Alternate History - Blog Posts

HEY, A NEW AU! Zoro, Kuina and Sanji trio?! Siblings?

Well, this is an AU I've been wanting to draw for months.

It's about how, Zeff seeing that Sanji still didn't value his hands as a cook, punished him, forcing him to go to a dojo so that when he hurt his hands, he would really value them.

The blessed dojo is Kou's, where Zoro and Kuina are. Upon arriving, Sanji expresses his displeasure at being there, which annoys Zoro.

Over time, Zoro, Kuina and Sanji begin to get along better, to the point that the three of them began to train hard, unaware that they've gone from strangers to siblings. Kuina and Zoro almost always defend him from ridicule for his very thin body.

Sanji was present but hidden when Zoro and Kuina made their promise. On the day Kuina died, Sanji and Zoro bumped fists before Sanji said that he should fulfill Kuina's dream. at all costs, and Zoro told Sanji that he should become strong so that he would not be underestimated for his thin body. Two years pass, Sanji must return to the baratie, while he is on the return ship, Zoro yells at him from the coast to fulfill his dream and promises, Sanji yelled the same thing back.

Something I didn't mention was that the three of them had told each other their dreams, plus Sanji cooked for everyone at the dojo. Sanji uses two swords, but he uses them for blocking, not attacking. L The bandages on his legs are from kicking a rock for years until it broke. Sanji and Zoro fought a thousand times, Zoro won 501 times and Sanji 499 times, Sanji against Kuina simply didn't, Kuina won. the 800 fights they had. Sanji spent 2 years in the dojo.

Years later they met again in the baratie according to the original story and the rest, well, One Piece 👍

Fact that made me laugh but seems true and correct: I think Zoro was very short as a child which is why I said that Sanji beat him by 10 cm even though Sanji is originally taller than Zoro, and of course,Kuina is a little taller than Sanji, so you can imagine Sanji's teasing of Zoro, which is ironic since Sanji is currently 1 cm shorter than Zoro🤣

About the ch au What about barabarossa it never happened and how did the nazis go with their plan

Uh jeez- well, for starters, there wasn't an alliance between the Germans and Soviets, so there was no need for the most part to invade (except for potentially more power). But that's not really the case??? The nazis were more focused on trying to invade France and the UK early in the war, but they do try to invade the USSR, but struggle due to the Unions prepared border security (a thing I probably should have explained in my og post) and inevitably end up failing and falling back.

Tl;dr: Barabarossa does happen, just later in the timeline and for different reasons.

About a year ago I started working on my Retrograde Earth series, in which I depicted Earth's continents on a backwards-spinning Earth, which would result in a major reconfiguration of Earth's climate. The first map I made in this series was Retrograde South America; however, that map has aged a bit since then as I've learned more about mapmaking and received further input from u/AncalagonTheBlack42 and MolotovJack. This is my attempt to remake that map from scratch. My next project will be to stitch all of the maps I've made thus far into a global map and render it as a globe in Blender or some other program if I can get that to work.

I forgot to post the Retrograde Eurasia map back when I finished it in February. Since we’re looking primarily at Asia and Europe this time, this map is by far the largest out of the five I’ve done. For any further details on the climate check out:

 https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/1bwp6hn/v5_retrogradeclockwise_earth_map_and_accompanying/ 

 https://www.deviantart.com/molotovjack/art/Retrograde-Earth-V5-Final-Version-985503973.

I’ve been wanting to do a detailed tilted Antarctica map for a while now, but the low resolution of the bedmaps up until now and the need to reconstruct pre-glaciation topography made me a bit apprehensive to start it. However, the recent release of bedmap3 to the public gave me the motivation to give it a shot. For this map I used the isostatic adjustment from Paxman et al. (2022) on bedmap3 to create a version accounting for isostatic rebound. I then used the rasters of Antarctica during the Eocene-Oligocene boundary from reconstructions made by Paxman et al. (2019) and tried my best to combine it with my rebounded bedmap3 map, in order to preserve the fidelity of the highlands and add the features which were lost to erosion. I took this heightmap and ran it through Wilbur to carve out valleys and rivers as well as to add more detail to the coasts and ease the transition between the two maps. I then used the topography and likely climate of the continent to create a false satellite map. Finally, I looked up the names for various features, both glacial and subglacial to fill out the map. I also used qgis to help convert between projections and do raster calculations for the rebounded map.

