History Literature / MaleRising

[[spoiler: After an epic run, the timeline has officially concluded on December 17 2015, bringing to a close around 336 chapters covering over 170 years in-story / 3 years and 348 days in real-world time.]]

* WarIsHell: While Jonathan's narratives mostly err towards the brighter side of things, there are a few snippets and chapters that show just how brutal conflicts can get in the Malêverse.

* JeanneDArchetype: Mélisande, Prophet-Queen of Rwanda.

* BadassPreacher: [[JeanneDArchetype Mélisande, in spades]]. She led her followers to rifle-battles with only a ''sword'' to protect her. [[spoiler:After her time as Prophet-Queen of Rwanda, she organized protests and resistance groups in Igboland against the Imperial government of the British Empire]].

* WhereItAllBegan: In the first installments, Paulo Abacar lived in a house in Oyo Square, Sokoto. [[spoiler: 177 years later, his great-great-great-granddaughter Laila Abacar visited the house - now a museum and shrine - in the epilogue. She considers moving her family there at the end.]]

* NoBloodForPhlebotinum: Unfortunately, one negative consequence of Africa industrializing and modernizing early is that problems of [[PostPeakOil resource depletion]] and environmental destruction also arise early. Case in point: the Nile War, fought between Egypt and Ethiopia over rights to the waters of the Nile, which by the mid 1930s has grown increasingly strained as both nations divert water for their own farms and factories. Desertification in the Sahel also starts happening several years before OTL due to the greater development of the region, while the Niger Delta states of Bonny and Calabar experience civil unrest in the mid 20th century due to the pollution created by the oil industry.

* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: Used by [[spoiler:Theodore Roosevelt]] against [[spoiler:Woodrow Wilson]] during a political debate on the [[spoiler: Indian War of Independence]]. The latter wants the United States to support the British Empire in the name of "racial solidarity". [[spoiler:Teddy]], who has actually been to the subcontinent, disagrees.

* CallingTheOldManOut: Partly the reason for why [[spoiler:Anastasia Romanova split off with her father, Tsar Alexander. She learned of what he did [[Main/{{Dystopia}} during the Great War]] and was repulsed by his actions.]]

* [[IHaveNoSon I Have No Daughter]]: Tsar Alexander warned his [[spoiler:daughter Anastasia Romanova]] of being disowned if she were to marry [[spoiler: Prince Tewodros of Ethiopia. They married anyway, and the Tsar disinherited her.]] The Tsar's actions during the Great War partly [[CallingTheOldManOut influenced the decision.]]

* Main/{{TheTheocracy}}: Has appeared in many shapes and forms over the timeline, with the most notable case being the [[spoilers:Fraternal Republic of Honduras]].

** The Abacars and the Igbo were no slouch in this department, either.

* [[IHaveNoSon I Have No Daughter]]: Mentioned in passing. Tsar Alexander warned his [[spoiler:daughter Anastasia Romanova]] of being disowned if she were to marry [[spoiler: Prince Tewodros of Ethiopia. They married anyway, and the Tsar disinherited her.]]

* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: Used by [[spoiler:Theodore Roosevelt]] against [[spoiler:Woodrow Wilson]] during a political debate on the [[spoiler: Indian War of Independence]]. The latter wants the United States to support the British Empire in the name of "racial solidarity". [[spoiler:Teddy]], who has actually been to the subcontinent, loudly disagrees.

* FullCircleRevolution: [[spoiler:Tolstoyist Russia]], after its founder's death, soon turns back into the same oligarchy that it had emerged as a revolution against, with the [[MegaCorp "Six Parties"]] taking over much of the economy. Following the [[spoiler:Sino-Russian]] War, between the demands of trade unions for cooperation with the war effort and the rebels who embodied the regime's founding ideology far better than the regime itself did, the Six Parties offered some limited reforms, only to curtail them later and crack down harder than ever before. By the 1960s, the nation is on the verge of a second revolution.

** The Imperial Party in Britain isn't quite ''as'' bad as the Nazis, but it's close, viewing the Empire as a source of tribute and (failing that) plunder with which to rebuild the British economy after the Great War. Things come to a head when [[spoiler:India revolts as a result]]. Their homefront policies aren't much better, with their militant racism and [[StayInTheKitchen anti-feminism]], bitter crackdowns on unions, socialists, and other dissidents, the degradation of British science and academia due to censorship and politicization resulting in a massive brain drain, and overall subversion of Britain's democratic institutions.

