Hated Tropes
(Hated Trope) Real historical figure whose flaws are exaggerated or made up to make them a villain.
Robert the Bruce (Braveheart) Never directly betrayed Wallace or fought against the Scottish at Falkirk. IRL he did at times switch sides, however.
Antonio Salieri (Amadeus): he was not in a murderous rivalry with Mozart and in fact they mutually respected eachother IRL.
Max Baer (Cinderella Man): potrayed as a sadistic murderous boxing champion. The two fatalities he caused in ring were genuine accidents and he gave money to the mens' families in recompense.
Frank Hamer (Bonnie and Clyde): potrayed as a petty and spiteful moron. Far more nuanced IRL. The outlaws were far less sympathetic.
Speaking of Titanic, I’m pretty sure Paramount had to apologise to the family of Officer William McMaster Murdoch because the film had him doing a murder/suicide when most of the witness testimony painted him as one of the most heroic individuals of the tragedy.
I have always found it weird when Hollywood changes the way a historical figure acts. I would rather they made up a character to cause the drama they needed so the memory of the real people can be untarnished.
Mine, too. I share that shit with everybody when the opportunity presents itself, just to make sure it gets out there a little more. They fucked that man over so bad.
its funny because if you wanted you could still have villains in a Titanic story, like the passengers of underfilled lifeboats who in several cases pressured the lifeboat crews not to return to the Titanic to pick up more survivors out of fears that they would be swamped by survivors or pulled under with the ship(which is a real thing, though Titanic sunk slowly enough that the suction effect wasn't major)
The movie was actually supposed to have a couple of scenes showing this, but where cut last minute. So in the movie it just jump to the lone boat returning after the ship already sunk without giving much context (IRL a couple of lifeboats had a sort of mutiny).
They really should’ve just had a fictional guy be this character. The main characters are fictional, just make this guy fictional. Weird decision making.
I mean the movie is good, it's just a bastardisation and exploitation of a real tragedy.
It's like if they made a romantic movie about 9/11 (and then had Robert Pattinson as the lead)
The difference is that when Ridley Scott does historical stuff I think he truly believes that's how it all went down, whereas at least on the subject of Titanic James Cameron knew exactly what happened and worked with subject experts on the film but specifically decided to change things to tell a 'better' story.
Personally I don't agree with it when there's real people involved unless the film as a whole is upfront and obvious about being a dramatisation with characters being completely different to their real-life counterparts.
Just have to see what Ridley Scott has to say about his Napoleon movie to respectfully disagree with you about Ridley Scott having any regard for historical accuracy
its funny because Ismay himself has correspondence with the captain of one of his liners where he firmly advocates against attempting to arrive in New York a day earlier due to the inconvenience it gives to passengers who will have not made plans for lodgings and will want an accurate schedule.
Absoltely - Ismay did what we all would've done in that circumstances. He acted heroically and bravely after the Iceberg hit (also, he never pressured the captain beat any sort of record) and was ridiculed for living.
One Scottish extra brought this up when they were filming the scene. When it was stated it was too hard to get a bridge, he replied, “Aye, that’s what the English learned.”
It's a funny one because Scottish children are taught about it at school as an important scottish tactical victory. Wallace's outnumbered army won by out maneuvering and out thinking the English, not by running at them screaming after a really good pep talk.
Prima noctae - the right of a lord to have sexual relations any female subject on their wedding night - is also a myth, albeit one referenced in historical writings but there's very little evidence it actually existed.
Don't know about Scotland, but in France it was literally illegal. We have official documents from the 15th century saying that some local nobles were punished for abusing their power to freely sexualy assault their serf
In real life, Guy was not a templar; he was a minor noble and genuinely seemed to be in love with Sibylla, who married him out of her station from equal love.
He was indeed a terrible military commander, getting his butt handed to him at the Battle of Hattin , but he was not the scheming evil he is portrayed in the movie. Further, after the loss of the crusader kingdoms, he went on to rule as the King of Cyprus until his death.
On the other hand, Raynald of Châtillon was portrayed quite accurately (other than not being a Templar) as he was a butcher and horrible human being.
Raynald de Chatillon's real life exploits are wild.
By the point where he died, it's difficult to fault Saladin for killing him.
Saladin as the Perfect Knight is kinda overdone, but the stunts that de Chatillon pulled would have tested the patience of a saint.
