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Never Was This Universe
- 258 statements
- 47 feature instances
- 26 referencing feature instances
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| Never Was This Universe | comment |
Alternate History provides a method for creating a setting which is almost like our world, but varies in large enough ways that they couldn't plausibly actually be ours. This trope covers settings which feel like Alternate History in this way, but don't actually have a specified point of divergence: no matter how far back in history you look, their history has always been different from ours in some way (frequently, though not always, because it contains un-Masqueraded fantasy elements). In Spite of a Nail is necessarily in effect, in order to keep the setting approximately similar to the real world—indeed, sometimes the histories of these settings are more different from reality than their presents. Compare Alien Space Bats and Historical Fantasy. See also Close-Enough Timeline and Rubber-Band History. Contrast Secret History. Examples |
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| Never Was This Universe / int_11d0af1 | type |
Never Was This Universe | |
| Never Was This Universe / int_11d0af1 | comment |
Lyra's world in His Dark Materials had a definitively different version of the Protestant Reformation (up to and including John Calvin becoming Pope) than ours, as well as a society of sapient armored bears which has been around for considerably longer than that. Plus, y'know, the whole visible and living souls thing... And much more... | |
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At first, Watchmen may seem like a case of In Spite of a Nail or Alien Space Bats: the timeline appears to have diverged from ours in 1938 with the emergence of costumed heroes, and more drastically in 1959 with the birth of Dr. Manhattan, who has actual superpowers. However, a close look at the details of the comic hint that the timeline diverged a lot earlier than in 1938. In the world of Watchmen, the famous Heinz slogan is not "57 Varieties", like in our world, but "58 Varieties". Also, apparently The New York Times doesn't exist at all, it's been replaced by the fictional New York Gazette. In our world, both the coining of the "57 Varieties" slogan and the founding of The New York Times took place decades before 1938, so the implication is that there were subtle differences between our timeline and the Watchmen timeline long before the costumed heroes entered the scene. With "58 Varieties", it's theoretically possible that the new slogan simply replaced "57 Varieties" sometime after 1938, but New York Gazette already existed in 1938, as Hollis Mason's autobiography mentions the paper reporting the initial exploits of the first costumed hero, Hooded Justice. There are also other differences between our world and the world of Watchmen — such as the existence of a man with actual psychic powers — that seem to be unrelated to the costumed heroes or Dr. Manhattan, therefore suggesting that world of Watchmen was never ours to begin with. It could also be a case of the authors not wanting to violate trademarks, or even more simply, mistakes. |
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| Never Was This Universe / int_229d36f5 | type |
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| Never Was This Universe / int_229d36f5 | comment |
The TV series Kings apparently does take place on Earth, but the exact location of the fictional countries is never revealed and the precise historical era remains a mystery (though the society and tech ranges from Cold War to 20 Minutes into the Future levels). The only clear-cut reference to our world is a throw-away line about Franz Liszt. | |
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| Never Was This Universe / int_23da5ef5 | comment |
A Memoir by Lady Trent is set in a world that seems superficially similar to ours, other than the numerous species of dragons. The geography is different, and instead of Christianity being the primary religion it's pseudo-Judaism, but you can generally tell what countries are supposed to be analogues to real-world ones. | |
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| Never Was This Universe / int_286b0fc9 | comment |
Castle Falkenstein is set in an alternate Victorian Era with faeries and dragons. | |
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| Never Was This Universe / int_366a284d | type |
Never Was This Universe | |
| Never Was This Universe / int_366a284d | comment |
While the setting of Fist of the North Star might at first seem like it's just the world as we know it but set after a nuclear appocalypse in the near unspecified future, as the series goes on it shows some curious divergences from our own world. Apart from the broken down skyscrapers and cities in the deserted background (and intact ones in flashbacks), there are not a lot of signs that regular urban life as we know it ever existed, almost all people who aren't superpowered martial artists or Always Chaotic Evil thugs with mohawks and outfits straight out of Mad Max dress and behave like medieval peasants, weapons more advanced than swords or bows are incredibly rare to come by, same for any mode of transportation that isn't bikes/dune buggies/horses, there are no recognizable landmarks or indications that the territories seen used to be any real world city/region, the nuclear devastation and radiation sickness mechanics don't match anything resembling our own, and last but not least no traces of pre-war governmental rule is seen, with martial arts and the constellations being the major forces turning the gears of the world. | |
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When Women Were Dragons takes place in 1950s-60s America. The only difference is that women periodically change into dragons. | |
