Archived Discussion Main / HistoricalVillainupgrade

• On the other hand, a number of historical dramatizations written during or just after Vlad's rule are allegedly also exaggerated, to the point of early-form political cartoons comparing him to Pontius Pilate.
  • He was also known as one of the first people to hold the nobility accountable for their actions, and to promote peasants to positions of authority if they were superior to a noble competitor. Which, given that most of the people doing the writing at that time were nobles and elites, might explain a good bit about his treatment by history...

Natter

• While Jack The Ripper was unquestionably a villain, it is common to make him something other than human, such as a demonic entity or malicious alien. One episode of the old Star Trek portrayed Jack the Ripper as a disembodied creature that fed on fear, and had the ability to travel from planet to planet.
  • And who can forget Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure's "ZOMBIE Jack the Ripper."
  • Notably averted in Babylon 5.
  • He has also been portrayed other occasions (e.g. From Hell) as a mad surgeon, as opposed to the lower-class murderer with no medical skills that modern hunters of serial killers believe him to be (as he was never caught, however, who really knows?).
  • He also has an appearance in Hiromu Arakawa's Shanghai Youma Kikai, though not as a villain.
  • Similar to the Star Trek example, The Outer Limits also involved Jack being a body swapping Energy Being. Later on it turns out there's two of them, they have access to a time machine & they've been using it to orchestrate the events of every single episode in the series for their own amusement because they're immortal & bored with life.

Jack's already a villain; no upgrade here.

• Averted by the recent movie Mongol which showed Genghis Khan, aka Temugin, as downright sympathetic.
• Also averted by Doctor Who, of all things, which referred to Genghis Khan in admiring tones back in the first season.
  • Although the 9th Doctor comments once how the hordes of Genghis Khan weren't able to penetrate the doors of Tardis, implying that he had to leave that era in a hurry.
• Bill And Teds Excellent Adventure seemed to downgrade him, where the worst he did was "totally ravaged Oshman's Sporting Goods".
• Genghis Khan kind of invited this trope. He wasn't an absolute monster, but Central Asia still hasn't really recovered from the damage the Mongol invasion did over seven hundred years ago. Also, his idea of diplomacy ran along the lines of "See these severed heads? That's what happened to the last city that refused to surrender."
• Seeing as how Genghis himself cultivated this image (mostly to prevent bloodshed and conquer peacefully) it isn't that surprising that we see him that way to this day.

Please avoid all these aversions. Aversions are, for the most part, not needed.

• Adolf Hitler himself is a bit of an odd exception, however. Although frequently given dark sorcerous powers or robot armies in fictional adaptations, it's questionable that any attempt at villain upgrades make the man any more awful than he already was in real life. In fact, most fiction tends to shy away from his worst atrocities. He is arguably an unupgradeable villain.
  • He was apparently really nice to his secretaries and loved his mother. All you'd have to do for an upgrade is show him being mean to the staff and spitting on his mother's grave and he'd be maxed out on evil.
  • Stupid Jetpack Hitler is mainly for one reason, and one reason only.
  • This troper would argue that those who claim he was the worst man in history are either giving him a Historical Villain Upgrade, or a historical villain downgrade to Stalin and Mao. Not that the real man isn't decent movie villain fare, mind you.
    • I think anyone who would claim he was the worst man in history would be ignoring far more people than those two. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao weren't the most evil people in history, they were just three of the most successful at it.
  • But even though Stalin and Mao racked up higher body counts, Hitler had the more blatantly villainous trait of killing for no logical reason rather than just to maintain power.

Again, Hitler is already an evil villain.

• That is, until the National Convention tried to stop him. He ran around the assembly floor, pointing randomly at people and shouting 'Death! Death!'
  • So Yeah. ( :: crickets :: ) Fiction tends to portray him as either an out-of-touch, icy, bookish eunuch (and/or Ambiguously Gay) or the above-described power grubbing lunatic, and the former might be worse. I don't think any of these adaptations include the random stress-induced explosive nosebleeds...

Natter

• Most figures in Roman history suffer from either this or Historical Hero Upgrade. Unfortunately, centuries of reading what is essentially propaganda have reinforced the idea that history equals truth, and revisionist archaeologists have a hard time convincing people differently, even their own peers.

Irrelevant natter

• This Troper has now heard the original will be Villain Upgraded as well. WTF?

Natter.

