YMMV / Reds!: A Revolutionary Timeline

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • The idea of the Franco-British Union, a fully politically integrated collaboration between the United Kingdom and France, might sound somewhat outlandish to modern readers, but it is actually a national entity that both British and French politicians had seriously considered and openly negotiated about creating at several points during the 20th century, and it even came fairly close to existing during OTL World War II. The attempts at creating a Franco-British Union might actually be considered one of the spiritual predecessors of the European Union.
  • Most of Robert W. Welch's unhinged conspiratorial beliefs, including accusing some US presidents of being secret communist agents and communism of controlling both sides of the Cold War and being a front for The Illuminati, are the same he held in OTL.
  • Several readers assumed that Fascist Turkey's ultranationist "Turanist" ideology, which mixed anti-Arab and anti-Armenian racism with an irredentist aim at annexing all of Central Asia, was made up for the timeline as a Turkish parallel to Nazism and Japanese imperialism. Not only is it an actual political movement that has played a major role in Turkish history, the TL's portrayal of the ideology actually toned down a lot of the even more ridiculous OTL aspects of the ideology^note In the real world, the Turanist movement started not in Turkey, but with 19th century Finnish and Hungarian nationalists, who believed that the Uralic languages such as Finnish and Hungarian were related to Turkic and Mongolic languages of Central Asia and that meant the countries were part of a greater "Turanic" race. The movement was promoted by Ottoman nobility as an alternative to religious sectarianism, and had even spread to Japan due to coincidental similarities between Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic and Japanese grammar. Not only that, some later theorists began to believe that some Native American tribes were Turanic, because since they had technically originated in Siberia they were part of the Turco-Mongol cultural sphere.
• Broken Base:
  • For a while, the posts about Commander Columbia and the wider Rubyverse were controversial among readers: some loved the detailed backstory for its creation, how it portrays the differences between OTL and TTL animation (and in particular how the Animation Age Ghetto is outright defied), its possible influence and the general idea of a "new American mythology". Others accused it of being a Plot Tumor on the timeline, a blatant case of Author Appeal from Spartakrod's behalf, the detailed backstory as being little more than Character Shilling for self-inserts, being way too similar to modern anime to have existed in The Golden Age of Animation, and even as insufficiently socialist due to it being superhero universe and the critiques against superhero universes on the left that sprang up recent years. ^note We should note that the latter is Newer Than They Think: there is a long history of leftists who write superhero stories. Superman himself was intended as "a thorn in the side of the establishment", after all After Spartakrod re-wrote most of the lore surrounding the Rubyverse for the SV version (namely, pruning away the elements that seemed the most "modern" to casual readers and emphasizing that the entire franchise only became as influential as it is ITTL because the government used it as propaganda during the War), most of the detractors seemed to have come around on it and it's now considered a key part of the lore.
  • Among contributors and fanfic writers, it's a major debate as to how many pieces of pop culture from OTL should be transplanted to the Redsverse. On one hand, many think that it would be a fun exercise to see how their favorite movies, shows, books or video games would be different in the Redsverse to show how the culture of the timeline has diverged from OTL. On the other hand, just as many think that a lot of people asking "does X property exist in Reds and what would it be like?" aren't interested in whether or not their media properties, should exist in the Redsverse, and their ideas for how it would be different would either be not-so-subtly them trying to prove that they can make it "better", overly-didactic sermons about why capitalism is bad, or a weak attempt at "satirizing" a real life creator's political views. The general consensus seems to be that before you suggest a pop culture piece, you shouldn't ask what something would be like in the Redsverse, but rather if the existence of something would say something about the society of the TL.^note This, incidentally, has led to an unspoken rule among contributors to not make an in-universe version of Harry Potter: a reimagining of the Wizarding World in the Redsverse would either be indistinguishable from Harry Potter Becomes a Communist or a commentary on JK Rowling's controversial political views and how they're reflected in the series, and "leftist Harry Potter parodies" are a dime a dozen on Twitter and Tumblr
  • The decision to scrap the original plans for a three-way Cold War or at the very least a more strained relationship between the UASR and the USSR post-World War II was extremely controversial at first: many accused the writers of the TL of white-washing the Soviets, glossing over any differences or disputes between Soviet and American socialism, and abandoning an interesting idea for a story that was rarely seen in the AH community, while others praised it for averting the "leftist infighting" cliche and the stereotype that Russians "have no democratic tradition". As time goes on, most long time fans have considered it to be right for the story, mostly because of how the original version never really explained what it was that made the Soviets turn on the Americans, but there's still a few people who think that the "three way Cold War" idea was interesting even if it wasn't feasible.