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| Never Was This Universe / int_3aeb1c75 | type |
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| Never Was This Universe / int_3aeb1c75 | comment |
Dragon Ball started off as a Constructed World without any direct links to our world. However, one of the Non Serial Movies featured Adolf Hitler as a secondary villain, implying that the world is more this trope. The English dubbed anime occasionally make references to the real world. And at one scene, Pilaf was holding a globe resembling our Earth. Shots from outer space in the Super anime also seem to gel with Earth geography. |
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| Never Was This Universe / int_3e6d4cc7 | type |
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The Marvel title newuniversal features mention of how this 2006 Earth is different before the White Event even hits - Hillary Clinton is President, Paul McCartney died while John Lennon is still performing, the World Trade Center is still standing, and Korean manhwa is popular in America while Japanese manga is merely an affectation for specialists. This is particularly notable since the original The New Universe made a big deal out of this being "the world outside your window"; the only superhero universe that was exactly like ours until the White Event (although that never quite worked either). | |
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| Never Was This Universe / int_3e8c09b9 | type |
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The world of Attack on Titan is virtually unknown beyond the Walls, but the story has references to the Far East and Asia, also the phrase at the beginning implies a future setting. However, it has been revealed that the Walls are situated on a island named Paradis which is relatively tiny compared to the larger continental landmass nearby; considering that official sources state that the area inside the walls has a radius of over 480 km, the only islands large enough to fit would be Greenland, Antarctica and Australia but the shown map doesn't resemble any of those (in fact it does resemble an upside-down and mirror-flipped Madagascar to the east of an upside-down and mirror-flipped Africa, except that Madagascar isn't large enough). | |
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Strangereal in the Ace Combat series is an alternate version of our Earth with virtually identical nature and humans and a roughly Present Day tech level, but the continents are completely different (their shape often hints at an amusingly warped and twisted version of our real landmasses). The countries and nations are completely fictional as well, but are all thinly-veiled Fantasy Counterpart Cultures. The world also experienced a major historical event in the late 90's in the form of the Ulysses Impact Event, in which an asteroid dubbed "Ulysses 1994XF04" entered the planet's atmosphere and broke up, bombarding several countries in fragments, devastating both populations and local infrastructure, the aftermath of the incident is which as a catalyst for several (if not all) of the major conflicts in the following years. | |
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Earth in The Adventures Of Dr Mcninja seems like our Earth with Rule of Cool applied, but King Radical reveals the truth. It is a world trapped between two dimensions, the Radical Land and some boring universe, and those realities are bleeding into Cumberland, creating the weird mix of awesome and boring, implying that our world is the boring universe. | |
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The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump takes place in a universe much like ours, except all the science and technology has been replaced with magic; somehow, this hasn't kept the CIA from employing spooks (only now they're real ghosts), and even crosswalks retain their names despite their origins differing wildly from our world. | |
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Deathloop appears to take place in a sci-fi alternate history of the 70s on an abandoned arctic fishing island. However, as you explore the island, you begin finding things that don't quite add up such as the fact that despite the 70s aesthetic of the game, the year is 1965 and that one character's favorite book is about the fall of empires in the previous century. Pieces start adding up to heavily imply (something that was later confirmed by the developers) that the game doesn't take place in our world but Dishonored's world centuries later. | |
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Both the Marvel Universe and the DC Universe are like this. Both have specific differences from ours from the very moments of their creation (i.e. billions of years ago), and include all sorts of strange stuff, not just superheroes. Even if you removed all of these elements, you end up with Earths that have several cities and countries that never existed in our world. Despite this, historical events such as the 9-11 attacks keep happening, obviously to make them feel more 'real'. | |
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Touch (2017): While most magic is hidden by The Masquerade, in this world it's considered perfectly normal for people to get marks on their faces after certain major life events, most notably enduring extreme pain and losing one's virginity. The point of divergence is apparently back to cavemen days, when elves tinkered with humanity to create better Human Sacrifices. | |