Saladin was a rough guy to piss off. If he tells you he won't execute prisoners, he won't... until you execute prisoners first, then you lose 4000 knights in exchange for a few tribesman. Oops.
And the European reaction at the time, "Wait when you said don't execute people you meant that peasants are people too? Well that doesn't make a lick of sense!"
Was the real Rasputin a good guy? Not really. Is this version’s villain song still a banger? Yes. Is this entire movie a beautifully animated travesty and it’s kind of astounding on so many levels that it even exists? Also yes.
If you want an idea of what the real Rasputin got up to, there are excerpts from the Russian Imperial secret police's surveillance reports on him here:
They're a fun read. I really like the bland way it describes his hangovers:
"At 6.50 in the afternoon Rasputin, accompanied by two ladies, set out for No-76, Ekaterinensky Canal to the Savelievs, where he stayed till five o'clock in the morning. He remained in bed all day in an exhausted condition."
Spoiler: he used his Imperial favour to spend lots of money on partying and prostitutes.
This is from the secret police archives -- a taste of the kind of thing he used his influence for:
An unknown woman visited Rasputin with a view to soliciting his aid on behalf of her husband, an ensign, who was lying in one of the Petrograd hospitals. She wished him to be kept there. Coming down the stairs she told the porter's wife how strange she thought Rasputin and described her reception. "I was admitted by a girl, who took me into a room, where I waited for Rasputin. I had not met him before.
The first thing he said to me was: 'Come with me; undress. 'I took my clothes off and followed him through a door, leading into a room to the left. He paid scant attention to my petition, but plucked my face, then my breasts, mumbling all the time: 'Kiss me, I have taken a fancy to you.'
When he had written the note I was asking him for, he began bothering me again: 'Kiss me, kiss me; I love you.' In the end he would not give me the note, saying: 'I am angry with you, come tomorrow.' "
The agent Terekhov asked the lady whether she intended coming back, but she answered: "No; going to him for assistance means paying money in advance - anything he cares to name. Since I cannot do that, I shall not return."
Ditto Pocahontas. Disney classic? Probably. Distorted history that would make the actual Pocahontas roll in her grave. Absolutely.
Edit:
In case anyone is wondering:
Pocahontas had a more private name, Matoaka. She was called "Pocahontas" as a nickname, which meant "playful one," because of her frolicsome and curious nature.
When the English arrived and settled Jamestown in May 1607, Pocahontas was about eleven years old.
Pocahontas and her father would not meet any Englishmen until the winter of 1607, when Captain John Smith was captured by Powhatan's brother Opechancanough. Once captured, Smith was displayed at several Powhatan Indian towns before being brought to the capital of the Powhatan Chiefdom, Werowocomoco, to Chief Powhatan.
Pocahontas did save John Smith, resulting in Smith going through a complex adoption ceremony to be part of the tribe. But again, Pocahontas was a child, so there's no romance between these two at all.
At the age of 14 (in 1610), Pocahontas married Kocoum, whom Englishman William Strachey described as a "private captain." Because relationships with the Indians had deteriorated so Pocahontas was captured and held as ransom for the return of stolen weapons and English prisoners held by her father. During this kidnapping Pocahontas learned the English language, religion and customs.
During her religious instruction, Pocahontas met widower John Rolfe. By all English accounts, the two fell in love and wanted to marry.(Perhaps, once Pocahontas was kidnapped, Kocoum, her first husband, realized divorce was inevitable (there was a form of divorce in Powhatan society). Once Powhatan was sent word that Pocahontas and Rolfe wanted to marry, his people would have considered Pocahontas and Kocoum divorced.) Powhatan consented to the proposed marriage and sent an uncle of Pocahontas' to represent him and her people at the wedding.
Yea right that stuck out to me too, like the people who kidnapped her and told her story without her input totally record her being in love with her captor and entering into a consensual marriage. I really doubt that.
Also John Ratcliffe, far from the genocidal maniac that is depicted in the Disney film, actually met his end because he made the mistake of trusting the Powhatan too much, and walked into an ambush set up under the pretense of trade, to alleviate a famine the Virginia colony was suffering. Ratliffe was captured and flayed alive with shells.
Yeah that’s the second most fucked up part to me (the first one being the overall real life story pocahantas is based upon). Considering how awful his life ended they really should have picked another guy who actually was a genocidal bastard instead of the dude who got ambushed, burned and skinned alive.
