Trivia / Reds!: A Revolutionary Timeline

• Ascended Fanon: A large amount of the canon was decided and fleshed out in discussion with readers, to the point where it could be called a collaborative work. In other instances, some readers have written their own contributions unprompted and subsequently canonized by Aelita.
• Reclusive Artist: Illuminatus Primus, the AH.com writer who created a lot of the early lore and was one of the founding members of the troika, left around 2015 to focus on raising his children. He wasn't seen again until he posted in the SV thread in 2024.^note For posterity's sake, this entry was originally under The Pete Best...and his first SV thread post happened immediately after it was published, so it was changed accordingly.
  • Longtime contributor GoulashCommie, aka Marxist-Hueyist or just Huey, stopped posting in order to focus on his graduate studies. It's become an inside joke among long-time contributors to say that he will return to writing for the timeline in its hour of need
• Trolling Creator: One writer on the SV version wrote an an entry in the style of an EBC news article, and in place of a link to the external-linking policy, posted the Rickroll.
• What Could Have Been:
  • At one point the Cold War was originally planned to be a three-way Cold War between a DeLeonist bloc headed by the UASR, a Marxist-Leninist Bloc headed by the Soviet Union, and a capitalist bloc headed by the Franco-British Union. This was abandoned for several reasons, the biggest being that a) as time grew on the idea become unrealistic and implausible from a logistics standpoint, and b) the lack of a good Inciting Incident for the split (aside from possibly the Horn War, which was only suggested around the time Aelita reconsidered the idea) as Stalin had always been established as dying earlier than OTL
  • Note that the state of American-Soviet relations changed constantly throughout the TL: after the "three-way Cold War" idea was abandoned, it was changed to the Soviets being an ally of the Americans with their own foreign policy goals, much like the relationship between France and NATO during the Cold War, with a democratic revolution in the 70's. Then it was decided that it would be better the avoid the "Communist schism" cliche all-together and have them be loyal allies.
  • Had the original "three way Cold War" plan been kept, Aelita had already written which nations in the Comintern would've been Soviet or America aligned after World War II. China would've been the closest ally to the Soviets (and would eventually grow its own independent foreign policy), Japan would be close to the UASR, Korea would be neutral. Most shockingly, Germany was originally going to be completely undivided and non-aligned.
  • World War II was originally supposed to end with the UASR dropping atomic bombs on Kyoto and Yokohama to parallel the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After a contributor pointed out the logistics issues about the UASR's uranium supplies and nuclear program compared to the OTL US Army ^note IOTL, the uranium used for the Manhattan Project and the bombings came from Canada and the Belgian Congo, places with governments that aren't particularly friendly to the TTL UASR. Not only that, but Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, was a devoted anti-communist it was decided to narrow it down to a single nuke dropped on the combined fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Korean Strait.
  • The idea of Rhodesia (and later, the South African National Republic) being the archetypal pariah state came about by circumstance: Miss Teri, a long time fanfic writer who would later join the troika, wanted to write about a TTL version of The Interview and Aelita suggested Rhodesia as a North Korea analogue since at the time they had no plans for the country. Teri had originally intended it to be about Americuba, but it had already been established by that point that they underwent democratization.
  • At various points, Spartakrod had suggested that the timeline's version of Bernie Sanders would be a leader of the True Democrats, the joke being that UASR society was so left-wing that OTL America's most famous socialist politician from the 21st century would be considered a far-right fossil by the standards of the Redsverse if he ran on the same policy he did IOTL. When he made his canonical Redsverse debut, it was as a Liberation party leader.
  • In the earliest revisions, the UASR gained diplomatic relations with the British by selling them the territories of Hawaii and the Philippines and giving Alaska to Canada. Hawaii and Alaska are both part of the UASR in the newest revisions, and the Philippines becomes a joint Anglo-Japanese colony before the War divides the country into a communist North and a capitalist South.