  • Among left-wing readers, the decision to have multiple parties in the UASR (and possibly the rest of the Comintern) draws significant controversy. Marxist-Leninists and adherents of other ideologies derived from Leninism believe that it serves as an abandonment of the vanguard party and needlessly divides the American proletariat because "there's only one working class". Anarchists and followers of more libertarian forms of socialism however, like the idea because it showcases how non-authoritarian forms of socialism could develop and means that could have been taken for the OTL Communist bloc and socialist movement in general to avoid the many pitfalls that led to its collapse.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • The Red May Revolution is a cathartic payoff after reading about the years of struggle and government suppression endured by the Workers' Communist Party of America, seeing them both defeat the tyrannical NSF regime and finally rise to power with the will and the means to transform America.
  • The Axis in Reds! is made even more dangerous than OTL and the situation becomes extremely dire as they come close to conquering all of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin and commit countless atrocities across the lands they occupy. Reading about their defeats across the world is both a relief and extremely gratifying.
• Common Knowledge:
  • A common belief among detractors of the timeline, particularly those identifying as center or right-wing, is that the Franco-British Union is a free-market hellscape and a massive Author Tract Take That! towards the perceived injustices of capitalism. In reality, while socialism is indeed presented in the timeline as the more superior economic system overall, the FBU's sociopolitical system is closer to a very robust social democratic welfare state than any form of free market neoliberalism and even Americuba, despite maintaining the ideology of American exceptionalism, adheres to Keynesian economics over modern day American-style deregulated capitalism.
  • Some detractors also believe that the Greater Indian Commonwealth and Nigeria are "still British colonies." They aren't, they're Commonwealth Realms.
  • Part of the reason why there was so much drama surrounding the Commander Columbia lore posts was because a lot of people had mistaken ideas as to what it was. Commander Columbia and her boyfriend Vladimir are commonly believed to be self-inserts of Spartakrod and faer partner. In reality, they just gave their faces as reference material to the artist who was commissioned to draw them for a discount. Many assume that the Rubyverse is told in comic books but it actually starts as a series of animated films. The character designs on the forum are not supposed to be what the series looked like when it first debuted, it's supposed to be how they look like in the 21st century because none of the contributors are rich enough to hire an artist who can pull off a convincing facsimile of 1930s animation.
  • A somewhat common claim by right-wing detractors of the timeline is that Stalin commits very little of his OTL atrocities during his time as leader because of the UASR being a moderating force pushing for more democratic policies in authoritarian socialist states. In reality, Stalin still causes the deaths of 600,000 people in the Great Purge and ultimately it took a Benevolent Conspiracy by Mikhail Frunze to fully dislodge many of the authoritarians and opportunists in the USSR following Stalin's death.
• Complete Monster:
  • William Dudley Pelley is the "President" of the Free American State in a German-occupied Belarusian town called Maly Trostenets. Under Pelley's guidance, the Nazi collaborationist state recreates a twisted image of the pre-revolutionary America, where the ideals of National Socialism are upheld, the amended Constitution enforces racial oppression, and African-American prisoners of war are kept as slaves to emulate the "idyll" of the antebellum United States. The luxurious life of Pelley and other Nazi Americans in Maly Trostenets is maintained by oppression of the local population, subjecting the Soviet people to grueling forced labor and starvation rations. When the German defeat on the Eastern Front becomes apparent and food supply to the Free American State runs short, Pelley decides to cut rations for Soviet laborers even more in order to keep the parasitic existence of the Nazi American statelet undisturbed, leading to numerous deaths from hunger among the Slavic workforce. To distract himself from the horrific reality of the incoming Nazi collapse, Pelley indulges in rape of female prisoners, only to later shame the sex slaves for their "devilish temptations". When Pelley attempts to escape to American Havana after the German surrender, he is immediately brought back to the Soviet Union, as even the anti-Communist American state saw Pelley and his regime as a hideous disgrace to American ideals.