Description:

It’s difficult to picture Antarctica as anything else aside from the vast frozen expanse we see at the bottom of the world today, but as with everything involving deep time, our present is only a snapshot in Earth’s history. Up until the Late Eocene, Antarctica was as rich and varied as any other landmass. From what little we have of Antarctica’s fossil record, its makeup was broadly similar to Pre-interchange South America, home to early Ungulates and Marsupials as well as their close relatives. Antarctica’s habitats were equally diverse, hosting grasslands and even Austral forests, likely resembling the Valdivian rainforests of Southern Chile, with even palms being present during the Paleogene. However, as South America and Australia departed northwards, the circumpolar-Antarctic current took hold, restricting the flow of warm subtropical waters to the poles. This cooled the continent and its elevated interior allowed glaciers to easily take hold, thereby dooming nearly all of its inhabitants to extinction. 

But what if this wasn’t its fate? Let's imagine that over the course of the last 40-45 million years, Earth’s poles slowly change their positions, slowly enough that its disruption to Earth’s climate is about as gradual as the movement of the continents. By the present, the North Pole is over Africa, somewhere in Northeast Nigeria, and the south pole over the middle of the Pacific, adjacent to the Manihiki islands, which places Antarctica squarely in the Tropics with the new equator running through East Antarctica. The tilt chosen for this map is the same as Jaredia from the World Dream Bank’s Planetocopia, an old website which depicted alternate versions of Earth, as well as alien planets. For now, we won’t focus on the ramifications this has for the rest of the planet. 

Being covered in glaciers over the last 34 million years has dramatically altered Antarctica’s topography, not only has the land been isostatically depressed, but the movement of glaciers has eroded vast tracts of the continent. This version of Antarctica never underwent any kind of extensive glaciation, resulting in a landmass quite alien compared to the one we would get if we simply removed the glaciers from Antarctica now. The Northeast of Antarctica is now covered in tropical rainforests, likely filled with a diverse array of marsupials and birds. Things become slightly drier as we travel inland and increase in elevation. Even without glaciers, much of the interior ranges from 1000-1300 meters above sea level, comparable to the South African Plateau; which now supports the world’s largest subtropical highlands, similar climatically to the highlands in Ethiopia. Much of the North-Eastern side of the highlands drains into the Lambert graben, a permian-aged rift, which now forms a bay. Rivers coming down from the highlands introduce an immense amount of water into the bay, making the majority of the bay range from fresh to brackish, and with the sediment supplied by the mountains making this bay rather shallow. During Glacial maximums, this bay transforms into a low-lying plain, the sediment of which now makes the seabed ample territory for seagrass meadows. Further into the highlands, we find Lake Vostok, now relieved of its burden of ice. Without the depression from the ice above, the coasts of lake Vostok sit at about 1000 meters above sea level and are surrounded by subtropical forests. The lake’s depths nearly extend back down to sea level, supporting hydrothermal vents like those in Lake Baikal, with the only indication that something is different being the new flow of detritus from above. 

To the West we find a desert encompassing almost all of Marie Byrd Land and the Southern portion of the Palmer Peninsula. Sediment derived from the Marie Byrd land volcanic field, dispersed by the winds, colors vast swaths of the desert red. A few of the shield volcanoes in the Marie Byrd Land volcanic province rise high enough to capture some moisture, creating small oases of highland grasslands and in rare cases cloud forests. The Northern tropical forests of the Palmer peninsula are uniquely isolated from the mainland by Ronne bay to the East and the West Antarctic desert to the south, meaning any fauna here would likely be endemic to it. In the Ross Bay, the Transantarctic mountains cast a sizable rain shadow to the west, helping to form a narrow desert on the leeward side. In Ross bay, we also find a small archipelago of desert islands, with the largest being Penwell Island, a remnant of which exists in our Antarctica as Penwell Bank. To the South we reach the boundary between the tropics and subtropics. Near Antarctica’s new southernmost point we find the mouth of the Wilke’s river: the longest river on the Antarctic continent and which terminates with a wave-dominated delta. It’s also here that we find the largest permanent glacier on the continent, limited only to the highest points of the Victory Mountains.

Even without the circumpolar Antarctic current, Antarctica remains an extremely isolated landmass. No land bridges have connected it to any other continent since the Eocene, though South America (Now north of North America) remains just within reach. Ocean currents in the Drake Passage travel primarily from East to west, meaning that rafting events are unlikely to take settlers from South America to Australia, but could take settlers the other way around. It’s possible that South America could receive a regular influx of marsupials and other fauna from Antarctica over the course of millions of years. 

