Quote Originally Posted by Anymage View Post
If the governments and pop culture look overwhelmingly like ours, that wouldn't make sense if entrenched forces were reacting rationally to the realities of their world. Which I get why comic writers will gloss it over, I was just curious at what point it did become justifiable instead of us just having to mutually agree not to fridge logic the whole thing fall apart.
The general rule of alternate history is that you get one big change that you can extrapolate outward from and expect the reader to reasonably follow. Any more than that and the story particularly becomes opaque. This is particularly true with long-running serial stories where events build on themselves. Doubly so when there's an expectation that the audience won't be following or have access to all parts of a story, which is something comics and comics-derived properties particularly struggle with. The average author who writes a ten novels series, for example, doesn't really need to worry about book nine being comprehensible to people who haven't been around since book one (though they do need to worry about people who maybe read book one ten years ago and aren't inclined to re-read the whole thing), but the MCU, for instance, cannot bank on everyone who goes to see Avengers: Endgame having seen all the prior movies - and thanks to box office reports we can actually say, mathematically, that a huge portion of the Infinite War audience hadn't seen certain prior films, particularly the Ant-Man movies, which is why Ant Man gets featured in the critical in-movie recap bit at the opening of the film.

Comics, therefore, have it pretty tough, and I sympathize with the writers. The lore of the in-universe characters is complex enough that comics timelines need to periodically reboot and various derivative works make a point of ignoring or tweaking plot lines according to need - DC alone is running multiple non-intersecting TV versions of its stories right now - which means everything else needs to be as familiar as possible or the audience will be utterly lost. This is something that dates back to at least WWII, which was a huge seminal, globe-altering event that several early comics passed through and whose contours therefore had to be preserved. This is something that actually happens to any universe with supernatural elements that date back at least that far, all of the various White-Wolf oWoD games had to tiptoe, generally very poorly, around WWII as a historical issue and try to throw up rationalizations for how supernatural interference didn't derail the course of events and leave the postwar world unrecognizable.