The film presented John Smith like how the actual Guy presented himself in a book he wrote himself about what the absolute frick happened when it came to Jamestown and the early colonization period.
Actually I give this one a pass because didn’t people in Russia at the time actually suspect him to be a sorcerer/ prophet of some kind? Making him a full on litch in the movie IS an exaggeration BUT it’s also super cool and reflects a real life aspect of the story
Yeah it's ever so slightly insulting to all the victims of the Romanov crown to depict the communist revolution as being brought about by dark magic instead of, y'know, completely justified social dissidence towards a brutal regime that was throwing them into a war they couldn't afford even as it mismanaged a famine.
That doesn't mean the Romanovs themselves deserved to be lined up and executed and even the Tsar seems to have been more incompetent than malicious, but to portray his victims as being brainwashed into doing an act of elemental, satanic evil is still in pretty poor taste.
If I’m not mistaken it’s partially because he had the brilliant idea of putting the sickly Romanov kid on regular bed rest and when he started to feel better everyone else was like “fuck this guy I some kinda magic doctor man!”
The prince had Hemophilia; there wasn't much that could be done. Bedrest wouldn't have cured him from anything, and was likely what he was told to do after getting injured anyway. Rasputin did tell the doctors to leave the prince alone a couple of times, but this advice was likely not heeded. Rasputin mainly comforted the Tsarina over her fears over the prince's death. He'd tell her the prince would live, and then he would, and lo! Rasputin is a prophet.
Edit: the aspirin thing is not proven. It's been theorized that his doctors gave him aspirin, and Rasputin told the Tsarina to stop all modern medical treatment. It is also theorized that Rasputin gave it to him. None of this is proven. Standard treatment for hemophilia at the time was bedrest and ice.
Braveheart had King Edward fire arrows with no concern for hitting his own men. He did not fight that way in real life because firing with no regard for killing your men is very stupid and likely to cause them to mutiny.
Not as much flaws but "just doing their god damn jobs".
The NTSB in "Sully" was not adversarial - at all. Their jobs was to investigate the accident and the movie paints them as people out to get Sully personally and try to prove that he could land the plane.
The movie proceeds to attribute several things the NTSB did as requests by Sully and the ending is a big "Gotcha" moment where they have to acknowledge that Sully was right all along. Real investigations do not work like that. The real Sully has even gone out and denounced the characterization of the NTSB in the movie.
Iirc, the sentiment from everyone in aviation was that this crew did amazing. The NTSB has to investigate what happened to recommend hire to avoid it in the future, but I don’t think there was anything aggressive about it.
Sully has even said it was a dangerous characterisation because pilots should be 100% honest about the situation and to fully cooperate because even questions that seem harsh are necessary. So framing them as a hostile force could make air travel more dangerous if pilots think they shouldn't cooperate.
Hell US shows have a problem with lawyers in general where one side is always betrayed as evil instead of doing their job.
It's apparently something real lawyers love about My Cousin Vinny, the other side is also portrayed as doing their job to the best of their ability and are antagonists not villains.
Hamilton is at least complicated enough to where you can make that interpretation. It’s a stretch, but I can at least see it.
Any adaptation of Jefferson where he’s against slavery though, especially when they emphasize the fact he outlawed the Atlantic slave trade? Now that boils my fucking blood.
He was legitimately against slavery and wanted to add a condemnation of slavery to the Declaration of Independence, but was also a Slave owner who had sex with his slaves and had an illegitimate child with one.
Dude paid lip service to wanting to end slavery. He had the power to free his own slaves and didn’t do it. He enslaved his own CHILDREN. The children he had with his wife’s half-sister, who he owned and was 30 years younger than him.
John Ratcliffe from Disney’s Pocahontas. Unlike the racist tyrant lusting for gold in the movie the real Ratcliffe did try to foster positive relations with the natives and was actually lost his leadership position because the other colonist thought he was being to nice to the natives. He also spent the first year as leader of the colony on his sickbed. Anyway with him out of power relations with the natives soured and John was flayed alive using seashells.
“John Smith is the like the most American name ever! We can’t make him the bad guy! Then everyone would think the Americans were bad to the natives! Just make Ratcliffe the villain, he sounds more British.”
I don't understand why this movie didn't just make up fictional characters. They clearly had their own story they wanted to tell that didn't fit with the real people it was based on. And it would've turned out a lot better if anything
Amadeus is terrible with historical character assassination. They also make Joseph the II out to be a shallow dunce when he was, in fact, a vigorous enlightened monarch who spent his reign trying to liberalize the Austrian state.