• Oliver Cromwell. His actions are one of the reasons why the British monarchy isn't all-powerful and absolutist anymore, and yet he is the "villain." Terry Pratchett satirizes this mentality with "Old Stoneface" Vimes.
  • Not that this would make the Irish feel any more kindly towards him.

Totalitarianism is totalitarianism. Cromwell may have broken the power of the monarchy, but he himself was a sort of proto-fascist who behaved in pretty much the same manner as the kings before him. (Disclosure: I'm Irish).

• Haig wasn't evil, and he wasn't suffering under political pressure. He was a goddamn moron.

Natter.

• Not to mention Completely Missing The Point, Salieri starts the movie by being taken to the nut house, qualifying him as an Unreliable Narrator at the very least.
• This troper's music teacher actually believed this one...even putting it on the composers test...

Natter

• The historical Banastre "Benny or Bloody" Tarleton was noted for a couple of incidents that would qualify as "atrocities", the Waxhaw Massacre being the most infamous. He just didn't get involved in the more "personal" side of the Revolution in the South (which was a rather nasty affair). On the other hand, he survived the war (losing most of one hand), and went into politics...
  • And promptly got a Villain Upgrade against William Wilberforce in Amazing Grace, making him possibly the only person to whom this has happened twice for two different subjects.
  • Mel Gibson's hero character was inspired by Real Life revolutionary Francis Marion, who was probably a deeply unpleasant man (it is alleged that he raped his female slaves and hunted Native Americans for sport). To many reviewers it seemed very unfair that the atrocities committed by British troops in the Revolutionary War had been greatly exaggerated, whereas atrocities committed by Americans had been ignored completely.
  • Tarleton also makes an appearance in the movie Sweet Liberty where Michael Caine plays an actor who who intends to portray him as a Loveable Rogue to the chagrin of Alan Alda's historian character who refers to him as a bloodthirsty rapist and murderer.
  • And that's another example of historical villain upgrade: Tarleton was an extremely ruthless commander, but he was never accused of raping or murdering anyone (at least not personally).

Natter. Also, this is about about antagonistic figures being portrayed as actually evil, not ignoring unpleasant facts about the protagonists.

• Those audiences have obviously never seen/read any Dutch story pertaining to the Eighty Years War... think Spanish Inquisition with Philip holding the red hot pokers.
• Casting Philip as a vilain is easy, but lazy... The man really believed he was God's instrument, which helps explain why he got so in over his (none too terribly bright) head.

Natter

• Averted in Seventeen Seventy Six as well as Amazing Grace (the film), which while not particularly sympathetic to pro-slavery politicians, don't paint them as satanic, either.

Non-example is non-example.

• Averted by Catch Me If You Can. The main conflict is between the real-life teen con artist Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the semi-fictional FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). Both characters are portrayed sympathetically - essentially, the film has no bad guy.

Ditto

• This troper would argue that anyone who ran a "Freak Show" essentially a chance for morons to point and laugh at people who were different, couldn't have been all that humane.
• Except that back then, just about the only paying job that a "Freak" could get was working in a circus.
  • Even now. Freak shows allowed the persons on display to earn a living wage, and often become wealthy if they had good management and common sense of their own. Nowadays almost all of those who would have been seen in freak shows are on welfare, living in rank poverty, sometimes going without necessary medical treatment and dying decades before their time. Some improvement.

Natter. Also, I've seen some interviews with people who do work as freaks, and believe it or not, amny of them enjoy the attention and money. Freaks actually seem to have a good sense of camaraderie.

• This troper likes to think that the Imhotep of the movie was simply named for the famous architect — by his parents, that is — and otherwise unrelated.

I've got a place for crazy theories.

• Somewhat justified in that the story was being told by the one surviving Spartan in order to improve the morale of the next army to face the Persians by making them out to be inhuman monsters.
  • I know that when I'm going into battle I never feel really confident unless I've been told I'm going up against a demon with saws for arms.
  • Ah, but you won't, because the Spartans killed them all!
  • And it's easier to kill people when you don't think of them as human beings.
• While the Persian Empire certainly bore little resemblance to the version in 300 it does not neccessarily deserve the extreme whitewashing some critics have given it: Darius (Xerxes's father) overthrew the previous monarch in a palace coup and Xerxes himself ended up assassinated and he was far from the last Persian Great King to die in domestic intrigue. The empire also saw a huge number of major revolts in the period - at one time or another the Ionian Greeks, the Babylonians and the Egyptians were in open revolt.
• While this troper can sympathize with people who were offended by the movie, it seems to him like most offended people overthink the whole thing. While the movie does turn the Persians into a mindless horde, there isn't a whole lot of time to give each Persian soldier a personality and background when the movie is clearly designed to be about people kicking ass.

