History YMMV / TheGunsOfTheSouth

** If you follow South African politics at all, then TheReveal of who the Rivington men are won't be nearly as much of a shock.

* CompleteMonster:
** [[AmoralAfrikaner Andries Rhoodie]] is the leader of the [[UsefulNotes/TheApartheidEra South African]] Neo-Nazi group [[RightWingMilitiaFanatic AWB]] who seeks to create a permanent bastion of white supremacy in the world. To this end he steals a time machine and travels back to 1864, [[GivingRadioToTheRomans arming the Confederacy with AK-47s]] to help them win UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar. After this plan succeeds, Rhoodie and his group buy hundreds of black slaves, promptly torturing, starving, and raping them out of sheer racial hatred. [[spoiler:When Robert E. Lee becomes Confederate President on a platform of gradual emancipation for slaves, Rhoodie sends a team of commandos to kill him and the entire Confederate government, culminating in a massacre in which dozens of bystanders, including Lee's infirm wife, are killed. With the Confederacy having turned against them, Rhoodie has his group wage a war that gets thousands of Confederate soldiers killed out of spite.]]

** Piet Hardie is this trope, even to his fellow Rivington men. His sexual habits - never described in detail, but very likely involving sadism - are mentioned to be so repellent that not only do his comrades have unfavorable remarks to make about him, but after the incident involving Josephine ([[spoiler:a gorgeous mixed-race woman whom Hardie buys at the slave auction intending to make her his mistress, but who is so horrified by his sexual tastes that she tries to run away almost at once and ends up committing suicide as she can't take any more of it]]), none of Rivington's prostitutes will do business with him. Eventually, when [[spoiler:Hardie gets killed in the explosion which blasts the crucial gap in the AWB men's defensive lines open]], both Nate and Mollie rejoice.

** The fact that, in our timeline, the AWB men initially come from a time when the President of the United States is [[{{UsefulNotes/BarackObama}} a black man]] makes their actions seem much funnier and more desperate.

* DuelingWorks: Actually within Turtledove's own fandom as this work is a direct contrast in its portrayal of the Confederacy to ''Literature/Timeline191'' where the CSA is much closer to the ''Nazis'' than the more romanticized romantic version here. Some have even suggested that Turtledove wrote the latter as some SelfDeprecation to this novel.

* CompleteMonster: [[AmoralAfrikaner Andries Rhoodie]] is the leader of the [[UsefulNotes/TheApartheidEra South African]] Neo-Nazi group [[RightWingMilitiaFanatic AWB]] who seeks to create a permanent bastion of white supremacy in the world. To this end he steals a time machine and travels back to 1864, [[GivingRadioToTheRomans arming the Confederacy with AK-47s]] to help them win UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar. After this plan succeeds, Rhoodie and his group buy hundreds of black slaves, promptly torturing, starving, and raping them out of sheer racial hatred. [[spoiler:When Robert E. Lee becomes Confederate President on a platform of gradual emancipation for slaves, Rhoodie sends a team of commandos to kill him and the entire Confederate government, culminating in a massacre in which dozens of bystanders, including Lee's infirm wife, are killed. With the Confederacy having turned against them, Rhoodie has his group wage a war that gets thousands of Confederate soldiers killed out of spite.]]

* DuelingWorks: Actually within Turtledove's own fandom as this work is a direct contrast in its portrayal of the Confederacy to ''Literature/Timeline191'' where the CSA is much closer to the ''Nazis'' than the more romanticized romantic version here. Some have even suggested that Turtledove wrote the latter as a TakeThatUs to this novel.