  • Virgil Effinger is the leader of the Schwarz Legion, the military wing of the Free American State. Serving as the "Secretary of War" of the Nazi American puppet government, Effinger is responsible for repressing the native population of Maly Trostenets, taking a sadistic pleasure in brutal and inhumane torture and killing of Soviet citizens and American prisoners of war. Effinger especially hates those "Aryan" prisoners of war who refuse to join the Nazi side, throwing them into a basement and letting dogs maul them. Effinger personally tortures and murders slaves who collapse of starvation and executes one Belarusian for each who drops dead from labor. As the tide of war turns against the Germans, Effinger becomes even more psychotic, causing him to randomly murder Slavic servants and even turn his gun against the Red American renegades, blaming their "lingering Redness" for defeat. Effinger is assassinated shortly before the Soviet liberation of Maly Trostenets under mysterious circumstances. Whenever he was killed by his Belarusian maid, the SS members who started to consider him "deranged and violent wastrel" or Pelley's goons who saw him as an obstacle for their evacuation, it is clear that everyone recognized Effinger as a deeply depraved and sadistic individual.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception:
  • For the love of God, never say that the UASR is actually a dystopia. Never say the timeline is wish fulfillment for the authors, either, since society in the TCI was designed to feel completely alien to our own sensibilities.
  • No, the UASR does not discriminate against autistic people and/or the mentally ill. That idea came from someone misinterpreting a fanfic post and assuming it was canonized
  • The UASR's political system is completely different from the one in the modern USA, so God help you if you try to fit an "OTL populist conservative Republican congressman" shaped peg into a "TTL Militarized Internationalist People's Deputy from the Liberation Party" shaped hole. And while we're on the subject, don't say that it's "unrealistic" for the Soviet Union to become a democracy either.
  • The TCI does not expect all entertainment to have a didactic anti-capitalist message. By the 21st century, most of the people in the UASR and Soviet Union have never lived under capitalism, so they don't need to be reminded about how bad it is since they've already lived for nearly a century under socialism. Please keep this in mind before making a pop culture contribution.
• Fandom Heresy:
  • If you don't like some parts of how the UASR is run, that's fine. If you say that it's actually a dystopian hellscape and that all the positive stories are in-universe propaganda? Time for a struggle session.
  • Never ever suggest that it's "unrealistic" for the Soviet Union to become a democracy or that you preferred it when the Soviets were Leninists fighting against the democratic UASR, especially if you're talking to a Russian fan of the TL.
  • And perhaps most important of all, never say anything bad about longtime contributor Marxist-Hueyist, better known as simply "Huey". He pretty much defined the African and Middle Eastern lore for the TL, is one of the nicest people in the online alt-history fandom, and convinced Aelita to have Somalia annex Djibouti and the Ogaden region of Ethiopia during the Horn War, thus fulfilling the dream of uniting the entire Somalian people. He's too busy in his personal life to contribute, but he's dearly missed. One reader, unaware of his fame, once said that Somalia going communist in the 50's was unrealistic and was told in no uncertain terms that he wasn't allowed to touch it
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • With New Deal Coalition Retained, which Reds! fans accuse of being an unrealistic right-wing wank that whitewashes right-wing authoritarian and outright Fascistic figures and goes way over the top in demonizing the entirety of the Left. NDCR fans in turn call the Redsverse wish fulfillment for its authors, a charge that the troika deny. In the 2020s a similar but no less intense rivalry started with The Footprint of Mussolini.
  • For a while, a smaller one existed with Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg, which shares a similar Second American Civil War plot in its American focus trees. While at first they were Friendly Fandoms, and there are still many who are fans of both, some Reds! fans have accused the newer members of the KR mod team of favoring certain nations and ideologies above others and misunderstanding socialism. Then an expy of the Green Guard was added in the Brazilian focus tree as an option for Imperial Brazil, which led to Aelita starting a twitter thread accusing the devs of plagiarism and whitewashing (since the KR Green Guard are much nicer than the original, genocidal Reds! version). It's mostly died down, though.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With The New Order Last Days Of Europe: American society as seen in TNO is reminiscent of the United States in the Redsverse's 1920s, and some of the paths for reunifying the Soviet Union (in particular Sablin and the various anarchists) resemble the "democratic communism" seen in the TL. Many of the timeline's contributors are also members of the mod's dev team.
