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Drow

2020-07-20T17:19:01Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:603D:3245:CD3:552E: /* See also */

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[[File:45308.jpg|400px|thumb|right|"Okay who let their manslave out of the kitchen?"]]

'''Drow''', more commonly known as "Dark Elves", are a common reoccurring type of [[elf]], first introduced in [[Dungeons & Dragons]] as a matriarchal society of black-skinned and white-haired subterranean elves who are literally allergic to sunlight. Unlike real-life underground species that develop pale skin, drow have black skin due to the curse laid upon them by [[Corellon]] when [[Lolth]] turned them away from the other elven gods. They produce adamantine equipment (which falls apart in sunlight, yet is bad-ass underground), take slaves, are ruled by an abusive matriarchy that likes S&M, have magic resistance, really like spiders and hate most other elves.

In short, they'd be fucking cool, were it not for the fact that 90% of all player character Drow will be Chaotic Good and be Rebelling Against The Evils Of Their Race, thanks to the raging hard-on underages and other tryhards have for [[Drizzt]]. As a result, even though dark elf pr0n is A) common, B) totally acceptable given their canon behavior, and C) totally relevant when somebody asks for dark elf pictures (see B), people still get whiny on /tg/ at anything moderately crude. Sure, we're trying to hold back the tide of cancer, but where dark elves are concerned, it's totally good.

[[Eberron]]'s Drow are somewhat different, in that they have gender equality (more or less), hang out in jungles with the Yuan-Ti, and the largest known tribe worships Vulkoor, a dickish scorpion god who still looks like a cool guy to hang out with compared to [[Lolth]]. Their mamas also actually love them, rather than whip them everyday before sacrifice them later. They're still a bunch of racist dicks, though. Still, Eberron Drows are the more tolerable Drows, have a nice childhood, and at least they can be reasoned with easier. This means you'll have a slightly easier time playing a Drow here than in any another setting.

[[Drider]]s are what happens when drow take their obsession with spiders a bit too far. The specifics vary from edition to edition and setting to setting.

[[Shadow Elf|Shadow Elves]] are the [[Mystara]]n equivalent to Drow, and are frankly way less fucked up.

==History==
Drow were first mentioned in the second, 1978 hardback of the [[Monster Manual]] for [[Advanced Dungeons & Dragons]] 1st edition, under "Elf". Here: "The 'Black Elves,' or drow, are only legend. They purportedly dwell deep beneath the surface in a strange subterranean realm. The drow are said to be as dark as faeries are bright and as evil as the latter are good. Tales picture them as weak fighters but strong magic-users." Contemporaneously they are fleshed out in ''[[Against the Giants|G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King]]''.

They truly sprang onto the world in the followup [[Drow Trilogy]] [[Adventure Path]] which, with its sequel [[Queen of the Demonweb Pits]], fleshed out the [[Underdark]], drow culture, and [[Lolth]]. They subsequently entered the [[Fiend Folio]], and Gygax himself gave them PC stats in ''Unearthed Arcana''. (More on that in a minute.)

The already-popular villains exploded in popularity as a PC race following the release of the Drizzt novels to the point of parody, oversaturation, and backlash, though all three have died down with time and distance.

The race has been an occasional target of attack because, like many things can if described in a deliberately-misleading-and-reductive way, the broad strokes of "darker-skinned elves are ruled by evil feminazis and have a savage, half-civilized culture of betrayal" sounds ''really'' bad. To tell you what you already know, there's some grains of truth to the unfortunate implications, but it was the occasional source of bad-faith trolling before people who didn't know anything about them but the memes took it seriously - if nothing else, drow are almost never described as having ''any'' human skin tones outside of Japan, and their facial features are usually drawn to resemble a white or Asiatic appearance rather than an African. It also didn't help that the porny ''Queen of the Spiders'' cover had their skin as an ashen dark tan ''a la'' South India, rather than pure black.

As of the [[5e|present]], the drow have seemingly moved past the backlash to hit the most popular spot they've ever been in. They were introduced as a ''core'' PC race for the first time in 5e (albeit the only one at launch to have a built-in penalty), the second major adventure line for the edition took place in the Underdark and gave them a ton of focus (and was retconned to be a massive plot by their patron goddess to boot), and they tend to cameo in most other adventure lines or collections and get new monster versions added with each new Monster Manual equivalent.

In-universe, the drow backstory mostly boils down to them being victims of the bitter breakup between [[Corellon]] and [[Lolth]].

Much like how [[Duergar]] have the long-forgotten "good but still [[Underdark]]-dwelling" counterpart of Grey Dwarves, so too do Drow have such a counterpart race: the [[Rockseer Elf]].

==(A)D&D==
===First Edition===
There never were Drow in the BXCMI line. This line did spin up some underworld elves incompatible with surface elves - the Shadow Elves, the Schattenalfen - but those were Aztec or post-Aztec. Shadow Elves farm spiders in, like, one city only. LEAVE THEM ALONE!!

Where Drow did exist, starting at Greyhawk, Gygax (at first) restricted them to the role of monsters, due to their in-game lore. Both [[Drizzt Do'Urden]] (in Icewind Vale, not Greyhawk ... and arguably not Forgotten Realms at first, either) and [[Viconia de'Vir]] were exceptions, with backstories to explain why they're on the surface instead of down in the Underdark.

That said, Gygax wasn't entirely ignorant to his audience. PC stats for drow elves appeared, alongside the other [[Underdark]] [[Demihuman]]s ([[duergar]] and [[svirfneblin]]) in the original [[Unearthed Arcana]] for AD&D 1e. They were still quite strong, but nerfed from their appearance in the Drow Trilogy for instance knocking out that spell-resistance. They were also less powerful than their 2e incarnations:
::No ability score penalties or modifiers.
::Sunlight Sensitivity: -2 penalty to Dexterity and "to hit" rolls and enemies gain a +2 bonus to saves vs. drow attacks when both the drow and their opponent are in bright light. If the dark elf is in shadow and the opponent is brightly lit, this changes to a -1 to hit penalty/+1 save bonus instead.
::Unlike drow NPCs, drow PCs do ''not'' have 50% magic resistance. They cannot regain this trait without a Wish spell.
::Drow do not gain the weapon bonuses of normal elves, but instead are ambidextrous.
::Drow have Infravision 12'.
::Drow females have movement rate 15', whilst males have movement rate 12'.
::Drow have the Stealth and Detect Secret Doors abilities of [[elves]], and the Stonecunning ability of [[dwarves]].
::Drow have access to the spell-like abilities of Dancing Lights, Faerie Fire and Darkness 5' Radius. They gain access to Detect Magic, Know Alignment and Levitate at 4th level, with female drow also gaining Clairvoyance, Detect Lie, Dispel Magic and Suggestion at that level. All spell-like abilities are usable 1/day.
::Available classes: [[Cleric]], Warrior ([[Fighter]], [[Ranger]], [[Cavalier]]), [[Rogue]] (Thief, [[Acrobat]], [[Assassin]]), [[Wizard|Magic-User]].
::Class levels for Drow Males: [[Cleric]] 7, [[Fighter]] 10, Magic-User 18, [[Thief]]/[[Acrobat]] Unlimited, [[Assassin]] 12, [[Ranger]] 14
::Class levels for Drow Females: [[Cleric]] Unlimited, [[Fighter]] 12, Magic-User 11, [[Thief]]/[[Acrobat]] Unlimited, [[Assassin]] 12, [[Ranger]] 14

Naturally, when 2e rolled along, [[The Complete Book of]] [[Elves]] [[splatbook]] also provided new rules for playable Drow and holy ''fuck'' were they powerful... IF you were playing in the Underdark.

+2 Dex, +1 Int, -1 Constitution, -2 Charisma for initial ability score modifiers, and with racial maximums of 18, 20, 17, 19, 18 and 16 for Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma respectively. They have a bunch of spell-like abilities, all usable once per day; Dancing Lights, Faerie Fire, and Darkness by default, with Levitate, Know Alignment and Detect Magic gained at level 4. Drow [[Cleric]]s get even more, in the form of Clairvoyance, Detect Lie, Suggestion and Dispel Magic. Also, they ''start'' with Magic Resistance 50% and increase it by +2% per level, to a max of 80%, and get a +2 bonus on all saves involving magic.

So, what's the drawback? Aside from the sensitivity to light (-2 penalty to Dexterity and Attack Rolls, enemies are +2 bonus to saves vs. drow spells), they also lose their powers if they spend more than two weeks outside of the Underdark, losing 10% Magic Resistance and one spell-like ability each day. If they go back to the Underdark, they get their powers back if they spend 1 day for each week they spent on the surface. Also, they get a -4 penalty to Reaction rolls against other elves, and increase their experience costs by +20%.

===3rd edition===
3E managed to make it almost a whole year before caving in and making the Drow a full and proper player character race in the 2001 ''Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting''. They had the usual elf boni and flaws, plus: +2 Int, +2 Cha; Darkvision 120' instead of elf-normal lowlight vision; Spell resistance of 11 + character level; +2 to will saves against spells; the ability to cast dancing lights, darkness, and faerie fire as spell-like abilities 1/day; proficiencies with hand crossbow, rapier, and shortsword instead of elf-normal; sudden bright sunlight will blind a drow for 1 round; and the drow will be dazzled until they leave the bright light. Male drow have [[wizard]] as their favored class, female drow have [[cleric]] (of [[Lolth]]) as favored class.

The larger array of spell-like abilities they had in AD&D, such as Levitation, are retconned in this edition as being exclusive to drow nobility only. That's not to say mechanics to let a PC have access to these powers were completely unavailable.

They had an article on their culture in [[Dragon Magazine]] #298 that really emphasized the darker side of drow culture. Want a sample? According to this lore, drow don't die out because, despite their tendency to murder and torture each other, they're as fertile as [[orc]]s, with females normally conceiving twins and triplets. They normally only birth a single baby, though, because the strongest usually kills and absorbs the others in the womb; these prenatal struggles actually produce orgasms more intense than anything a drow female might feel elsewhere. This sensation, ''chad-zak'', is explicitly called out as the main reason why drow women are willing to get pregnant at all, considering the selfish power-hungry bitches they generally are.

[[Eberron]] has a drow sub-race called the Umbragen, who possess strange, mystical powers connecting to the darkness. Mechanically, this is represented by replacing their spell saving throw bonus with a + 2 racial bonus to Hide & Move Silently checks, swapping their weapon proficiencies for longbow, shortbow, longsword & rapier, and making their [[Favored Class]] into [[warlock]], plus a racial-restricted set of variant abilities for [[soulknife]] and a bevy of racial feats. All of this appears in [[Dragon Magazine]] #330.

===4th edition===
The 4E Monster Manual had some explicit monsters-as-races in the back, and the Drow were one of them, although they got an identical repost in the 4e [[Forgotten Realms]] Player's Guide alongside the [[Genasi]] -- fittingly, since FR basically created the idea of Drow PCs.

For Drow, +2 Dex and +2 Cha or +2 Wis, Darkvision, +2 Intimidate, +2 Stealth, Fey Origin, Trance, and one racial encounter power (Llothtouched) that could be used as a minor action for one of two effects that last until the drow's next turn: a close-burst-1 darkness spell the drow can see through, or a faerie-fire spell that gives combat advantage against the target.

Drow had a couple of [[Dragon Magazine]] articles available to them. Issue #367 featured the article "Children of Darkness", a setting-neutral (in that it was equally applicable to both the [[Nentir Vale]] and the [[Forgotten Realms]]) guide to drow with new racial feats, a racial [[Paragon Path]] (the Curseborn) and a racial [[Epic Destiny]] (the Redeemed Drow). Ironically, it brought back the idea of drow having greater racial magic without touching upon the old mechanics; a paragon level racial feat called Highborn Drow gave the drow a third effect to their Lolthtouched racial power; Webs of Darkness creates blinding webbing of solidified shadow that ensnare all enemies in a close blast 3. This was then followed by issue #413, which abounded in new racial themes for drow; the Bregan D'Aerthe Mercenary, the Elderboy, the Melee-Magthere Champion, the Sorcere Adept, the House Priestess, the Widow of Arach-Tinilith, the Ooze Master, the Secret Apostate, and the Skulker of Vhaeraun.

===5th edition===
Drow are '''finally''' an outright core PC racial option in the Player's Handbook, as an elven subrace. The usual elf advantages, along with +1 Cha, 120' darkvision, automatic knowing some spells: the 'dancing lights' cantrip at 1st, the 'faerie fire' 1/day at 3rd level, and 'darkness' 1/day at 5th level. Automatic weapon proficiencies are hand-crossbows, rapiers and shortswords. They are also the ''only'' core race to receive an explicit ''penalty'' in the core book: if the drow or the drow's target are in direct sunlight, the drow has disadvantage on attack rolls and perception rolls. It's not as crippling as it sounds in practice, but it ''is'' annoying as hell. Better hope you fight indoors a lot, and/or play them in an adventure designed around spelunking or limited sun exposure, like ''Out of the Abyss'' or ''Curse of Strahd''.

Xanathar's Guide gave them a boost with a new racial feat; Drow High Magic. Reflecting the "noble drow" spell-like abilities of AD&D, this feat grants a drow the ability to cast Detect Magic at will and both Levitate and Dispel Magic once per long rest without a spell slot.

==Pathfinder==
Pathfinder ditches the [[Lolth]] aspect and instead makes Drow aligned to assorted [[Demon Prince]]s instead. They got playable templates for the first time in their Bestiary entry, and updated versions thereof in the Advanced Races Guide. Pathfinder goes back to really, really freaking old Drow lore by stating that there's two kinds of Drow; normal Drow, and Noble Drow, who're even tougher and nastier, with a lot more magical powers. These were handled as separate races in the Bestiary, but ARG instead changed it to a Drow race with a bunch of racial feats to simulate Noble Drow abilities, which is arguably more balanced.

Fluff-wise, they're tied into the weird sf-bent of the [[Golarion]] setting, being the descendants of elves who refused to flee the planet in the face of a catastrophe, and turned to demon worship to survive. First-generation drow are actually the result of elves who've broken really bad physically and psychologically transforming into dark elves. Natural-born drow aren't actually innately evil, but their culture, which engages in the traditional practices of slavery, human sacrifice, etc., with the lovely addition of [[fleshcrafting]], is so hideously corrupt that almost all of them end up bad anyway. They aren't matriarchal like classic drow either. Just assholes. Their [[drider]]s are... well, see that page.

===Drow===
* Ability Score Modifiers: +2 Dex, +2 Cha, -2 Con
* Size: Medium
* Speed: 30 feet
* Darkvision 120 feet
* Drow Immunities: Drow are immune to Magic Sleep Effects and get a +2 racial bonus to saves vs. Enchantments.
* Keen Senses: +2 Racial Bonus on Perception checks.
* Spell Resistance: 6 + class level
* Spell-Like Abilities: Dancing Lights, Darkness and Faerie Fire, each 1/day.
* Light Blindness: Abrupt exposure to bright light blinds a drow for 1 minute and leaves them dazzled on all subsequent rounds until they get out of the light.
* Poison Use: Drow don't risk poisoning themselves when they apply poison to weapons, etc.
* Weapon Familiarity: Free proficiency in Hand Crossbow, Rapier and Shortsword.

===Noble Drow===
* Ability Score Modifiers: +4 Dex, +2 Int, +2 Wis, +2 Cha, -2 Con
* Size: Medium
* Speed: 30 feet
* Darkvision 120 feet
* Drow Immunities: Drow are immune to Magic Sleep Effects and get a +2 racial bonus to saves vs. Enchantments.
* Keen Senses: +2 Racial Bonus on Perception checks.
* Spell Resistance: 11 + character level
* Spell-Like Abilities:
** Constant: Detect Magic
** At-Will: Dancing Lights, Deeper Darkness, Faerie Fire, Feather Fall, Levitate
** 1/Day: Divine Favor, Dispel Magic, Suggestion
* Light Blindness: Abrupt exposure to bright light blinds a drow for 1 minute and leaves them dazzled on all subsequent rounds until they get out of the light.
* Poison Use: Drow don't risk poisoning themselves when they apply poison to weapons, etc.
* Weapon Familiarity: Free proficiency in Hand Crossbow, Rapier and Shortsword.

{{Pathfinder-Races}}
{{D&D4e-Races}}
{{D&D5e-Races}}

==Starfinder==

With Alien Archive 1, the Drow are back. While they're still socially divided into normals and nobles, the stat difference is gone. They're still assholes, they're still into slavery and puppy-kicking cruelty, but now they've diversified into the wholesome and socially conscious industry of interstellar arms trafficking. Drow society is matriarchal again, although gunrunning males form something of a ''nouveau riche''.

===Drow===
* Ability Score Modifiers: +2 Dex, +2 Cha, -2 Con
* Size and Type: Medium humanoid with elf subtype
* Darkvision 60 feet
* Drow Immunities: Drow are immune to Magic Sleep Effects and get a +2 racial bonus to saves vs. Enchantment spells and effects.
* Keen Senses: +2 Racial Bonus on Perception checks.
* Light Blindness: A drow exposed to bright light is blinded for 1 round and dazzled as long as they remain in areas of bright light.
* Drow Magic: Dancing Lights, Detect Magic; In addition drow count as having the Minor Psychic Power feat for the purpose of meeting prerequisites, and if a drow takes the Psychic Power feat, they can add the drow's limning light supernatural ability to the list of spell-like abilities they have available.

== Eberron ==
Drow in [[Eberron]] have unique fluff. Like all elves, drow were formerly slaves to Xen'drik's [[Giant]] Empire, but they remained when the now light skinned elves having split and left their native land of Xen'drik for Aerenal 38,000 years ago. By culture ''they'' are the original and "normal" elves are the offshoot. Most of them live in the jungle or ruins of giant civilization on Xen'drik instead of underground, they speak Giant instead of Undercommon, and they aren't associated with spiders, with the largest group of drow preferring Scorpions instead.

There are a handful of known types of drow, with each tribe being of one of these types, but the published material explicitly states more exist beyond the known areas. The Qualtiar are nomadic tribes that love scorpions. The Sulatar are giant loyalist who have really ancient magic and are obsessed with fire. The Hantar'kul or "Blood Hunters" believe they are destined to rule Xen'drik and seek to remove the foreigners, who they see as the biggest obstacle to their rule. The Umbragen avoided the dragon by settling underground and selling their soul to a dark power known as "Umbra". The Umbragen are fighting, and losing, a battle with a daelkyr lord's army and seek weapons to aid in that fight, as they are too prideful to ask for help.

While the campaign setting says "sahuagin and drow are not ideal races for player characters", they actually make more sense than most campaign settings. In Eberron, most drow aren't crazy religious cultists and come into conflict with heroes because they are simply territorial people that believe that, as they were servants of the giant empire when it fell, the remains of giant civilization belong to them and all the "archaeologists" from the north are robbers. Typical NPC Drow are still typically evil though. ''City of Stormreach'' states that "a few drow exiles have found their way to the city, and others have chosen to abandon their old ways and settle among humanity", "drow who don’t subscribe to their race’s ruthless ways come to the city to escape the cruel life of the wilds" and that Drow often come to the city to trade. This seems to have been a fairly decent number, as the demographics of Stormreach state Drow, Goblinoids, Giants and other monsters combine to make 5% of the 11,650 population, so there are ''hundreds'' of Drow that aren't actively hostile to humanity. Further ''Secrets of Xen'drik'' explicitly states that Drow tribes beyond the known ones are likely out there past the "charted" parts of the continent, so there may be non-hostile tribes of drow out there.

== Exandria ==
Like in many other settings, the drow of Exandria delved into the Underdark at the command of the goddess Lolth. Unfortunately for these dark elves, though, the Underdark of Exandria is apparently quite a bit more dangerous. The types of civilizations the drow might live in beneath the surface of other settings seem to be constantly beset by abberations and other monsters to a overwhelming degree. As a result, Lolth is actually becoming increasingly unpopular with the drow race, who turn to alternative gods. Most prominently is an entity called the Luxon worshiped by the people of the Kryn Dynasty of the continent of Wildemount. Because the Luxon reincarnates those who die into newborns within a certain range regardless of the baby's race, it's led to a situation where a goblin could have been a drow noble in a past life, or vice versa. Though some drow still remain loyal to the Spider Queen, things have gotten so dire for Lolth that most of her faithful in Wildemount are goblinoids, with the drow head matron mother in the continent of Wildemount reduced to hiding out in a goblinoid fortress.

==Half-Drow==
You may be curious; given that the [[drow]] are still [[elves]], even if they are evil slave-taking bastards, can they [[Half-Elf|interbreed with humans]] too? Well, ironically, D&D never really gave that angle much attention - even though Gygax probably would have agreed if you'd pointed it out that half-drow would make far more believable PC options than pure-blooded drow, being neither as overpowered as old-school drow were nor able to advance in the drow's twisted society and thus less likely to drink the kool-aid & be evil themselves. So, for the most part, half-drow have been ignored throughout D&D's history.

