Keeping counterfactual butterfly effects manageable

Fictional characters provide unusually explicit models of thought because their motives and decisions are often stated directly in the source material. Moving many real historical people at once would create compounding second- and third-order effects that become increasingly difficult to trace. Replacing Tirpitz and Scheer with Tarkin and Thrawn while retaining their surrounding institutions limits that multiplication of butterfly effects. A disciplined counterfactual must then explain each causal step and keep the resulting argument linked to the historical setting. The method is still alternate history, but it remains useful when its assumptions and path from divergence to outcome are visible.