Imagine you're watching or reading a good piece of Historical Fiction, and you notice a really cool character. You want to find out more about what they were like in Real Life, so you take to the net to look them up, but then you find...nothing. You don't see any articles or posts about the real person, only about the character from the work. And that's when you realize, that that very cool, very important person who seems to have made a great impact on history just simply didn't exist.
You just ran into a History Foreigner.
A History Foreigner is a character who is completely fabricated for the sake of the story. Perhaps the writers didn't really care about being accurate. After all, if a character is made-up, no one will point out historical inaccuracies related to them, since they didn't exist, so there aren't any facts.
Other times, the writers might have found an amazing person in the history books, whose character might have fit their story but there is just one problem: said person existed in a completely different era and place. In this case, the writers will create a new character who perfectly resembles the actual person in personality, and will do similar events, but their personal details, such as their name, appearance, gender, or age are altered.
Sometimes, a person in Real Life might not have been interesting enough, and instead of going for a simple Historical Hero Upgrade or Historical Villain Upgrade, the creators go to the extra mile, and make a new character from the ground up, who replaces the actual person.
For low level characters, it doesn't matter if they are fictional or not. A History Foreigner needs to be a character so important, that whatever they did would put them in the history books.
Often the creators may try to sell you the character's deeds as Secret History, saying that the character did exist in Real Life, they were just kept out or erased from the history books.
If the character has a relationship or friendship with an actual person, or perhaps a relative of one, this may go hand-in-hand with Historical Relationship Overhaul.
Compare No Historical Figures Were Harmed, where a character obviously based on a historical figure, but not actually one is put amongst otherwise fully fictional characters.
Contrast Historical Domain Character.
A Period Piece usually only (at least, mostly) features made-up characters, while in Historical Fiction, a lot of the cast are usually people who did exist in Real Life. Thus a History Foreigner is only notable if most of the main cast is otherwise made up of Historical Domain Characters.
See Canon Foreigner for the related, fictional equivalent.
Examples:
- Gladiator: Maximus Decimus Meridius did not exist. Word of God is that he is an amalgamation of several different people, including Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus
(Marcus Aurelius's general in the Danube region and Lucilla's second husband), Maximus of Hispania (from whom his name and moniker were taken), and Narcissus, the athlete who killed Commodus in Real Life (and whose name Maximus retained in the first drafts of the script).
- The Last Kingdom: Although most of the royalty in the series, such as King Alfred, Lady Aethelflaed, Queen Aelswith, King Edward or Lord Aethelred did exist, many others, including the main character Uhtred, Thyra, Brida, Father Beocca, Ragnar Ragnarsson, or Ragnar the Fearless. There was an Uhtred of Bebbanburg, but he lived a century after the series' events.
- Assassin's Creed: Odyssey: No, unfortunately there was no Eagle Bearer who helped random people across Ancient Greece, met all kinds of Historical Domain Characters such as Socrates, Alkibiades, Thespis, or was a descendant of Leonidas of Sparta and Pythagoras, or meddled in Athenian and Spartan politics and partook in the The Peloponnesian War or successfully took down an evil cult.