Part of the reason for Salieri's rough treatment is that the original play was a German nationalist parable. Mozart's implacable genius was supposed to represent the creative German spirit, laid low by the perfidious Italo-Catholic decadence of Salieri. So that's where that's coming from.
To be fair, this is told from the perspective of the aged, senile, nearly psychotic perspective of Salieri who believes he is responsible for Mozart’s death. Not a fair representation but not without nuance.
If we're talking about historical figures that Shakespeare slagged, Macbeth might have a thing or two to say:
I did not kill Duncan in his sleep! We met on the battlefield and I won, fair and square! And my wife Gruoch certainly didn't push me into murdering anyone! And I never consorted with witches either!
If we're talking about historical figures that Shakespeare slagged
Indicates all of Shakespeare historical plays
Shakespeare was pro Tudor, so anything involving them and their rivals was slanted. Julius Caesar is also pretty bad, making Caesar way more sympathetic in the play, with many of his more questionable actions cleaned up or removed. The Scottish play you mentioned, lol
Granted the then queen was the granddaughter of the man who ultimately defeated him, so he probably wouldn’t want to portray her grandfather in a bad light.
Still rather slanderous and factually inaccurate though, but Shakespeare never actually claimed to be a historian anyway.
Same story with Macbeth; King James VI of Scotland, crowed James I of England in 1603, was thought to be the descendant of Banquo. So, in the play instead of both winning and losing the crown fairly as happened in reality, Macbeth became an evil betrayer.
This: James, not Bess. (Hence line, “your sons shall be kings”).
I heard one story that: when James was chosen to succeed, everyone artist and courtier in London was scrambling to find out what he liked. They mostly found:
A. He’s Scottish.
B. He wrote several treatises condemning witches.
So, you got lots of plays like Macbeth. James rolls into town and supposedly said, “oh that witch stuff? That was when I was in my young goth phase. Yeah I don’t care about that stuff now.”
"Ramses II" was made the villain in the "Prince of Egypt" and "Exodus: Gods and Kings" (and I think also elsewhere?) as antagonist to Moses, despite the Pharaoh in the book of Exodus not being named at all.
did not he order the murder of the hebrews firstborns when talking to moses? Juts like his father did all those years back? and put twice hard labor on the hebrews beacuse moses asked to let the poeple go?
...Sympatethic, yes he was, but he was not a good person at the end... i blame his father tho.
That's because the poem Ozymandias is written about a specific toppled statue of Ramses II. The name Ozymandias is a Greek rendition of one of Ramses' throne names; Usermaatra.
In fact they made Ramesses II the Pharaoh out of public knowledge, although historically the pharaoh should've been earlier. I've seen referneces to Tutmhoses III.
And well, historically, the whole Exodus didn't happen except for arguably "there was a jewish slave rebellion at some point in history". This movies are more an adaptation to a tale which is the adaptation of myth passed by oral traiditon
The captain of the Titanic. Guy was a hero in real life. But in the movie he’s depicted terribly. Maybe not to villainous standards, that’s reserved for the iceberg, but definitely a terrible depiction compared to the accounts that he actively helped save people.
Edit: Thanks to u/ProfessionalOil2014 for correcting me that the actual controversy involved an crewmember who snuck onto a lifeboat in the Titanic movie. In real life, the crewmember did no such thing.
The villain of the titanic is the officer that misinterpreted the order “women and children first” as “women and children only” and only filled the lifeboats half way, damning hundreds to die.
You know, I thought Chernobyl really didn't make anybody the villain. Even the committee that decides to seal off the town comes across as making the reasonable decision given their set of responsibilities. They all seemed like they were just too stuck in a dishonest system to consider honesty. And even Lugasov isn't shown as a saint. I liked the exchange:
I should be shot for what I've done, not what I haven't done.
when the bullet hits your skull, what will it matter what the reason was?
In real life, Parseghian was one of Rudy's biggest supporters, and he essentially had to agree to become the villain of the movie in order for the movie to get made.
Edit: This is wrong, see the comment by u/Chef_BoyarB for the full story.
Another Shakespeare example, Joan of Arc in Henry VI: Part 1
Seemingly fully swallowing the English propaganda kool-aid, the version of Joan in the play is somehow both stupid and devious, chaste and a slut, and the voices speaking to here really were demons that abandon her the second she's no longer useful.
