History of your settings - are there moments you'd like to explore?

Not sure if this would fit better in World Building, but it's more one of those throw-away questions to other writers rather than a question regarding my own setting, so I'm putting it here for now.

Anyway, my question is directed to those of you here who are writing settings with some amount of fictional history - alternate history, fantasy-style conworlds, future history, doesn't really matter as long as it's not the real deal. For those of you that this applies to, are there any particular moments in that history that you find yourself interested in writing about, whether hypothetically or as an actual project; as actual fiction or an in-universe document?

I've recently found myself considering that several periods in the history of my comics might make entertaining stories (or settings for stories) and am curious whether anyone else feels the same way, and if so what those moments are.

Yeah, it's tough to settle on a specific point. I once created a 2000 year future timeline and wanted to a sort of anthology style work just because I could then explore different points of the timeline I created.

Several. I like making history for my characters to build on and reference to. It also helps explain certain aspects of the setting.

The Nightmare Years, a dark age where fear and ignorance plagued the interstellar nation the story takes place in. It was caused by what are described as evil flowers and ushered in the monarchy which formed from the military rule put on the nation to handle the crisis. They may or may not have misplaced a few planets.

The Teknocrat Terrorist Wave was a series of attacks by violent cybernetic humans who aimed to overthrow the government and create an all cyborg nation. They hacked cyborgs who didn't adhere to their cause and used them as weapons. It took the unmodified warrior nobles to finally put them down after chasing them from planet to planet. This established the Knights who were the elite warriors and heroes who many of the characters in the story proper aspire to be like. It also gave the people a strong aversion towards cybernetic implants.

edited 14th May '12 10:15:49 AM by Parable

My setting's history has a century long apocalyptic conflict, so there's lots of things to explore there. There are quite a few immortal characters that have lived through that time period, so most of that time period would be covered via flashbacks.

My version of the American Civil War is rather interesting. As is the Mexican Revolution of 1943-47. The whole setting is based on an alternate history, so I could do all kinds of things from the POD in the 1600s to the time of the stories.

"My version of the American Civil War is rather interesting."

I am intrigued.

Well, in this setting slavery self-destructed in the 1850s because it was no longer profitable due to cotton not coming into high demand by Europe (due in part to a lack of the cotton gin and also due to a very different Industrial Revolution) and the diversification of the American South's economy and improvement of its infrastructure. So instead the "Civil War," which is more a large-scale rebellion, begins in 1873 after the United States Government, with no slavery to hold it back from wonton imperialism, decides to annex all of Mexico. The western settlers, upset that the government is focusing more on expanding blindly rather than improving what we have, and leery of adding a large Mexican Catholic population, revolts, and all the Representatives and Senators from the western States walk out of Congress.

The Army is marched up from its conquest of Mexico, gets into an embarrassing quagmire against the rebels—who, while few in number, are better suited to the terrain, and run rings around the large, cumbersome army—and then it devolves into a series of low-level battles running until 1875. Robert E. Lee commands the US Army, in his last military command, with Grant, ironically enough, having been fired from the Army entirely, taking up a command in the rebel force.

The airplane is invented by a tinkerer sympathetic to the westerners in San Francisco, while the tank—well, more accurately, a farm tractor armored and armed with a machine gun—is invented by the US Army to counter rebel trench tactics, and named the "landship."

It's not really intended to be a super accurate "what if" scenario, in terms of famous people involved (for example, Jefferson Davis is President at the beginning of the war, but dies close to the end, and his Vice President, Henry Wise, is beaten in the election by Frederick Seward; this isn't terribly realistic, but is rather amusing), but it fits with the overall feel of the setting, which is intended as "vaguely plausible but mostly not to be taken seriously from a historical standpoint."

edited 14th May '12 1:37:28 PM by Flyboy

I like.

Though I'm skeptical what kind of economic developments other than the literal complete and simultaneous collapse of all industries would render basically free labor economically impractical.

I would think they would either transfer said labor to other crops / industries or sell off / free / let die the slaves they no longer need in their scaled back operations. Remember, ones slaves were part of their economic assets, the same way your home, land, store, or car is. And there is always going to be a need for SOME labor, even if it's just household chores. And getting someone to give up a property with such high value and diverse utility is ... difficult.

Well, I based it on the fact that to maintain slavery the American South basically had to enact an Orwellian fascist state apparatus with a disproportionate amount of effort spent on military force of arms to suppress potential rebellion. On the flip side, in Virgina as early as the 1840s-1850s they were having referendums on whether to even keep slavery, and freedom only lost in the state legislature by only a handful of votes.