  • Despite the above, many fans of Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg, and in particular Internationale players, are also fans of Reds because both timelines have an American civil war featuring Douglas MacArthur that could possibly end with a socialist America. There's a lot of discussion comparing the Combined Syndicates of America to the UASR and how they'd be different from one another. (In case you were wondering, MacArthur overthrowing the government in both timelines is a coincidence)
• Funny Moments:
  • "Hoover, at any rate, knew how much trouble he and his party were in. His back door plea to controversial Democratic Party presidential nominee Huey Long to drop out of the race to avoid splitting the anti-communist vote was met with Long's explicit indifference to whether capitalism or socialism was the order of the day in the United States."
  • Jane Schafer gives a funny quip as she arrives with her platoon on the Eastern Front in Icebreaker.
    Jane Schafer: "No one got lost in the twenty metre march from the train. The Nazis will never know what hit them."
  • On April Fools 2022, the writers post outlining a hypothetical prestige TV series based on the TL made by DisneyWarnerDiscovery (a subsidiary of EA) where the UASR suffers the same Full-Circle Revolution as real-life communist states, Eugene Debs is inexplicably still alive in 1933, and Americuba is a truly free society that "incorporates the best elements of all systems" and whose president is played by Pitbull. It's written by Joss Whedon, who apparently made Stalin speak exactly like Xander.
  • The post about the TTL death of Stalin is on a forum thread where the users debate his death, eventually leading to a die-hard Stalin defender accusing the Americans of having Sean Cinnedie (or JFK as he's better known in our universe) kill Stalin because he was secretly a British spy working at the behest of his father (who after the revolution left him for dead and fled to Americuba). The final post is another user saying "Nobody shot him, his head just did that!"
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While still quite popular with most users of the site, many of the comments from fans on the Sufficient Velocity version are from South-East Asia, primarily Indonesia.
  • It's also popular among Russian users of the site because of its even-handed, non-stereotypical portrayal of the Soviet Union. Other works of "Socialist America" AH fiction tend to have Russia be opposed to a socialist America to parallel the TTL Cold War, but the current incarnation of Reds! has the USSR as a free and prosperous UASR ally. The same could also be said about the TL's large Latin American fandom.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Aelita created "Rule Britannia", a stereotype of British right-wing nationalists, as one of the members of the in-universe counterpart to AlternateHistory.com. Shortly afterwards though, a poster with the exact same username joined the real AH.com with eerily similar opinions to his ATL counterpart.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Major Jane Schafer, after killing Lavrentiy Beria.
  • Thanks to the aforementioned Huey (who is Somalian), the entire nation of Somalia counts. (Hell, among long time members of the Discord channel, it seems that the OTL nation of Somalia is starting to be one)
  • The TL's version of Richard Nixon shows that the Capitalists are mistaken about Communist aggression...in the sense that they have gravely underestimated it.
• Memetic Mutation: On the Discord server, jokes and fanart◊ about Leon Trotsky being obsessed with American deli sandwiches are common, with some users suggesting that he would moonlight as a food critic during his exile in the UASR
  • Long Nigeria ^explanation A common nickname for the West African Federation, a post-war Dominion that merges all the British and French colonies along the Gulf of Guinea and is the strongest AFS state in Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • "Where's the Mexico lore?"/The Fabled Mexico Lore ^explanation Despite being the second country in the Americas to have a socialist revolution and Emiliano Zapata becoming a Mao-like figure ITTL, there was very little actual concrete explanations as to how and why Mexico collapsed into revolution, especially in the AH.com version, leading to many jokes on the Discord server about Mexico not having any lore. Finally discredited in 2022, after actual Mexico Lore posts started being made.
  • The FBU are The Morlocks ^explanation  A...colorful user on the SV thread once "extrapolated" from a post about sports that the people of the Franco-British Union would somehow become a completely different species from the Reds and be mentally unable to have a communist revolution because of head injuries in sports and leaded gasoline. It quickly became an inside joke among long time readers because of how bizarre it was.
  • Whenever the TL's version of Richard Nixon is brought up on the Discord, it's a matter of time before someone else says "I WANT YOU TO SMOKE A BOWL AND NUKE LONDON!" ^explanation  Redsverse Nixon summed up in one sentence: it's the unofficial motto for the culturally libertine yet extremely militant Liberation party in the UASR.
  • LONG LIVE GREATER SOMALIA! ^explanation  After Huey convinced Aelita to have Djibouti and the Ogaden Region be given back to Somalia in the TL, a lot of long time readers and members of the Discord have advocated for Greater Somalia in real life with varying degrees of seriousness.
• Moral Event Horizon: Longworth and MacArthur blatantly subverting democracy and disregarding the US Constitution. It is also seen as this universe, since it triggered a socialist revolution and brought down the US government.