Resources Used:

Bedmap3: https://data.bas.ac.uk/full-record.php?id=GB/NERC/BAS/PDC/01615 

Reconstructions of Antarctic topography since the Eocene–Oligocene boundary: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2019.109346 

Total isostatic response to the complete unloading of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-15440-y

I almost forgot to post the Retrograde Australia map here!

Retrograde Africa (Africa on a backwards rotating Earth)

Retrograde North America (North America on a backwards rotating Earth):

I think this is my favorite retrograde Earth map I’ve made thus far, I’m hoping to work on Earth piece by piece until I have a full map.

Retrograde South America

This is my attempt to emulate a satellite map of South America on a backward spinning Earth, I based this on the climate maps made by Molotovsnowman and AncalagonTheBlack42: https://www.deviantart.com/molotovjack/art/Retrograde-Earth-V5-Final-Version-985503973

Which themselves were based on this study and this map from the Worldbuilding Pasta Blog

https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/9/1191/2018/

https://worldbuildingpasta.blogspot.com/2023/06/climate-explorations-day-length.html

Adelie, a tilted Antarctica

Tilted Africa

What if Australia was as it was during the Miocene?

Modern Messinian salinity crisis

(In the Paratus universe, the Soviets landed on the Moon first.)

Newly Released High Resolution Film Scans from Apollo Missions

8,434 photos from the Apollo missions were just uploaded to flickr by NASA! 

Countryhumans: The Commanders of Gilead

Drew this back in December 2022 and finished it on April 13, 2024.

I wanted to draw the Commanders of Gilead from Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale in Countryhuman style. I wanted to make them as accurate as possible. *Yes, I also added Donald Trump because for my headcanon I'm working on for the Hulu series' alternate history, he's a Commander in Gilead* I previously drew my first Gilead design back in November 2022. At first, I liked it but now I don’t like the head since most Countryhumans have round heads like Countyballs. So, when I drew the Commanders, I wanted to make them more human-like heads than round but keep the style of Countryhumans like the white eyes

Commander Fred Waterford played by Joseph Fiennes

Commander Nick Blaine played by Max Minghella

Commander Joseph Lawerence played by Bradley Whitford

Commander Andrew Pryce played by Robert Curtis Brown

Commander Warren Putnam played by Stephen Kunken

Commander MacKenzie played by Jason Butler Harner

Commander Donald Trump as himself *obviously*

Commander George Winslow played by Christopher Meloni

Countryhumans: Republic of Gilead

Drew this a while back on November 22, 2022. This is the Republic of Gilead or simply just Gilead. He’s the fictional country from Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I wanted to draw him as a Countryhuman since I saw how popular the fandom is. I joined in to draw Gilead in CH style and gave him a bio. The person I based him on is Commander Fred Waterford, played by Joseph Fiennes.

For those who don’t know much about The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s based on the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood. It’s set in a dystopia where the world suffers from low birth rates due to pollution that causes a fertility crisis. In the US, a Christian fundamentalist group called the Sons of Jacob or SOJ, a Puritan Christian group, violently did a coup in Washington DC on President's Day, by killing the President, Congress, and the rest of the Cabinet, to overthrow the US government. They seized power and transformed the former US into the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian patriarchal Christian theocracy that rules most of the former continental US. They strip away women’s rights and make them handmaids to be impregnated by their Commanders, who are the leaders of Gilead, for their barren wives. Their laws are based on the Bible, mainly the Old Testament for the authoritative laws against women.

In the Hulu series, it does the same element as the book but it is set in an alternate 2014 where the SOJ did the coup in Washington DC on September 11, 2014, by staging a terrorist attack to kill President Obama, Congress, and the Cabinet. The SOJ blamed the attack on Islamic extremist groups for the attack, quite possibly ISIS at the time of 2014. They then removed women's rights by first firing them, leaving them unemployed, freezing their bank accounts, not allowed to own property, and finally a nationwide abortion ban. All of these led to a 2nd Civil War from 2014 to 2017, as the setting for Season 1 of the series.

I already finished watching the series back in February 2023. I'm still waiting for the release of Season 6, which won't come out until next year due to the writer's strike last year. My mom got me hooked to watch this show. I mainly watched it for its alternate history since it talked about a fictional 2nd American Civil War.

It's a good show to watch. I highly recommend watching it as it parallels how US politics are right now.

I refuse this bullshit.

What if Israel was created in Bessarabia?

by carpathian_mapper/instagram