So, in this setting, with a focus on foodstuff rather than labor-intensive cotton production and little interest by the North, the South never falls into its silly siege mentality of "THIS IS ARE CULTURE," and with better infrastructure, education, and a more diversified economy, the people are much less tolerant of the slaveholding elite and their propaganda.

Blacks certainly aren't very well-off after slavery, of course. They enact something rather similar to Jim Crow laws, all built around keeping blacks as wage slaves or sharecroppers. Add to this the general smug sense of superiority that comes with the attitude of "you owe us because we freed you; otherwise you'd still be a piece of property!" and no, black people definitely aren't having a good time of it. But it's still slightly better than American slavery.

Unfortunately, it also means that the North and South have no reason to fight over new territory (which is the real reason why I did this to the timeline). Thus the US ends up annexing Mexico and Central America (the Panama Canal is still built, in the 1880s, but Panama obviously doesn't get to be an independent country, and it's not in the exact same spot) and establishing economic hegemony over Gran Colombia (which survives, due primarily to American interference) and Chile.

edited 14th May '12 1:53:08 PM by Flyboy

His setting has it they stopped being profitable by the 1850's so that's part of the reason slavery went away.

Personally, based on the history, I'd have it done even sooner, since it wasn't just the economic factor that sustained slavery, but the cultural mindset that developed after the cotton gin got popular and the Missouri Compromise divided the slavery question along geographic lines. If slavery starts dying sooner and faster with no economic pull holding it back and no need for compromises that led to the "Us vs Them" mentality of the Antebellum years. And if the South did diversify in the early years they would probably be more inclined to join in the Second Great Awakening and view slavery as a moral wrong, encouraging more freeing by the slave owners themselves.

" with Grant, ironically enough, having been fired from the Army entirely, taking up a command in the rebel force."

I support any story where I get to see Grant giving beatdowns to someone else.

Ninja'd.

edited 14th May '12 2:03:16 PM by Parable

That's a good point, and I think I'll have the "1850's" date actually refer to when the last holdouts gave up, and the majority having gotten rid of it earlier in the 1830s-'40s..

Most of it is because the Bonus Bill of 1817 passes over James Madison's veto, actually. That's what gets the South better infrastructure and, over time, education.

Heh, mostly I was just all "how funny would it be if I reversed Lee and Grant's position?"

I don't think it's that far-fetched. Grant was disliked by his peers and had resigned from the military because he went all alcoholic without his wife, and ended up moving out west. Even when they let him back in he spent most of him time out in the boondocks, too. Whereas Lee was very close to being the Union commander in the real Civil War, and was both obviously talented and well-liked by the military command structure.

edited 14th May '12 2:07:34 PM by Flyboy

You've converted me. Good logic and research. You're going places, person.

From an economic perspective at least. From a cultural perspective - it's a little different. I don't see why they would turn around and recognize black people as people. It would involve recognizing that they had been horrible people. Which seems unlikely. It's also interesting how hardcoded slavery was in to the southern judicial system. To the point where the entire code basically evolved around justifying slavery. They had to use very extensive troll logic and disregard of stare decisis to keep it going, and then build their other laws to fit said logic. It's really not unreasonable to say that it was the single most influential aspect of their society.

You would need A LOT of education, integration, a generational culture shift, and outside ideas. I think. But really interesting concept. I'd read it.

edited 14th May '12 2:19:19 PM by Cthulboohoo

Thanks. My goal is to be a history major with a US history specialization, so this is kind of my thing.

I think the only two points where the timeline delves into total silliness is when I added a totally random religious conversion for a Russian Tsar to set Russia on to a path to constitutional monarchy, and when I used aliens to explain where all the weirdo steampunk shit came from. Those were both purely for the sake of "well if I don't have this then the plot doesn't work," and I tried to at least make the effects of both logical after the alien space bats.

To that end, Russia has a civil war in the 1840s between mercenaries hired by the nobility and the Imperial Army of the Tsar, while the steampunk shit only serves to spark a ridiculous arms race between the imperial powers of the world and allows them to consolidate their empires into sprawling superstates, setting up the actual story, which is about when it all blows up to hell in the '20s for this world's Great War.

"To that end, Russia has a civil war"

Civil Wars: Good for every background story.

edited 14th May '12 2:20:49 PM by Parable

Well, unfortunately, my Russian history is kind of shitty, so I did the best I could with what I knew and what I could find in research. Researching Russian history is hard for me, though, because I have no context or point of reference within the culture. It's the same reason why going through any given East Asian nation's history is difficult for me, as well.