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300 is a heavily stylized war epic where the Framing Device consists of Dilios, the one surviving Spartan from the 300, recounting epic battles held by near-nude Spartans against monstrous Persian ninjas, bomb-throwing wizards, and a gigantic bald god-king. Such a story is purely exaggeration from an Unreliable Narrator, right? Wrong. The last shot of the film reveals an entire Greek army who really does go to battle in minimal armour, and they really don't fight in formations like more serious historical experts insist they should. The sequel goes even further by revealing that Xerxes really is as gigantic as Dilios made him out to be (though whether he's actually a god is still uncertain), the Athenians fight near-nude as well as the Spartans, and Xerxes' second-in-command Artemisia dies in a battle at sea that she historically survived. | |
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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is set in Regency-era England with the addition of fairies and magic. Its medieval past is considerably different from ours, as northern England was a separate magical country. | |
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Similarly, Wasteland and its sequels initially look like an Alternate History where the Cold War went hot in 1998. But the more time spent in the game, the more differences start to show. Wasteland's version of 1998 had tech like handheld laser weapons and true artificial intelligence. When details are given about this tech, it's not just advanced, it's impossible. For example, Wasteland 3 mentions that a robot demonstrating self-awareness has a CPU clock of a few hundred megahertz. This is consistent with real world tech from the late '90s, but for a bulky Windows 98 computer that might still have a floppy disk drive. | |
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Never Was This Universe | |
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Several worlds in the GURPS Infinite Worlds setting, most bizarrely the United States of Lizardia (its history is just the same as ours, except the people are intelligent dinosaurs). Parachronic researchers usually claim these worlds were created in reality quakes, but they can't always prove it. | |
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Never Was This Universe | |
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To some degree, Fallout; The offical divergence is shortly post-WW2, with the most important difference that the microtransistor is not invented, leading to an Atomic age focused around vacuum tubes and other inefficent technology that depletes Earth's resources much faster. However, certain tech, such as fusion cells, energy weapons, sentient robots and the effects of radiation, imply that the physical laws of the Fallout universe are different from our own. Fallout 3 and 4 expands on this, implying that the presence of non-human, eldritch beings, and an entire nonhuman civilization have been part of Earth's past. | |
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Pokédex works like this, with a timeline similar to our world and many Historical Domain Characters, despite how Pokemon exist in this world. | |
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The world of Chainsaw Man generally resembles real life, but humans have been menaced by Devils empowered by fear for an unspecified time, and geopolitics are a bit different (for instance the U.S.S.R. is going strong by 1997). A single source of divergence appears to be present itself in the form of the Chainsaw Devil erasing things from history (including World War II, the Holocaust, and nuclear weapons)... and then we're immediately told the same process erased things real life didn't have (including a fictional disease and volcanic eruption, but also much more bizarre things like a star whose light broke children's minds and ways life ended besides death). To say the series' relation to real life history is unclear would be quite an understatement. | |
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Girl Genius, probably. It hasn't been confirmed yet, but while it possibly takes place in an early, exaggerated industrial revolution no amount of Fan Wank has had any success nailing down a potential point of divergence (but at least a couple centuries back, given that Rembrandt is implied to have been a spark). And unlike most examples, In Spite of a Nail doesn't appear to be present, the closest being vague allusions to historical characters like Louis XIV ("Storm King" instead of "Sun King") and the aforementioned Rembrandt (although only as "Van Rijn", and he's known not as a painter but as a brilliant builder of beautiful and incredibly advanced clanks, which even other Sparks have trouble replicating), and even then only the names indicate a connection. The Secret Blueprints states that the divergence point was the development of science itself - in our timeline, it was a series of itinerant hiccups until the Industrial Revolution; Hero of Alexandria's steam engine was suppressed by conquerors who didn't want to give up slaves, Leonardo da Vinci's work was suppressed by an ignorance-enforcing Church with the power to burn people alive and claim their possessions. In the GG verse, the instant SCIENCE was discovered, Sparks seized power from warlords and demagogues. "West Pole" makes little sense in our world. Even if it's in the Show Within a Show, their planet must have something different. Or the pole is defined by a field which doesn't exist in our world. Given how the Americas are mentioned off-handledly, but apparently not reachable (least not anymore) along with the mentions of a group known as the "Sons Of Franklin", the American colonization happened until some event led to no longer there being contact (and may or may not be tied to the West Pole thing). |
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Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)'s setting is explicitly a parallel universe to the real world, with a specified point of divergence, meaning it falls under Alien Space Bats. The Fullmetal Alchemist manga, by contrast, falls under this trope: the proliferation of Fantasy Counterpart Culture nations implies a great similarity to the real world, but no actual connection is ever made between the two. | |