The very first mention of the idea was as "half-casts" (''sic'') in D3; subsequently expanded in [[Unearthed Arcana]] for AD&D 1e. Here, half-drow were described as literally nothing more than standard [[half-elves]], but with the drow's sunlight vulnerability trait slapped on top (in short, whilst exposed to sunlight, you suffer -2 dexterity and a -2 penalty on your to-hit rolls, and your foes get a +2 bonus to their saving throws against your attacks - this decreases to a -1 to hit penalty and a +1 save bonus if you're in shadow but your victim is in direct sunlight). Not exactly the kind of thing to make people interested.

The half-drow seemed destined to be forgotten... and then came [[Ed Greenwood]], who, amongst his many ''other'' [[Magical Realm|"inspirations" from his belief in the Free Love movements of the 60s]] that he slipped into the [[Forgotten Realms]], found the drow to particularly tickle his fancy. So, after coming up with things like [[Eilistraee]], naturally, he needed a place to put in half-drow. Enter Dambrath, a region in the "Shining South" that he decided to make ruled over by the Cintri; a race of half-drow descended from the ancient drow conquest of Dambrath under the reign of a particularly foolish human king... well, alright, technically, the Cintri are a melting pot of half-drow and [[half-elf]] bloodlines, since they descend as much from the half-elf [[cleric]]s of [[Loviatar]] who helped the drow conquer the place - after all, Loviatar is basically the Realm's goddess of evil BDSM and femdom, so she's got that in common with [[Lolth]], to the point that Lolth even lets Loviatar's faith be the state religion of Dambrath - but they're still mixed human and drow bloodlines, so it counts.

Ironically, despite the Cintri, no 2e version of the half-drow statblock ever debuted, not even in the Shining South [[splatbook]] that introduced Dambrath to the Realms' fanbase. But it did mean that half-drow made it into 3rd edition in a [[Forgotten Realms]] [[splatbook]] - [[Races of X |Races of Faerun]], to be precise. Of course, like their 1e counterparts, they were not particularly well-differentiated mechanically from their half-elf roots; a 3e half-drow is, officially, a [[half-elf]] with Darkvision 60 feet and replacing Elf Blood with Drow Blood, so they're treated as Drow for race-targeting stuff instead of [[Elf]].

Eberron, likewise, states half-drow exist, typically results of trysts in Stormreach, but doesn't actually do anything with them or give them stats. The implication is that Half-Drow exist but are exceptionally rare and with the drow population that interacts peacefully with humans being the mere hundreds their rarity likely ''is'' exceptional. Still, Eberron works on the idea that player characters are ''supposed'' to be exceptional in general, and playing one isn't off limits.

A more mechanically invested version of the 3e half-drow didn't come to be until towards the end of the edition's lifespan, when the 3e version of the [[splatbook]] "Drow of the Underdark". It states "Half-drow have the standard racial traits of half-elves given in the Player’s Handbook, except that their favored class is the class in which they have the most levels. In addition, rather than elf blood, they have drow blood. Since drow is a subrace of elf, the net effect is that they have elf blood as well. The specification of drow blood means that for all special abilities and effects particular to a drow, a half-drow is considered a drow."

Additionally, both properly half-Drow characters AND half-elf characters with only a little bit of Drow heritage, like the Drow equivalent of a Tiefling or Aasimar, could take the following feat during character-creation:

::'''''DROW LEGACY'''''
::The drow blood in your veins runs true and grants you some abilities from that heritage.
::'''Prerequisite:''' Half-elf with drow ancestry.
::'''Benefit:''' You have a +2 racial bonus on Will saves against spells and spell-like abilities. You have darkvision out to 60 feet. You receive Exotic Weapon Proficiency (hand crossbow), as well as, Undercommon and the drow dialect of Elven as automatic languages.
::If you have an Intelligence score of 13 or higher, you also gain the following spell-like abilities, each usable once per day: dancing lights, darkness, and faerie fire. Your caster level equals your class level.
::'''Special:''' Taking this feat also causes you to have light sensitivity: You are dazzled (–1 circumstance penalty on attack rolls, saves, and checks) in bright sunlight or within the radius of a daylight spell.

In Pathfinder, half-drow are represented by alternate racial traits for stock half-elves. Half-Elves can trade their superior multiclassing ability for darkvision, which is strictly better if that character isn't multiclassing anyways, or low-light vision for darkvision and light blindness. They can trade their bonus feat and multiclassing bonuses for dancing lights, darkness, and faerie fire as spell like abilities, which absolutely isn't worth it. Finally they can trade their bonus feat for proficiency in hand crossbow, rapier, and shortsword, which ''also'' isn't worth it since anyone who would bother with those weapons is already proficient with those weapons or is playing half-elf in the first place to get the bonus feat.

Perhaps the best the poor half-drow have ever had it has been in 5th edition, where a half-elf can trade their two free skill proficiencies for the drow's racial spell-like abilities; it's not much, but at least it's something to represent drow ancestry, and it's decently beefy compared to the AD&D and Races of Faerun depictions. Once again, it was a [[Forgotten Realms]] sourcebook that brought them out of the darkness - the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide.

Drow-elf crossbreeds are given the briefest of mentions in the original Vault of the Drow as part of an encounter with "rakes" (think outcast punks) in the (under)city [[Erelhei-Cinlu]]. They have never been statted in any form, but are probably close enough to half-drow to use that template. Still, there's possibilities here for a creative DM.

==See also==
Dark Elves exist in [[Ptolus]] as NPC characters. They worship a [[Galchutt]] named [[Gorgoth-Lol]], which means "totez not Lolth LOL" in the elvish tongue.

* [[Seldarine]] - The gods of the [[Elf]] and [[Drow]] pantheons.

* [[Drizzt|Drizzt Do'Urden]] - A... [[skub|polarizing character]], but still the most famous and iconic drow hero in ''D&D''.

* [[Viconia de'Vir]] - A [[cleric]] of Shar in the ''[[Baldur's Gate]]'' games, and a good example of a "PC-friendly" drow who ''isn't'' a chaotic good Drizzt clone. Also [[Bioware]]'s first "sexy, mildly-evil-but-mostly-misunderstood lady love interest" character, setting the template for all those that followed. (Looking at you, Bastila, Morrigan, Isabela, Jack...) Had an incredibly complex, tragic and deep story in the sequel involving brotherly love and sacrifice. Her template may have set off a series of dominoes resulting in the next entry...

* [[Drowtales]]: When an admittedly-skilled bunch of [[drawfag|artists]] with the mental maturity of a blighted potato make a webcomic series financed by sponsor-avatar insertion, porn requests, and (the worst) ''plot dictation'', and slather copious amounts of [[Skub]] onto it. Said artists also have an axe against humanity/BDSM lesbian fetish to grind. ''Mostly'' the latter.

* [[Unified Setting/Drow]] - Arctic merchant vikings who ride giant lobsters, but still have black skin and white hair.

* [[Sandwich Stoutaxe]]: 1d4chan's take on the heroic Drow, she was abandoned by her family and raised by a Dwarf. So named because said dwarf found her in a basket that he thought was full of sandwiches.

* [[Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition races]]

==Official Art Gallery==
<gallery>
File:Queen of the Spiders.jpg|Looks like a trashy 80's Manowar album but OK.
File:Spiderbound Drow Warrior.jpg
File:Drow Adventurer vs Carrion Crawlers.jpg
File:3e Drow Demon-Binder (Marilith).jpg
File:4e Drow Demon-Binder (Marilith).jpg
File:4e Drow Priestess.jpg
File:Drow of the Underdark 3e Cover.jpg
File:3e Drow Warleader.jpg
File:Drow Priestesses (DotU).jpg
File:Starfinder Drow.jpg
File:Bathing Drow Noble.png
File:Drow Prosthetic (DotU).jpg
File:Drizzt by Todd Lockwood.jpg|did I mention the [[Drizzt|Mary Sues]] yet?
File:Drow scouts by jonhodgson.jpg|[[Meme|Welcome to the jungle]], where you can play a Drow however you want
File:Xendrik Drow.jpg|Xen'drik's drows like to tattoo themselves with scorpion venom.
</gallery>

==Fanart==
<gallery>
File:drow_blackface.jpg|not racist; or at least not THAT kind of racist
File:Drows_in_SPEEES.jpg|in the skin darkness of the future, there is only Mary Sues. A.k.A [[Drowtales]]: How to be a mangaka-faggot with cognitive dissonance.
File:Yafgc drow matriarchy advantages.png|drow men have [[Rule 34|a place]] in their matriarchy
File:Throne of the Drow.jpg
File:The Scarlet Tarantula (Drow Monk).jpg
File:CestreeandDrow.jpg
File:TgplaysDrow.png|In surface world, adventurers are always looking for a party. In matriarchal Underdark, matron makes a party out of you!
</gallery>

==Monstergirls==
{{Monstergirls}}
[[Image:MGE Dark Elf.jpg|300px|thumb|right|The Dark Elf maiden is an alluring creature, if in a different way to her light-skinned cousin.]]

Given that female elves are practically canon [[monstergirls]] in [[Dungeons & Dragons]] to begin with (where do you think [[Half-Elves]] come from? Human women pouncing on cute elven men? Pah!), and that the drow are both female led ''and'' have a long tradition of cheesecake/pin-up tier femdom-heavy artwork for their females - there's a reason drow are often mocked on nu-/tg/ as a culture made up of cheesy BDSM pin-up art - it should be no surprise that drow feature in works of erotica just as frequently as their surface cousins. Indeed, the talk of D&D sessions everywhere must have had since the late 90's, inevitably, sexualized Drow raids owing to Greenwood's [[Magical Realm]]. Often called "Dark Elves", their skin tone ranges from the actual drow onyx/blue/purple to more dusky brown colors, which leads to the nickname "chocolate elves" being used for erotic female drow characters.

Given the heavy BDSM themes in actual drow society, it should be no surprise that drow monstergirls are usually portrayed as dominatrixes in the same way. Asian hentai artists, however, like to subvert the idea by portraying them as submissives instead of dominatrixes; chocolate elf slaves and maids are as old as [[Elf slave, wat do?]] threads. Might have something to do with dark skin being inferior in Asian cultures.

In the [[Monster Girl Encyclopedia]], the Dark Elves have willingly embraced [[succubus]]ization, unlike their Light Elf kindred. This has turned them into a perverse culture of dominatrixes, who take human men as their sexual slaves. They were some of the setting's earliest [[skub]] when it was confirmed that they actually do practice incest, with young dark elves being taught the arts of sexual dominance, bondage and sado-masochism by using their fathers as their subs - that was quickly blown out of the water by other controversial aspects of the setting, like the revelation that ''most'' monstergirl daughters will generally lose their virginities to their fathers and then decide whether they do or don't want to go and find their own boyfriend later.

==MonsterGirl Gallery==
<gallery>
File:Dark elf.jpg
File:Fertile Drow Sorceress.jpg

File:Chocolate elf.jpg|Because chocobutt best butt.

File:Dark elf vs High elf.jpg
File:Pink Haired Drow.png
File:Dark Elf Butt.jpg
File:Dark Elf Matriarch.jpg
File:Drow and Broken Mirror.jpg
File:Drow Cleric.jpg
File:Drow Duelist.jpg
File:Dark Elf Sorceress.jpg
File:Drow Fantasy Armor.jpg
File:Drow Harpist.jpg
File:Drow Queen Valsharess Fanart.jpg
File:Drow Matron Mother.jpeg
File:Drow Sorceress.jpg
File:Drow Sorceress 2.jpg
File:Drow Vampiress.jpg
File:Drow Violinist.jpg
File:Drow Swordsinger.jpg
File:Skimpily Clad Drow Sorceress.png
File:Shortstack Dark Elf.png|Drow + [[shortstack]] = ?

</gallery>

Post-Cold War

2020-07-20T14:22:41Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:603D:3245:CD3:552E: /* The World Powers nowadays */

{{flamewar}}
{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared the attacks part of a holy war against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]] and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam, and strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion - Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who preached a hardline stance against immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals and increasing domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality, now intensified to a degree that many observers thought to border on authoritarianism. And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's rapport with Putin at the time continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to take back the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators. This was aided by the echo chambers created by social media plus the mainstream media increasingly taking sides rather than just reporting on the conflict, which minimized any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side" and has led some commentators and scholars predicting the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police (the most recent one in a string of increasingly unjustifiable killings by police over the preceding years) went viral across the internet. This newest act of police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led large scale protests and riots reminiscent of similar riots in 1968 of burning buildings, clouds of tear gas and widespread violence (including against unarmed protesters). While President Trump condemned the killing and signed an executive order banning choke holds in response (and this problem existed long before he was sworn in), many deemed it deemed too little, too late. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle with various groups of protestors and rioters taking over part of the city and renaming it CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), which was walked back and later re-packaged as CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest - when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act] and use military force to suppress it (a move that even the military thought would be extreme despite the Insurrection Act being invoked and enacted for the eerily similar 1968 riots). CHAZ/CHOP was disbanded by the Seattle police in early July following an executive order from Seattle's mayor (conveniently right after protestors staged a rally outside the mayor's house). By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump, and China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's mismanagement of COVID-19 and their increasing Human Rights Abuses (the ones against the Uighur Muslims [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/video-chinese-ambassador-confronted-over-blindfolded-uighur-muslims-2020-7?r=US&IR=T looking '''very''' similar to Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews]). Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Post-Cold War

2020-07-20T14:21:25Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:603D:3245:CD3:552E: /* The World Powers nowadays */

{{flamewar}}
{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared the attacks part of a holy war against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]] and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam, and strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion - Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who preached a hardline stance against immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals and increasing domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality, now intensified to a degree that many observers thought to border on authoritarianism. And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's rapport with Putin at the time continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to take back the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators. This was aided by the echo chambers created by social media plus the mainstream media increasingly taking sides rather than just reporting on the conflict, which minimized any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side" and has led some commentators and scholars predicting the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police (the most recent one in a string of increasingly unjustifiable killings by police over the preceding years) went viral across the internet. This newest act of police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led large scale protests and riots reminiscent of similar riots in 1968 of burning buildings, clouds of tear gas and widespread violence (including against unarmed protesters). While President Trump condemned the killing and signed an executive order banning choke holds in response (and this problem existed long before he was sworn in), many deemed it deemed too little, too late. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle with various groups of protestors and rioters taking over part of the city and renaming it CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), which was walked back and later re-packaged as CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest - when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act] and use military force to suppress it (a move that even the military thought would be extreme despite the Insurrection Act being invoked and enacted for the eerily similar 1968 riots). CHAZ/CHOP was disbanded by the Seattle police in early July following an executive order from Seattle's mayor (conveniently right after protestors staged a rally outside the mayor's house). By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump, and China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's mismanagement of COVID-19 allowed it to become a global pandemic and increasing Human Rights Abuses from the CCP (the ones against the Uighur Muslims [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/video-chinese-ambassador-confronted-over-blindfolded-uighur-muslims-2020-7?r=US&IR=T looking like something right of Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews]). Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Post-Cold War

2020-07-20T14:11:32Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:603D:3245:CD3:552E: /* The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism */

{{flamewar}}
{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared the attacks part of a holy war against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]] and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam, and strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion - Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who preached a hardline stance against immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals and increasing domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality, now intensified to a degree that many observers thought to border on authoritarianism. And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's rapport with Putin at the time continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to take back the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators. This was aided by the echo chambers created by social media plus the mainstream media increasingly taking sides rather than just reporting on the conflict, which minimized any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side" and has led some commentators and scholars predicting the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police (the most recent one in a string of increasingly unjustifiable killings by police over the preceding years) went viral across the internet. This newest act of police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led large scale protests and riots reminiscent of similar riots in 1968 of burning buildings, clouds of tear gas and widespread violence (including against unarmed protesters). While President Trump condemned the killing and signed an executive order banning choke holds in response (and this problem existed long before he was sworn in), many deemed it deemed too little, too late. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle with various groups of protestors and rioters taking over part of the city and renaming it CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), which was walked back and later re-packaged as CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest - when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act] and use military force to suppress it (a move that even the military thought would be extreme despite the Insurrection Act being invoked and enacted for the eerily similar 1968 riots). CHAZ/CHOP was disbanded by the Seattle police in early July following an executive order from Seattle's mayor (conveniently right after protestors staged a rally outside the mayor's house). By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump, and China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's mismanagement of COVID-19 allowed it to become a global pandemic. Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Post-Cold War

2020-07-20T14:06:45Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:603D:3245:CD3:552E: /* The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism */

{{flamewar}}
{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared the attacks part of a holy war against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]] and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam, and strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion - Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who preached a hardline stance against immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals and increasing domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality, now intensified to a degree that many observers thought to border on authoritarianism. And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's rapport with Putin at the time continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to take back the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators, aided by the echo chambers created by social media minimizing any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side", with some commentators and scholars predicting that the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police (the most recent one in a string of increasingly unjustifiable killings by police over the preceding years) went viral across the internet. This newest act of police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led large scale protests and riots reminiscent of similar riots in 1968 of burning buildings, clouds of tear gas and widespread violence (including against unarmed protesters). While President Trump condemned the killing and signed an executive order banning choke holds in response (and this problem existed long before he was sworn in), many deemed it deemed too little, too late. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle with various groups of protestors and rioters taking over part of the city and renaming it CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), which was walked back and later re-packaged as CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest - when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act] and use military force to suppress it (a move that even the military thought would be extreme despite the Insurrection Act being invoked and enacted for the eerily similar 1968 riots). CHAZ/CHOP was disbanded by the Seattle police in early July following an executive order from Seattle's mayor (conveniently right after protestors staged a rally outside the mayor's house). By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump, and China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's mismanagement of COVID-19 allowed it to become a global pandemic. Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Post-Cold War

2020-07-20T13:57:37Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:603D:3245:CD3:552E: /* The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused */

{{flamewar}}
{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared the attacks part of a holy war against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]] and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam, and strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion - Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who preached a hardline stance against immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals and increasing domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality, now intensified to a degree that many observers thought to border on authoritarianism. And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's close connections to Putin since his election have continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to take back the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators, aided by the echo chambers created by social media minimizing any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side", with some commentators and scholars predicting that the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police (the most recent one in a string of increasingly unjustifiable killings by police over the preceding years) went viral across the internet. This newest act of police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led large scale protests and riots reminiscent of similar riots in 1968 of burning buildings, clouds of tear gas and widespread violence (including against unarmed protesters). While President Trump condemned the killing and signed an executive order banning choke holds in response (and this problem existed long before he was sworn in), many deemed it deemed too little, too late. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle with various groups of protestors and rioters taking over part of the city and renaming it CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), which was walked back and later re-packaged as CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest - when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act] and use military force to suppress it (a move that even the military thought would be extreme despite the Insurrection Act being invoked and enacted for the eerily similar 1968 riots). CHAZ/CHOP was disbanded by the Seattle police in early July following an executive order from Seattle's mayor (conveniently right after protestors staged a rally outside the mayor's house). By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump, and China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's mismanagement of COVID-19 allowed it to become a global pandemic. Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Post-Cold War

2020-07-20T13:55:17Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:603D:3245:CD3:552E: /* The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused */ While George's death was unjustified and police brutality, there is no evidence to suggest it was racially motivated - the three officers weren't all-white, and while his killer Derek was a thug unfit to be a cop, there's no evidence he was racist, let alone against black people.

{{flamewar}}
{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared the attacks part of a holy war against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]] and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam, and strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion - Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who preached a hardline stance against immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals and increasing domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality, now intensified to a degree that many observers thought to border on authoritarianism. And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's close connections to Putin since his election have continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to take back the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators, aided by the echo chambers created by social media minimizing any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side", with some commentators and scholars predicting that the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police (the most recent one in a string of increasingly unjustifiable killings by police over the preceding years) went viral across the internet. This newest act of police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led large scale protests and riots reminiscent of similar riots in 1968 of burning buildings, clouds of tear gas and widespread violence (including against unarmed protesters). While President Trump condemned the killing and signed an executive order banning choke holds in response (and this problem existed long before he was sworn in), many deemed it deemed too little, too late. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle with various groups of protestors and rioters taking over part of the city and renaming it CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), which was walked back and later re-packaged as CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest - when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act] and use military force to suppress it (a move that even the military thought to be extreme even though the Insurrection Act ''was'' invoked and enacted for the eerily similar 1968 riots). CHAZ/CHOP was disbanded by the Seattle police in early July following an executive order from Seattle's mayor (conveniently right after protestors staged a rally outside the mayor's house). By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump, and China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's mismanagement of COVID-19 allowed it to become a global pandemic. Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Post-Cold War

2020-07-20T13:41:24Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:603D:3245:CD3:552E: /* 9/11 and the War on Terror */

{{flamewar}}
{{Topquote|What we may be witnessing is not just the end of [[the Cold War]], or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.|Francis Fukuyama, ''The End of History and the Last Man''. Unsurprisingly, he has since admitted that in retrospect he was being too optimistic.}}

After the end of the communist regimes and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended almost half a century of [[The Cold War|Cold War]]. The ideological, political and economical clashes between different ideologies that had had its apex during World War II had finally ended with the prevalence of capitalism as the dominant economic model and with western-type democracies as the most favoured political models (at least in the West and the ex-Soviet States). The End of the World through nuclear means, [[grimdark|while almost seen as a certainty during many periods of crisis]], had not come to pass, and [[noblebright|a feeling of peace and relief spreaded through the world]]. While the old fear of a world war pretty much dissapeared, the problems of the Cold War were replaced by many other and smaller conundrums all around the globe. This aspect is important, since due to technological advancements and the development of computers and the Internet, the world is more interconnected than ever before, and events that decades ago would've been isolated to a small region could have massive reverberations throughout the globe.