** [[spoiler:This is also a case of RealityIsUnrealistic, because the Confederates are outraged that anyone would try to assassinate a president in such a way and sure that none of their own people would do such a thing, not knowing that in the original timeline John Wilkes Booth would have done just that to Lincoln (although Booth acted without the sanction of the Confederate government and there were no innocents killed there. To be fair that would be hard using a single-shot pistol like Booth did. The assassination also was denounced by the real Lee and Jefferson Davis).]] [[spoiler:And that's the point: assassinating a president is bad enough, but it's the deliberate killing of large numbers of innocent civilians in the process that sends the attack clear over into MoralEventHorizon territory. In fact, Lee already did know from the ''Picture History of the Civil War'' that Lincoln had been assassinated, and this very thought flies through his mind during the Richmond Massacre.]]
* {{TearJerker TearJerker}}:

* SugarWiki/FunnyMoments: A Confederate chemist at the Tredegar Ironworks figures out that the active ingredient in some of the Rivington Men's future explosives is nitroglycerine... which is also the active ingredient in the heart disease treatment tablets they've been giving to Lee. Lee is briefly convinced they're attempting to assassinate him by feeding him explosives.

** The fact that, in our timeline, the AWB men initially come from a time when the President of the United States is [[{{UsefulNotes/BarackObama}} a black man]] makes their actions seem much funnier and more desparate.

** [[spoiler:This is also a case of RealityIsUnrealistic, because the Confederates are outraged that anyone would try to assassinate a president in such a way and sure that none of their own people would do such a thing, not knowing that in the original timeline John Wilkes Booth would have done just that to Lincoln (although Booth acted without the sanction of the Confederate government and there were no innocents killed there. To be fair that would be hard using a single-shot pistol like Booth did. The assassination also was denounced by the real Lee and Jefferson Davis).]] [[spoiler:And that's the point: assassinating a president is bad enough, but it's the deliberate killing of large numbers of innocent civilians in the process that sends the attack clear over into MoralEventHorizon territory. In fact, Lee already did know from the ''Picture History of the Civil War'' that Lincoln had been assassinated, and this very thought flies through his mind during the Richmond Massacre.]]

** The AWB crosses this in the eyes of the Confederacy when [[spoiler:they attack Lee's inauguration with Uzis in an attempt to kill him, spraying bullets all over the place and killing countless civilians, including Lee's wife Mary and his vice president.]]

* AcceptableEthnicTargets: The time-traveling Afrikaner extremists. All of them are portrayed as violent racist militants who like the fact that the Confederacy allows black slavery, buying slaves for themselves while there. To be fair however, the real-life group they came from was [[{{EveryoneHasStandards}} extreme even by apartheid standards]] (it was actually banned by the government in those days). It's not like they're civilians, either, so they can hardly be considered representative of Afrikaners--[[ANaziByAnyOtherName they're literally neo-Nazis]].

** The fact that, in our timeline, the AWB men initially come from a time when the President of the United States is [[{{UsefulNotes/BarackOboma}} a black man]] makes their actions seem much funnier and more desparate.

* HilariousInHindsight: [[spoiler:The secret room in the AWB's Richmond office building]] predominately features a lot of [[{{WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarePants}} chrome]].

* CriticalResearchFailure: After they win the war, the Confederate Army returns to Richmond for a victory parade, to triumphant music. One of the songs played is [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Cry_of_Freedom Battle Cry of Freedom]] — a Northern abolitionist march.

* FridgeBrilliance: The self-defeating nature of the AWB is subtly foreshadowed in the slave auction, where they use their abundant wealth to corner the slave market, running up the prices and making it impossible for locals to afford slaves. This comes to undermine the cause of slavery, since people who don’t have slaves are less willing to stand up for it when Lee runs on a platform of gradual emancipation.
* FridgeLogic:
** Isn't it peculiar that nobody - not even General Lee, when Andries Rhoodie told him that he and his compatriots hailed from South Africa - made the connection with the Boers/Afrikaners? In the mid-1860's, two of the best-known events in Afrikaner history, the Battle of Blood River and the Great Trek, were already several decades in the past, and a well-educated, savvy person like General Lee ought to have been able to figure out from where they came from (of course, it does turn his thought "Dutchmen they are" when he hears the accents of Rhoodie's friends into an example of HilariousInHindsight). In fairness though, South Africa wasn't very well known then to Americans (or even called that, since it was divided into different British colonies, Boer republics and black African kingdoms).
*** There was a state called the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Republic South African Republic]] that had existed since 1852. Not sure how well known it would have been in 1860s America.
** Despite being fierce Afrikaner ultranationalists that maintain a base of support for years in the Confederacy, at no point do the men of AWB try to reach out to the Boers in South Africa even though their detailed knowledge of future history and technology would secure the Boers for decades against British encroachment.

