Hm. You make a really good point. I do disagree in that I don't really feel that 100 years is necessarily a long time, but for most of the population, it's almost ancient history. I was picturing grandmothers a few decades ago remembering their fathers/uncles/grandfathers/etc. But I guess, at least for young women, it's truly not applicable considering I doubt people really passed on tales of masculine expression lol.
Damn d00d. I wasn't thinking I'd get a response and forgot to check, so I'm sorry about the late reply! This stuff is really cool to think about.
Recall that as per the history class conveniently covering the topic the same day Marika isekai'd the male sex was completely extinct by 1920; in circa 2019 someone who was a newborn baby at that point would be hitting a full hundred - and anyone who actually witnessed a still-living, breathing male while old enough to actually remember it with any clarity will be about a decade older.
Not gonna find too many 110-odd year olds whose recollection of their childhood is still worth a shit, that's for sure...
Moreover since the virus just screwed over birth-sex distribution rather than killing off those with XY chromosomes (ie. male extinction happened through total inability to replace deaths rather than massive "die-offs" a la the Black Death) that timeframe means that for the last males to have perished of natural causes by 1920 the virus had to have achieved global coverage by the early 1800s, ie. around the Napoleonic Wars or shortly after.
This also means that Lily's summary of the worldline histories being "mostly the same, but with many minute differences" is utter nonsense.
The demographic impact would have been very noticeable by the mid-1800s at the latest and entire world history would be dramatically different; by the turn of the century global population would have been well under half of what it was in our world - not only were several generations of men simply never born in the first place, but there was an terribly acute and rapidly worsening shortage of males to sire any children at all. (It's unclear when exactly the technological breakthrough allowing female-female procreation was achieved but it probably wasn't a "mature" science before the Thirties or Forties; IRL serious study of genetics was still taking its first baby steps around that time.)
The societal and economical effects of this staggering demographic deficit are difficult to overstate, but one important spin-off divergence is that the great "Wars To End All Wars" of the early 20th century, and the demons they let loose, could not have happened for the simple enough reason nobody had the necessary resource and population bases to wage them. Hell, it's rather unlikely the vertiginous expansion of the colonial empires in the second half of the "Long Nineteenth Century" happened either since the would-be imperial powers had rather more pressing problems at home. (On the upside despite the hit the economy would've taken from shortages of labour and consumers there would've been far fewer people consuming resources so objective scarcity was likely rather less.)
Plus I reckon staring species extinction in the face rather distracted folks from such pursuits.
OTOH that's also the sort of stressor that pushes individual people and entire societies alike into raving lunacy - ought to be a safe bet that some truly bizarre and disturbing doomsday cultism and related was only too common around the turn of the century. And with wholesale extinction breathing down their necks I doubt the scientists desperately searching for some, any solution much cared for the niceties of medical ethics...
Probably a period of history those who lived through it would really rather not reminiscence too much about, all things considered.
Anyway the summa summarum is that some of the most important dynamics, processes and events after about 1800 that created the world as we know it cannot have happened in this timeline. The divergences are too dramatic and go too far back for it to be anything but radically different from ours - though admittedly much of that will be on a scale and scope entirely irrelevant to Marika's immediate and very personal problem of being stranded in the wrong reality.
Oh, and random food for thought: if the virus that excised male H. sapiens sapiens from this timeline is still around - endemic but harmless in the population for ex - then there's a very real possibility Marika is now a carrier, or will be by the time she might find the means to return... and the other Marika she swapped places with probably already introduced it to her timeline.
...this is the work of that one fucking Yuri Fairy again isn't it? >:C
And this concludes tonight's installment of Overthinking Fiction With random-sensei.
last edited at Feb 28, 2019 6:02PM
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