YMMV / Timeline-191

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Custer really that far out of touch, or is he using Obfuscating Stupidity to get Dowling to think on his feet and develop as an officer?
• Complete Monster: Commander Roger Kimball is initially nothing more than a sleazy, misogynistic Confederate submarine captain who views women as conquests and non-whites as subhumans. Following the Confederacy's defeat in the Great War, however, an enraged Kimball vents his spite by ordering his submarine, the CSS Bonefish to fire on the USS Ericson, killing everyone on board, and making himself into the worst war criminal of the conflict, a title that he revels in. Unemployed after the war, Kimball becomes a Freedom Party thug, assaulting members of the opposing Radical Liberal Party, scheming to have his former Executive Officer, Tom Brearly, assassinated, and finally trying to rape his ex-girlfriend, Anne Colleton, when she leaves him. At the time of his death he is plotting to avenge himself on Anne by tracking her down and strangling her, cementing himself as the irredeemable bottom-feeder he always claimed not to be.
• Ending Fatigue: The last third of In at the Death is basically tying up loose ends, though given the number of loose ends, it's justified.
• Fan Nickname: One for the entire series. The actual name of the series is "Southern Victory" but Timeline-191, or Tl-191, is what it's almost universally called among the fanbase.
• Fanon: Although never confirmed by Word of God, many fans believe that Turtledove originally planned to have the US lose World War I and become the Expy of Nazi Germany. So the theory goes: Gordon McSweeney would have been its version of Adolf Hitler (explaining why such a memorable character was unceremoniously killed at the end of the Great War trilogy), Flora Hamburger would have been its version of Rosa Luxemburg (hence her name and Leftist politics), and Irving Morrell would have been its version of Erwin Rommel (hence his name and expertise with tanks). It's also likely that Abner Dowling would have had a prominent position in its fascist government, hence his surname ("Dowling" was the surname of Adolf Hitler's Irish-born sister-in-law).
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • The series primary focus being on North America (mainly the U.S. and Canada portions) along with the almost 30+ year Time Skip from the 1880s in How Few Remain to 1914 with The American Front has had many fans speculate on the status and events of the rest of the world. AlternateHistory.com has had many ongoing threads dedicated to fleshing out aspects of the rest of the world of Tl-191; Photos From Featherston's Confederacy and Tl-191: Filling in the Gaps for example.
  • The series ending in 1944 with the Second Great War has many speculate on what the world would end up like by the present. Perhaps most famously being Timeline-191: After the End by "David bar Elias" over at AlternateHistory.com
• Franchise Original Sin: The American Empire and Settling Accounts series get a lot of criticism for being lazy and unimaginative rehashes of Real Life 20th century history (World War II and the interwar period, specifically) that fail to explore the full implications of their setting, but this trend started all the way back in How Few Remain: the Second Mexican War was also a pretty obvious retread of the actual Franco-Prussian War, and the novel's narrative didn't bother to explore any of the implications of the Second Mexican Empire having never been overthrown. Most readers just didn't mind at the time, since the Franco-Prussian War is nowhere near as widely known (or as sensitive an issue) as the rise of the Nazi Party or the Holocaust, and the narrative still focused enough on the unique aspects of the timeline that it felt exciting and imaginative.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • After the Great War, part of Texas is carved out and becomes a US state named Houston, despite being nowhere near the city. Sam Houston was not a supporter of the Confederacy and was in fact forced out of Governorship of the State after it seceded. Naming it Houston makes perfect sense.
  • The popular fan theory that Flora Hamburger was originally conceived as an American Expy of Rosa Luxemburg (rather than the AU version of Eleanor Roosevelt that she eventually became) actually makes perfect sense when you realize that even her name is an obvious derivation of Luxemburg's. Both of them have floral-themed first names (Flora/Rosa), and both of them have surnames derived from regions of Germany (Hamburg/Luxembourg).
  • The Confederacy is repeatedly stated to rely heavily on automatic weapons during the Second Great War, similarly to both the USSR and Third Reich in WWII. A commonly recurring Confederate weapon is the Tredegar Automatic Rifle alongside a Confederate SMG specifically stated not to be the Thompson (which is a Union weapon). Tredegar is one of the Confederate's mainstay firearms in all four wars, and appears to be an AKA-47 of the real world Browning Automatic Rifle (B.A.R. and commonly called "the Bar" in pop culture). The rifle may have more in common with the B.A.R. than you'd think; the real world John Moses Browning, if his names isn't itself a clue, was a devout Mormon who developed many of his firearms (among other things, inventing semiautomatic and lever action weapons and the pump-action shotgun) in Utah in the real world; given that Utah is an occupied hellhole in the series, it's highly unlikely his weapons would've ended up anywhere but in Confederate hands. As a side note, the Tredegar is never referred to as a TAR, but always as the Tredegar Automatic Rifle; this is both correct and possibly to avoid confusing it with the realworld modern firearm, the Israeli TAR-21 (The Assault Rifle-21 Century).
