No, I'm not talking about alternate WWII's where commanders or battleships or strike witches are magical little girls. Or, by the same token, historical settings where magic or aliens or another fantastical element appears and changes everything. I'm also not talking about near-future (for the time) sci-fi series like Neon Genesis Evangelion or Ghost in the Shell that are now retrospectively AH. (What's the term for that btw? Can't be retrofuturism, the '90s feel too recent.) Or other future history. FH without a POD in the past don't count. Though I did see an incredibly silly suggestion on TVTropes' WMG page for Eva that the series takes place in a world where the Axis won WWII.
I'm not even talking about bonafide actual full-fledged alternate history anime where the different world becomes a focus of the plot. Code Geass is the biggest example that everyone knows, but Jin-Roh and the rest of its Kerberos Saga probably should get attention as it is basically The Man in the High Castle, Fatherland, TNO, and every other Nazi Victory timeline rolled into one dark gritty anime. It's crazy there's only been two small threads it on this forum. I mean, I haven't seen it (I don't watch much anime) but even I know how important it is, and will get to it soon.
What I'm talking about is I'm listening to a review of Gunslinger Girl (a series I had heard of, but I did not know anything about actually) which describes it as taking place in an alternate Italy where the Years of Lead never ended, but continued into the 21st century. And there are also magical cyborg schoolgirl hitmen, but that fantastical element exists independently of the setting. That's really impressive to me that anime can just have non-obvious AH settings because- hey, we want political thriller action in the land of the Mafia, but we want it in the modern day, so who cares if most non-Italians don't know what the Years of Lead are.
Another example that I'm more familiar with (and which is probably a better example, in case the review is exaggerating and the aforementioned series doesn't really dive into the alternate history that much and just uses Italy as window dressing), is Full Metal Panic! It's a series that has a continued Cold War until there are mecha, with a surprisingly specific timeline that I remember seeing back in 2006 when people were using Wikipedia like a big fan wiki. All of that happens in spite of the series being about high school romcom hijinks. Or the mecha, even, which that article used to have details on each model. And its planes, ships, and guns.
So yeah, any other examples of anime that just casually happen to be alternate history?
I'm not even talking about bonafide actual full-fledged alternate history anime where the different world becomes a focus of the plot. Code Geass is the biggest example that everyone knows, but Jin-Roh and the rest of its Kerberos Saga probably should get attention as it is basically The Man in the High Castle, Fatherland, TNO, and every other Nazi Victory timeline rolled into one dark gritty anime. It's crazy there's only been two small threads it on this forum. I mean, I haven't seen it (I don't watch much anime) but even I know how important it is, and will get to it soon.
What I'm talking about is I'm listening to a review of Gunslinger Girl (a series I had heard of, but I did not know anything about actually) which describes it as taking place in an alternate Italy where the Years of Lead never ended, but continued into the 21st century. And there are also magical cyborg schoolgirl hitmen, but that fantastical element exists independently of the setting. That's really impressive to me that anime can just have non-obvious AH settings because- hey, we want political thriller action in the land of the Mafia, but we want it in the modern day, so who cares if most non-Italians don't know what the Years of Lead are.
Another example that I'm more familiar with (and which is probably a better example, in case the review is exaggerating and the aforementioned series doesn't really dive into the alternate history that much and just uses Italy as window dressing), is Full Metal Panic! It's a series that has a continued Cold War until there are mecha, with a surprisingly specific timeline that I remember seeing back in 2006 when people were using Wikipedia like a big fan wiki. All of that happens in spite of the series being about high school romcom hijinks. Or the mecha, even, which that article used to have details on each model. And its planes, ships, and guns.
So yeah, any other examples of anime that just casually happen to be alternate history?