This period of history is being studied and analyzed by historians as we speak, considering most of the relevant events of this period happened less than 30 years ago and are continuing into the present day (2020, as of this article's writing). There's a reason why historians usually don't touch anything that's happened in the last twenty or so years, so we'll do our best to avoid any [[skub]] and just retell events as they happened and how they relate to one another; which is no easy feat since the world has become more interconnected than ever, with events happening halfway around the world being felt everywhere. Now, pretty much everyone outside of tribes not in regular contact is generally in the know about the affairs of the world due to the fact that anything can be recorded and discussed on 24/7 news networks and the internet definitely made everyone more aware of everyone else.

==New World Order: The 1990s==
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall or transformation of communist regimes worldwide, the United States found itself catapulted into a position of undisputed supremacy over the globe. Following a short, brutal war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which ended in a rather hilarious roflstomp victory for the U.S-led Coalition, which took casualties in the low hundreds compared to Iraq having 85% of it's pre-war armed forces completely wiped out), the U.S began perhaps one of it's greatest decades of economic and cultural prosperity under the dotcom bubble. With it's military might guarding the vital sea and air routes of the world, the 1990s began a period of interconnectivity and increased trade that would be later known as "globalization" (Though for some, the term "Westernization" would be better suited, as much of the world has adopted, at least in part, American cultural, military, and economic doctrines).

This isn't to say that things were all peaches and sunshine for the U.S, however. In many cities across the U.S, many African and Hispanic Americans became utterly fed up with the way the police forces often treated them (in the case of many metropolitan areas like L.A., it was little better than dirt). A boiling point was reached when Rodney King, an African American man (who had a history of armed robbery and beating his wife), was given a retalitory beating by two white police officers on camera after leading a high speed chase through a residential area, resisting arrest and attempting to charge an officer. The news media edited out King's aggresion towards the police, but the jury for the officers would see the full tape and acquit them. This action triggered the Los Angeles race riots, which would leave a scar on the collective consciousness of Americans everywhere. Another dark side to this otherwise happy time was the military debacles in Somalia and the war crime filled Yugoslav Wars. The Yugoslav Wars were the only remotely symmetrical war in recent history between something more than African warlords, but rarely appears in war games (or video games that aren't Tactics Ogre) for the simple reason that nobody can understand what the hell was going on without serious research. The domestic side of the Federal Government lost a lot of trust during the Clinton administration between Bill Clinton's sex scandals and the heavy-handed and openly corrupt response of the FBI and ATF took to dealing with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The agencies repeatedly claiming concern for supposed hostages they didn't know the location but totally existed before ''setting their compound on fire'' and driving over it with an armored vehicle, which would have killed the hostages if they existed, then planting their own equipment as evidence remains a popular example of the ATF's naked corruption to this day.

Meanwhile, in the newly reformed state of Russia, things were looking a bit... well, let's just say that the immediate post-Heresy Imperium had it much better than what happened to Russia. Problems ranging from a severe economic collapse, the rise of oligarchs and criminal mobs, a major rebellion in the majority Islamic province of Chechnya, and the government is about as morally pure as your average Tzeentchian cultist all contributed to the post-Soviet Russians generally feeling pretty damned hopeless and betrayed by the West. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, tried his damndest to fix things, but turning the country around proved to be beyond his skills, and left the office in relative disgrace. Enter one Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and someone with a more [[God-Emperor of Mankind|authoritarian and straightforward way of doing things]]. He technically stabilized Russia, but has since been continually stirring shit up in the rest of the world ever since.

In Europe, the European Union was officially ratified by the Maaschirt Treaty in 1992, marking for the first time since <s>Rome</s> Napoleon that a singular power has held complete sway over <s>all</s> most of the continent. The EU's goal, amongst many things, was to promote economic and military cooperation amongst its member states. To that end, most nations in the EU abandoned their national currencies for the euro, with <s> only </s> UK, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Sweden retaining their own. This group has rapidly moved past the mere economic partnership and into either: an overstate that curtails the freedoms of its member countries who are "represented" by unelected bureaucrats with no method of removing them, an attempt to create a governing body that could step in and stop the squabbling nations of Europe from starting WW3, or a hopelessly incompetent bureaucratic clusterfuck that survives through sheer inertia, depending on your point of view. Or any combination of the three.

In the Middle East, however, tensions were steadily rising. Due to events like the discovery of oil in large parts of the region, the disaster that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the formation of the Jewish state of Israel in was formerly Arab land and its subsequent occupation of far more territory than it was actually supposed to get, the various Muslim tribes and nations of the Middle East began to look at the Christian and secular nations of the West and Russia with barely restrained hatred, feeling that they had been cheated, stomped on, and oppressed by the ungodly European and American powers over and over again. Many began to long for the glory days of the Golden Age of Islam in the Early Middle Ages, and so started to turn to increasingly radical sects of Islam that promised such a return to power and prestige, such as the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam, the state religion of the most powerful islamic nation, Saudi-Arabia. The disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in late-Cold War had provided experience to the Mujahideen (roughly translating as "those engaged in a holy war"), experience which was now being turned against those who supported them against the Soviets. A few began to carry out acts of terror against their Israeli and American foes, such as in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack on the USS Cole. But the worst was yet to come, as a new, much more disciplined and organized group of Sunni radicals known as Al-Qaeda (in Arabic, literally "The Base" or "The Foundation") came into being, led by wealthy Saudi billionaire and former muhajedeen commander Osama bin Laden. Their strike against the heart of their perceived enemies would forever shatter the ideal of Western triumph and total American supremacy, and usher in a new, long, bloody period of conflict. Of course, the fact that many of these groups were originally trained and armed by the CIA to fight the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war is often swept under the carpet.

==9/11 and the War on Terror==
{{topquote|We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.|CIA Director James Woolsey, 1993}}

9/11 can be seen as the catalyst for what would fuel today's paranoia against "terrorism". On September 11, 2001, several Al-Qaeda terrorists hi-jacked 4 commercial flights and crashed them to three different locales, although the most significant of this was the World Trade Center, causing the Twin Towers to collapse and be labeled as the worst terrorist attack on American soil, as it killed nearly 3,000 people. One of the planes - Flight 93 - saw passengers and crew learned of the other suicide attacks and fought back against the terrorists, who chose to crash the plane into a field and kill everyone rather than cede control. This attack was led by a man named Osama Bin Laden. If you want to subscribe to the tin-foil hat crew, there's been several conspiracy theories related to this, most popular of which is that the American government planned for 9/11 and the entirety of the tragedy, but whether you want to believe those or not is up to you.

Anyway, with the world shocked, a worldwide manhunt for Bin Laden occurred, taking the US-led coalition forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Pakistan. During their hunt, this resulted in warlords and dictators in the Middle East getting the knife, most notably Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Long story short, after a bunch of wacky misadventures and more conflicts than anyone can count: SEAL Team Six, a special operations unit of the US Navy, eventually found and killed Bin Laden during a raid ten years later.

Despite the shock of the attacks, the people of the United States didn't wholly "unify" as is too often suggested by those who lived at the time. Muslim Americans, and even quite a few who simply ''looked'' Middle Eastern, including Sikhs and South-East Asians, were the targets of hate crimes - arsons, murders, and assaults shot up in the days and weeks after the attacks. It has been asserted that this is the origin of the Western Conservative bias against Muslims and the reignition of fear of foreigners. This was also a major catalyst for anti-religious groups given that Al-Qaeda is an Islamic terrorist group and the mastermind Bin Laden declared the attacks part of a holy war against the United States, resulting in several things including the [[Imperial Truth|New Atheist movement]] and a ''huge'' surge in religiously-motivated villains in fiction for the next two decades (especially Islam, and strangely - since 9/11 wasn't done in the name of this religion - Christianity).

Despite the success of the Osama Bin Laden raid, the War on Terror never really "ended" and it jump-started the global arms industry into overdrive. It created a demand for more guns, more militarization, more equipment, and more troops, in order to stem the tide of terrorists and rogue elements threatening everyone's safety (if you want to believe the rhetoric, anyway). It's also being seen as pseudo-Imperialism, as while the occupied Middle Eastern territories visited by the coalition are technically held by local governments, its not that easy to miss that the US-led coalition are basically bumping off heads that they don't like and installing people that are more open to their policies into government positions and occupying them with either US troops and/or PMCs (i.e. mercenaries) as "observers" to help stabilize the region and train their troops, essentially turning them into a nation unofficially governed by the US. While it can be argued that said heads were in dire need of a thumping for the sake of the people, this is creating an increasingly common way for the US to expand its sphere of influence, while being able to dodge the bad label associated with imperialism. Needless to say, this created even more of the resentment and hatred that allowed al-Qaeda to gain power in the first place, which combined with the crumbling state of Syria's government ended up setting the stage for ISIS, a more powerful and widespread organization intent on recreating the Islamic Caliphate of old.

This also created a glamorization of the military by the media that contributed to the war being somewhat normalized in the eyes of the public and painting the coalition forces as heroes (I.E: vidya games like Call of Duty or movies like American Sniper). Call it entertainment or call it propaganda, either way, it contributed to the public being more accepting of what's essentially a world-wide conflict comprised of proxy wars and skirmishes with no clear beginning or end. It also had the effect of massively expanding national governments worldwide in order to "protect and secure" the lives of the citizenry, whereas most libertarians and anarchists viewed it as nothing more than a blatant power grab using security as an excuse.

The US and remaining coalition forces are still technically fighting the War on Terror despite the original aggressors responsible for 9/11 being neutralized. As of writing this article: they're only three years shy of officially beating the Vietnam War in terms of duration. Indeed, it has raised concerns about the purpose of this ongoing conflict, as much of Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much a hotbed for insurrection to the point that Western intervention is no longer having a discernible effect and may very well be actively making it worse. Plus, with the aftermath of the war against ISIS, it has led to yet more intervention by larger neighboring states and more destabilized local conflicts, such as Turkey advancing into Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran conducting a proxy war against each other in Yemen, the crackdown of the Kurdish independence referendum in Northern Iraq, and the Taliban further entrenching themselves in various provinces in Afghanistan.

==The Great Recession==
{{topquote|If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that's your problem. If you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, that's the bank's problem.|J. Paul Getty}}

In 1987 Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and would hold that office until 2006, leaving behind a legacy of [[just as planned|fuckheug asset bubbles]]. Under the presidencies of Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, lending standards became increasingly lax to the point where a well dressed [[Lictor]] could qualify for a mortgage. Prices for homes, stocks, and college educations skyrocketed, but because the dollar menu remained a dollar the talking heads insisted it wasn't inflation.

Stocks first plummeted in 2000 when everyone decided the likes of yahoo! and pets.com weren't worth a trillion dollars. Then in 2008 the market shit itself again when bankers realized that Lictor was never going to pay off his home loan. But he can still get a bank to pay for his hormagaunts to go to Princeton, so the shoes aren't done falling yet.

At the height of the bubble, it was possible for a person to obtain a home loan with no declared income, no declared assets, no down payment, and on negative amortization terms which means the borrower is only aiming to pay the interest on the loan (and maybe not even all of that) in the hope of selling the house later for more than the loan. The sheer quantities of '''[[just as planned]]''' flavor kool-aid everyone was drinking would turn [[Magnus the Red]] several more colors.

The overwhelming majority of these loans were variable interest because the Fed had dropped rates so low that for a brief time they were actually paying banks to borrow money (you read that right, not paying them to lend money, paying them to borrow money from the fed; things got crazy). The result was the economic equivalent of Chernobyl; as soon as it became apparent that rates couldn't go any lower everyone who couldn't pay was wiped out and declared bankruptcy. The banks and investors had been divvying up the anticipated profits from the loans and selling them as securities, and suddenly nobody knew what those securities were actually worth. As banks and insurance companies started imploding, the US government was obliged to intervene to stave off a complete collapse of the economy, but this was incredibly unpopular.

==The Rise of Extremes, and the Tide of Populism==
The year 2016 was a shitshow in many, many ways, and its long-term effects have yet to become fully apparent. In hindsight, all those celebrity deaths were quite foreshadowing.

The policies of Barrack Obama had become unpopular in many rural and conservative places, such as the Midwest and the Deep South, on top of an increasing racial divide that hadn't been seen since the late 1960s. Fed up with these policies, and with the apparent inaction of many moderate to center-right Republican politicians, a good deal of right-leaning voters turned to more hardcore conservative, right-wing populist candidates... candidates such as Donald Trump (yes, the same one from ''The Apprentice''), who preached a hardline stance against immigration, negotiations for fairer trade deals and increasing domestic manufacturing, and a return to the Reagan-era "Peace through Strength" mentality, now intensified to a degree that many observers thought to border on authoritarianism. And despite all the odds, Trump won the presidential election through a handy margin in the electoral college against Hillary Clinton (though Hillary won more of the popular vote thanks to the large urban bases in California and New York), due to an appeal to Rust Belt workers and Hillary's association with her husband's scandals (as well as an overcomplicated clusterfuck involving emails that people made a big deal about at the time but now seems kind of dumb). This was accompanied by the rise of the so-called "Alternative-Right", a hardcore right-wing ideology that espouses ethnonationalism and nativism as its primary goals.

Almost immediately, the left accused Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin in stealing the election from Clinton, and a two-year long investigation was launched (that ultimately found evidence of Russian interference with the election in Trump's favor, but could not find sufficient information to confirm or deny that Trump or his campaign was aware of it or actively cooperating with the Russians; Trump's close connections to Putin since his election have continued to arouse suspicion but nobody's willing to go through that whole mess again unless they find a smoking gun), with both sides accusing one another of rigging the election. Reacting in anger to what they perceived as Trump's violent racism and bigotry, a collection of left-wing anarchist paramilitary groups formed, naming themselves "Anti-Fascist Action", or Antifa, for short. Antifa would disrupt conservative and right-wing rallies, claiming that as Trump's main supporters were sympathetic to Nazi ideology and espoused violence against their opponents, they could not be dealt with through purely non-violent means. In response to this, hardcore right-wing groups like the Proud Boys formed and began to clash on the streets with Antifa, turning the streets of cities like Portland into scenes eerily reminiscent of early-1920s Weimar Germany.

In 2018, a surge of left-wing populism enabled the Democrats to take back the House of Representatives, and hardcore left-wing candidates such as "Democratic Socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon saw themselves propelled to the heights of political power. A political divide in the United States that had slowly been festering since the Bush presidency had grown to fruition; moderates and centrists soon found themselves on the back burner, and the American people polarized into ideologically incompatible camps who began to view each other as traitors to the Republic and wannabe-genocidal dictators, aided by the echo chambers created by social media minimizing any potentially friendly interactions with the "other side", with some commentators and scholars predicting that the U.S might see another civil war within a generation.

In Europe, populist movements arose as a result of the perceived overbearing rules and regulations coming from the EU, the migration crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War, and a general resurgence of nationalism. The most notable of these movements was the '16 British Exit movement (Brexit, for short) that sought the departure of the UK from the EU, and soon, nominally centrist governments in Europe soon found themselves out of power or greatly diminished, replaced by populist right-wing or populist left-wing governments, as the dream of the European Union looked more and more like a fantasy. Brexit itself proved to cause its own problems after it became clear that after leaving the EU, numerous trade deals would need to be renegotiated (among other issues much too complex to describe here) that would profoundly damage the UK's economy if they could not be preserved. The fact the question of Brexit was decided by a referendum of the general public, which was only partly aware of the issues at stake and did not understand the consequences of leaving the EU, did not instill confidence in the government. Moreover, it is possible that if Brexit does end up happening, Scotland may leave the UK in order to preserve their connections to the EU.

In Russia, Putin's imperialistic ambitions, a paranoid fear of NATO expansion, and possibly a desire to reclaim what had once been a critical port in the old USSR, propelled the large nation into invading its neighbor, Ukraine, in order to "protect Russian minorities in the Donbass and Crimea". Ukraine, having just recently undergone a political revolution that ousted the pro-Russian administration, wasn't having it and fought the Russians and their separatist allies to a virtual standstill in the still-ongoing Donbass War. The Putin regime has also been implicated in several other acts of interfering with other world governments, perhaps as a way to exact revenge for how the West abandoned Russia to its fate after the Soviet Union fell. That said, Putin's stranglehold over Russian politics and elimination of anyone with enough political acumen to take his place has set the stage for a major power vacuum to arise after his death/retirement, and there's no telling if the Russian government as it exists today could survive in his absence.

Meanwhile, populist leaders and old-school authoritarians rose up in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Thailand, India and Pakistan, which has put a nail in the coffin for liberalism in those various democratic institutions. In China, President Xi Jinping removed the term limits and became China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; this coincides with China reverting back to the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty on steroids and trying to bring back the Sinocentric world order of old. Beijing's initialization of the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Eurasia and the String of Pearls geostrategic security bases around the Indian Ocean is a multinational project that dwarfs the Marshall Plan, and has spooked Washington into trying ways to at least counter some of China's ambitions to various results. The rise of China, combined with the political stagnation of the US and the decline of Western institutions, has bifurcated the Post-Cold War World Order. Unipolarity has ended.

The future of the world is in flux, as it always has been. Only time will tell whether or not the moderates will again take the reigns of power, or if the status quo is permanently shifted to the left or right. Or if the worst-case scenario predictions about the effects of uncontrolled global climate change come to pass and make that whole question a moot point. After all, it's hard to rule a country when a significant fraction of it is suddenly no longer fit for human inhabitation.

==The Pandemic of 2020 AKA World.exe has paused==
In late 2019 (first confirmed infection was somewhere around middle of December, with a non-connected solo infection showing symptoms on December 1), a new strain of coronavirus appeared in the Hubei province of China. Genome sequencing would later confirm that the virus hopped to humans from bats, which have historically been a source of multiple other epidemics such as Ebola and SARS.

An airborne respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 resembled the common cold, with some studies suggesting that 80% of infected would be asymptomatic or show mild cold-like symptoms (although in hindsight its close relation to a virus that caused a smaller but still major outbreak in 2002 known as SARS should have been a cause for alarm; later studies have since shown that these "asymptomatic" cases develop a variety of health problems later in life). However in a small minority of cases, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, it could result in severe pneumonia frequently resulting in death, and it spread so quickly that the so-called "small minority" is still likely to end up being millions of cases. Unusually for a pandemic, the virus had almost no effect on the young, in contrast to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 which affected the strongest the worst due to life-threatening immune responses. Or at least that was assumed to be the case, right until it was discovered that "recovered" cases in younger individuals had a disproportionately high risk of developing strokes, heart conditions, and other life-threatening problems, although this may be due to selection bias; large scale epidemiological studies are as yet still in progress. Regardless, pneumonia is no joke and a virus that humanity has zero immunity against is a very nasty thing indeed.

Through the end of 2019, it was believed that the virus could be contained to China, but by February 2020 it was clear that containment had failed and that the virus would spread worldwide. With the nationalists and the populist leaders proving themselves unable to handle a disease that respected no borders and unwilling to cooperate with each other long enough to create a productive response that might have kept the virus from becoming a full-fledged pandemic, the global community flailed helplessly in between bouts of passing the buck as the disease, named "COVID-19", spread across one continent after another.

Widespread government orders to close businesses and pushes for people to remain in their homes resulted in unemployment levels never before seen in history, and the global economy reached its lowest point since the Great Depression in what is now being called the "Great Lockdown". Worldwide air travel ground to a halt, and transportation energy use dropped so precipitously that oil reached ''negative'' value (not an error result, producers are actually paying people to take oil away). The prolonged economic downturn has made a fair number of people talk about the possibility of implementing major reforms such as universal basic income to ensure that economies don't implode entirely, although the reactions to said proposals have been mixed. On the other extreme some politicians have shown a blunt prioritizing of the economy over the people the economy is supposed to serve, which unsurprisingly has not won them much goodwill.

Even after more stringent lockdown protocols were adopted by at-risk regions, the virus has continued to spread and health care systems throughout the world are being pushed to their limits as people continue to die from COVID-19; as of June 2020 it's already killed more Americans than the entire First World War. With a vaccine still at least a year away (and that's the most optimistic estimate) as of this writing, it's anyone's guess as to how long the pandemic will last...or if the global economy will be able to survive the measures needed to keep the pandemic under control until it ends.

The effects of the stress placed upon populations during the lockdown would be combined with long-standing racial tensions in the form of the large scale protests and riots that took place after video footage of the death of an African-American man at the hands of police, the most recent one in a string of increasingly unjustifiable killings by police over the preceding years. This newest act of racially motivated police brutality in the face of a steadily growing sentiment that police forces were corrupt and motivated by bigotry led to images straight out of the similar riots in 1968 of burning buildings, clouds of tear gas and widespread violence against unarmed protesters. There was even a brief insurrection in Seattle with anarchist protestors taking over part of the city and renaming it CHAZ (Capital Hill Autonomous Zone), which was walked back and later re-packaged as CHOP - Capital Hill Occupied Protest when President Trump threatened to invoke the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807 Insurrection Act] and use military force to suppress it (a move that even the military thought to be extreme). CHAZ/CHOP was disbanded by the Seattle police in early July following an executive order from Seattle's mayor (conveniently right after protestors staged a rally outside the mayor's house). By the middle of 2020 the comparisons to 1968 of a year of 'one goddamn thing after another' were many and apt, and it's not even time for the US presidential election yet.