** In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, the state of Ulster becomes a Protestant mirror to Ireland's Catholic theocracy, a reactionary state run by Imperial Party diehards for almost sixty years that expelled most of its Catholic population upon independence in 1924. By the '70s, it's suffering a brain drain (especially among women) and a stagnant economy, and the rest of the Commonwealth views them as an embarrassment. Their fall comes in 1981, when Ulster's longtime agitation over the "four lost counties" of Donegal, Cavan, Tyrone, and Fermanagh leads to a violent border clash with Ireland that proves to be the last straw for the Commonwealth; they immediately send in the troops to remove the government and hold new elections in which the Imperial Party is banned.
** Natal after [[spoiler:the Indian War of Independence]]. It secedes from UsefulNotes/SouthAfrica and becomes a white supremacist pariah state where the black majority lives in conditions of virtual slavery, with the local Imperial Party still in power and [[spoiler:the deposed -- and bitter -- ex-King of Britain]] finding his way there. One poster compared it to an inverted [[Literature/TheDraka Draka]], one that was more pathetic than anything, and by the 1940s it's facing significant rebellions, eventually falling in 1945 due to a combination of internal revolt and an invasion led by the UK, South Africa, and India. Jamaica undergoes a similar experience after Imperial Party sympathizers take over, though it only lasts a few years after the fall of the Imperial Party in Britain.

** Imperial Russia. Before the the Great War, she was the largest land empire on Earth. After that, it was nothing more than a tiny province/colony in the [[spoiler:Horn of Africa]]. That doesn't mean the Romanovs are gone, though...

** The British Empire experiences this after the Great War.

The timeline can be read [[http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=226788 here]], with a comprehensive list of posts [[http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/timelines/list_of_male_rising_posts here]] for those who don't want to sift through the discussions.

* UsefulNotes/CivilRightsMovement: The US experiences two of them. The first occurs in the 1920s, and escalates almost to the level of UsefulNotes/TheTroubles in OTL, with [[TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized white and black militias roaming the Southern countryside]]. It ends with huge gains made for African Americans, outlawing the "separate but equal" system that had existed prior, though notably, private discrimination is still legal. Cracking down on that would have to wait until the ''second'' Civil Rights Movement in the '60s and '70s, which sees white segregationists trying in vain to resist Washington's vigorous enforcement of new civil rights laws. The governor of Florida notably fights tooth and nail against desegregation, supporting [[RightWingMilitiaFanatic "citizens' defense organizations"]] and even calling out the state militia ([[CurbStompBattle which does not last long]]) when the US Army is sent in to enforce desegregation.

* UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire: The Malê have been supported by it, fought it and been part of it at various times.

* BiTheWay: [[spoiler:Laila Abacar, in the denouement installments of the timeline. She weds both a husband and a wife and managed public scrutiny by weaving the marriage through a loophole in Islamic law (that a man can have up to four wives)]]

* BiTheWay: [[spoiler:Laila Abacar, in the denouement installments of the story. She weds both a husband and a wife and managed public scrutiny by weaving the marriage through a loophole in Islamic law (that a man can have up to four wives)]]

* BiTheWay: [[spoiler:Laila Abacar, in the denouement installments of the story. She weds both a husband and a wife and managed public scrutiny by weaving the marriage through a loophole in Islamic law (that a man can have up to four wives)]] See Polyamory below.

** One of the Romanovs ends up becoming the [[spoiler:empress of Ethiopia]] by choice. [[IHaveNoSon The Tsar wasn't happy]].

* [[IHaveNoSon I Have No Daughter]]: Mentioned in passing. The Tsar warned his daughter [[spoiler:Anastasia Romanova]] of being disowned if she were to marry [[spoiler: Prince Tewodros of Ethiopia. They married anyway, and the Tsar disinherited her.]]

** One of the Romanovs ends up becoming the [[spoiler:empress of Ethiopia]] by choice. The Tsar wasn't happy.

* [[IHaveNoSon I Have No Daughter]]: Mentioned in passing. The Tsar warned Anastasia of being disowned if she were to marry [[spoiler: Prince Tewodros of Ethiopia. They married anyway, and the Tsar disinherited her.]]

* PragmaticVillainy: Not so much evil, but more of a difference in thought; Rebecca Felton was a white supremecist who disapproved of slavery and lynching not because it was morally wrong, but because she thought it would corrupt the whites' morals.

[[spoiler: After an epic run, the timeline has officially ended on December 17 2015, bringing to a close around 336 chapters covering over 170 years in-story / 3 years and 348 days in real-world time.]]

* WhereItAllBegan: In the first installments, Paulo Abacar lived in a house in Oyo Square, Sokoto. [[spoiler: 177 years later, his great-great-great-granddaughter Laila Abacar visited the house - now a museum and shrine - in the epilogue. She considered moving her family there at the end.]]

* WorldWarIII: The "Second Great War", while still unfought as of 1960, holds a similar place in the popular imagination once people start realizing just what the newly-tested atomic weapons are capable of. One such scenario is presented in a dystopian book by that title, written by a pair of disaffected generals, one Russian and one Chinese, after the Sino-Russian War in the 1940s. While civilization isn't destroyed in their scenario like it is in so many others, it is sent back to the nineteenth century, with over ten percent of humanity dead.

* NukeEm: Unfortunately, unlike OTL, nuclear weapons wind up being used in war on two occasions instead of [[UsefulNotes/AtomicBombingsOfHiroshimaAndNagasaki one]].

** The second time comes in [[spoiler:2001, when Siam's military-fascist regime drops several low-yield tactical nukes on the battlefield in their war with Burma. Again, this proves to be a big mistake.]]