Most of the backstory isn't terribly relevant to the main story, either, in terms of what gets directly referenced. I figured it'd just be good to know so that I don't write something into the main story that makes no goddamned sense. If I found a better way to do what I need to do with Russia, I'd do it that way, but I figured it'd be bad to set it before Napoleon, so that was the next-closet thing I could find.

My story currently has a quasi-historical setting in that it uses real-world geography and real historical cultures (e.g. Nubians and Anglo-Saxons), but the history and characters are all fictional. However, I wouldn't mind revising the setting to a more fantastical, completely made-up one; I'm simply using historical civilizations because those are more familiar to lay readers.

With regards to the earlier discussion about racism, that features in my story too, but it goes in the opposite direction. The Nubians and other "civilized" black people regard white people, or at least Northern Europeans like the Celts and Germanics, as uncouth, backwards barbarians, and they particularly don't like to see white men associating with black women (the fear is that the former will rape the latter). This causes some problems for my white male and black female leads.

If I ever get in a really depressive mood, I might try and portray the Fall of Belka. Try being the operative word, as the horrors of an interstellar civilization wiping itself out in a couple weeks are probably beyond my skills. (Hell, it's probably beyond anyone's skill. Most people struggle to deal with the scale of devastation you get by nuking a city.)

There are a few incidents I'd like to examine in more detail beyond that; first battle of the Combat Cyborgs, the day the Combat Familiar Program went to crap so it's not just Bondarenko's bit in Cardinal of the Kremlin in my head, and most importantly Zest and Lutecia's rescue of Agito, which unwittingly caused the war.

I recently realized one of my most interesting characters was my Big Bad — or more accurately, who he was during the Uelane Revolution, before his Start of Darkness.

A desperate revolutionary from an enslaved people, seeking to keep the spark of hope alive in those who follow him despite being certain the best he'll manage is to be a Doomed Moral Victor. His only remaining hope is to die on the battlefield rather than be tortured to death by his slavers. He is filled with guilt over the lies he tells his people to keep them from giving into despair, and over the agonies being inflicted upon his family to punish him even as he roams free himself. And there's nobody he dares tell of his suffering, certain that as a king, he must always give the impression of strength and courage.

And then one day, something offers to help...

Yeah, if this writing thing works out, I'll probably end up writing a prequel. Hopefully it doesn't go too badly.

edited 14th May '12 8:00:44 PM by KillerClowns

I've got an alternate universe setting, and...well, I think it'd be more effective if I just showed it to you. Gentlemen...BEHOLD!

*bows head shamefully, runs away, and heads back home to hide under the sheets*

To be honest, I'm not real interested in the history of my current story. Most of the "interesting" stories are within the two or three generations shown in Manifestation Files.

Which I will develop as needed.

Since the history of the Forgotten Lore setting is supposed to basically be our history with some minor differences, I haven't really thought out the history in detail. I certainly could write some other stories set in the world tho. Perhaps the story of one of the minor characters who acts at the protagonits' mentor and is mentioned to have fought against supernatural beings when he was younger.

The Netherworld setting on the other hand has a lot of such moments, as the backstory is for the most part underused. I probably should write a serious story focusing on the Netherworld setting, whether a longer Zaran il Legio story with an actual plot, or by writing about some even in the past of the setting. The best candidates would probably be the First Great War or the First Legion War that followed it (several thousand years in the past, when the Demon King forged a continent-spanning empire which fell apart in a civil war), or the last Legion War (recent but unspecified time in the past, latest time when several of the Legions engaged in full-scale war with each other). Also, while it's strictly speaking not history, at some point in the future of the setting Zaran will succeed her father as the overlord of their Legion. That would have a lot of potential since it would allow me to write an older, more mature and experienced Zaran who still wishes for the millenia-long war between the Legions to end, but has grown to accept that it cannot be ended without the use of force.

There's a lot of history I'd like to cover in my setting, which is basically High Fantasy combined with World War I technology. The planet where it takes place has about 10,000 years of recorded history and, before that, was ruled by a highly-evolved, space-faring race; abandoned when resources ran dry; recolonized and revitalized by stray gods; and repopulated with new mortal races. There's a lot to think of, but the one period I'd really like to write about, other than the current story that takes place between 3011 and 3016 (1768-1773 on Earth), is the time roughly between 3700 and 4200, during which a massive war breaks out that threatens to destroy the planet and even forces the gods to question whether mortals should be allowed the freedom to create and destroy.

edited 21st May '12 7:45:47 AM by ZigtarXamos