Confederate, the new HBO show from the Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and DB Weiss, was announced in a press release a few weeks ago and is slated to begin filming sometime after the final season of Thrones, which will probably air in 2018. But already there seems to be little appetite for the series, which plans to take a revisionist approach to American history, imagining a world in which the South successfully seceded from the union and slavery persists “as a modern-day institution”.

So much so that, during Sunday night’s episode of Game of Thrones, a grassroots campaign to upend the forthcoming series began on Twitter with the hashtag #NoConfederate, started by the activist April Reign, who was also behind #OscarsSoWhite. The hashtag proceeded to make waves on Twitter; by the end of the hour, it was the number one trending topic in the US and number two around the world.

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Since the project was revealed in early July, it has become a kind of cultural albatross for HBO, and especially Benioff and Weiss, each of whom have fielded criticisms over the years for both the overwhelming whiteness of Game of Thrones and the network’s programming writ large. Naturally, the idea to follow up their fantastical juggernaut with an alt-history project – one that’s been ridiculed as a gratuitously speculative take on this country’s bloodstained past, the stuff of white supremacist wet dreams – made the pair a lightning rod for widespread rebuke.

The reimagining of slavery and the outcome of the civil war as basis for a television show was deemed spectacularly ill-advised by many, not least the Twitter commentariat, as well as writers and showrunners who consider Benioff and Weiss peers. “I suppose it’s an interesting premise,” wrote the essayist Roxane Gay in an op-ed for the New York Times, “but as is often the case with interesting premises, at what cost?” She went on:

“It has been more than 150 years since the civil war ended, but it often feels like some people are still living in the antebellum era. In parts of the United States and, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s visit to Poland recently, the world, the Confederate flag is still proudly flown. This month, Ku Klux Klansmen marched in Charlottesville, Va., to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from a city park. They were not the first nor will they be the last to resist acknowledging that the Confederacy lost the civil war.”

On Twitter, the MSNBC host Joy Reid weighed in: “It plays to a rather concrete American fantasy: slavery that never ends, becoming a permanent state for black people. Repugnant.”

Confederate, and the disapproval it has attracted, represents a sort of apogee in the trend of alt-historical fiction, a genre in which the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Phillip K Dick and Noël Coward have dabbled. Just last year, the author Ben Winters wrote a novel, Underground Airlines, in which the civil war had never taken place and instead, slavery remained legal in four states below the Mason-Dixon line. Whether Confederate will deal with the material as deftly as Winters, who owed an extreme debt to the writer Octavia Butler’s pioneering science-fiction novel Kindred, remains to be seen.

There are other vague precedents to the Confederate controversy, such as Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, which imagined that the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan won the second world war and now ruled over the US; the 1962 novel was adapted into a moderately successful Amazon series that premiered in 2015. There was less blowback to that project, created by Frank Spotnitz, presumably because the show’s source material already existed (although there was some understandable upset over some Nazi-inspired subway ads). If fans were worried about how a televised depiction of a triumphant Third Reich might have reverberated, they at least were able to sniff out Dick’s novel to get a sense of how the show would handle its subject matter.

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But with Confederate, no such luxury exists. And, as Gay wrote, the Trump presidency, which every day ranges from cynical race-baiting to outright racism, further situates Confederate in world that, suffice to say, is not champing at the bit for dystopian renderings of slavery. Just last week, the president encouraged police brutality in a speech; his inner-circle of advisers includes Sebastian Gorka, who has close ties to Hungarian group called the Order of Vitéz, which has historical links to the Nazis, and of course Steve Bannon, the outspoken white nationalist of Breitbart fame.

In an interview with Vulture, Confederate’s creators, and the co-writers and producers Nichelle and Malcolm Spellman (both of whom are black), defended the show against what they saw as pre-emptive criticisms. Benioff cited his fascination with history and the civil war, noting that the prospect of a different ending, had Robert E Lee been able to successfully raid Washington DC, has always fascinated him; Weiss also referred to slavery as America’s “original sin”.

Moreover, both Spellmans explained their initial apprehension about joining the project, ultimately concluding that it needed black voices to work. “Me and Nichelle are not props being used to protect someone else,” Malcolm Spellman said, adding that there would be “no whips and no plantations”.

Still, many remain unconvinced that Confederate is in good hands with Benioff and Weiss, or that it’s worth the investment from HBO, which itself has been chastised as insufficiently diverse for years. Of the 16 dramas, comedies and anthology series the network currently airs, two – Issa Rae’s Insecure and the Rock’s Ballers – are fronted by actors of color.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Raleigh Ritchie (AKA Jacob Anderson) as Grey Worm in Game of Thrones. Photograph: HBO/2015 Home Box Office, Inc. All

On Game of Thrones, too, viewers have often noted the near nonexistence of racial diversity; when actors of color do appear, they’re generally cast aside as objects of fear or sexual set-pieces (John Boyega recently joined the conversation to air his concerns). None of this has helped quell the overwhelming suspicions regarding Benioff and Weiss’ ability to rehash America’s brutal history of slavery without turning it into fodder for those who minimize its existence or, worse, wish such a history never ended.

Casey Bloys, HBO’s president of programming, defended Confederate last week in an interview with reporters. “If you can get it right, there is real opportunity to advance the racial discussion in America,” he explained. “If you can draw a line between what we’re seeing in the country today with voter suppression, mass incarceration, lack of access to public education and healthcare ... to our past and shared history, that’s an important line to draw and a conversation worth having. [The producers] acknowledge this has a high degree of difficulty. It’s a risk worth taking.”

Perhaps, for HBO, it is, if only because even a version of Confederate that confirms our worst suspicions couldn’t sink TV’s most formidable cash cow. And, based on comments from Benioff, Weiss and representatives of the network, the team behind Confederate seems to be cautiously optimistic that the rewards and provocations of alt-history fiction – its ability to jolt us into consciousness, to recognize parallels between the past and present and force audiences to reckon with them – outweigh the risks.

But before it begins production, Confederate will be up against the considerable handicap of public opinion. And if the sustained opposition to the project shows us anything, it’s that no sophomore success is guaranteed – especially if the project aims to sate nothing more than the ambitions of its own architect.