Code Geass/Headscratchers/And Alternate History: Difference between revisions

** [[Ass Pull|Bismarck's Geass can see into alternate realities]] [[Epileptic Trees|and he saw the name Britannia and told Chuck about it. He decided it was awesome, and so renamed the Empire. This is why everyone's shouting "All Hail Britannia" so much, to drum the new name into their heads.]] [[Hand Wave|Bismarck's Geass seeing alternate realities combined with Chuck's love for random historical revisionism is also the explanation for all other alternate-history-related wonks]]. (This was all going to be explained in the original plan for the series, but then Bismarck's role was shortened to "I know what's going on and am trying to convince whoever's in charge not to be dumb, blurrgh I am daed")

*** Heh. In all seriousness though, I'd speculate that even if the Romans were defeated, the name might have remained and was popularized somehow at a later date...or just because.

** This is actually incredibly easy to explain. There are plenty of historical examples of groups taking the name there enemies have given to them and using it for themselves. For the best real world example, English soldiers called American revolutionaries "yankees" as an insult. American troops liked the name so much they adopted it. So Romans go to attack the barbaric Britannians and lose. Britannian becomes synonymous with barbarism and the Britannians adopt the name as an insult (i.e. "Nyah nyah, we're just a bunch of barbarians and we kicked your ass".)

*** That's slightly different, though - 'Britannia' is the official Roman name for Britain, and 'Britanii' for its people; neither carries a pejorative sense, unlike words such as 'yankee'. Besides, the examples you're thinking of there are never official, just colloquial - it's still the United States of America, not the United States of Yanks. The only reason Britannia would have become the official name for the empire is if the Celts were at some point conquered by either the Romans or a Romance-language-speaking people. This is still entirely possible, though - the fact that the Tudors ruled Britain rather suggests that the Norman invasion of 1066 (going by our calendar, of course) was successful, even if it was against a Celtic king rather than an Anglo-Saxon one. <ref>On a related note, if Britannia remained a unified nation independent from Rome, it's unlikely that the Anglo-Saxons would have been able to colonise the island as they did, since Britannia would have been less destabilised by the collapse of the Western Roman empire - though still probably affected economically, as Rome would undoubtedly have been its biggest trading partner - and, as a unified kingdom, would've had fewer foreigners threatening it - the actual Romano-British faced threats from Cornwall, Ireland and Scotland, as well as internal divisions, even before they had the Germans to worry about; CG Britannia, assuming the entire main island was unified, would only have the Irish and the Germans, a much more manageable threat.</ref>