[[Memes]] have never been better though.

==The World Powers nowadays==
{{topquote|For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us.|General James Mattis}}
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the massive economical crisis Russia suffered while adapting to the new capitalist system, the United States appeared as a global power with no real competition. For a while at least. The United States had to focus their attention in the War against Terror, a massive campaign against terrorism around the globe, in particular after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, which ended up with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings through kidnapped planes. Since then, the United States has been present in the Middle East in one way or another. The world in general has had to adapt their military systems, being prepared to deal with another massive world war, and now have to fight small skirmishes against global terrorism, usually with a heavier weight of intelligence and counter-intelligence over actual military power. At the same time, they also have to deal with the ethical snarl of determining where the lines between "civilian" and "combatant" can be drawn, to say nothing of the suggestion that the War on Terror is really a ploy for the US to build a new empire without openly admitting that's what it's doing.

Outside of the US, Europe continued the process of developing an unified political entity, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 with the birth of the European Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many ex-republics and other european countries under soviet control joined the EU, event that caused certain frictions with Russia. Also in this period we saw the fracture of Yugoslavia, with the conflicts that followed being some of the most bloody and brutal in Europe since the end of World War II.

To further add to the point in Europe right now, with the UK leaving the EU, there is a growing belief that the power vacuum created by Britain is going to make the Franco-German Bloc even more overly dominant. Macron's ambition for a French-dominated EU through a 'European Army' have raised eyebrows amongst Napoleonic/Gaulist analysts. In theory, it makes sense for France to centralize Europe's military under the command of the French as this is Paris' only window of opportunity to not only reinstate itself as the great power of the continent, but also break away from US over-dependence. The window of opportunity is simple in explanation; right now France's old regional adversaries, Germany and the UK, no longer pose a threat. Germany has destroyed its political leadership due to the migration crisis and is militarily castrated. The UK have lost almost all political credibility after the Brexit circus and is on the brink of political fragmentation. Paris right now is the most militarily capable member of the EU and a nuclear armed weapons state in its own right with vast financial influence over its <s>colonies</s> African friends and multiple overseas naval base. However, in practice, the sheer level of bureaucratic clusterfuck in the language barriers of the <s>28</s> 27 member states would be a significant challenge to such an idea. Let alone the fact that South and Eastern Europeans do not like the idea of being dictated by the French, and would rather prefer the Americans under good'ol NATO instead. Furthermore, Paris has a stagnating and mediocre economy, so we have no idea how Macron is going to balance the budget and, with Berlin's economy contracting to near recession levels, such ideas may prove ''too'' ambitious in the first place. But alas, if Macron wants to role-play Europa Universalis whilst putting on his Napoleon hat, he can be our fucking guest.

[[Japan]], after the economic boom they enjoyed during most of the 80s, suffered one of the biggest asset price crashes in history, sinking their economy. Badly. This was a catastrophic event for many Japanese, and this crisis lasted for over a decade (technically they haven't recovered from it yet). While they are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the effects of the 90s crash has had a massive impact on their financial, business and general culture, to the point of being very difficult to find any Japanese work set in modern day that doesn't reference the crisis in any way.

Many of the old communist countries quickly changed into capitalist economies during the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, there are only a handful of countries that would title themselves as communists, with none of them following a purely pre-91 planned economy (China, Laos and Vietnam changed their economy into a capitalist-like system while retaining much of their political structure, North Korea is basically an absolute monarchy, and Cuba is steadily changing and opening their economy to the world).

After the massive humanitarian, agricultural and economical crisis that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused, [[Pretend|China adapted their communist system into an capitalist one hidden under a communist name,]] and became the ''de facto'' factory of the world, developing a massive industry and becoming a world power from the first time since more than a century. Its economic and political influence in the world is extremely important in world politics. The relationship between China and the US after the Cold War is....how do we put it...shall we say complicated? The US-China relationship is akin to a marriage still hanging on because both partners are so much in debt with one another that divorcing would be too much trouble for its worth. However, China has had plenty of problems during the last decades, such as the failed "one child" policy and increasing industrial and environmental pollution. Tensions have strained further with the US pushing for industrial independence from China under Trump, and China earning plenty of ill-will given the Chinese government's mismanagement of COVID-19 allowed it to become a global pandemic. Still for all its inconvenience, China is the second most powerful geopolitical entity and has grown to dominate international relations whether detractors like it or not. [[Skub|Now the question on China's superpower status is nothing more than political skub amongst academics and political scientists, due to how....skubby the ''actual'' credentials to '''''be''''' a superpower is in the first place.]] Whatever the case, if the US ceases to be the world's superpower, China will definitely go for the top spot.

On the other hand of Eurasia, Russia as well tried to recover its influence in world politics, [[Skub|with different degrees of success]]; as mentioned before it now seems to have shifted focus to undermining the influence of other countries instead, particularly that of the US. After somewhat recovering from the massive economic crisis of the 90s, Russia is still one of the most powerful and influential countries worldwide, due to its military weight and nuclear arsenal. Whilst US-China relationship is an overcomplicated trainwreck of interdependence, espionage and trade/IP disputes, Russia-China relations seem to have patched up the divorce from the Sino-Soviet Split. This was due to the fact that both the Russian and Chinese government realized how pointless and petty the split was, and that teaming up was a far more better choice than being divided. Although fears and suspicions still exist, the 2014 Ukraine crisis forced Russia to ignore these old-time fears of China as the relationship towards the West nosedived back to the good old days of the Cold War. The drop in oil prices along with sanctions crippled Russia's already vulnerable economy to the point that, economically speaking, Russia became an economic dwarf. As you can imagine, you can't have another arms race if you don't even have the money to spend them. Fortunately for Russia, this is where China comes in. Although the EU still remains the largest trading partner for Russia, in the long term, trade with China would increase due to China's obviously ''large'' middle class. The Chinese are hungry and in ever present need for oil, gas and foodstuffs, Russia is a giant oil and gas reserve with plenty of fertile ground to farm. Factor in the fact that a friendly China would safeguard Russia's underpopulated and vulnerable Far East and you will see a Russia even more against current Western institutions than the old Soviet days. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, they still have more nukes than anyone, but they have reduced that number considerably due to it's not necessary to have so many nukes anymore, and they are reeeealy expensive to build and maintain.

==Technology, science and culture==
After the world stopped fearing the nuclear holocaust that a MAD would've been, there were many shifts in technological interest. In particular, computer science grew and developed exponentially, with computers becoming a part of everyday life. Modern communications have been affected as well. It is difficult to grasp how big of an impact has the Internet had in shaping modern life but suffice to say it affects every aspect of our lives. Readers of this article are well aware of this since they are using the internet to read it. In particular, the world of entertainment has become really big thanks to this technological level. Videogames replaced movies as the biggest and most profitable entertainment media (thanks in part to the growth of mobile gaming).

Many of the concerns of the Cold War era still persist, and in many cases, they've only grown with time. Without a nuclear war to worry about, things as environmentalism has changed focus on global warming and the waste of polluting elements into the ocean as their effects grow increasingly noticeable. Another issue relating to culture would be the rise of populist movements in various regions around the globe, from every bend of the ideological spectrum, mostly as a result of the increasing globalization and the presumed decline of what was once the nation-state.

===Spaceflight===
One of the high points of the Post-Cold War era has been the shift of emphasis on space activity away from government agencies and towards commercial ventures. With the dissolution of the USSR, NASA began collaborating with the Russian government, first with missions to the Mir space station and later with the construction of the International Space Station.

Beginning with SpaceShipOne in 2003, private enterprise has ticked off a number of firsts and achieved in years what took the military industrial complex decades. In 2015, SpaceX destroyed the conventional business model of space rocketry by successfully landing and relaunching a first stage rocket. Practical re-usability combined with fixed cost pricing likely heralds the end of the massive government sponsored development programs of the past. New technologies in testing include inflatable modules and 3d printed solar panels constructed after launch.

The iconic LC-39A, departure point for the majority of the Saturn and Shuttle launches, is now operated under commercial lease by SpaceX. It is a safe bet that space exploitation is the next trillion dollar mega industry, quadrillion even, unless major AI breakthroughs are made.

==The appeal of Post-Cold War world==
Do you like stories of special force operators going on incredibly risky missions to take down terrorists, insurgents, and radicals of any ideological or religious flavor? Then this setting might be right for you, due to the prevalence of the Global War on Terror and the almost-extensive use of special forces such as the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Spetznaz, SAS, and so on in their fight against the new enemy that has largely replaced the Soviet Union in the minds of many in the West - the radical Islamic "jihadist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, whose goals range from either kicking all foreign influence out of their country, to establishing a global caliphate.

Wargame wise, there is some appeal in recreating the various, drawn-out conflicts such as in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (to date the longest war in American history at over 17 years if one doesn't count the Korean War, which the US never officially declared war during and has spent most of its existence cold.), pitting the well-equipped, organized, and disciplined forces of the Western powers against the zealotry, tenaciousness, and cunning of the various insurgent and terrorist groups that plague the region. Due to the rather asymmetric nature of these wars, as well as the murkiness that comes with it, it's not as popular as the more conventionally focused, more-or-less Black-And-White morality of World War 2 setting.

[[Urban Fantasy]] and Superheroes are often set in the current Post-Cold War era. By making fictional, fantastical threats one avoids the question of what the hell is there left to fight. It also benefits from being a world that's largely prebuilt and known to players, allowing writers to focus exclusively on what's different.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Star Trek

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[[File:Enterprise.jpg|thumb|500px|right|If you aren't already hearing the theme song you might not belong here.]]

{{Topquote|Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!|James T. Kirk, <s>third</s> captain of the starship USS Enterprise}}

'''''Star Trek''''' is a multimedia science-fiction series and one of the cornerstones of nerdy media properties (in fact, Klingon is the most learned fictional language, and the only one to surpass Tolkien's elvish in popularity), and one of the few to crossover into mainstream popularity (alongside ''[[Star Wars]]'', ''[[Doctor Who]]'' and a few others). It's also one of the longest-running science fiction franchises, as it began when the the first episode of The Original Series aired in 1966, and since then has had over 50 years of geek history spanning several generations. Needless to say, it's had a huge influence on all things sci-fi, and, by extension, [[/tg/]].

Originally, ''Star Trek'' was [[noblebright]] beyond noblebright and, in many ways, was the polar opposite of ''[[Warhammer 40,000|Warhammer 40K's]]'' [[grimdark]]. The more recent reboot films, however, have taken a much, ''much'' more grimdark tone, which is delightfully [[skub]]tastic.

== Games ==
There's been plenty of tabletop games and [[/v/|vidya gaems]] featuring ''Star Trek'' without being merchandising bullshit (see: themed ''[[Monopoly]]'' sets), including one of the earliest action multiplayer wargame: ''Netrek''.

*'''''Star Trek: Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier''''' (1978) The very first Trek tabletop [[RPG]]. Written by, I shit you not, Michael Scott. Groggy (grokky?) as all hell, and due for an OSR.
* '''''[[Starships & Spacemen]]''''' (1978 1e, 2013-present 2e) This was an attempt by a guy named Leonard Kanterman to make his own Star Trek RPG but since he didn't hold the license he had to alter the names and fudge the rules a bit so he wouldn't get sued. It appeared and died fairly quickly. It was later purchased by [[Goblinoid Games]] and heavily reworked to work more like their other game, [[Labyrinth Lord]] but different enough that converting things back and forth should take a minute or two longer than just dropping them in. The 2e version has some decent third party material at least.
* '''''[[Star Fleet Battles]] (SFB)''''' (1979-) The crunchiest starship combat game you're ever going to find outside of a computer. Based on the original series and not any of the later series, for licensing reasons. Takes some liberties with the setting, which (combined with the aforementioned licensing) is why "''Star Trek''" isn't actually in the title. It's had its own video game spinoff in the form of Starfleet Command. The series died when the last company owned by Interplay broke up in the early 2000s.
* '''''Star Trek: The Role Playing Game''''' (1982-1989) Made by [[FASA]], essentially ''[[Traveller]]''-lite, or a happier, shinier ''[[Rogue Trader]]''. Hasn't aged terribly well, what with having been made when the only canonical ''Star Trek'' materials to work with were the original and animated series, the first four films, and a couple of now non-canon novels. If you try to dust it off, expect tons of conflict with the rest of the show. Died as they were trying to update it for ''TNG'', because Paramount's corporate suits (surprise, surprise) had no idea what an RPG actually entailed and were worried about violence, and getting their cut, and... oh you know the drill by now. Welcome to the 80's.
* '''''Star Trek: Starship Tactical Combat Simulator''''' (1983) FASA designed this, so it feels like ''[[Battletech]]'' but not as good.
* '''''Prime Directive''''' (1993-2008) The most successful tabletop RPG line (but that's not saying much), it's actually still in print. Produced by Amarillo Design Bureau, so again no direct name-dropping of "''Star Trek''." Lasted as long as it did by constantly evolving, in Borg-like fashion, to adapt to the current zeitgeist. Has had 4 editions, with the second using [[GURPS]], the third using [[Wizards of the Coast|d20]], and the fourth [[d20 Modern]].
* '''''Star Trek [[Card_Game|CCG]]''''' (1994-2007, 2011-2014, 2013-2015, 2018-) There's been a few of these, most notably the games released by [[Decipher]], but never globally popular. They also suffered from game balance problems from fans wanting their fave character, but needing extra rules for their quirks. There's also the problem of putting numbers to character stats, such as one game that asserted that [[Heresy|Picard having about twice the integrity of a Klingon pig]]. Later versions are "deck-building" games to try to cash in on the popularity of ''[[Dominion]]'' and ''[[Thunderstone]]''. And now virtual CCGs are the order of the day.
* '''''Star Trek: The Next Generation Role Playing Game''''' (1998-2000) The next attempt, made by Last Unicorn Games. Won an Origins Award for best new game. Has a lot of extraneous skills, as expected of a 90's RPG, but does a good job of capturing the feel of the show. Includes core books for Deep Space Nine and The Original Series, with a planned Voyager book never released. Tons of fan material is available, including books for Enterprise, Voyager, and even the Captain Pike era. Authors of the original game have also finished and released adventures and sourcebooks online. Died an untimely death.
* '''''Star Trek Red Alert''''' (2000) A Diskwars game themed to ''Star Trek''.
* '''''Star Trek Roleplaying Game''''' (2002-2005) When [[Decipher]] had the CCG license, they decided, "What the hell, let's make an RPG, too." Some of the authors of the Last Unicorn Games RPG worked on this game. The systems are similar but different enough that they aren't compatible. The fluff focuses more on the Voyager era. A well made game but it's forgotten for a reason.
* '''''Star Trek Online''''' (2010-) An [[MMORPG|MMO]]. Decent gameplay mechanics, especially starship combat. Storyline leaves something to be desired, especially when the ostensibly [[Noblebright|peaceful]] Federation trades shots at least once with every other faction in the galaxy. Is also sadly being screwed over by CBS who keeps retconning the series thus forcing the game to bend more and more unnaturally to fit in the new canon. Still, it's solid enough for an MMO and you can hit max level quick enough to get into the real meat of the game and join a Fleet (their version of a guild) and blow shit up.
* '''''Call To Arms: Star Trek''''' (2011) [[Mongoose_Publishing|Mongoose]]'s license for ''Babylon 5'' expired, so they collaborated with Amarillo Design Bureau (the ''Star Fleet Battles'' guys), re-themed the game to Star Trek along with improving the system to make it more nifty. Less micro-management than SFB, and ships get some cinematic feats.
* '''''Star Trek: Expeditions''''' (2011) Ignore the tie-ins to the movie, Reiner Knizia designed this. Explore the gameboard, flip over missions, try to have the proper crew to get victory points.
* '''''Star Trek: Fleet Captains''''' (2011) Tile flipping, exploring, and spaceships fighting over resources
* '''''Star Trek: Attack Wing''''' (2013-) [[WizKids]] license the flightpath system from [[Fantasy Flight Games]] and adds ''Star Trek'' to the mix, [[Skub]] ensues. The game has been consistently plagued with balance issues, to the point that the rules errata is more than ten times longer than the actual rules. The actual current rules for things like the Borg special movement and fighter squadrons are completely different than the rules as written.
* '''''Star Trek: Ascendancy''''' (2016-) 4X table top boardgame from GaleForce9. Most of the races are represented, though the base set only has the Federation, Klingons and Romulans. Andorians, Vulcans, Cardassians and Ferengi can be purchased as expansions. There is even a Borg expansion that turns the game semi-coop as everyone tries real hard not to be assimilated.
* '''''Star Trek Adventures''''' (2017-) The latest attempt at an RPG, by Modiphius. It also comes with a whole range of miniatures of the various crews from the show. Runs on a similar engine to the creator's ''[[Conan the Barbarian]]'' which both makes sense, since they're both pulpy storytelling, and is hilarious, given the total tonal mish-mash between the two. Task resolution is generally done via a mixture of six attributes and six disciplines, which are added together, then used as a modifier for a d20 roll. For instance, combat is usually handled by the Security discipline, but hand-to-hand combat would use Fitness or Daring, while firing a phaser or other long-arm would use Control, and shipborne weapons Insight or Reason. In addition to combat stuff, players might solve problems by obtaining information and sciencing the shit out of it. They also have various Values that can be tapped for additional dice, a shared pool of Momentum all players can spend to gain advantages and add to by overboosting on success, and a pool of Threat that they can give the GM rather than burning Momentum, which he can then spend to make the situation degrade. It's a fun system, but it requires a GM who can wrap their head around the idea of an evolving situation rather than a set encounter to really click, which can be hard for GMs who're used to the ''D&D'' model.

== So why should I care? ==
Because between them, these six TV series and their assorted spinoff movies, books, etc. can provide inspiration for any sci-fi game you could care to run. If you want light-hearted action, look at the sort of things that happened in ''TOS'' or ''DS9'' to get the crew into some dangerous situation. If you want a charismatic villain, look at Gul Dukat or the Borg Queen. More serious issues are often handled with various degrees of success. While many science fiction series deal with a wide range of topics, Star Trek does so as aspects of a greater world. Like [[Tolkien]] is to fantasy it's a prime gateway drug to science fiction and especially science fiction which is more than "action movie IN SPACE!"

Not to mention in any sci-fi RPG with remotely free-form rules you're likely to encounter ''Star Trek'' fanboys, so you might as well know what they're talking about. The unholy spawn of a Trekkie and a [[Furry]] is known as a [[Chakat]], and you should fear it.

At its best ''Star Trek'' is thoughtful, optimistic futurism with a positive human element and brings you to strange new worlds in the grand tradition of speculative fiction which is accessible to even the layman. At its worst ''Star Trek'' is arrogant, smug, hypocritical, one-sided, preachy, dull and sloppy.

== Setting ==
Here's the Cliff's Notes on ''Star Trek''. A couple of general warnings; firstly, ''Star Trek'' likes to ''really'' take its "racial themes" bits just a little too far. Second, despite this, it's rare for an entire race to be completely irredeemable the way many fictional aliens are: there are heroic and sympathetic characters from nearly every race listed below, able to put more-positive spins on their racial themes. Thirdly, aside from very occasional appearances by [[H.P. Lovecraft|aliens who are so bizarre that humankind can barely comprehend them]], all of the aliens look like dudes with rubber masks on (because they are). In real life, this was because there was no budget for anything else, but in-universe it's been explained by some kind of [[Old Ones|Precursor]] race who seeded all of the planets with their broadly humanoid DNA, and every race evolved slightly differently from there. There isn't much [[fluff]] on what these precursors were like, and some of it was contradictory, and Gene Roddenberry didn't like the idea (although he still had to work with the rubber forehead stuff). The good news for fa/tg/uys who like [[homebrew]] is that this makes it fairly easy to write [[d20 system]] rules for all of the races - after all, most ''D&D'' races are just humans with rubber masks on...

=== A Composite Creation ===
This is a general note that one should consider: Star Trek was created in pretty much the opposite way as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in how it was made. Tolkien worked out a bunch of linguistic stuff and general history of Arda in his spare time over the course of years, then decided to use that as the basis for some stories that he eventually gave to some publishers which in the end sold quite well.

Roddenberry, by contrast, pitched a very broad general idea (it's the future, things are good, we got some guys on a ship exploring space; a "wagon train to the stars") to the networks and eventually Lucy from ''I love Lucy'' took to have it on the network. Roddenberry then worked with a variety of writers and actors (and some later on) who added to this rough skeleton of an idea in a process that would continue on to this day.

This is not to knock either approach, but both have their advantages and disadvantages. In regards to Star Trek, a franchise which relies mostly on an episode of the week format (until recently apparently) that's been going on for more than half a century this means that the canon is a fucking mess. There were numerous people at the helm and many of them had often very different ideas about what should be done that were just thrown out to see what stuck, many of which were contradictory and some of which we'd frankly rather forget (Date being possessed by a mask, for instance). In general fans and fluff writers have been spending a whole lot of time trying to straighten things out and much of the lore is basically a rough consensus of what people like and what fits in with it. Later series got more systematic about this, but there are still points of contention and a lot of flat out contradictions due to its scattershot nature.

