Catalog of the Weird Parallels

[Flyndaran]

How do insurance companies and murder investigations work? Did he just lose control of his car in the rain, or was it caused by a ghost?

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Is this a very recent thing that somehow spread universally overnight? Because if not you'd think a long term presence of occasional immortality would have changed something. Somebody important dies, becomes a ghost and continues to hold the same position *forever*, and it changes nothing significant?

Edit: at 1% of the population, and assuming ghosts don't eventually vanish or something, about 1 person in 2000 becomes a ghost. If they do fade after a while it's a bit more probable. That's not ridiculously long odds. There are going to have been absolute monarchs, important artists or thinkers who died young, people who were killed to prevent them from revealing earthshattering secrets and so forth who made those odds successfully.

Ghosts have always been around. The main weirdness of this world is that from the Enlightenment on ghosts have gained, slowly but surely, basic human rights and social acceptance.

Ghosts outside the modern west sometimes have fewer human rights or none if the locals label them evil spirits.

Ghosts do tend to fade with time, but it isn't all that consistent. Some ghosts from the 1920s have faded away. Meanwhile, there are around ninety-some ghosts that were around before the birth of Christ. Fewer than ten are considered older than five thousand years. However, many ghosts claim to be older than they are.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

What about ghost animals? There is plenty of folklore concerning the ghost of animals who came back to help beloved owners, to plague cruel owners, or to punish humanity. Having such entities around could radically change the perspective of people concerning ghosts, especially since their intelligence is no longer limited by biology or genetics.

Imagine a scenario where you have a ghost wolf who hunts humans in revenge for the annihilation of her kinfolk. Even if she cannot materialize, she could scare her victims to death or drive them in a panic off a cliff or into oncoming traffic. Her victims wake up when they hear her growling above them and have a heart attack when they see a timber wolf about to eat them or she could chase campers over the side of a cliff.

Ghost animals tend to be far less able to interact than ghost humans, rarer, and normally shorter lived. But there are always exceptions.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

How do insurance companies and murder investigations work? Did he just lose control of his car in the rain, or was it caused by a ghost?

Exorcism is well understood and legally regulated. Ghosts can and have been arrested for crimes and convicted. Ghosts are no more or less law abiding than humans. Ghosts can be interrogated.

[Astromancer]

The TV show Ugly Americans suggests a weird parallel. Due to a magical accident, the vast majority of humanity has turned into other types of intelligent beings. Different types of fay, mutants, vampires, Harry Potter style Wizards, and Witches, etc. Society is in chaos as people deal both with the loss of being one species and the struggle of the legal systems to accommodate the new complexity.

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

The TV show Ugly Americans suggests a weird parallel. Due to a magical accident, the vast majority of humanity has turned into other types of intelligent beings. Different types of fay, mutants, vampires, Harry Potter style Wizards, and Witches, etc. Society is in chaos as people deal both with the loss of being one species and the struggle of the legal systems to accommodate the new complexity.

Fairly common idea, actually.

There are several webcomics where monsters are just other ethnic groups. There are also comics and cartoons with the same subject (the Hotel Transylvania franchise, for example).

My personal favorite from my childhood is Transilvane, an artifical world in DC Comics created by Dabney Donovan, based on Hammer Films monsters.

Actually, I think it's not only playable but sounds fun.

[PTTG]

Objects: Huaman beigns around the world were transformed into anthropomorphic inanimate objects in 1991. These objects posses some amount of mobility, sentience, and liveliness. They don't age or require food or water, and are highly resistant to normal wear and tear, but can be destroyed by the sorts of things that would destroy their nominal form.

Society is slowly winding down as the need for economic activity comes to a halt. Many -- but not all -- goods and services are now irrelevant. People are discovering that it's often easier to sit back and let a year or two slide by as a CD player or a car than it is to forcing themselves to fill human roles. Current date 2002.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

Fairly common idea, actually.

There are several webcomics where monsters are just other ethnic groups. There are also comics and cartoons with the same subject (the Hotel Transylvania franchise, for example).

My personal favorite from my childhood is Transilvane, an artifical world in DC Comics created by Dabney Donovan, based on Hammer Films monsters.

Actually, I think it's not only playable but sounds fun.

You mean Superman took a perfectly nice world of vampires, witches and werewolves and turned it into into a knockoff of "Oklahoma!"? That's horrible!

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

You mean Superman took a perfectly nice world of vampires, witches and werewolves and turned it into into a knockoff of "Oklahoma!"? That's horrible!

They had an evil editor back then. Later on, in an issue of Superfriends comic book, the JLA meet another world's JLA and they all looked like Horror movie tropes.

[Ottriman]

Shitpost

For some baffling reason, this timeline features advanced computers and mass internet usage despite being in the middle ages! Smiths can craft electronics by hand and batteries are readily available, ones that can be charged with cranks, sunlight or water-wheels.

The current date is 1000 AD, the world is TL 3 but with TL 9 electronics somehow. According to cursory research by timeline-hopping agents this +6 TL to electronics has held true even back into the stone age, where tribes would make tabulating machines to track their stock of supplies.

With global communication networks being over a thousand years old as a tech at this point, the world has explosively shared culture, information, memes and shitposts about everything from cooking to religion and more.

Yet travel is still hard and most people are dirt farmers, with rugged and sophisticated smartphones helping them out. In many places this huge access to information means that people are much better educated on average than OTL 1000 AD, and also inundated with false internet data on social media platforms, of course.