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a case of Never Was The Canon Verse. It initially appears to be a case of Point of Divergence with Petunia marrying a scientist instead of Vernon Dursley, but as the story goes on more and more differences are revealed with no specific point of divergence from canon. The author's note on the first chapter clarify that "there exists a primary point of departure, at some point in the past, but also other alterations", the primary point of departure most likely being Dumbledore's decision to look at all the prophecies. | |
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Erec Rex seems to be about two kids from our world who wind up exploring some Magical Lands underground. However, "Upper Earth" still has a sport called springball, and fast-food places are referred to as "fastaurants." | |
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While there's a whole alternate history worked out for Code Geass, the show's mythology relies on things like a free-energy supplying mineral called Sakuradite (that powers giant robots) and a society of immortals who give out mental superpowers to people and then pass on their immortality to them, so clearly there's something different going on that isn't just caused by the differing historical events. It could be that whatever is going on is what caused history to be different in the first place. And on top of that, the most common mental superpowers involve some form of memory alteration, so that alternate history is itself unreliable. | |
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Never Was This Universe | |
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What Touhou Project shows of the world outside of Gensokyo seems to put it in this trope. Youkai and magical creatures co-existed for millennia with humans (and some still do), Physical Gods were actively worshiped until disbelief threatened their ability to work miracles, some of the first humans left Earth to form a new society on the moon, and magic was (and to some extent still is) quite common—but the history of the world nevertheless progressed quite similarly to our own. | |
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Never Was This Universe | |
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Anathem starts out seeming like a far-future version of Earth. Things get weird very fast. | |
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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen takes place in a world whose history is based on the fiction of our reality, even in ancient times. For example, The Trojan War is not only historical fact, but Britain was also settled by survivors of the Trojan War. The history of this Earth also includes such things as Cthulhu and the other Elder Gods fighting a celestial war with the divine beings of the Christian theology at some point in prehistory, the Hyperborian Age occured just before conventional history begins, instead of Elizabeth I ruling England, Henry the Eighth had a half faerie daughter named Glorianna and World War II still happened but with Adenoid Hynkel as the ruler of Germany. | |
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The world of Go, Mutants! differs from our own in a plethora of ways, ranging from the truly bizarre (the existence of Gojira and other Kaiju, aliens landing on Earth and interrupting a baseball game in 1963) to some things more mundane (Nixon beats Kennedy and is later assassinated by John Glenn), but it's definitely not even close to our universe. | |
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The Deryni series feels like this. The map vaguely resembles Europe with Great Britain attached to the continent, but the countries are not those of Earth, either past or present. However, this world did manage to produce Christianity and The Bible! | |
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This is a major plot point of Ash: A Secret History. Initially framed as a "lost chapter" of European history by the Framing Device, the historians translating the text grow increasingly puzzled by its increasingly inexplicable divergences from known history, which go increasingly far back, such as a Carthage founded by Visigoths, an alternative Christianity centered around the "Green Christ" and a tree instead of a cross, and golems. Then they start finding artifacts corresponding to this divergent history at dig sites. Then the big twist comes out: this divergent history is the result of humans being latent (and, occasionally, not so latent) reality warpers. Our history is the result of our powers having been sealed off retroactively by a Cosmic Retcon... but the seal is failing, and our original history is leaking back in. | |
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Welcome to Night Vale is set in a Fantasy Kitchen Sink and Conspiracy Kitchen Sink with absolutely no Masquerade, and has apparently always been this way, even going back to the Stone Age. Initially it seems that the world outside of Night Vale is the same as in our reality, but later episodes reveal several other divergences, like the Clutch Plague never happening and Alexander Hamilton having been president. "A Story About Huntokar", reveals that this is because Night Vale is actually the location of a tear in reality where all universes meet. However, it's also made clear that it wasn't in our universe even before, and that its point of divergence with our timeline happened before the beginning of time with the birth of the gods from the Mudwomb. | |