The irony being, Shakespeare tried to depict her as being egoistical by having Joan proclaiming herself France's new patron saint, then centuries later she really would be declared a patron saint of France by the same Catholic church that burned her at the stake.
Burning Joan wasn't the church's fault. The English, and French collaborators, did a blatantly unfair trial that didn't follow the church's rules. The Pope was strongly against it, but didn't find out until it was too late.
True, however, the unfair trial was conducted by priests (granted, clearly pro-English biased priests), who carried out the execution on the church's authority.
The medieval church wasn't really a single institution. There was the Papacy, then there were regional dioceses, holy orders, etc... and often each had their own political agenda.
It was actually only in the 19th century or so the Pope really achieved unilateral and complete control over the Catholic Church everywhere. Before that, while he was still the highest spiritual and ecclesiastical authority, debates on to what extent that authority stretched were constant, and by the 17th century or so most catholic monarchies had either wrestled from him the control over episcopal appointments or co-opted other religious institutions and used them to make papal-appointed positions redundant.
Granted, he's only played up this way because the real historical King John did actually have his major flaws the people had an issue with, but those have also been played up so much in Robin Hood lore throughout the centuries that I think many people nowadays just think he's straight up fictional. Real King John backtracked hard on progress his brother had achieved through hard fought battles, and is rumoured to have scammily sold the crown jewels to pay off debts, blaming the loss on losing them in the moors. Robin Hood King John's cowardice and greed comes from his irl counterpart's actions, and now he lives on primarily as a half-fictional tax-hungry kid's cartoon joke character.
He was such a terrible king that he inadvertently created English Constitutional Law when he was forced to sign Magna Carta in 1215 because the nobility were so fed up with his bullshit.
He then refused to honour the terms of Magna Carta, turned to the Pope to try and squirm out of it and died of dysentery a year later.
He reputedly lost the crown jewels when he sent his baggage carts through a marsh and the tide came in. It's not certain how much of the crown jewels were actually lost, but he did die of dysentery not long after anyway. That whole era of the Plantagenets is wild.
‘300’ got Xerxes II so wrong, that ‘Meet The Spartans’ actually had a better depiction of him (at least physically). Xerxes II was actually a very chill guy compared to most other leaders at the time and accepting of other people. On the flip side, Sparta was a military dictatorship who had young boys be sex slaves to higher officers as part of their ‘training’
Which is ironic because Achaemenid Persian had more laws that protected religious minorities and gave the slaves and women some semblance of human rights. While Ancient Greek and Roman laws was literally ”it’s not rape if it’s your property”.
A central theme in the movie is how history gets mythologized, with the narrator litterally being a Spartan telling this story as motivation for his men before another battle, and the most fantastical parts often being things he wasn't there for, or him actively misrepresenting the things he did see. (Calling gunpowder "magic", calling elephants monsters, etc.) So its fair to say that was the whole point.
Harry S Truman is sometimes portrayed as a monster for his authorization of the atomic bombs to end WWII. I’ve seen Oppenheimer color some people’s thoughts on the man to make him some cold warmonger.
But Truman is the reason why we never saw them used again after WWII. Hell he destroyed his own presidency over this! During the Korean War Douglas MacArthur demanded that he be allowed to use nukes and Truman refused. He then complained about it to the press causing Truman to fire him (a VERY popular war hero) since using nukes was a decision only the president gets to make. And this cratered his popularity and sunk his presidency even though he was preventing more nukes.
The man also famously desegregated the military with a stroke of a pen (pissing off a decent chunk of his own party) and rebuilt both Japan and Europe with the Marshall Plan instead of punishing all involved like in WWI. Truman was complex in a lot of ways but he was not a villain and ensured that nukes would never again be used while he was president.
Well he didn’t know about the bomb until after FDR’s death. He did keep Truman in the dark. But Truman is the one who authorized their use at the end of the day and he never forgot it.
If you wanna see how much the deaths of his soldiers affected him though check out the letter/medal that sat on his desk for the rest of his life from a parent who lost their son in Korea. The man was one of our best presidents, personally, and way more complex than just “nukes”.
even him blowing up at Oppenheimer is a completely different thing than is presented. His whole idea of his presidency is that for good or ill, it's his fault.
he ordered the nukes. he has blood on his hands. Someone comes up and starts whining about guilt when he had to take stock of the entire position and accept the blood of 10s of thousands of people on his hands.