• My Real Daddy: Downplayed: while Aelita's contributions are still highly regarded and they're generally seen as the real writer for the timeline, they have admitted that IlluminatusPrimus had convinced them to take writing the TL more seriously, and he had contributed the first major revisions to the lore. Most notably, he was the one who decided against the "three-way Cold War" aspect of the timeline, averting the "leftists are always fighting" stereotype. And as the timeline grew and moved to Sufficient Velocity, many have said that the other two troika members, Spartakrod and Miss Teri, deserve their own credit for shaping the timeline into what it is today.
  • Not for the timeline as a whole, but for the lore of a specific region: long-time contributor Marxist-Hueyist, better known as just Huey, pretty much defined the lore for post-war Africa and the Middle East.
• Narm: The earliest version of the timeline had a key piece of (now Canon Discontinuity) lore, Robert Taft's refusal to swear an oath of loyalty to the UASR and a resulting case in the People's Tribunal that led to strained relationships with Stalin's USSR, told in the form of an in-universe Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic.
  • The original post about the Free American State (not written by any member of the Troika) was horrifying...until the latter half. There's a part where the author felt that they needed to explain, in exact detail, why Pelley violated all of the Seven Deadly Sins, including one for gluttony where the only explanation is he got really fat. There's another part where MacArthur condemns the Free American state that ends with "even capitalist dictators have a heart". When the Americans liberate the camp, it's said that "it was one of the rare moments where the Soviets had to stop the Americans from committing war crimes rather than the other way around". It ends with a moral about how wanting to resurrect the past leads to war crimes. No wonder it had to be rewritten for the SV verison to seem less like a creepypasta.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Holocaust is extended to countries that were neutral in OTL, such as Spain and Sweden, with expectedly horrific consequences. Atrocities are also committed against Greek and Armenian populations by Turanist Turkey on par with the OTL Armenian Genocide.
  • The fall of Sweden to fascism ITTL means it couldn't be used as a refuge or path to escape Axis-controlled Europe for Jews like it was IOTL.
  • The Free American State. The very idea of it is chilling: It's a bunch of deranged American anti-communists attempting to recreate all the worst parts of the pre-Civil War United States in occupied Belarus, including sexual violence, homophobia, blackface minstrel shows, and chattel slavery of black POWs. And they let their children take part in war crimes. Many people have compared it to Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom in its absolutely fucked up depiction of the worst of fascism.
• Values Dissonance: A bit of a milder example than most, but it has to be said that the authors are actual Marxists and anarchists writing from a Marxist/anarchist perspective. Now, your first response might be "Well, duh!", but apparently some people are genuinely surprised to find this out and assume that "Marx being correct" is a POD and not something the authors actually believe. They do a good job at making it not seem like an Author Tract, though: the authors frequently stress that the UASR is supposed to come off as somewhat weird to our sensibilites. More specifically, the authors are left communists, so quite a few Marxist-Leninists might view the UASR's society as being revisionist!
• Values Resonance: In 2009, when the original timeline was posted to AH.com, it was seen as a fun novelty...but with the growing popularity of socialism and radical leftism among young people, you can make the case that it probably introduced a lot of young AH nerds to leftist activism in the first place, and by the time the story finally moved to SV a lot of the "radical" ideas it had stopped seeming radical. Aside from that, the TL had a few things that were rare in AH at the time:
  • There's a gay rights movement as early as the 1920's, and a trans rights movement to go along with it: many of the characters in the TCI are queer and it's pretty much seen as normal. In 2009 this was rare in alt-history writing.
  • Presaging the debate over Confederate memorials in the South, the UASR just destroys them all together, unthinkable at the time but now a commonly held (if still controversial) viewpoint.
• Unbuilt Trope: As the great-granddaddy of all "Socialist America" alt-history, it's actually kind of funny how many cliches from future "Socialist America" timelines it avoids:
  • While earlier versions of the TL planned a three-way Cold War between the UASR, USSR and FBU, later revisions had the USSR stay a loyal member of the TCI. In contrast, so many other "Socialist America" timelines place their socialist American revolution closer to the end of World War I (rather than the Great Depression in the case of Reds!) so that it can replace the Russian one, and often have Russia stay capitalist to keep the Cold War parallelism or even undergo a fascist takeover with it being subsequently defeated at the end of an alternate World War II in the latter case.