Natter

• In a subversion, Gargoyles has a Macbeth whose character follows the real person with much more fidelity, apart from his ill-fated alliance with gargoyles and becoming immortal.

Natter. Also, Not A Subversion.

• Modern historians, for example Paul M. Kendall, are trying to rehabilitate Richard III. and have gathered evidence from historical records that Henry Tudor, not Richard III., had the means and the motives to murder the two princes, and that king Richard was unpopular with many nobles (but popular with the English commoners) because after taking the throne he had passed laws and enacted reforms that strengthened the rights of the commoners and cut into the privileges of the nobility. After Henry Tudor had killed Richard at the battle of Bosworth Field with the help of traitors and usurped the throne (and founded the Tudor dynasty), he started a propaganda campaign to paint himself in a good light and to besmirch Richard's name forever.
• Much of this is true, but Henry Tudor killing the princes is tenuous at best. They were by and large thought to have died around late 1483 (notably, Richard made no effort to counter this rumor by, say, showing them in public), when Henry was still in exile in France. Say it with me: means, motive, and *opportunity*.
• Parodied in Black Adder, which gives the Villain Upgrade to Henry and makes Richard a nice guy, played by Peter 'Mawwiage' Cook.
• Inverted in a Doctor Who (radio play? novel? memory's fuzzy this morning), where Richard cares very much for (and ends up adopting after being shunted to the present) the two princesses.

Natter.

• One with a grain of truth; Newton evidently spent a lot of time dabbling in alchemy and mysticism. Also, he was quite, quite mad. And a genius.
  • The alchemy may be the reason for the madness, since it involves dealing with mercury. Note that he made his scientific discoveries (optics, theory of gravity, calculus) while he was younger.
• Isaac Newton did spend more time on his alchemy than his mathematics or physics, but he has also (urban myths or not) been credited with loving his cat and having invented the cat flap so "Puss" could go in and out of his study whenever she wanted (and with putting a second smaller hole next to it when "Puss" had kittens).
  • In the book, he does love his cat, Hobbe, and observing him is what starts him on his dark path. When Hobbe - who's really the keeper of the titular Wild Roads that Newton is trying to access - finds out about the experiments, he starts the London Fire while freeing the other cats.
  • While this editor isn't familiar with the book, this sounds like a variation on something Newton and other early scientists actually did. As is described in the novel An Instance of the Fingerpost (and perhaps also in the The Baroque Cycle), a lot of early research on anatomy was done through painful animal experimentation.

Natter.

• Well, of course not. I mean look at the man. His face is so stereotypically evil that he makes a photo of Hitler on a bad day look like your grumpy neighbour.

Natter.

• In Sengoku Basara, however, this gets subverted. Ieyasu is often played as an antagonist and comes off pathetic (really, kidnapped and tied up on a daily basis!?). But he's a good guy.

Aversions are not examples.

Kat: Uh, how is the Tarleton stuff natter? It seems to me that it's a perfectly legitimate example. He was not an evil man, merely one acting in the beliefs of his time, while Amazing Grace, Sweet Liberty and the Patriot are all portraying him as downright evil.

Buttle: The "X already really is an evil villain" deletions were retarded. I'm not undoing them as I don't care enough; the fact that I agree with you about Hitler, Jack the Ripper, and Churchill may have something to do with that. But there are other examples on the page of people who I also think were unambiguously bad — apparently you disagree with me there, as you didn't delete them. This page, and this site, are about popular culture, and a gaggle of "tropers" are not up to the task of deciding, once and for all, which historical figures really truly were eeeeevil. That shouldn't be a consideration when putting up an example. Do fictional depictions match the historical record? If not, are the deviations clearly meant to better suit a figure to the role of villain? Then they belong here.

Matthew The Raven: And there's no such thing as a real-life 'villain.' There are evil people, sure, but a villain is a role in a story. There's no such thing in real life.

• Pontius Pilate kinda goes through this in the Bible. When you actually look at the historical record regarding Pilate it becomes unlikely that the real Pilate (who was a really brutal guy) would have been intimidated by the Jewish leadership.

You haven't give a reason for it.