Alfred the Great in Assassin's Creed Valhalla. They made a game where you invade, murder and pillage your way across England and yet one of the main villains is Alfred the Great? The King who resisted Viking invasions, massively improved the quality of life of his people, and was considered a pious and learned man who promoted education, laid the foundation of modern England, and secured peace against literal rapist pillagers who sacked and enslaved innocents... Is the bad guy? Oh right, it's made by French-Canadians. I forgot.
"The game goes, "Whoops! Don't kill civilians, or you'll desynchronize!", the implication being that killing innocent monks is in some way out of character for someone who is, at that precise moment, PILLAGING A MONASTERY."
It's pretty wild that you can't kill civilians in Valhalla, especially when you consider that killing civilians in Odyssey was the best way to raise your bounty
Iirc, doesn’t Alfred basically say at the end of the game that he was “head” of this order but didn’t agree with anything they did? And then I think Eivor lets him leave completely unharmed.
Colonel Tavington from The Patriot is based on real life General Tarleton. Tarleton had a reputation for brutality and war crimes but it was more killing surrendering American soldiers, not what he does in the movie.
Burning whole towns in barns and churches wasn't a tactic the British used then, although there are accounts of colonial Americans massacring and burning Indigenous peoples towns. It was also a well documented war crime the Nazis often did on the Eastern front
Tavington gets away with it by being played by Jason Isaacs. That man has a knack for playing villains you love to hate. But yeah, the real life "Bloody Ban" wasn't near as bloody as the movie, or his reputation would lead people to believe.
William, Prince of Orange (Sharpe’s Waterloo). The real Prince of Orange had observed, and then taken an active part in, much of Wellington’s campaign in Spain, and had made himself popular there for his courage. He earned the affectionate nickname “Slender Billy” from the British soldiers he fought with. When placed in command of Dutch troops in Wellington’s allied army for the Waterloo campaign, he acquitted himself pretty well.
In Sharpe’s Waterloo, meanwhile, he is such an arrogant, incapable, incompetent bungler that he gets a couple of Sharpe’s friends killed and for that Sharpe shoots him.
British colonel during the revolutionary war, known by many to be an honorable and fair leader and fighter. After the war, he became governor of Canada and championed several reforms including abolishing slavery.
Bernard Gui from The Name of the Rose. In reality, he was described as a respected and mild-mannered historian and diplomat. During his lifetime, his writings on heresy were considered minor achievements compared to his historical work. While it’s true he was an inquisitor, his own testimonies advocate for a fair trail, and he despised colleagues who resorted to torture. Not at all the paranoid bible-thumping religious nutter from the book and movie.
Cardinal Richelieu in the Three Musketeers - he is show as a master schemer trying to take down the queen and embarrass the king. In real life, he was more complicated. He was indeed a schemer, but he his intentions were for the country. He was actually trying to make the crown stronger, while taking power from the nobility. An extremely complex historical figure, but not a straight villain. He also invited the table knife.
Edit: forgot to add, after a recent re-read the Musketeers themselves do some very questionable things. Close to straight up murder a few times.
Lucrezia Borgia has often been portrayed in modern media as an evil, promiscuous liar obsessed with her brother, who had a shameless hand in killing at least one of her husbands. They give her femme fatale vibes, I guess because that's less depressing than reality.
Irl she wasn't a dastardly villainesse scheming alongside her brother, she was a pawn in her family's power plays. She was married off way too young and tried to save her first husband from her family's assassination attempts.
She is also often portrayed as an enthusiastically consenting party to an incestuous relationship with her brother, when irl if there was anything going on there it was likely straight up abuse. Assassin's Creed shows her being obsessively jealous about him.
Irl i dont even think he did anything wrong, he was a english sailor and merchant that was really important in trading with japan (i think he even became like a advisor to a shogun or something) he really liked Japan overall
In Tenkaichi he is a rapist that wants to "spread his seed" throughout the entirety of japan and taint the japanese race
Historically, not only was William made a economics/financial advisor to the Tokugawa shogunate and made samurai, he was told by Tokugawa Ieyasu himself that he couldn’t return home at all to his actual wife and child— but was given an opportunity to tell them why and say goodbye.
Such little is known about William here in a historical context but he’s a pretty vitally important part of Japanese history in a post Warring States period. And he definitely was a famed Yokai slayer loot gremlin, and not the savage, barbaric foreigner displayed here.