  • Due to the tendency of Socialist America timelines to use World War I as a divergence point, said timelines tend to have Fascism take root in Britain, France and occasionally Russia due to a Central Powers victory causing a ultranationalist backlash in these countries, leading to a World War II with the OTL allied powers taking the place of the Axis and the Socialist America teaming up with a victorious Central Powers (and Russia if it dosen't turn Fascist) to take them down. Reds! however has a World War II against the very same Axis powers of OTL, albeit significantly enlarged with the inclusion of Brazil, Spain, Sweden and Turkey into the Axis.
  • A lot of the "obvious" choices for a socialist American leader are conspicuously absent: the modern day leader of the UASR (as of TTL 2020) isn't anyone who is "famous" in OTL modern American politics or socialist activism like Bernie Sanders, Cornel West, Noam Chomsky or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, or even a open Communist like Angela Davis, Richard Wolff or Michael Parenti, but someone who in real life is the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. His predecessor is better known IOTL as a queer poet, and the current opposition leaders are better known as actors IOTL^note The Social Ecology Union's current leader is Native American actor and activist Dallas Goldtooth, best known for his role in the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, his work in The 1491s, and for playing Spirit from Reservation Dogs. The Communist Labor Party is led by Danny DeVito, as part of a meta-joke about his resemblance to the Marxist theorist Amadeo Bordiga, who ITTL inspired the party's ideology.
  • While the capitalist world is portrayed as being deeply flawed, the authors stress that by the standards of OTL, the Franco-British Union (and indeed most of the Alliance of Free States) is an extremely livable social democracy. Neoliberalism is a fringe ideology promoted mostly by kooks and venture capitalists, and the government promotes union rights (but clearly favoring "patriotic" unions), robust social welfare programs, and universal basic income as an alternative to communist revolution, much like the New Deal in the 30's. To someone who only thinks of socialism as government programs and welfare states (as the meme goes, "Socialism is when the government does stuff"), the FBU might even come off as socialist
• Unintentional Period Piece: The earliest posts in the timeline are from 2009, and sometimes it really does show:
  • The aforementioned Hetalia fanfic, which was posted to the TL's version of LiveJournal. IOTL, Hetalia as a franchise would undergo Hype Backlash due to overexposure, and Tumblr would replace LJ as the go-to site for fandom.
  • Many of the earliest pop culture contributions were transparent references to media that was popular at the time: an early story post explaining the TL's version of John Dilinger is about the in-universe version of Public Enemies, which had just come out at the time. The oldest posts referenced the craze for reality TV that hadn't yet petered out, with a TTL equivalents of Rock of Love, which had just ended. The very first post was from a TTL version The West Wing, which still had a sterling reputation but would later become the target of criticism for its idealistic tone and ham-fisted, preachy writing. (Hilariously enough, when the SV version touched on the TTL West Wing equivalent, it was with a piece explaining that as time went on people thought that it was too idealistic and had ham-fisted, preachy writing...just like in real life!)
  • The reason why apartheid Rhodesia became the big pariah state in the TL is because Teri was writing a fanfic contribution about the TTL equivalent to the North Korean-set comedy film The Interview, which had made the news after it had been taken out of theaters after the North Korean government threatened to bomb the US if they went through with the release, and since she couldn't find any state that could correspond to North Korea Aelita suggested Rhodesia because she didn't have any plans for the country at the time. The controversy over the film faded after it was released to streaming and people thought it was just an average comedy movie that just so happened to be about assassinating a real-world dictator, but Rhodesia's place in the lore would grow considerably.
  • On a meta level, while Aelita first came up with the timeline in the early 2000's, the original posts coincided with the aftermath of the Great Recession and the early days of the Obama administration causing a resurgence of interest in socialism among Americans: at the time, the premise of a genuinely free and prosperous democratic society that adhered to communism was unheard of in alternate history, and for a lot of the younger members of AH.com it was their entryway into leftism. Going back and reading some of the earliest story posts, some of them come off as pretty quaint in an era where many young people self-identify as socialists.
  • Aelita herself mentioned that in the Social Ecology Union reflected her own political views from 2009-2012, and the outline for the party had to be rewritten because not only had her views changed since then, she began to feel that the party's original platform was starting to look implausible in the world of the TL and seemed like it was just transplanting a type of anarchism that only emerged IOTL after the fall of the Soviet Union into a world where the Communist bloc is thriving.

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