Mine: Humanity put its geopolitical and ideological differences aside in the 1930s to fight the Scinfaxi. Once the threat was over, however, it didn't last.
- Hostile Terraforming: What the Scinfaxi were doing to Earth. Nuclear weapons were the only thing that was able to slow them down, and indeed, when humanity abandoned Earth upon deeming it a lost cause, they nuked the entire planet into a lifeless, irradiated husk in order to wipe out the Scinfaxi.
- Hyperspace Lanes: A network of hyperlanes (or "cosmic strings") connect star systems to one another, which can be transited by spacecraft. Ships can conduct interstellar travel without them, but it's exponentially faster and more efficient — not to mention safer — to follow a hyperlane.
- Inscrutable Aliens: 250 years after the Scinfaxi attacked Earth, virtually nothing is known about them. No communication was ever established, and the species itself was never observed directly, only their technology and biosphere. It's not even clear if they are a biological race or something more eldritch.
- Light Is Not Good: The Scinfaxi are frequently associated with mysterious, beautiful lights that herald death and destruction. Their namesake is Dagr's horse from Norse Mythology, who pulls Dagr's chariot and brings the light of day to mankind.
- Manifesto-Making Malcontent: Marc joked that the process of creating the introduction, which he spent a month writing in a cabin in the woods, bore some disquieting similarities to this, complete with him quoting the first line of the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski's manifesto.
- Putting on the Reich: Marc discusses this in the introduction, specifically what he thinks are some of the risks involved with this trope. While he's generally a fan of sci-fi stories that draw on real-world totalitarian movements for their villains' ideologies and aesthetics, he also thinks that, when it's done badly, there's a risk that fans can start Rooting for the Empire, associating totalitarian aesthetics not with tyrannical, murderous villains but with cool, stylish, badass figures who make good points and thus growing less critical of totalitarianism in general. At worst, it can risk recycling the propaganda of the old dictatorships themselves. This was a big reason why he went for an Alternate History setting, so that he could feature in his world futuristic versions of the actual fascist and communist nations of history, with all the historical baggage and atrocities they're associated with, rather than fictionalized analogues to them that don't have that baggage.
- Rule of Cool: Marc has said that one of the guiding principles of the setting's worldbuilding is that "the Rule of Cool can win, and it can win big." He argues that a lot of science fiction, even the more grounded varieties, is built on premises that sound ridiculous at first glance, and what makes them work is selling them with conviction and their own sense of internal logic without apologizing for themselves or winking at the camera. That said, another guiding principle is that "excitement has consequences," and that pulling cool stuff into a story for its own sake without thinking of how it would affect everything else can run the risk of making the world feel like a static, incoherent, and cartoonish one where even big events have little consequence.
- Shocking Defeat Legacy: The Acadian War became this for the Americans in a manner akin to the real-life Vietnam War, especially after the defeat at Stan Valley on Roseau, where the American task force that held orbital superiority was forced to redeploy to another front in the war only for the Acadian National Navy to take advantage of this and establish its own orbital superiority over Roseau. It was the first time that American soldiers were subjected to orbital bombardment, and with that, the myth of American invincibility as the most powerful nation in the Orion Arm was punctured.
- Shout-Out:
- The Scinfaxi attack Earth using tripods and Hostile Terraforming, almost certainly a reference to The War of the Worlds (1898).
- The Scinfaxi themselves take their name from Dagr's horse from Norse Mythology.
- Space Cold War:
- Humanity is locked in one of these, with several major powers all descended from real-world 20th century nations: the Democratic Alliance (led by the heirs to the United States and the United Kingdom), the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Greater German Reich, and the Empire of Japan.
- Marc also discusses this in the introduction, describing how, in many sci-fi works, this trope usually takes the form of The Federation (coded as a heroic, Western-style liberal democracy) versus The Empire (a villainous, authoritarian, hegemonic force), with the Looming Threat (an Always Chaotic Evil force of Omnicidal Maniacs, typically a Horde of Alien Locusts or an Eldritch Abomination) in the background and various rebel and mercenary groups thrown in for flavor. He wanted to create something a fair bit more complex than that which would be more reflective of real-world geopolitics, one big enough to function as a sandbox for others to work in if they wanted to but which still had a solid framework to build its biggest conflicts around, one that he found in a mix of the multipolar Great Power conflicts of the World Wars and the ideological rivalries of the Cold War.
- Standard Sci-Fi Setting: Discussed by name in the introduction, complete with a link to and quotes from this very wiki's page on the subject. Marc is an unapologetic fan of this setting and heavily rooted the world in it, albeit on the darker and more grounded end of it with a lot of influence from Alien and Battlestar Galactica.
- Tripod Terror: The Scinfaxi attack using massive, near-invincible machines that resemble Martian tripods in the artwork.
- Year Outside, Hour Inside: Hyperspace travel is instantaneous from the travellers' perspective, but takes weeks, months, or even years in real time depending on the length and stability of the hyperlane.