You know, like [[/co/| comic books]].

=== Factions ===
<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="width:800px">
'''The Federation'''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
[[File:Federation_Ships.jpg|thumb|500px|left|Starfleet's ships of the Line (original universe/canon)]]
Might as well talk about that main faction. The United Federation of Planets is what the [[Tau]] think they are. Its backstory is that in the distant future of the 1990s, [[God-Emperor of Mankind|übermensch]] [[Space Marines|created by genetic engineering]] began conquering the Earth. The [[Imperial Guard|normies]] fought back and won through sheer numbers, cryogenically freezing the Augments and kicking them out of Earth, but the damage and mass political unrest of World War III got half the planet nuked. This was why genetic engineering was banned. Fortunately, in 2063, a <s>drunken asshole</s> heroic visionary named Zefram Cochrane created humanity's first warp drive (though it functioned based on the principle that gravity bends space-time, and was therefore more akin to an Alcubierre drive than anything that's dependent on the [[Warp]]) and made first contact with the Vulcans. The Vulcans eventually helped humanity rebuild and overcome poverty, disease, war and hunger. With its Earthly problems solved, man turned to the stars and found out its three closest neighbors were [[Imperium of Man|racist xenophobic dicks trying to murder each other]]. Since any war between them would've swept up puny little Earth and gotten it glassed, humans decided to force their neighbors to sit down and talk things out. Incredibly, it worked, and the United Federation of Planets was born.

The Federation is a commie [[noblebright]] hippieland society with a post-scarcity economy and a strong democratic government ([[Mary Sue|pretty much Roddenberry's idea of utopia]]). As a result, Federation citizens work not because they have to, but because they want to. However, despite their advanced technology, transhumanism, that is intentionally making [[Space Marines|SPESS MEHREENS]] and mutants like the infamous antagonist Khan Noonien Singh, is illegal.

The Federation's Navy is almost always called Starfleet. It's a mix between a military, a coast guard and a space agency, and usually rates scientific research as a higher priority than defense. One of its quirks is that it doesn't subscribe to the "bigger is better" policy used in most [[Warhammer 40K|sci-fi]], and even by most of the other ''Star Trek factions''. If the Federation ''does'' make a large ship, it's because they want it to have a daycare, swimming pool and ice cream bar. If they want a warship, they'll take a little gunship half the size of a modern day destroyer and pack it with enough antimatter nukes and guns to exterminate a solar system. In some cases, especially when dealing with ships from several centuries into the future, the ship is bigger on the inside than on the outside [[Creed|allowing it to hide a vast array of powerful armaments, ''space-bending'' equipment, and even whole planetary landscapes]]. They can get away with this because they out-tech almost everyone else by a country mile. The reason for the series' infamous "technobabble" is that <s>even ''they'' don't know everything their tech can do!</s> their technology is always evolving, and they know it so well that they can often use it in ways that even the original in-show design schematics did not intend.

In theory, Starfleet follows a rule called the "Prime Directive", which says that you're not allowed to interfere with low-tech races ("low-tech" being defined as "not having invented the warp drive", since warp technology apparently follows naturally from the laws of physics) or else things like turning the locals into Nazis might happen. The Original Series talked about this rule all the time, and Captain Kirk threw it aside whenever there was a sexy alien babe in sight. From ''TNG'' onward, it tended to instead be brought up whenever a hack writer needed a reason for the heroes to ''not'' instantly resolve a given problem with their superior technology or a way of making our heroes look like assholes for following it rigidly (yes, we could save this species from extinction but that would be interfering with the cosmic plan!), though there were a few good episodes that took it seriously.

Some of the more important member races are:

'''Founding members:'''
* [[Humans]]: You know 'em, you love 'em. Comprise seemingly 90% of Starfleet for reasons in no way related to the cost of makeup/CGI.
* [[Vulcan]]: The Original [[Eldar|Space Elves]], very emotional, especially during "pon'farr" (see below), who followed the teachings of an enlightened sage and embraced logic and rationalism after their emotions nearly led to them [[Slaanesh|wiping themselves out]]. They are what the average race of fantasy elves think they are, except on ''Enterprise'' because the writers wanted to artificially inject tension into the show (some of that was retconned to be a Romulan plot). Occasionally enter a state called "pon'farr," where they need to either [[Dark Eldar| fuck something half to death]], kill it with the nearest sharp object, or die of a brain aneurysm to let out all that pent-up emotional tension. Fa/tg/uys may recognize this as the sensation they feel every time [[Games Workshop]] puts out a new army book. Pretty bro-tier overall.
* Andorians: Blue dudes with antennae and constant fits of passion, the polar opposite of Vulcans and their one time foes. Pretty much fa/tg/uys, right down to the romantic streak, in the technical sense. Also, they live underground on a diet of meatbread and rage. Most of what defined them happened in Enterprise as they rarely showed up in the TNG-era, and even then did so as set dressing, allegedly because one of the showrunners hated their antennae and banned anyone from using them.
* Tellarites: Space [[Dwarf|Dorfs]]; like insulting everyone and arguing a lot (no, really, petty insults are considered a polite gesture in Tellarite culture), mostly because the very first tellarite ever shown in the series got in an argument with Spock's dad and now it's their whole racial thing. “Sarek said something in a scene once that was meant to demonstrate that he was stand-offish and kinda rude, but we like Sarek so it's now the defining attribute of this species.” It's all in good fun you understand, your confidence in your ideas and actions should be sturdy enough to withstand honest assessment and critique.
'''Notable Additional Members:'''
* Betazoids: Invariably attractive humanoid aliens with telepathic powers. Half-betazoid, half-humans apparently only have "empathic" powers, so they are well-regarded by Starfleet captains for their ability to point out the obvious and fill out the tight bodygloves that make up the Starfleet uniform in a pleasing manner, especially since theirs seem to come in a custom cut for reasons entirely unrelated to Roddenberry's erection. Their homeworld is like dropping a really hippie college and Space Vegas into a blender. They were taken over during The Dominion war because Earth or Vulcan would be seen as bullshit due to their large post Borg attack defense fleets/ship yards. While the writers would have to actually add new characters for the Andorians and Tellarites(such as Ambassadors for a government in exile). So Betazoid took the hit to raise the stakes.
* Trill: Originally a one-off race introduced as a sapient parasite that possesses and controls a barely, or even unintelligent humanoid host, they were radically reworked in ''Deep Space Nine'', right down to losing their rubber foreheads in favor of spots. Now, the host is itself an intelligent humanoid, and some, but not all, of their kind are able to willingly merge with a symbiont (because someone can't spell) that allows them to access a mixture of the memories and personalities of all previous hosts, though in a way that, theoretically, enhances the host's personality rather than destroying it or subsuming it. Then, when they die, they can pass on the symbiont to another host, theoretically, one they mentored. They went from having a rubber forehead to some spots because Terry Farrell had a allergic reaction to the make-up.
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'''The Klingon Empire'''
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[[Image:Batleth.jpg|thumb|right|A Bat'Leth (sword of honor), one of several types of Klingon bladed weapons. Frequently mocked IRL for being a poorly designed weapon.]]
[[Commissar|''"It is a good day to die!"'']]

The Federation's main rival and (movie era and afterward) the quintessential ''Star Trek'' race of lumpy foreheaded aliens. Originally they were a rough analog to the Russians (though they took some elements from [[Communism|communist China]]) in a rough cold war allegory with the Federation (even though the Federation are as commie as they come, though admittedly much of that came around in the TNG era). Their defining feature was that they were militaristic and imperialistic while the Federation was scholarly and respected liberty. This gradually moved more and more into them becoming Imperial Japan/[[Vikings]] In SPESSS obsessed with honor, fighting and dying honorably in battle while worshiping at the altar of [[Sigmar|warrior Jesus]], even as they turned from the Federation's bitter enemies into that friend who's fun to be around when he's not getting into drunken bar fights. You see shades of it during the movie era and it became more and more prominent through ''TNG'', culminating in ''DS9''. Do not make the mistake of thinking that Klingons are nothing more than barbaric savages, however; with Worf being part of the crew, and with ''DS9'' dealing with Klingon politics an awful lot we can see Klingon society as it truly is. Even so, they do often wander into self-parody territory.

The Klingons, in their current iteration, are a feudal society ruled by a council made up of the most powerful families. Klingon society holds very little value on things such as currency and material gain (which results in the Klingon empire [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65l7RHUx2A having a very simplistic understanding of economics]), believing that anything you acquire without some form of blood, sweat and/or tears on your part is a pathetic and dishonorable way of going about things, much the same way many cultures used to hurl abuse at merchants and bankers. Another thing to keep in mind is that a Klingon's reputation is literally everything. This can be easily seen in the episode "The House Of Quark" where dying honorably can literally change the outcome of an entire noble house, later when the Grand Council is visibly disgusted at D'Ghor. No respectable Klingon uses ''money'' to defeat his opponents. And no respectable Klingon would be so eager to perform an execution of an unarmed Ferengi in what was supposed to be an honorable duel. Klingons are still capable of being cunning and crafty, however, and having a high diplomacy score is viewed as honorable as they still have examples of cunning and clever heroes tricking boorish and stupid monsters.

[[Warhammer 40000|Klingons often carry swords into battle in an age of energy beam guns]]. In-universe, this is less suicidal than it sounds in the context of boarding actions and tight starship corridors. The Bat'leth is actually a rather shitty weapon. The Mek'leth is noted to be better in most situations. They use the same Disruptor weapons as the Romulans, and at one point used similar starship designs. While is explained as the result of a temporary and unholy alliance, given the eventual animosity between the two races, it was just an excuse to reuse props on a limited budget.

The Klingons are tied with the Vulcans and the Borg as being the most prominent and recognizable non-human species in Star Trek. Beloved of the Internet and the general public, to the point that there are published books like "A Klingon Christmas" in the world. The Klingons have their own constructed language. If you are ever worrying that you might not be a nerd, learning Klingon will solve that problem for you. Please note that this is in general considered by experts to be pathognomonic of [[Chris-Chan|autism]]. You have not experienced Shakespeare until you hear it in the original Klingon.
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'''The Romulan Star Empire'''
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''"It's always chess with the Romulans"''

You know those [[Eldar|Vulcans]]? Well a few thousand years ago, as their planet was ravaged by war, some of them turned to intense emotional control and logic to tame their murderous passions, while most others left the planet altogether, founding a colony on the planet Romulus and dubbing themselves [[Dark Eldar|Romulans]]. Since said planet shares a name with a mythical figure known for founding [[Roman Empire|a city which built a vast empire]], and they had warp drive while those around them did not, you probably know that they turned to building an empire of their own. They hold the second place of prominence as immediate rivals to the Federation. Comically, they actually have better emotional control than the average Vulcan, since they gene-engineered most of their problems away years ago, and don't have to deal with the emotional blowback from pon'farr. The downside is that they lost some of their cousins' niftier powers, like mind-reading and being able to transfer their soul into another person for safekeeping. Although Star Trek Online also revealed that their trip to Romulus was a terrible ordeal, and their gene-engineering was taking during that time resulting in them losing most emotions save for bitterness of being "forced out".

The difference between the Klingons and the Romulans is basically the difference between Gork and Mork, or Khorne and Tzeentch. Klingons will fight you up front with simple brute force. Romulans are sneakier guys, preferring to fight you when you're not looking with spies, cloaked ships and complex plots behind the scenes and playing the long game. There is a lot of political infighting among them, though where the Klingons would duel to the death Romulans would seek to discredit their rivals, have them die in unfortunate "accidents" or disappear. This difference has left both Romulans and Klingons with a big hate-boner for each other, to the Romulans the Klingons are crude brutish barbarians and to the Klingons the Romulans are a pack of scheming cowardly weaklings.

Like the Klingons, they served as a rough Cold War allegory. In this case, they were rough analogs to Communist China (as seen by 1960s Americans), a distant horde of inscrutable and potentially dangerous Orientals who generally were unseen and projecting vague menace, but when encountered face-to-face could pack quite a punch indeed: the first major Interstellar War that Star Trek Earth fought was with the Romulans, which was fought entirely in space with neither side ever seeing the other face to face. Afterward, they set up a 'Neutral Zone' between the Federation and the Romulan Empire that no one even tried to cross for a century. From the Original Series onward, they frequently squabble and bicker with the Federation, before joining forces with them to fight the Dominion in ''Deep Space Nine'' and having their government devastated in ''Nemesis''.

In one of the two alternate universes created by J.J.Abrams movies, the so-called "Prime Universe", Romulus itself got caught in a supernova as part of the Abramsverse's backstory. ''Picard'' has revealed that Starfleet was going to help evacuate Romulus before the nova hit, but then some rogue androids destroyed the shipyards that the rescue fleet was being built at, so the Federation shrugged, flipped the Romulans the bird, and let them get blown up. The Romulan Star Empire collapsed in the aftermath, with the surviving Romulans are now scattered across half the galaxy. Most of the former Romulan colonies are now officially governed by the Romulan Free State, but their ability to exert their authority is implied to be limited at best and non-existent at worst. The Neutral Zone, in particular, collapsed into near lawlessness. Some of them have got hold of a Borg cube and are presumably up to some nefarious shit with it.
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'''The Ferengi Alliance'''
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[[Image:GW_Ferengi.jpg|thumb|left|A typical ferengi engaged in typical ferengi activities]]
''"A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all."''-Eighteenth Rule of Acquisition

Introduced in ''TNG's'' early days as the villains for the series, and what [[/pol/]] thinks Jews are. Some Jewish people have actually complained about their being subliminally Jewish and thus anti-Semetic, specifically mentioning that they were moneyhungry, lascivious, and ugly, and their large ear lobes were stand-ins for the sterotypical Jewish nose ([https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/08/14/science-fictions-anti-semitism-problem/?noredirect=on more on that here, we're not shitting you]), based on an old medieval stereotype that was enforced to prevent them owning land or assets. The idea was to make a caricature of capitalism as a contrast with the techno-communist Federation. This might have worked if these were not [[FAIL|''TNG's'' early days]]. Instead they overshot the mark by a light year or so, on top of other bad decisions, and you got a race of short (Gene wanted to make an evil short race as big evil races were overplayed), big-eared, [[goblin]]-like losers about as threatening as a grumpy pug. Over the first and second seasons they tried to make these guys threatening, but they fell flat on their face every time. Eventually the writers just said "fuck it" and the Ferengi got demoted to comic relief species, and their status as terrible enemies was demoted to propaganda designed to scare the Federation while the Ferengi government tried to figure out what to make of a species that rejected the acquisition of wealth as a goal. The Ferengi had some good moments in the later seasons of ''TNG'', but most of the best stuff that fleshed them out came from ''DS9'', which had an [[awesome]] Ferengi bartender named Quark as a major character. For an idea of what the Ferengi might have been like if the writers had their shit together, look up the Druuge of [[Star Control|Star Control II]] or the Magog Cartel from Oddworld.

Ferengi religion is only hinted upon in ''DS9'', but what is seen implies a simplistic system based on financial success. Ferengi all follow a rulebook/canon known as the Rules of Acquisition, which can be described as Ayn Rand IN SPACE and condensed into the form of Confucius' Analects. There are 285 of these, each a short piece of advice on how to stay in the black. Examples include "Peace is good for business," "War is good for business," "Never have sex with the boss's daughter," and "Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack." The first, and most important, of these is "Once you have their money, you never give it back." Sometimes, the Ferengi Randian spirituality extends into outright interpretations of the afterlife: according to some, the afterlife consists of the Divine Treasury and the Vault of Eternal Destitution, which are respectively analogous to Heaven and Hell. Entrance into one or the other depends on one's business ventures at the time of death; those that were turning a profit are allowed to enter the Divine Treasury, and the rest are damned to the Vault.

Ferengi government is ruled over by a Grand Nagus, a mix between a <s>pope</s>chief rabbi and a CEO, and he basically treats his civilization like some sort of company, with citizens regarded as workers. Directly below him is the Ferengi Commerce Authority, a [[what|quasi-religious]] organization dedicated to ensuring that correct business practices were followed and correct moral behavior was shown (including keeping the proles in line), although to the Ferengi, these are one and the same. The agents of the FCA are the Liquidators, who are essentially Inquisitors crossed with IRS auditors on steroids. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Ferengi females have no rights and are mentioned as [[PROMOTIONS|not even being allowed to wear clothes]], which leads to [[That Guy|boorish behavior]] on the part of Ferengi towards just about any species. Of course, we see female Ferengi on the show who push that envelope, but it seems that overall "regressive" does not even begin to describe the gender relationships in their culture. Quark's mother, a social climber who marries the head of their government, begins pushing through a women's rights movement during DS9, which proves more successful as time goes on.
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'''The Borg Collective'''
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[[Image:Borg cube.jpg|300px|thumb|right|The Borg have assimilated and improved your [[d6|die]]. It always rolls six. Crap your pants, 'cause resistance is futile.]]
{{Topquote|We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture shall adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.|The Borg's opening hail. This is not a boast or a brag, it's them simply explaining you how things are going to go down.}}
{{Topquote|One other thing. You may encounter Enterprise crew members who've already been assimilated. Don't hesitate to fire. Believe me, you'll be doing them a favour.|Picard going full [[grimdark]].}}

The Ferengi were utter failures as serious villains, so they needed something to fill that gap. Thus they made the Borg, an aggressive [[Tyranid|hive-minded]] collective of hyper-adaptive, [[Necron|regenerating]] cyborgs that assimilates entire species into itself in its attempt to improve and evolve. Shit, that's like coming up with [[Warforged]] while trying to replace [[Kender]].

In many ways, the Borg are the truest dark reflection of the Federation, and despite their name, they're not Swedish. While the Feds want you to join their little club on your own, to "add your culture to the galactic community," the Prime Directive means they will ultimately accept you turning them down, even if you have shit they really want. The Borg say "fuck that" and just absorb you. While the Federation believes everyone should work together [[Tau|for the greater good]], they still have a very strong sense of individualism and a culture of personal accomplishment (unless your individual belief happens to run counter to the Federation's principles anyway, in which case you're just WRONG because the Federation is the best). The Borg pool all their minds together into a massive collective consciousness in the pursuit of group perfection, becoming an almost-literal personification of techno-capital. The Federation is all about beauty and tranquility and all that hippie stuff, and their tech is eco-friendly and dolphin-safe. Borg [[Tyranids|strip mine entire planets and drain entire oceans]] in the name of growth and efficiency.

Your standard Borg [[Cubes|cube]] is a huge multi-kilometer [[Firaeveus Carron|metal box]] (yes, bigger than most [[Imperial Navy]] cruisers) able to go up against an entire Federation warfleet and win. That's right, one of their ships could threaten the entire Federation and [[Exterminatus]] Earth. When done right, [[Necron|they are a cold, calculating, nigh-unstoppable force, a threat to all life]] that wants to retain free and distinct personalities (although they will ignore a single person if not on an assimilation mission, as what they really want is to absorb whole civilizations). Apparently, in Picard's nightmare in ''First Contact'', the Borg assimilation process includes a surgical [[Grimdark|drill through the eye. While awake.]] Of all the stuff to come out of the TNG Era they are undoubtedly the most well recognized in mass pop culture.

Unfortunately the got a bad downgrade during ''Voyager'' (the Borg Queen blew up cubes full of tens of thousands of drones because a few of them have been severed from the Hive Mind), but even there they were frequently not to be messed with. One amusing thing to note for people that haven't watched ''TNG'': the Borg were actually only in six episodes (and three were breakaway drones) and one movie, yet they're arguably the franchise's most famous pure villains aside from Khan. Goes to show how good they were when written properly. Then in ''Voyager'' they get their shit completely pushed in when they discover a new race of extradimensional aliens which they label Species 8472, which were immune to being assimilated, and had to ask the Federation for help in dealing with them. [[Necron#Regarding_Fluff_Change_-_Sore_Butts_Everywhere.|Wait, this sounds familiar...]]
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'''The Cardassian Union'''
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Introduced in ''TNG'', they are third fiddle to the Klingons and the Romulans. If the Klingons are hypothetically-honorable techno-barbarian warriors and the Romulans are an empire of civilized and refined but sly and ruthless expansionists, the Cardassians are essentially scaly fascists re-enacting ''[[1984]]'' IN SPACE. Their trials announce the outcome at the beginning, and the defense attorney is executed if he wins. Also, THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!

Originally a race of peaceable, spiritual artists called the Hebitians (ironically not dissimilar to the Bajorans), modern Cardassia was born in hunger and desperation when their homeworld began to suffer simultaneous mass famine, pandemic, resource depletion, and ecological collapse. A military junta seized power, figuratively and literally auctioned off the soul of their culture through liquidating all the planet's art and religious artifacts into cold hard cash, and turned the Cardassians into the opportunistic imperialists they are today.