• Fridge Logic: The folks at AlternateHistory.com have an entire thread dedicated to instances of fridge logic in this series.
• Genius Bonus: The fishing vessel, F/V Ripple, that George Enos worked aboard actually was a part of the New England fishing fleet in real life, and was requisitioned by the U.S. Navy as a minesweeper during World War One.^note Although it was requisitioned for the Imperial Russian government, which had purchased the vessel from its initial civilian owner and was unable to take delivery due to the 1917 revolution.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A major antagonist of the series is named Saul Goldman.
• It Was His Sled: Now that Turtledove has published seven books detailing the rise of the Freedom Party and the Second World War, the revelation that Jake Featherston is the series' equivalent of Hitler isn't nearly as shocking as it was early in the series when he appeared to be nothing more than a run-of-the-mill artilleryman who happened to hate blacks a bit more than the average Southerner.
• Magnificent Bastard: In this alternate history of the early twentieth century, the United States, Confederate States, and the Red Rebellion, all produce some truly admirable blackguards.
  • African-American rebel Cassius was perhaps the deadliest internal enemy the Confederate States ever faced, launching a Red Revolution under the nose of his master, Anne Colleton, and establishing the Congaree Socialist Republic throughout much of South Carolina. Opposed by enemies who considered him subhuman and incapable of strategic thinking, Cassius confounded the Confederate forces sent to subdue him, and using threats against captured white civilians, forced his enemies to negotiate with him on an equal footing. Eventually killed after the fall of his Republic, Cassius nevertheless stuck a dagger in the side of the Confederate States of America, costing them the Great War, and in the long run, helping to bring the entire white power structure of the Confederacy crashing down.
  • Luther Bliss, head of the Kentucky State Police was a bitter, misanthropic old man who used every measure he had, legal and extralegal, to keep Kentucky within the United States of America. After Kentucky was returned to the Confederacy in a plebiscite, and the Second Great War began, Bliss returned to the state as the Union's single most effective spy, stirring up trouble for the Confederates with both the Red Rebels and white opponents of the Freedom Party, sabotaging Confederate war efforts behind the lines, and eventually triggering an uprising in occupied Covington. Hating everyone equally, Bliss was able to work with any and all enemies of the Confederate government, and proved a permanent and irremovable thorn in their side for the duration of the Second Great War.
  • Clarence Potter was a Confederate intelligence officer who had a chance to stop the Red Rebellion of 1915, but was prevented from doing so by his superiors. Years later, Clarence became an inveterate adversary of the Freedom Party, only to win admittance into its government when he killed an assassin who was after Jake Featherston at the Richmond Olympics. Concealing the fact that he had originally gone to the Olympics to kill Jake himself, Clarence became Featherston's head of military intelligence, providing infiltrators and saboteurs to spearhead the invasion of the USA during the Second Great War. When the war began to go badly, Clarence flirted with launching a coup against Jake, while simultaneously pushing for the completion of the Confederate atomic bomb project, and once the bomb was completed, delivering it to Philadelphia in the back of a truck and blowing much of the de facto US capital off the map. Exonerated of involvement in Freedom Party atrocities after the war, Clarence got off scott free, and retired to write his memoirs in peace, while the rest of the Confederate leadership paid for their crimes in full.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Chester being a (reluctant) participant in Boris Lavochkin's reign of terror leaves him wondering if he has crossed it.
  • Jake Featherston, Jefferson Pinkard and the CSA as a whole cross it during the "population reduction."
  • Roger Kimball, already largely unsympathetic, crosses it when he sinks a ship after the end of WWI and gloats about how good it feels to be a war criminal.
  • The Mormon resistance actually comes off as pretty sympathetic, even obeying the Geneva Conventions, until they start using people bombs.
• Protection from Editors: Harry has a really bad habit in repetition. It reaches a ridiculous new height in In at the Death when a chapter is duplicated.
• Seasonal Rot: How Few Remain and The Great War have real life parallels but these have been adjusted to fit the North American setting and are clearly divergent timelines. American Empire and Settling Accounts, on the other hand, are widely considered to be just lazy rehashes of real history's Interbellum and World War II.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The Population Reduction, especially the deaths of prominent characters like Scipio and Hipolito Rodriguez's suicide. Even Jefferson Pinkard's family visiting him before his execution; much as he deserved what he got, there was real love there.
  • Jake Featherston being forced to Mercy Kill his secretary and Morality Pet Lulu.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many readers were disappointed the series was ultimately the Interbellum Period and World War II with the Serial Numbers Filed Off instead of organically examining the global consequences of a Confederate victory.

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