* FridgeLogic: Isn't it peculiar that nobody - not even General Lee, when Andries Rhoodie told him that he and his compatriots hailed from South Africa - made the connection with the Boers/Afrikaners? In the mid-1860's, two of the best-known events in Afrikaner history, the Battle of Blood River and the Great Trek, were already several decades in the past, and a well-educated, savvy person like General Lee ought to have been able to figure out from where they came from (of course, it does turn his thought "Dutchmen they are" when he hears the accents of Rhoodie's friends into an example of HilariousInHindsight). In fairness though, South Africa wasn't very well known then to Americans (or even called that, since it was divided into different British colonies, Boer republics and black African kingdoms).

* CompleteMonster: [[AmoralAfrikaner Andries Rhoodie]] is the leader of the [[UsefulNotes/TheApartheidEra South African]] Neo-Nazi group [[RightWingMilitiaFanatic AWB]] who seeks to create a permanent bastion of white supremacy in the world. To this end he steals a time machine and travels back to 1864, [[GivingRadioToTheRomans arming the Confederacy with AK-47s]] to help them win UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar. After this plan succeeds, Rhoodie and his group buy hundreds of black slaves, promptly torturing, starving, and raping them out of sheer racial hatred. When Robert E. Lee becomes Confederate President on a platform of gradual emancipation for slaves, Rhoodie sends a team of commandos to kill him and the entire Confederate government, culminating in a massacre in which dozens of bystanders, including Lee's infirm wife, are killed. With the Confederacy having turned against them, Rhoodie has his group wage a war that gets thousands of Confederate soldiers killed out of spite.

** Several lines of dialog spoken by the historical characters are [[TruthInTelevision things they actually said or wrote]], just in different contexts; only a historian or Civil War scholar could get them all. As one example, Robert E. Lee says "Let the tents be struck" after the war ends in both reality and Turtledove's novel, the only difference being that in the former he lost and in the latter he won.
** A variant of his last words, which were actually "Strike the tent".

* CriticalResearchFailure: [[InUniverse On the part of the Rivington men]], who failed to anticipate how popular their rations would be among the Confederates. Even more than a lack of arms, the inability to keep the army properly supplied played a huge role in the defeat of the South, something that has been well-documented by historians.

* AcceptableEthnicTargets: The time-traveling Afrikaner extremists. All of them are portrayed as violent racist militants who like the fact that the Confederacy allows black slavery, buying slaves for themselves while there. To be fair however, the real-life group they came from was extreme even by apartheid standards (it was actually banned by the government in those days). It's not like they're civilians, either, so they can hardly be considered representative of Afrikaners--[[ANaziByAnyOtherName they're literally neo-Nazis]].

* CompleteMonster: [[AmoralAfrikaner Andries Rhoodie]] is the leader of the [[UsefulNotes/TheApartheidEra South African]] Neo-Nazi group [[RightWingMilitiaFanatic AWB]] who seeks to create a permanent bastion of white supremacy in the world. To this end he steals a time machine and travels back to 1864, [[GivingRadioToTheRomans arming the Confederacy with AK-47s]] to help them win UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar. After this plan succeeds, Rhoodie and his group buy hundreds of blacks slaves, promptly torturing, starving, and raping them out of sheer racial hatred. When Robert E. Lee becomes Confederate President on a platform of gradual emancipation for slaves, Rhoodie sends a team of commandos to kill him and the entire Confederate government, culminating in a massacre in which dozens of bystanders, including Lee's infirm wife, are killed. With the Confederacy having turned against them, Rhoodie has his group wage a war that gets thousands of Confederate soldiers killed out of spite.