Despite being a whole lot weaker than the Federation, the Cardassians manage to hold their own, partly because what they lack in resources and raw power is made up for by a combination of intense cunning and high charisma stats. Compared to the equally deceptive Romulans, the Cardies are more likely to flash you a smile while tickling your ribs with a knife. They'll use any tool they can to gain the upper hand and while that often means unpleasant and terminal sessions in dark rooms, strip mined planets and the enslavement of entire species, they'll gladly become your bestest buddy if it would achieve their goals. Their intelligence service, the Obsidian Order, is also one of the most ruthlessly efficient organizations in the entire sector, managing to outscale the Romulan Tal Shiar when it comes to producing magnificent bastards and manipulating the politics of entire worlds to their advantage. Unlike the Romulans or the Klingons, they don't tolerate the sort of literal infighting that is rampant in both those states, that shit only serves to weaken '''GLORIOUS CARDASSIA''' and needs to be stamped out with ruthless efficiency. Exposing that someone who just happens to be your enemy as being a dangerous subversive is just a benefit, although this can result in both sides of a conflict shouting "For Cardassia!" as they charge each other. Sort of how Democrats and Republicans are both for America, yet oppose each other.

Cardassia has a very fluid hierarchical government, similar to the political realities of post-Stalin but pre-Collaspe Soviet Russia. Broadly speaking, there are three different facets of the government: the Central Command (which holds all the power) the Obsidian Order (who holds the least amount of power, but controls the most puppets) and the Detapa Council (similar to the [[High Lords of Terra]] and just as worthless). Cardassian society holds a very strict view of family, placing family just below the needs of the State in a vague approximation of Confucianism.

The State holds a semi-divine mythical status in the eyes of its citizens, with it being viewed as impossible for the State to ever make mistakes. The ideal Cardassian life was one of complete loyalty and servitude to the State and family, with the "repetitive epic," detailing how generations of Cardassians go on to serve both in exactly the same way over and over seen as the height of their culture. The Cardassian government is assumed to be omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent by pretty much every Cardassian, with all Cadassians gladly giving of themselves to the State. Such was this level of belief that when Picard was tortured by the Obsidian order, the torturer saw nothing wrong with bringing his daughter to work because he was working for the State, and therefore the torture of Picard could never be disturbing or wrong. That's why their trials announce their sentences at the beginning and execute the defense attorney if he wins; their "trials" are more excuses to show off the power and infallibility of the State to the masses than actually determine guilt or innocence.

As far as plot significant activities went, they had a war with the Federation a few years before ''TNG'' which ended in the creation of a Demilitarized Zone between the two powers and (significant to ''Deep Space Nine'') abandoning the previously occupied planet of Bajor they had exploited for resources. After a disastrous war with the Klingons and The Maquis led to a popular revolution and overthrow of the existing government, one leader seized power, declared himself absolute leader, and joined the Dominion towards the end of ''DS9'', which was some serious bad news for the ''DS9'' crew.
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'''The Bajoran Republic'''
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The Bajorans are a species native to the Planet Bajor. They were, until shortly before the events of ''Deep Space Nine'', under a brutal occupation by the Cardassians who strip mined their planet. They had a fighting resistance which veered in and out of being considered terrorists and all in all were often represented as Palestinians IN SPEHSS. After that, they got their independence, although they're thinking about joining the Federation. The Bajorans have one system and are technologically backwards; the Federation is technically breaking the Prime Directive by interacting with them, but as they've spent years under the oppression of a warp-capable species, they can probably handle it. Also ''DS9'' proves that ancient Bajorans managed to travel at warp speeds to Cardassia using solar sails and an enormous amount of luck, which technically makes them a warp-capable species. The only reason why they are significant in terms of the politics of ''Star Trek'' is that they have a wormhole near their planet, which has some timey-wimey aliens living it that they worship as gods, and serves as the only way to get to or from the Gamma Quadrant that won't take decades, making it strategically priceless. Hilariously, this was discovered almost immediately after the Cardassians ''thought'' they'd extracted everything of value from the Bajorans and peace'd out, certain that the system was no longer worth the PR hit they were taking from it, only to get burned by some harsh seller's remorse. Also, their species has the oldest civilization (roughly a half-million years) of any major ''Star Trek'' race, and the wormhole aliens have gifted them some cool shit, like the Orb of Time.

The big thing that makes the Bajorans unique is that they actually have a serious religion going on -the human race is depicted as mostly non-religious. They're also probably one of the most accurate depictions of any highly religious alien race in a sci-fi franchise, because they are divided between the majority who interpret their religion as [[Noblebright|peace and love]], and a small but loud minority of bastards who interpret it as [[Grimdark|condoning acts of terrorism]]. A blatant attempt to simulate Israelis for criticism, although that can apply to many religions nowadays.
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'''The Dominion'''
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A vast empire which exists on the other side of the galaxy in the Gamma Quadrant. The Dominion is ruled over by a species of liquid shapeshifters called The Founders.(aka Changlings aka Odo's people) They have at their disposal a military composed of two genetically engineered species that worship the Founders as gods: the short and articulate Vorta who serve as ambassadors, bureaucrats, and political commisars and the big brutal Jem'hadar, who are vat grown, drug addicted, cannon fodder. These oversee a large number of vassal races, including (as of later seasons of ''DS9'') the Cardassians.

The Founders were once (according to them anyway) a peaceful, kind civilization of explorers who wished to see the galaxy, explore strange new worlds, and seek out new forms of life. Unfortunately, they did this in the wrong neighborhood, and quickly ran into species who did not tolerate others. The fact that the Founders were shapeshifters capable of mimicking almost anyone did not help either. Paranoia, mutual mistrust, and some very bad things eventually led to the Founders deciding "fuck this" and moving their planet into a nebula so nobody would bother them. So more or less, a [[Grimdark|grimmer]], [[Grimdark|darker]], counterpart to the Federation, but with spookier Real Aliens.

The Founders are obsessed with order and are both extremely racist and xenophobic, and believe that all alien life is inherently untrustworthy and evil, and the best thing to do is conquer/enslave them before they do the same to them. They don't care about the rights of "Solids", and will happily ignore any sense of decency when convenient. This can be seen when The Dominion runs a simulation of the Dominion dominating the Alpha Quadrant. When O'Brien is assaulted by a Jem'Hadar and severely beaten to the point of needing emergency teleportation to medical (the crime being "disrespectful"), the Founders (disguised as Federation Officers) do not press charges, and when Sisko comes barging in demanding answers, dismiss him with little concern about their own soldiers brutalizing citizens. Their overall ideology could be thought of as Qin legalism IN SPACE: people are inherently evil and the only way to make a better world is to impose order upon them through brute force from a position of absolute, unquestioned power.

The Founders, when not wandering around in various forms, tend to spend their time in a massive ocean literally made up of countless billions of Founders, something which is referred to as the Great Link. According to the Founders, this allows them to share information with each other and come to peaceful decisions. This is rapidly proved to be bullshit; when a separated-at-birth one of their own merged into the Great Link to share his memories of the Federation as peaceful and tolerant space hippies, not only did the Founders ignore his memories, but actively fucked with his mind in an attempt to turn him into a sleeper agent. And even if it weren't, it shows their hypocrisy through their willingness to share freedom and liberty among themselves while depriving all their various slaves and conquered peoples of the same.

The Founders are massive dicks, even to their own people. Failure among Jem'Hadar is rewarded with slow and painful death from deprivation of the drug they're created to need and their lifespans are incredibly short. To be even bigger dicks, the Vorta have no sense of taste and can't appreciate beauty. Not to make them better diplomats, but because they were raised from a primitive stone-age ape tribe, and the Founders think they shouldn't be ever allowed to forget that. (On the plus side, they did give the Vorta an immunity to poison that would make [[Mortarion]] himself jealous. [https://youtu.be/rACCZaBcq1g?t=1m29s Observe.]) This may also stem from their own neuroses: the Founders themselves have almost no bodily needs at all and require no nourishment, so they design their slaves to be like them. Notably, Vorta tend to come in [[Paranoia|packs of clones; a new one is activated when an old one dies, and they retain some memories and personality between "lives,"]] further hammering home how expendable they are to their makers.

And both races are literally engineered to love their makers for what they have done to them and worship and revere them as gods.

Continuing from the Cardassian Union section because the fate of both powers are linked in DS9. After joining the The Dominion. Everything was going seemingly for them and their leader Gul Dukat. They figured out how to bring down the minefield created by the Starfleet crew of Deep Space Nine to block access to the wormhole. (The Cardassians use its old name Terok Nor while in charge.)

However during the start of the sixth season the Founders learn that their not the only "gods" in the Galaxy. As the Sisko convinces the Bajoran Prophets to remove the Jem'Hadar reinforcements in transit. Forcing them to retreat back to Cardassian Space and Dukat's old friend Damar shoots Dukat's half Bajorion daughter Ziyal. This makes Dukat jump off the deep end as the sod loses his sanity and than goes full nutcase after his rehab transport is destroyed by the Jem Hadar, and ends up fighting an injured Benjamin Sisko after hiding inside some caverns on a hell planet for a few days.

After escaping he allows one of the evil wormhole aliens to possess him, kills Jadzia Dax, forgives Damar for killing a family member. Creates a cult of Bajorions dedicated to the Pai-Wraths,than abandons the cult when Major Kira knocks over the suicide pill jar that mixes it in with his fake. Than has sex with an old woman and becomes a demi-god. Bent on buring the universe despite the fact that his own people suffered heavily under the rule of the Dominion. After getting a final bitch slap from the Sisko who gets to have a happy ending living with his god alien parents. At the same time teaching them not to be huge dicks. While Dukat himself is trapped in the Fire Caves on Bajor.

His old friend Damar despite murdering a half breed woman is a lot more sane. Lacking Dukat's crimisa, things get worse for him and the Cardassians under Dominion rule. Most of their victories are off screen such as taking over Betazed. One of the none few major non founding planets of the Federation. This forces the Sisko to bring the Romulans into the war on the side of the Klingon-Federation alliance. With some underhanded methods from a former member of the Cassidian Obsidian Order(Elim Garak). I.e. blow up a Romulan Senator's shuttlecraft and tricking the pointy ears into thinking a damaged but fake datarod(an advanced form of Solid State Drive) was the real deal.

Thus the blame for his death will be switched from the Feds and pals are shifted to the Cardassians. By the final season this leads to the Dominion finding new best buds in the form of The Breen. Damar decides he has enough of the bullshit and in the ultimate irony realizes that the status of his people are now no different from the Cardassian occupied Bajor.

So after the Breen score the Domain a temporary victory over the Federation Alliance. Damar and his Cardi buds destroy a Dominion cloning facility while their backs are turned. Just so he can stick it to his "friend" the Vorta, Weyoun 8. Leaving them and the Klingons being the only thing stopping The Dominion from steamrolling over the Alpha Quadrant. As one Bird of Prey(doesn't say if its the frigate sized B'rel or Light Cruiser sized K'vort class. Though DS9 almost always used the former) was immune to the Breen energy dampening weapon due to modding its warp core. Gowron, due to being a moron who did nothing to change course after his most trusted advisor(Martok) turned out to be a Founder and the first time the Jem Hadar kicked their asses during the Klingon-Cardassian War. Decides to take glory for himself and discredit General Martok(who now how his pre Dominion internment job). This goes as badly as your thinking. Forcing Worf(now a legitimate badass compared to his TNG days) to kill him and turning the role of Chancellor to Martok.

Meanwhile the Feds decided to help out Damar's resistance by sending him Colonel Kira(who now has the rank of a Starfleet Commander), Odo and Garak(Ziyal's former simi-boyfriend). The resistance eventually get their hands on one of the Breen Energy Dampeners. During some infighting Damar realizes that the restoring the old Cardassia is pointless. Killing one of his old friends. The Breen and Jem'hadar do eventually one up the resistance. But not before their brutality turns more Cardassian against them. So during the final space battle this makes the Cardi military switch sides.
Damar is killed during the final raid on the Dominion HQ. Focing Kira and Garak to lead the final push into the compound.
The War between the Alpha Quadrant Alliance and The Dominion ends when Odo offers to share the cure to the disease created by Section 31(the Federation's answer to the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order) which he passed onto them after the Founders also infected him with something that forced him to return to the Great Link the first time. He also promises to rejoin the Great Link so the Founders will learn not to be paranoid assholes.
It's difficult to say who are the bigger dicks here. The Founders for having Wayoon 4 infect Odo to return and turned him into into a solid(who was restored because dying a Changeling baby merged with him a season later) for killing a Founder who hacked the Defiant and almost succeeded at starting a war in the Alpha Quadrant. Or Section 31 for making the disease in the first place.

With all their advanced technology. One would think the Founders would have discovered a cure before being handed one. But the bad guys being just as flawed as everyone else is a common theme in Star Trek. Even in Star Trek Online despiste Odo being the one in charge a few decades later. As their Ambassador to the Federation. The experiments of the Founders sketchy past cause them and everyone else huge headaches including the dishonorable mention of the revived True Way movement.(i.e. the guys who hated that fact that the civilian Detapa Council ran Cadassaia.)

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'''Species 8472 / Undine'''
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The one and only race in the galaxy even the Borg don't want to fuck with. Introduced in Voyager, Species 8472 are three-legged creatures that live in a space called Fluid Space. It's similar to the [[Eye of Terror]] for the fact that it connects to an alternate dimension and [[Khorne|everyone will be ripped apart upon entering.]]

When the Borg first came around to try and assimilate them they were completely obliterated in a war in which 4 million Borg were killed in the first few days at the cost of almost no members of Species 8472. This war was such a roflstomp that the Borg were forced to call on the Federation for help. [[Tau|The Federation being the better people swallowed their pride and decided to help their sworn enemies,]] [[Eldrad|but were dicks and sent only one ship.]]

Species 8472 fought with fast moving, small ships and devastating beam weapons so the small ship of the Federation could keep up with them and helped the Borg force the species back into Fluid Space. The Federation were the villains on this one. That said, they eventually came to an accord with Species 8472, preventing further wars between the denizens of Fluid Space, except in lots and lots of video games that want to use a fresh antagonist.

That and that in ''Star Trek Online'', [[Awesome|they look like the fucking Predator.]]
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===The Q===

The Q are a race of beings who have elevated themselves to the point where they are basically gods. Most of them do not interact directly with the younger races, who they tend to consider with disdain- if they consider them at all. However a few of them take a more enlightened view, and one in particular has been known to fuck with individual humans from time time. They are mostly a TNG thing, and even there they work mostly by grace of John de Lancie's acting chops as a counterpoint to the charisma of Patrick Stewart, as de Lancie played the ''character'' Q, an all-powerful epic [[troll]] (no, not the fantasy kind) who's occasionally [[Tzeentch]]ian games sometimes appeared to be for his own amusement and sometimes acted as education or event protection to the human race. Various subplots involving the Q ''species'' range from somewhat thought provoking to mildly entertaining to ridiculous and banal, but the classic episodes that highlighted the charisma and chemistry of the two actors were often quite excellent.

=== The Mirror Universe ===
Not so much of a faction as an alternate setting, this is a parallel universe in which [[Alternate History|things have gone differently]] in Earth's History. The main point of divergence appears to occur when the Vulcan scientists who landed at Bozeman, Montana in 2063 are not welcomed with alcohol and music but instead are killed and have their ship looted. It is equally clear that where the main universe is Noblebright the Mirror Universe is Grimdark. Instead of a peace loving Federation searching for knowledge and friendly cooperation for the betterment of all, Earth gave rise to the ''Terran Empire'' which seeks out new life and civilizations to conquer and enslave, as it had done with the Klingons. Pretty much it's the PG-13 version of the Imperium of Man with a bit more Grimderp. Junior officers get promoted by killing their superiors, those that fail at that get thrown in the agony booth for their troubles and Emperor gets the job by usurping the previous incumbent. As a rule, characters in the mainline become, in the Mirror Universe, a selfish asshole version of themselves (or have to go along to get along: O'Brien, Spock). Following comic book logic the uniforms for the female characters are more revealing. Occasionally people can cross over from one universe to the next due to technobabble and cause mischief in either realm.

Originally it was a one off TOS setting for an episode of the week, but it was brought back in a few novels and some romps in Deep Space Nine in which [[Fail|the Terran Empire had fallen]]. In Enterprise's fourth season it got a two parter that was pretty good and would have been an annual thing if the show had been renewed, this one having little crossover with the main universe (a ship from TOS ended up in the Mirror Universe and is salvaged after all it's crew have died). We also went there in Discovery, for better or worse. Voyager never did the mirror universe, but instead got a homage episode with some alien historians in the far future getting the details wrong like historians tend to.

== The Star Trek Crew ==
Whether the focus of the show is exploration, manning a space station in an important locale or trying to get home, all Star Trek series have a basic set up of casting and focus: namely on a collection of people who are usually the senior most officers on the ship. If you decide to make a Star Trek inspired game take this into consideration.

* '''The Captain''': Big cheese. Makes the hard decisions. Needs to be able to talk, think or fight out of situations as needed. The third option fetishist finding the balance between empathy and reason. (Two least skubby examples: Kirk and Picard, but the skub will fly hard if you say one is better than the other, sufficed to say that people like both of them alot but for different reasons)
* '''The First Officer''': Second in command and trusted advisor. Added after the original series, where the role was combined with and split between two others. (Two least skubby examples: Riker and Kira)
* '''The Science Officer''': Got high Int stats. Can analyze the situation and work out solutions. The voice of reason. Almost never human. (Two least skubby examples: Data and Spock)
* '''The Engineer''': Hard working technically minded guy who gets shit done. (Two least skubby examples: Scotty and Geordi)
* '''The Doctor''': Ship's healer with a secondary scientific role. The voice of empathy, whether prickly or serene. (Two least skubby examples: Bones and the EMH Doctor)
* '''The Security Officer''': Rough and tumble no-nonsense sort whose job it is to keep these guys alive when diplomacy fails, which it often does. Often has to juggle providing ship's security with working the tactical station on the bridge in a crisis. (Two least skubby examples: Worf and Odo)
* '''The Helmsman''': Got mad spacecraft piloting skills, either full-sized starships, shuttles, or fighters. (Two least skubby examples: Sulu and Tom Paris)
* '''The Other Guy''': A crewmember whose role doesn't cleanly map onto other positions, a role often restricted to a single show. Example positions include communications officer, ship's councilor, transporter chief, and linguist. (Two Least skubby examples: Uhura and Troi)
* '''The Outsider''': Someone who is a passenger and regular cast member, but exists outside the organization, looking in and commenting. Usually works a side-job, like tailor, bartender, or cook. Either a beloved fan-favorite or utterly despised, there is no middle ground. (Two Least skubby examples: Guinan and Quark)

Some of these hats may be worn by more than one character, some may be worn by no one at all. This is especially true in the original series, which had a smaller cast overall, and which put less emphasis on an ensemble and more on the main trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The usual roles and character dynamics were instead set down by ''The Next Generation'', which later series generally copied.

== The Shows ==
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===''The Original Series''===
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Created in 1966 by legendary sci-fi [[spiritual liege]] and money-grubbing sexist lounge lizard Gene Roddenberry and pitched as a "Wagon Train to the stars", it's a pulpy adventure sci-fi, full of fistfights, sword fights, and hammy speeches. (The guns never work.)

The USS ''Enterprise'' is tasked by the Federation to go on a five year mission to explore space: the final frontier, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations and boldly go where no man has gone before, though due to budget constraints, her crew often finds that man has in fact gone there before. Or at least something that looks exactly like a man but is actually an [[Xenos|alien]]; most episodes split the difference. James T. Kirk sleeps with [[Hot Chicks|hot alien babes]] who either die tragically or leave tearfully at the end of the episode, but it's 'k because he's too in love with the Enterprise to ever love a mere ''woman'' more. Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy are cold and logical and rash and emotional respectively, and their constant friction must be resulting in the best make-up sex in the world, Mr. Sulu and Lieutenant Uhura wait in vain for focus episodes that never come, Ensign Chekhov suffers horribly to the approval of American Cold War audiences, and Scotty [[gets shit done]]. Uniforms, while iconic, tend to look a bit civilian though. Miniskirts are apparently mandated attire for the ship's fan-servicey female "yeomen" and others, because 1966. The civilian nature of the attire (including, one must assume, the miniskirts, but they had a visual appeal all their own) were apparently an intentional design decision by Roddenberry who didn't want uniforms to look military. Further specialness on the part of Roddenberry demanded phasers not look like guns, instead looking like nothing in particular at all (although looking back at them today they look sort of like TV remotes, which would be invented much later), and also (probably the only sensible decision in this category) ships that didn't look like rockets, giving ships their distinctive and iconic saucer-engineering-nacelles look that still stands out today.

The Original Series frequently ran out of budget and entire episodes were filmed using spare costumes belonging to the production company, resulting in a series of extremely goofy excuses to go to planets full of gangsters or [[Nazi]]s. This is often copied by shows who don't realize it was done out of pure expediency, and nowadays this [[TVTropes|"Planet of Hats"]] gimmick is practically a box to check off when doing sci-fi adventure. The lack of budget also resulted in one of the more memorable inventions; unable to budget for a sequence showing the ''Enterprise'' or a shuttle landing on a new planet every week, the writers instead decided to invent the transporter to "beam" the crew down to planets or between starships. Also worth noting: despite its mediocre critical reception, ratings and eventual cancellation, not to forget the uneven quality of many episodes, especially in the Roddenberry-less third season where poor Fred Freiberger had to come onto a show he didn't understand and try to get better ratings with less money, ''TOS'' had a hell of a cultural impact thanks to syndication and it has been said that since it entered syndication in 1969, there hasn't been a 24-hour period without some TV station, in some country, playing Star Trek. Cancellation of The Original Series is now considered one of the worst decisions in TV history, and while much of its silly 60's campiness is now laughable, it often still manages to teach relevant and important lessons today.

