There’s a part of me that wants to go check out all the Hamilton fic that I’m sure exists, all the alternate universes where things went…better. And the rest of me is like NO NO NO because that way lies doom.
But there’s also the part of me that keeps thinking of the Neil Gaiman bit where somebody is talking to a late 20th century Earth person & says something to the effect of, “Who’s President? Ah. Clinton? And Bush before him, and Reagan…? Ah. Yes. You live in one of *those* timelines…”
And I keep thinking, maybe that’s it. Maybe we live in one of *those* timelines. Maybe it’s not Clinton and Bush and Reagan and Nixon, maybe it went wrong a long time before that: “Ah. Hamilton married Eliza? Had the affair? Wrote the Reynolds Papers? Shot by Burr? You poor bastards, you got stuck in one of *those* timelines.”
Because you could, y’know. Draw a thru-line from Hamilton’s disgrace to Trump’s rise. It’d be conjecture, the world has more moving parts than that, but you could. And if you can draw those lines, you can draw a whole different line along where it might have gone differently.
Maybe only writers do this to themselves, but it does make me want to explore that whole AU.