  • As mentioned in the YMMV page, there was a big story arc for the immediate post-revolutionary period where Robert A. Taft, an anti-communist Ohio representative and son of William Howard Taft, refused to swear an oath to the UASR government and sued the government for trying to replace him. This was supposed to be the beginning of the UASR and USSR growing further apart, as Stalin criticizes the UASR for not immediately shooting him on sight. Infamously, the court case and the aftermath (Taft wins, but having made his point swears an oath to the UASR government and lets bygones be bygones) was told in the form of an in-universe fanfic for Hetalia: Axis Powers
  • Among the countries that had communist revolutions in early versions of the TL but are capitalist in modern revisions are Ireland (which was supposed to have a revolution after World War II that led to all of Ireland being unified and an "Irish Missile Crisis" in the mid-60s), Greenland and Iceland (occupied by the UASR during the war) and surprisingly enough, India (in the earliest versions of the timeline, before Aelita realized that the colonial elite and native bourgeoisie would've been a major stumbling block for native Communists and that the country would've worked better as an AFS nation to counterbalance East Asia all being communist). The Philippines, meanwhile, would've been entirely AFS rather than divided between communists and capitalists, and Somalia was originally going to be divided between capitalists and communists.
  • The original Second Cultural Revolution in the UASR was supposed to start in the 70's before being moved back to the immediate post-war 50's, and it would've ended with the Social Ecology Union dominating American politics. The SEU as a whole was an Author Avatar party representing Aelita's own political views at the time, and as the lore evolved she had to rewrite it so that it would be less tied to that.
  • Spain was supposed to be split into a capitalist half and a communist half after World War II, but the Troika felt that it would've been better to not have a communist state completely bisecting the Franco-Spanish border. After that, it was planned for Spain to be a "socialist monarchy" with a strong emphasis on worker co-ops. It was supposed to have been led by the arch-Catholic, legitimist Carlist branch of the House of Bourbon but ultimately sympathetic to socialism as the AFS equivalent to OTL Yugoslavia (a communist nation with a developed free market that had friendly relations with the Western Bloc). But as a reader from Spain pointed out, most of the Carlists supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and that while "leftist Carlism" does exist in real life it was only limited to a single Carlist claimant who was 6 when the Civil War ended IOTL and only became a leftist as an adult.
  • Part of the reason why it took so long to officially abandon the AH.com version of the timeline was because the Troika wanted to end the thread for Part 3 with the surrender of the Axis Powers and the end of the Great Crusade as a Grand Finale, but with the fandom and contributors gradually moving to the Sufficient Velocity thread (due to what can charitably be called Creative Differences with the website's moderators and userbase), it was eventually decided to pull the plug on updating the original all together to focus on the new revision. By that time, the Sufficient Velocity thread had already started World War II.
  • Illuminatus Primus, one of the original troika members, advocated for the UASR's flag to just be a plain red flag.
  • In older versions of the timeline, the identity of the commander of the Green Guard known as "O Diabo Verde" was completely unknown, concealing his face behind a gas mask, and meant to be a Riddle for the Ages. The SV version clearly identifies him as Cristiano Boaventura and even explains he conceals his face at all times due to his molysmophobia.
• Word of Dante: One of the flipsides of the above mentioned Ascended Fanon is that some readers have assumed that it one piece in the fanfic thread on AH.com was canonized, that meant every other piece of the same user was also made canon. For one infamous example, the writer who came up with the Free American State concept also wrote a fanfic piece theorizing that the society of the TL would be less accepting of autistic people due to Hans Asperger collaborating with the Nazis, and it somehow led to a few readers on the Sufficient Velocity thread assuming that the UASR would discriminate against autistic people until being told that it was never canon to begin with.
• Write What You Know: Why does Douglas MacArthur become a dictator ITTL? Well, Aelita's grandfather was a World War II veteran who met the man in person...and felt that MacArthur was extremely obnoxious.

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