Fun fact: the ''Enterprise'' and each of her 11 sister ships have enough firepower to [[Exterminatus]] a planet by themselves, after getting issued an order called General Order 24. This however is likely a time-consuming task. According to a later DS9 episode, it takes a fleet of 20 warships 1 hour of sustained bombardment to destroy a planets crust and 5 hours of sustained bombardment to destroy a planet down to its mantle. These 20 ships were also in service 100 years after the Enterprise so they were also more powerful.
Kirk has the distinction of being the only known captain to issue a [[Exterminatus|General Order 24]], because a planet was ''too'' much into wargames (he changed his mind after they dropped wargaming).
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===''The Animated Series''===
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The often forgotten middle child. More or less "seasons 4-5" of ''TOS'' with the same writing staff and actors, sans poor Walter Koenig. He was replaced by a weird camel person. He learned this at a convention, from a fan, while he was trying to announce he'd be writing an episode, which Gene promptly demanded he rewrite over and over. Classy.

Being animated allowed the staff to get a lot more creative with the alien designs and plots, and the writing and acting remain... well, top notch is a stretch, but certainly at the same levels as ''The Original Series'', with the occasional low point. Not ''nearly'' as bad as you're probably picturing from the name, although still limited by the low budget and primitive, cheap animation techniques of the television era it was aired in. Notably some sci-fi novelists were brought in to write some episodes, such as Larry Niven, and at least one episode, "Yesteryear," is considered such a pivotal moment in Spock's development that even people who hate the series enough to consider it all non-canon often make an exception just for that one.

Also, since the series now has no excuse for throwing in lots of Space Puritans and Space Wizards, it of course continued to do so to derptastic results, because by this point it had become traditional. The presence of a straight-up [[furry]] on the bridge, however, is downright unacceptable.
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===''The Next Generation''===
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Here's where it starts getting a little deeper and a little darker, although with a lot of left-wing political subtext turned up to 11. The USS ''Enterprise-D'' (the original and C were destroyed in action while A and B were retired) is, like its predecessor, tasked with going where no-one has gone before, but this time around the problems are less likely to be solved in a single episode. Jean-Luc Picard is the captain and he plots and negotiates his way to victory; Mr. Data is cold and unemotional, though not by choice - as an android, he'd very much like to change that; Riker takes over the captain's "sleep with alien babes" duties since Picard is married to the job; Worf the Klingon gets beaten up by monsters to show how tough the monsters are, meaning that Worf winds up looking incredibly weak by the end of the show's run and doesn't regain his badassery until his run on ''DS9''; Dr. Beverly Crusher is good old Bones minus his temper; Dr. Pulaski is Bones ''plus'' temper; Counsellor Troy is so badly written she becomes a running joke; and Geordi LaForge [[gets shit done]]. Only two things need to be said about helmsman Wesley Crusher: he was [[Mary Sue|Gene Wesley Roddenberry's shitty self-insert fanfic character]], and his sueness got to the point that even his actor started to hate him within the first season of the show.

Due to the massive success of The Original Series in syndication (and Paramount being [[Rage|pissed off]] by broadcast networks treating their most valuable IP like any other show), TNG was aired through syndication from the beginning. Although the first two seasons were laughably bad, the quality began to improve dramatically after an increasingly cocaine-addled Gene Roddenberry got too sick to keep ruining it and his partner-in-crime Maurice Hurley was thrown out on his ass, a moment often pinpointed via looking for when [[Meme|Riker grew a beard.]] The later seasons are widely considered to represent the apex of the franchise's episodic formula on the small screen (although ''DS9'' gave it a run for its money with a more serialized approach); sadly, this series only got one good movie.
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===''Deep Space Nine''===
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Unlike all the other series so far, ''Deep Space Nine'' primarily takes place in a fixed location - the titular space station Deep Space Nine, out near the borders of Federation Space. Said space station is near Bajor, which was recently freed from Cardassian occupation, and a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy which allows [[Warp|all sorts of of crazy shit to go down]]. If the other shows are a wagon train, this one's a border fort.

Benjamin Sisko is the captain, declared Emissary by the nearby Bajorans for making contact with the wormhole aliens they worship, and he successfully hybridizes the blow-the-shit-out-of-whatever-you-can't-punch Kirk approach with the talk-in-a-very-dignified-way-about-the-philosophy-of-the-thing-and-win-by-rhetoric Picard maneuver, in his ultimately-successful quest to become the baddest motherfucker in space, then literally becomes a space god. Kira the Bajoran ex-<s>terrorist</s> <S>''noble freedom fighter''</s> (who are we kidding she calls herself a terrorist) struggles to free and rebuild her people while coming to terms with the moral ambiguities of situations she prefers to see in black-and-white, Dr. Bashir works to find his character for several seasons before becoming a highlight, Dax gets often written poorly and has to switch bodies doing it, Odo IS ''Liquid Space Cop'', Quark runs his bar and [[troll|heckles]] the Federation, Garak pretends to be a tailor while definitely not being a super-spy and dropping killer lines, and Miles O'Brien [[gets shit done]]. Also, Worf wanders in halfway through, and actually gets to punch things instead of just getting punched by them. It's also a lot more political than other series (though ''TNG'' and ''Voyager'' have their moments) and the last series to have Gene Roddenberry's involvement (with less enthusiasm, in fact often much to the benefit of this particular series thematically, although Roddenberry's complete departure did not necessarily bode well for the franchise in general.)

It's the closest the pre-Kelvin series ever get to [[grimdark]], especially when the Dominion show up. The show has aged remarkably well and the terrorist/freedom fighter debate was repeatedly explored in a very mature and honest way. ''DS9'' is the most serialized of all Trek shows and could be considered a forerunner to the golden age of television with its long story arcs and deep character development. Overall, ''DS9'' has to be considered the most consistently good Trek show thanks to the excellent writing and fantastic performances from a truly wonderful ensemble cast. At least until the final season, when the writers who made it good were pulled to try and fail to make good movies, heralding the failure that was ''Voyager''. The finale episodes were mostly okay and tied up the story semi-satisfyingly, though a few die-hard subplots fell flat.

It wasn't without its controversies however. The show was airing around the same time as another thematically similar sci-fi show, ''Babylon 5''. Not only that but characters also shared similarities, as did the episodes. Interestingly, beginning of both series, introduction of characters and airing of similar episodes were often too close to each other for one show to copy the other but this did not stop massive [[Rage]] and [[/v/|fanboy wars]] from starting between fans of the two series accusing one another of plagiarism and having an inferior product. Happily, as time went on and both shows evolved, these hurt feelings have mostly faded.

How good is ''Deep Space Nine''? Every Star Trek series and even the reboot movies have pretty much ripped off ideas and concepts established during the series. Famously, within the "Trekker/Trekie" fan community, there's a little cell of fans who like it better than most other ''Star Trek''; these fans are typically called "Niners."
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===''Voyager''===
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Star Trek: Voyager centers around the eponymous USS ''Voyager'', a smallish ship which gets teleported over to the other side of the galaxy. The plot of the series centers on the crew's efforts to get back home, which COULD have made for an excellent premise. Unfortunately, there were few lasting story arcs, with most episodes being fully self-contained (as well as being littered with far too many episodes featuring holodeck or transporter incidents). As a consequence, despite being completely isolated from the Federation, no matter how bad things got Voyager always appeared in the next episode without a scratch, fully supplied, and with all its shuttlecraft intact. Think ''Gilligan's Island'' on a starship.

Like ''TNG'' and ''DS9'' it's a character-driven drama just as often as it is a sci-fi adventure romp, although compared to TNG only a few of the characters are particularly memorable. The captain and arguable "main character" is Kathryn Janeway, a Katharine Hepburn lookalike (I see what you did there) who is stern without being cold, and principled without being inflexible. The fan favorite is a character called "The Doctor" ([[Doctor Who|No relation]]); he's the solid-light hologram representative of the ship's emergency medical computer, who has to take on actual medical duties when their chief medical officer was conveniently killed in the pilot episode. Other than this, Chakotay is a peace-loving and spiritually rich indian <s>freedom fighter</s> <s>terrorist</s> [[FAIL|who was written with the help of a special cherokee consultant so native his name was Jamake Highwater and it turned out later on that he was actually jewish and didn't know dick about native cultures so he made everything up resulting in Chakotay basically being a borderline racist caricature of what you think indians are like. Akoochimoya.]] Tom Paris is an annoying jerk and is counterbalanced by Harry Kim who is the ideal boy-scout, making him only half as annoying and twice as boring. B'elanna Torres tries to perpetuate a lineage of dudes getting shit done but ends up blankly reciting her technobabble, having second degree plasma burns and – worst of all – systematically fails to get shit done whenever the warp core goes nuts. Tuvok tries hard to be as cool as Spock but ends up being a lame version of the n°1 Vulcan who uses logic to justify everything and makes it short for "you are wrong, I am right because I said so." Kes is passed as a fragile and nice character but it takes a couple of episodes to realize that having a short lifespan does not change the facts: [[powergamer|when you can boil someone to death from the inside of their body, drain life from everything around you to become stronger and do anything you want without knowing how, just by thinking of it]], you are a goddamn Mary Sue. From the fourth season onwards the only character the writers seemed to care about was Seven of Nine, [[Mary Sue|a human woman who recently escaped from Borg control and kept all of her cyborg enhancements but regained her free will]]; another Mary Sue, to be sure, but she's [[Hot Chicks|hot]], and the other characters are much worse, so that's not really a bad thing. Fortunately, The Doctor still received a lot of attention from the writers and almost single-handedly made the show watchable. There was also Neelix, who was the apparent inspiration for Jar-Jar Binks, and any sane crew would have pushed him out of an airlock on the first episode. Fans who stuck with the show despite its glaring failings were given one final slap in the face with the <s>controversial</s> shit final season, in which the producers decided "screw steadily crafting a satisfying conclusion to a story which we have wasted for most of the last seven years anyway; lets just ignore it until the final episode and then throw in some shit about trans-warp conduits and time travel, bitches love time travel!" If you did not care about any of the characters or the subplots or time travel making sense (the writers sure didn't), then the final episode was made just for you (and the Borg got a major setback, too, just don't think about the setup too hard).

The Doctor never once stopped being totally fucking awesome though (enough so to even earn a cameo in First Contact), and the great acting from the cast carries the series from being horrific to ''occasionally'' watchable. Just goes to show that no matter how good your actors are, they can't make diamonds out of shit.

Overall, most Star Trek fans view Voyager's legacy with a shrug and a "meh." Unfortunately, hopes that Voyager's successor would revitalize the franchise would soon prove to be overly optimistic.

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===''Enterprise''===
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From the minute the Nickelback-tier theme tune started, Enterprise attempted to take Star Trek in a new direction and was only partially successful in doing so. The series never quite caught its footing, although it still managed to have some enjoyable moments. It was most notable for providing a first-hand view of the key events that directly led to the formation of the Federation. The Federation's founding races were also featured heavily, with Andorians, Tellarites, and Vulcans all enjoying significant screen time alongside the human characters.

It's a prequel to the rest of the canon, taking place on the first ''Enterprise'', before the Federation was founded and during the period when Earth was still an independent power- so there's a lot of primitive versions of things from other series. At least the uniforms were pretty cool in an Air Force sort of way. Captained by <s>that guy from ''Quantum Leap''</s> Jonathan Archer, in hindsight the fact that they had to rename him from their original choice of Jeffrey Archer to avoid confusion with the disgraced British MP and author of the same name probably cursed the series with bad karma before it had even begun shooting. In an unusual twist for a ''Trek'' series, his first officer isn't a <s>terrorist</s> ''noble freedom fighter,'' however she does share a trait with her ''Voyager'' predecessor in that the actress who portrayed her frequently criticized the show's writers in interviews. Other than that, well, Hoshi Sato screams a lot, Travis Mayweather was so dull that even the writers forgot he existed, the resident Vulcan T'Pol serves as both the Science Officer and source of sexy fanservice, Malcolm Reed has an accent, Dr Phlox is a weird creepy alien with weird creepy alien morals (and gets surprisingly interesting when given enough screentime, which hardly ever happened), and Trip also has an accent and [[gets shit done]].

Was retooled twice, the third season tries to be ''24'' IN SPACE (stop some aliens, the Xindi, from blowing up Earth) while the 4th season is a massive apology about the last three seasons that tries to fix all the problems they had. As a result, the last season is the only one that's close to being really good.

Unfortunately, the poorly-received final episode is set on the holodeck of the Enterprise-D, which leaves us with the firm impression that the producers would have much rather have just continued making ''The Next Generation''. Considering the mediocre quality of the ''TNG'' movies we got instead, this probably would have worked out better for all involved (Or not since ''Voyager'' was that; its first episode was even numbered 901, as in Season 9 Episode 1).

Yet despite all the bad directing, subpar plots, and frankly boring episodes, ''Enterprise'' sometimes still manages to be moderately enjoyable with occasional moments of awesomeness if you can suffer through a fair few awful spots and aggressive mediocrity almost everywhere else. The focus on founding Federation races like the Andorans was refreshing and the technology level, being somewhere between the original series and the real world present-day, was quite interesting. We also got to see the Vulcans portrayed as arrogant, superior dicks. This actually makes a lot more sense than the way they're usually portrayed (which is fairly submissive towards humans) because they are, obviously and objectively, the superior race. The Klingons certainly still considered themselves to be honorable but the show made it clear that the Klingon notion of honor is rarely analogous to the human concept which was interesting as all hell to watch. There have been a few small nods to Enterprise in Discovery and the Abrams movies.

And let's be fucking honest, [[/tg/]] loves 40k and the Xindi arc was about as grimdark as shit gets. And that was awesome.

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===''Discovery''===
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----
<s>A LOAD OF SOCIAL JUSTICE SHIT!</s> Ahem, let's start again, shall we?

A new "prequel" series set 10 years before ''The Original Series.'' Again. Run exclusively on CBS' paid streaming service (unless you live outside the US and Canada, in which case you can get it on Netflix) to try and drum up sign-ups and revenue, it features a mix of ''Enterprise'' and Abramstrek aesthetics despite supposedly taking place in parallel to the TOS "The Cage" pilot while [[what|having technology superior to late DS9]] and introducing [[dune|mushroom-based space travel]] that would imply [[retcon|all later events and warp travel would be outdated]]. The trailer has attracted a lot of concern over the fact that Klingons have been completely redesigned to look like slit-nosed ogres wearing ancient Egyptian cosplay, and rumors that the Klingons shown were [[Racial Holy War|primitives who had been trapped in stasis]] proved to be unfounded, so there is no excuse. Not having a cold war to posture about, the new villains are based off of Trump-inspired xenophobia by the admission of the authors. Also the lead character is Spock's human sister that he never mentioned before, aka the ''exact'' origin of the [[Mary Sue]] which is just fucking depressing. To further reinforce this, there are ''numerous'' examples of dialogue and exposition that serve only to show how the Mary Sue main character was right all along, usually in conjunction with the death of the character that had foolishly disagreed with her. Want a new Star Trek episode about racism and immigration? Try the now-banned [https://youtu.be/3VEZH8bqytA Star Trek Continues]. Want Star Trek with humor, keep an eye out for the upcoming [https://ew-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/ew.com/tv/2018/10/25/star-trek-animated-comedy/amp/?fbclid=IwAR2WN6auDNm5YiunYhaqiu7vt9f-P08AuUjMpLA5LlpUgvTm9_xloJNRYb0 Star Trek: Lower Decks]; the prognosis doesn't look good so far, but let's wait for the release for the final recommendation. want a pseudo-Star Trek show about other modern issues? Try ''The Orville'' below; that's right, American Dad In Space may right now be a better Star Trek than an actual Star Trek series.

Initial reviews have been... well, it's shit. The writing is overly convoluted, the massive injection of grimdark into pre-TOS continuity is anathema to the hardcore fans (the ''human'' characters are often the ones doing the nastiest shit, including [[Marines Malevolent|trying to kill a Klingon party by planting an explosive on the corpse of one of their comrades for when they came to collect the dead]]) and the Klingons are so flat and devoid of characterization that they might as well be Larry the Cable Guy lookalikes wearing Trump hats. This is a massive disappointment for a series that promised to put a spotlight on Klingon culture but ended up retconning all the characterization that happened in TNG and DS9. It ''may'' get better with time (remember that it took two seasons for TNG to get really good) but given the release schedule (split between 2017 and 2018 with a long break) it may come too late for the fanbase to care. Currently it's cause for more fans to lose their shit over whether it's better or worse than the Abrams movies, which is a new record of [[Skub|Trek Skub]]. Releasing the show on CBS All Access instead of cable or broadcast TV makes it seem that executives don't really give a shit if the show succeeds or fails, bringing up the question of [[Bioware|whether they're deliberately putting Star Trek: Discovery in a no-win scenario where, no matter what happens, the executives have an excuse to cancel Star Trek altogether]].

Another stupid decision was not shelling out the cash to bring back Bruce Greenwood and Zachary Quinto as Captain Pike and Spock, respectively. Their ages wouldn't have mattered either if CBS and Paramount weren't too cheap to use the anti-aging CGI tech that is so commonplace these days. That being said, Anson Mount's portrayal of Captain Pike was a revelation that was BY FAR the most well-received aspect of Season 2.

There were also allegations that large chunks of the plot were stolen from previews of an in-development indie game (the unreleased 2014 game featured giant Tardigrades that had the ability to use an interstellar network to travel anywhere they wanted to- sound familiar?).

While Season 2 had some watchable moments, it was still middling at best, and nobody is ''ever'' going to let this series live down the garbage fire that was Season 1. If you do decide to watch Season 2, try not to think about it too hard once you are done. It gets worse and worse the more you think about it as you can and will come to realize that {{spoiler|the overarching plot hinges on time-travel but because the writing and production staff kept being shuffled, no one kept continuity so some of the hints of future actions or "red lights" are just forgotten about, some time-travel is done just to set up another event to make it possible for that same time-travel to happen. Think Bill and Ted, except lame and very confusing. Season 2 is an okay show if you look at the state-of-the-art visuals, let the big emotional moments grip you, but if you stop for a second and think about the continuity of events, you push yourself on a slippery slope that ends in not being able to ever trust the showrunning staff again.}}
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===''Picard''===
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Set to be a continuation of the original timeline, featuring old man Picard with Patrick Stewart reprising the role. Hopes are not high, but at the very least Patrick Stewart's presence should make it watchable if nothing else.

Update: It's bad. So, so bad.

The story so far: Picard ragequit Starfleet after they sat back and let the Romulans get blown up by the supernova mentioned in the first Abrams movie. This happened because some rogue androids orbitally bombarded Mars and blew up the rescue fleet that was being built there, so the Federation has banned all R&D on synthetic lifeforms and subsequently become [[Imperium of Man|isolationist, racist and xenophobic]] (does this remind you of anything?). Picard has been living in his family chateau ever since, making wine and hanging out with his dog and his Romulan housekeepers. Then a scared girl named Dahj turns up on his doorstep, and it turns out she's a highly advanced biological android constructed from the surviving bits of Data's positronic brain by the guy who wanted to dismantle Data in that episode "The Measure of a Man." Before Picard can really figure out what to do about her, she gets killed by a secret society of Luddite anti-Android Romulan assholes, but it turns it that's okay because she has a twin "sister" named Soji who is working with some other Romulans on a derelict Borg cube. Picard decides it's time to saddle up and go be a hero again. He starts putting together a crew that includes Agnes Jurati, a former cyberneticist; Raffi Musiker, his last executive officer, [[What|who is now an alcoholic drug-vaping hermit]] after getting kicked out of Starfleet; Cristobal Rios, a scruffy merc pilot whose ship is staffed entirely by holograms of himself; Elnor, a Romulan warrior monk raised by Romulan warrior nuns; and Seven of Nine, who has become a kickass pilot and is no longer wearing her infamous catsuit. Together, they're out to save Soji, stop the Romulans, and be the good guys in a galaxy that needs heroes, etc etc.

Key storytelling criticisms of the show include the idea that the Romulan Empire should have had enough infrastructure to effect an evacuation without help, and that even if they didn't, the Federation would ''never'' abandon a neighbor who was asking for help- not even a former enemy, and not even when doing so became difficult or inconvenient.

To make matters even more dumb and yet also more complicated at the same time, the showrunners are apparently under some kind of licensing agreement regarding the portrayal of images and concepts from the earlier shows. This means that they can't, for example, casually mention the Dominion War and its impact on the Federation, because if they did, they'd have to pay a licensing fee. This is why the show has been carefully crafted to look like a distant, derpy cousin of Star Trek, while only occasionally featuring cameos of things such as the Enterprise-D, or directly referencing arcs in previous shows: because if they use concepts from prior Star Trek shows, they have to pay for them.