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Doctor Who: The alternate universe Mickey and the Tylers settle in is implied to be something of this sort; they mention many earlier points in history that are all different, but later ones really aren't any more different than earlier ones. The original intent by RTD was that it was a reality where the Doctor failed to save Queen Victoria in "Tooth and Claw", and they considered showing that in the episode before deciding it would be too confusing — while citing Viewers Are Morons is tempting, remember it aired two episodes before the Cyberman two-parter that introduced this reality and likely would have required a major infodump by the Doctor. The alternate universe seen the the Third Doctor serial "Inferno" is similar. |
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Child of the Storm starts off as a case of Point of Divergence but the further the story progresses certain points of canon begins to diverge more and more. Word of God even confirms that the fic will evolve more as an alternate universe. | |
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The world of Deadlands initially appears to have a simple point of divergence on July 3, 1863, when supernatural events start occurring - beginning with the dead at Gettysburg getting up and trying to eat their comrades. It turns out that the supernatural has always been around, but was "locked away" from this dimension sometime during the Middle Ages until Raven brought about his "Reckoning." | |
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Codename: Kids Next Door. According to the Numbuh 1, adults are the artificial creations of kids, and the large majority of recorded history is actually a kid-adult civil war. It's hard to tell just how much of that is false propaganda, but there is a masquerade that predates the American Revolutionary War (it's mentioned the current KND is the "Seventh Age", but however long these ages are isn't discussed). Not to mention there is a sea somewhere in the continental United States filled entirely with asparagus instead of water, among the many other bizarre things going on in their world. Considering the show it crossed over with still apparently has Abe Lincoln as US President, there's probably even more going on. The crossover has cameos from other CN shows, which throws things even more into chaos and confusion, | |
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DARLING in the FRANXX: Like Code Geass and its Sakuradite, after Episode 19 establishes How We Got Here starting 20 Minutes into the Future, Episode 20 establishes an ancient war between Ultraterrestrials and an Alien Invasion, as well as showing that "magma energy" is Human Resources instead of a "mere" currently-undiscovered fuel. | |
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Hypnospace Outlaw takes place in an alternate 1999 where web developers dabble in Sleeptime Computing, creating an internet—the titular Hypnospace—that can be accessed while asleep. At first, the invention of Hypnospace appears to be the primary point of divergence, but it becomes increasingly clear that the differences stretch further back than that. The sitting U.S. president is "Hughes" rather than Clinton, the entire history of electronic music is different (centering around a descendant of psychedelic rock known as "haze"), and tennis was unscrupulously replaced in the late 1800s with "trennis", which has three players and uses a circular court. If none of this tips things off, it culminates in the game's climax, in which Hypnospace's Year 2000 update is linked to a fatal accident known as the Mindcrash—essentially being the reality of what people in "our" universe thought would happen with the Millennium Bug. | |
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In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Spock outright says: "An ancestor of mine maintained that if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains – however improbable – must be the truth." Whether he was referring to Sherlock Holmes as a real person or Arthur Conan Doyle is up to you. Holmes is treated as a fictional character in several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. | |
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The Bartimaeus Trilogy is set on a Present Day Earth much like ours, but different in that functioning magic exists and takes the place of more advanced technologies—and there was also an Atlantis. | |
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In Star Trek: Voyager when they visited 1996 in the episode "Future's End", the Eugenics Wars at least got a Continuity Nod via an easter egg of set dressing, a model of a DY-500 transport like the Botany Bay was visible in the office of an astronomer. While the Eugenics Wars weren't referenced in plot or dialogue, there was at least a (very) token acknowledgement of Khan and his saga existing in that timeline. | |
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A World of Difference is based on the idea of Mars being replaced by a habitable Earth sized-planet. Earth is however almost identical to our timeline, despite the fact that "Minerva" is the brightest object in the night sky, which you would think would have an effect on mythology and astronomy. The only noticeable difference is quite late - the assassination of Mikhail Gorbachev meant Soviet collapse was avoided and a US-Soviet confrontation and war scare over Lebanon leads to both sides sending separate manned missions to Minerva in 1990. | |
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The MMORPG City of Heroes is much like this; even though the history of its Earth follows many of the same events as those in our world, there is no clear point at which they diverge, as events such as the magic-laden wars between Mu and Oranbega take place thousands of years in the past. | |
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Sunshine and Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley both do this—Sunshine is set in a world with vampires, and Dragonhaven one with marsupial dragons. | |
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