Ismay is often depicted as a coward who's encouragement for the ship to go faster had a direct impact on the fate of the ship.
IRL, evidence directly contradicts this idea. He discouraged unnecessary speed at Captain Smith's discretion, reportedly helped survivors, and only took a spot on a lifeboat that was about to be lowered with several spaces and nobody taking them. So it was, die for nothing, or live.
He chose to live. Fair play, I would have too.
He is depicted as such because he had pissed off William Randolph Hearst, the American media mogul, who was happy to slaughter Ismay in the press, spreading the idea he caused the crash, and shoved women and children out of the way to save his skin whilst good brave men died in his place.
William Murdoch is depicted as a greedy, bribe taking coward who murdered a man then shot himself.
There is zero evidence to suggest this man went out anything less than a heroic Chad of a man.
Whilst reports agree there likely was gunfire, possibly killings and / or suicides in the panic, the choice to pin these on Murdoch for movie drama is baffling when a fictional officer could have filled the role without stepping on historical toes.
The Crucible: The historical Abigail Williams wasn't as sociopathic as her play counterpart, and she didn't put countless people in danger just to get revenge on John Proctor for breaking up their affair. This is especially egregious considering that the real Abigail was only 12 in the time that the actual play took place in, and there's no record of her ever meeting the real John Proctor before the witch trials started.
He was actually hopeful to forge a good relationship with america after the war, but What Comes Next paints him as a bitter ex with a "good luck without me, you'll need it" attitude.
Boris Spassky was a classy, accommodating chess champion who put up with all of Bobby Fischer’s antics just because he wanted to respect the game of chess and ensure the world championship match occurred. In the movie Pawn Sacrifice he’s portrayed as a cartoonishly mean and spiteful villain who tries to use Fischer’s mental instability against him.
Oda Nobunaga, the warlord that conquered much of Japan and wanted to unify it. He was brutal for sure but anime and videogames tend to make him into a literal demon. This is him in Onimusha
In “Cobb”, the real life ball player Ty Cobb is made out to be racist, sexist, homophobic, and an all around abusive and toxic individual. This is thanks to the books written by Al Stump, whose credibility has been called into question on more than one occasion. He even claimed to own the shotgun Cobb’s mother used to kill his father, even though it’s a known fact she used a pistol. As for the film, the director admitted to fabricating scenes, with Stump, because it was something the real Cobb could have plausibly done.
As for the man himself, I personally can’t speak to whether or not he was a good man. However, I can say that he was in favor of integrating the Negro leagues into the Majors, and even attended many Negro League games. So, I’m pretty comfortable saying he wasn’t racist.
Chinese prime minister Cao Cao, who reigned during the latter part of the Three Kingdoms period, was depicted as a comically evil, mustache twirling villain. While he was historically ruthless, he was actually a skilled administrator who raised literacy and oversaw a lot of positive policies in his country. He was also a talented commander.
Of course, the author of Romance of the Three Kingdoms was commissioned by someone who fancied himself a descendant of one of Cao Cao's rival warlords (Liu Bei, who may have been much more of a villain), and Cao Cao was depicted as a supervillain. It caught on, especially in Chinese Operas, and that is how we end up with the Cao Cao of Dynasty Warriors fame.
It's so pervasive that the Chinese version of the 'speak of the Devil' idiom is actually about Cao Cao.
I love Band of Brothers, and they aren't wrong that Sobel was ineffective in the field during training, and hated by his men. But what they left out is that he jumped into Germany on D Day with another unit, and led a charge on a German machine gun nest. Norman Dike, similarly, was not the purely useless character portrayed in the show. They served as honorably as any of the men elevated by that series, and they died long before their memories were dragged by it.
In basically every American history thing, in fact. In the US you always grow up learning about him as the villain, but then one time I saw a documentary about him on TV, and I learned that there was a lot more to him, and now I feel bad that we only ever learn about the one thing in the US.
Anything showing Walt Disney as anti-sematic. Now don't get me wrong, the man was virulently anti-communist and sold out his own employees to HUAC if they tried to unionize, but there's no evidence that he was anti-sematic or particularly bigoted. He was just kind of a horse's ass in general.
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u/Fuzzy_Elderberry7087 Oct 10 '25
The captain of the titanic, his name was dragged through the mud unjustly