Finally, when all has been said and done by the end of Season 1, Picard himself is reduced to a nearly-useless side character in his own show. Where once he commanded the admiration and respect of friends and foes alike, in this show he is consistently portrayed as a disrespected, disregarded, and often powerless caricature of himself, utterly reliant on the characters around him. {{spoiler|It doesn't help they legit kill him in the last episode and then made him an android after he also agreed to "kill" Data whose memories are basically in a server on a planet of Soong androids. The showrunners specifically came out and said their plan was always to kill Picard to make a point about how privileged he was being a captain in Starfleet. You can't make this shit up.}}

One other thing is certain. Whether you like the series or not, it's clear that this series is not taking place in Gene Roddenberry's noblebright vision of the Federation, and the fact that it is yet another grim, violent entry into the franchise is a point that has left many viewers with a bad aftertaste. If the rumors are true, then this show may have either killed the current grimderp Trek or has left fans so pissed that CBS is, once again, on the verge of financial ruin and possibly looking to sell the franchise since they aren't making the money they thought they would after the massive amounts of money they dumped into both this and Discovery.

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===''Strange New Worlds''===
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An attempt to put the golden goose back together on the operating table. After seeing the reception of having Captain Pike in Discovery, Paramount decided to simply return to the pilot cast of The Original Series with its fingers crossed that the old bird will resume replicating gold eggs.

NOTE: It may or may not actually come to light as rumors are leaking out that CBS has been pitching this, a Section 31 show and several other show ideas to try and get funding after failing to actually make money from their streaming service and dumping millions into Discovery and Picard with little return in way of merchandising money. It seems CBS and Paramount suits are desperate for their own version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (What Warner Bros. failed to do with their DC movies) While having little to no understanding of what makes both it and Star Trek popular in the first place.

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===''Lower Decks''===
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A new animated series being written by Mike McMahan, the guy who does the Rick & Morty cartoon. It's set in 2380 and will apparently focus less on the bridge crew in general and more on the grunts working in the bowels of the ship, specifically four ensigns including an Orion named Tendi which leads one to believe the show will probably be focused mostly on lowbrow "humor" episodes with technobabble nonsense stapled to it just like McMahan's other works. Expect people to be spouting off inane bullshit and saying "you're just not intelligent enough to understand" if you call out their dumb bullshit. Barring that expect a lot of "REEEEEEEEE" shit.

Is due to come out in August 2020..

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== Homages ==
Being such a long-running franchise with a wide audience, Star Trek has gained enough pop-culture recognition that it is often referenced in other works. In a few cases entire projects are made to pay homage Star Trek. Here are some examples.

=== Galaxy Quest ===
A sci-fi/comedy film released in 1999, directed by Dean Parisot. It parodies science fiction films and series in general, but particularly ''Star Trek'' and its fandom. The film stars big name actors including Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver and the late Alan Rickman. The plot revolves around the cast of a defunct cult television series called Galaxy Quest (for example, Tim Allen played the Kirk/Shatner expy and Alan Rickman played the Spock/Nimoy expy). They're also suffering fatigue that mirrors the experiences of the actual Star Trek actors (Rickman's character is typecast with his Galaxy Quest character and laments it, similar to how these things happened to the late, great Leonard Nimoy).

The cast are suddenly visited by actual aliens, the Thermians, who believe the series to be an accurate documentary (they have no concept of fiction and only the most bare bones idea of lying) and seek their help. The Thermians take the actors with them, who find themselves involved in a very real, and dangerous, intergalactic conflict, and unlike the show where it all wrapped up quickly they struggle to learn about and relate to the aliens. Speaking of the aliens, in a witty nod to the "rubber forehead aliens" so common in Star Trek, the Thermians first appear to resemble humans with unnaturally pale skin and straight hair, but that's revealed to be a holographic disguise and their true forms are squid-like. Can these actors find greatness within themselves, and possibly personal redemption? (Spoiler: yes, and it is incredible.)

Built around that ''Three Amigos'' premise of "What if the cast of ''Star Trek'' ended up on a real spaceship and had to actually do the shit they did in the show?" Featuring a veritable all-star cast of talented comedians and character actors, this is one of the best parodies ever made, and an affectionate love-letter to the franchise as a whole.

===Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning===
Another parody, parodying not only ''Star Trek'' but ''Babylon 5'' as well. The seventh in a series fan movies released in 2005, it's about Captain Pirk builds a starship called CPP ''Kickstart'', allies with Russia and takes over the world. He wants to take over more planets but the ships of his P-Fleet aren't fast enough to travel outside the Solar system. A maggot hole opens and it leads to an alternate reality. Pirk wants to take over the Earth of this reality, which leads to an [[awesome]] space battle between the P-Fleet and the fleet of the space station Babel 13 led by Johnny Sherrypie. The movie features some of the best special effects ever put in a sci-fi movie, which is pretty impressive, considering that this is an amateur film with a very low budget and was rendered in five years in someone's bedroom. The film is spoken in Finnish but subtitles are available for a wide variety of languages, including Klingon. They also made [https://web.archive.org/web/20070828010927/http://rpg.starwreck.com/ a role-playing game based on it], where your character [[Truenamer|becomes more incompetent]] [[Page 42|as he levels up]].

===Star Trek: Renegades===
Kickstarter Trek. The makers submitted their made-for-TV movie pilot to CBS in an attempt to get it made into a legit on-the-air series (and by god it shows), but they were not successful. As a result, while the project limped along for a few years afterward, it has good and bad in equal measure. As a non-official product it also cannot be considered canon. Some characters are actually interesting (about time we saw more of the Breen!) while others are pure Mary Sues (including a male Seven of Nine with a built-in Borg-gun/personal shield/fully-functional hand). Some of the ideas are interesting while others are boring or already-been-done. The CGI is all Hollywood-quality, but the practical effects are okay at best.
It's obvious that they made this without knowing that they were going to be able to make a TV show or not, and tried to cram the sort of build-up and intrigue we saw in DS9 into a span of 90 minutes. For now though, it's decidedly meh, and probably a dead project as well since it hasn't been mentioned on the maker's website in over a year as of late 2019.

===Star Trek Continues===
Of all the offerings listed here, Star Trek Continues is BY FAR the closest in theme and tone to the original 1960's series. Indeed, this is the whole point: from its inception, this fan-funded project was intended to represent a what-if "4th Season" of the Original Series, ending with the conclusion of the Enterprise's 5-year mission. It is surprisingly and at times ''delightfully'' watchable, with strong stories, consequences and arcs that carry over to later episodes, tons of attention to detail, unexpected cameos, and a cast that really came together, particularly in later episodes. It also delicately navigated a line between viewing female characters through the lens of a show that was rooted in 1960's culture while also not treating them as weak children dependent on men for protection. Star Trek Continues successfully concluded its "season" with all 11 episodes gradually released from 2014 to 2018, to heaps of industry awards and wide praise (including a personal endorsement from Gene Roddenberry's son, who said his father would've approved).

=== The Orville ===
<s>Star Trek fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off</s> A comedy drama sci-fi television series that began as a homage to Star Trek, created by and starring Seth MacFarlane of ''Family Guy'' infamy-- [[Skub|No wait, come back!]] The guy's a huge Trekkie and felt too many shows were up in their ass with grimdark, so he pitched his idea to the execs to make a loving comedic sendup of The Next Generation. Many of the executive producers and developers are notable industry Trekkies such as David Goodman (who wrote the ''Futurama'' Trek parody episode), or Trek alumni such as Brannon Braga. First airing in 2017, the series is about the strung-out not-Picard protagonist Captain Edward Mercer, played by MacFarlane himself, of the eponymous not-Enterprise spaceship "The Orville" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Orville likely named after one of the Wright Brothers]). His ex-wife Kelly is the first officer while the crew includes the beefy gay not-Worf alien Bortus, asshole not-Lore android Isaac, and John LaMarr and Gordon Malloy - an even more ridiculous parody of Harry Kim and Tom Paris. They explore the galaxy while dealing with personal problems and fighting various bad guys.

The show has a mix of drama, comedy and commentary on real world issues and the first Season ran for twelve episodes. The episodes include the pilot episode "Pilot" - where Ed and Kelly begin their posting on the Orville and start trying to reconcile enough to work together, "Majority Rule" - an episode with good (if derivative) commentary on social currency systems, "About a Girl" - A Bortus-centered episode that explores his relationships during a vital part of his race's life cycle, and "Krill" - one of the season's three anti-religion episodes (seriously, Season 1 pushes atheism hard enough to make Star Trek look like The Chronicles of Narnia), this one named for the villainous alien race who follow a violently xenophobic religion and the Orville's crew are tasked with studying them. The season was mostly well-received, a few recurring complaints notwithstanding, and the show was greenlit for a second season.

In the second season, Alara was written out of the show halfway through. The character's actress, Halston Sage, was briefly rumored to be dating Seth MacFarlane, although it is just as likely that other factors such as her role on ''Prodigal Son'' or a desire for a pay increase may also have played into her departure. If the dating rumor is true, however, it just goes to show that [[Derp|dating a co-worker and subordinate 20 years younger than you almost never ends well]], which may come back to haunt the showrunners as she was one of the better received characters. Don't worry though, Alara's character was immediately replaced with another forehead-alien of the very same race, gender, and profession, despite the fact that it had already been established that Alara's career path as a security officer was considered rather unusual for her species. Throughout the Season Isaac gradually turned good, becoming the crew's not-Data member, and another episode relied on a plot hole where a Krill captured and imprisoned by Mercer and co. in Season 1 returned as part of a strike force targeting Ed with no explanation for her escape. Speaking of the Krill, they become the "lesser villains that need to team up with the good guys to fight worse villains" cliché, in a possible asspull given all the villainous setup they got (deliberately built around being violently religious and xenophobic with a sinister design invoking Nosferatu to the point of sharing his fatal weakness to sunlight). The team up happens because the rest of Issac's robotic race, the Kaylons, have gone [[Necrons|Full Skynet]] against organic life. The cast seems to be gelling better - rumored situation between Seth and Halston aside, the writers have a better idea of what the show should be and the humor is now used in service of the stories; Alara's loss aside, it's a step up overall. While the show is getting a third season, it was moved from TV to streaming service Hulu and filming is currently delayed by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Some commend The Orville as a well-made, witty breath of [[Noblebright|fresh air]] in an overly [[Grimdark|stagnant]] genre with a side of nostalgia. Others denounce The Orville as derivative, sophomoric, vain (some consider MacFarlane stunt-casting himself as the main character the height of vanity, especially given his tendency to push his views on the audience) and also uncomfortable (eg; Ed's interactions with ex-wife character Kelly). Some think both sides have a point. Trekkies are equally divided on the show; many Trekkies [[butthurt]] over Discovery endorse The Orville, a significant number of Discovery fans hate The Orville, and a small and overlooked group quietly enjoys both.

As always, stay tuned for how this turns out.

== Films ==
As a general rule, the even-numbered ones aren't complete shit.

* '''''Star Trek: The Motion Picture''''': AKA: The Slow Motion Picture, or the Motionless Picture. A giant space whatsit is flying towards Earth, the mostly-retired crew has to go figure out what's going on and stop it. Old school sci-fi geeks like the ideas, but terrible pace and interminable special effects that were clearly meant to capitalize on ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' while failing to understand what people like about that movie kill them dead for everyone else. Besides the uniform worn by Kirk, the uniforms also look like pajamas. So no wonder they were changed only a movie later. Features an entirely bald female alien who is [[What|so good at sex that she has to swear an oath not to get it on with the crew]]. Really. This is canon.
* '''''Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan''''': As Kirk starts to feel his age, a one-off villain from the show makes a dramatic reapperance: [[Meme|KKKHHHAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!!!!]] Widely considered the best of all the films, and the only one considered a straight up great film, no qualifiers. If you haven't seen it, see it. So good many later movies in the franchise just try to rip it off instead of finding their own identities. Interesting fact: due to time constraints, actors of Kirk and Khan weren't available at the same time. So the entire script was written so that Kirk and Khan never need to meet face-to-face. But you'd never notice if it weren't pointed out to you. Roddenberry screeched autistically and objected to some of the actions of his characters, including Kirk shooting a [[Enslavers|brain eating space parasite]] rather than "[[Noblebright|keeping it for study]]." The fact that his strongest objections came to the most [[win]] of the films says a great deal about his deprecating value to the franchise around the TNG era.
* '''''Star Trek III: The Search for Spock''''': Where is Spock? ''He's on Genesis.'' ALL AHEAD FULL! Not really bad, just mediocre and run of the mill compared to the superior films that surround it. It was also saddled with the misfortune of undoing some of the previous film's more-daring decisions, and having its only daring decision reversed a film later. If you had to say that any film broke the "odd numbers suck" rule, it would be this one.
* '''''Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home''''': The crew of the ''Enterprise'' travels back in time to save the whales. No, literally and unironically. Scott tries to talk to a computer through the mouse, Spock nerve-pinches a punk on a bus in San Francisco, and somehow it works, creating something perhaps not quite in the genre intended but a classic in sci-fi dramedy. ''The Voyage Home'' is a zany comedy romp beloved by the general public and fandom alike, leaving only the most intractable fanbois to bitch and moan. Nimoy directed this one but there was a contract stipulation that Shatner would get whatever Nimoy got, thus leading to...
* <del>'''''Star Trek V: The Final Frontier''''':</del> <s>The epitome of the "odd-numbered Star Trek films suck" rule.</s> {{BLAM|Lies! There is no}} '''''Star Trek V'''''{{BLAM|! It was not called}} '''''The Final Frontier'''''{{BLAM|! It was not directed by Kirk's egotistical actor and did not have a plot that could literally be summarized as "Kirk is betrayed by his incompetent crew, yet goes on to fight God and win!" The films mysteriously moved from four to six and ''we are all improved because of this!''}}
* '''''Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country''''': The Space Cold War ends amidst searing mystery and drama. The sendoff for the original cast, except Kirk who got a worse send-off a movie later. Gene Roddenberry watched it, hated it, and was going to seek legal advice but died a week later. And good riddance to that, because it's a pretty sweet political thriller if your hippie-panties don't get into a twist at the thought that the Federation isn't a perfect place full of perfect people.
* '''''Star Trek Generations''''': Malcolm McDowell blows up planets to get into a magic space ribbon to live forever, no it does not make any more sense in context. An already-weak story hamstrung by its obsession with being daring and unconventional rather than good. Also, Kirk dies on the bridge in the most face-palming manner possible. Nimoy was offered the Director's chair, took one look at the script and demanded a rewrite which didn't happen so he refused to be involved.
* '''''Star Trek First Contact''''': The ''TNG'' crew face off with the Borg to ensure the future happens. Lots of action, a script that sparks with energy and snark, and some quite effective performances make this the only good ''TNG'' movie (we don't blame you TNG cast). It sadly is also the only appearance of the Defiant on screen, doing a pretty decent job of fighting the Borg before the Enterprise E saves the day of course. The Borg Queen was also introduced here before Voyager, ruining what could have been a good idea.
* '''''Star Trek Insurrection''''': If you thought the [[Avatar|Na'vi]] were a bunch of badly-written [[Mary Sue]]s, you ain't seen nothing yet! B-b-b-baby you ain't seen n-n-n-nothing yet! Also, Riker shaves his beard, and that's basically a war crime. Aged from terrible to forgettably bad thanks to that one scene of Picard and Data singing ''HMS Pinafore'' going memetic.
* '''''Star Trek Nemesis''''': The last stand of the ''TNG'' cast, ending not with a bang but a whimper. It also required amending the even=good/odd=bad rule to "''Galaxy Quest'' counts as a ''Star Trek'' film so this one is also odd."
* '''''Star Trek''''' (2009): Alternate timeline "reboot" (sideboot?) with the original crew, albeit with new younger actors. Timey-wimey shit happens and old prime timeline Spock (reprised by old Leonard Nemoy) is hurled back in time along with a bunch of Romulan assholes. The dickbag Romulans begin fucking shit up, slightly altering history in a way that ensures gratuitous lens flare. [[skub| Skubtastic]], but at least watchable (if a shiny CGI filled, non-moral space action means watchable for you), which is more than ''most'' odd-numbered films can muster. If you still even count it as odd, without the ''Galaxy Quest''-amendment.
* '''''Star Trek Into Darkness''''': Some [[edgy]] shit. The second of the alternate timeline ''Trek'' films. Terrorism, conspiracy and flapdoodle. Even more skubtastic, but generally considered worse than its predecessor, partially because (like ''Nemesis'') it tries to be a remake of ''The Wrath of Khan'' and having Kirk at his most punchable.
* '''''Star Trek Beyond''''': Controversial, but more in a question of whether it's decent or quite good. Lots of good character stuff and a decent story revolving around a race of mysterious space pirates trying to conquer a colony, but the action photography is poorly-lit shaky-cam horseshit and the sound work is awful. If it's the last "Kelvin Timeline" movie, as it seems it will be, at least it ended on a good note.

== Novels ==
Like most long time franchises ''Star Trek'' has a massive line of books. Unlike most they're basically just fanfics as nothing but the show and the movies is canon so the writers can do whatever they want. This changed after ''Nemesis'' since they might never have another show or movie in the "Prime" universe, so the writers got their shit together and wrote a group of books as a tight community very close to the shows. The relaunch novels are a continuation of the show they're about. Also there's the ''Titan'' book series which is about Riker and Troi getting their own ship, which happens to be staffed by every race in the Federation including living rocks, [[awesome|space dinosaurs]] that smell like [[meatbread|toast]] and a [[what|space cyborg ostrich]].

During yet another novel continuity (Star Trek: Destiny), the Borg go nuts and eat Pluto... yeah... and then they finally get sick of the Federation somehow managing to not get assimilated all the time, so they finally just send every last cube they have with orders to Exterminatus the absolute SHIT out of the entire Alpha Quadrant. Pretty much every important character from TNG, DS9, and Voyager has to team up to stop them, and even then the Federation still gets its shit kicked in and winds up having to rely on a vaguely ridiculous deus ex machina to win, and [[Grimdark|billions of people still die and dozens of planets are blown to shit]]. It was pretty insane.

Then all the Federation's main enemies get together to form an anti-Federation and start poking the bear, all the while telling their allies that they're somehow warmongering dicks, Section 31 gets its cover blown in a big way, and Riker gets promoted to Admiral. Also, a lot of the newer TNG novels have been devoted to following up on one-shot aliens from the show, like the guys that sent out the probe that made Barclay super-smart and those fish monks that were abducting crewmembers for experiments. Now that the Picard show is coming out, though, this will all presumably be chucked in the dustbin.

== Video Games ==
=== Star Trek Online ===
''Star Trek Online'' is the free-to-play online game built by Cryptic Studios and run by Perfect World. With an official license CBS, recurring characters voiced by various Trek alumni, and recently a license to include references to the reboot chronology (officially known as the "Kelvin Timeline"), it's the closest existing thing to an "official" continuation of the "Prime" timeline, and contains history and fluff extending nearly 40 years from the end of Star Trek: Nemesis.

Taking place in the 25th century (around the year 2409-2410), the Hobus supernova (the event that kicked Nero and Spock into the past during Star Trek 2009) has devastated the Romulans, and its near-collapse and fragmentation causes tensions between a resurgent Klingon Empire and the Federation. The tensions blow up into a war, with members of a new, nicer, breakaway Romulan Republic playing both sides in exchange for development aid.

The game contains deep cuts from all over Trek lore, and answers questions about what happened to various key characters, including Data (took over the Enterprise-E, then retired), the Enterprise (now an even bigger ship run by Andorian captain Shon), and the Voyager crew (it took Harry Kim 30 years to make Captain lol). Raises barely-shown, unnamed, and otherwise obscure races to new prominence as big bad foes, including the Iconians (ancient aliens with god complexes who mutated into energy beings, currently live in dyson spheres and were only defeated by predestination paradox), Tzenkethi (4-armed halo guys whose weak points are the FRONT of their shields), and Na'kuhl (the alien nazis from Enterprise as time-traveling terrorists who blame the Federation for a throwaway event that happened in TNG's beach episode).

Ostensibly free to play, but don't let that fool you... the ''not-so-micro''transactions are the only reason the lights stay on.

=== Starfleet Command ===

''Starfleet Command'' was a series real time space battle games by Interplay based on the much older tabletop game Star Fleet Battles. It came out in 1999 and was followed by several sequels and expansions. Gameplay was much like ''Battlefleet Gothic'', but with the player only controlling one ship. SFC remains Interplay's best selling game, topping even ''Baldur's Gate''.

=== Armada ===

A series of low effort RTS's churned out by Activision in 2000. Tried to take on both ''Homeworld'' and ''Age of Empires'', both of which have recently gotten HD remakes and ''Armada'' hasn't so that should tell you all you need to know. However, for one of the first 3D model space RTS's it was surprisingly easy to mod, resulting in many ship mod packs being made for it.

== Would you like to know more? ==
And oh Lordy, is there more...
*[http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/ Main Memory Alpha: A ''Star Trek'' wiki]
*[http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/ Main Memory Beta: The flip-side of Memory Alpha for the less than official stuff]
*[http://sfdebris.com/ SF Debris: opinionated episode reviews, has some non ''Trek'' stuff as well]

[[Category: Television]]