Basic Trope: The winners of a conflict glorify themselves and vilify the losers retroactively.
- Straight: The Empire attacks and conquers The Good Kingdom. The historians later present The Good Kingdom as Mordor who planned to release The Plague, so The Empire acted purely in self-defense.
- Exaggerated:
- The Empire is the lone global superpower and The Good Kingdom is a tiny but resource-rich speck of land on the other end of the globe. Everybody believes that The Good Kingdom was a real threat so The Empire was justified in attacking it.
- The Empire refuses to acknowledge that The Good Kingdom ever actually existed in its own right. As far as the imperial Propaganda Machine is concerned, they were just suppressing secessionist rebels.
- Downplayed:
- The Empire's history books say that most of the Kingdom didn't really want a war, but their king and a few crazy nobles forced them into it.
- The Empire's historians don't intentionally distort facts, they just write from their own perspectives and never consider how the citizens of The Good Kingdom view the invasion.
- The revision fail because they were done a few generations after the invasion.
- While The Empire's historians definitely are more sympathetic towards the Empire's motives, as time goes on it becomes clear that The Good Kingdom isn't exactly blameless or without sin either.
- Justified:
- The historians believe, "My Country, Right or Wrong."
- Everyone in The Good Kingdom was killed, so there's nobody left to contradict The Empire.
- Inverted:
- The Empire doesn't care about its image, so the conquered peoples get to write what posterity knows about it.
- Alternatively, due to any number of reasons (like the Empire having no written records or having those lost), the only accounts available are those written by the losers.
- The Empire deliberately plays up its own atrocities to scare people into raising a white flag of surrender
- Even though The Empire fell, sympathizers spread propaganda on how their atrocities never happened to anticipate its resurgence.
- For whatever reason The Good Kingdom downplays the evil of The Empire suggesting that it was mere desire for slaves that caused an invasion instead of their actual practices of deliberate genocide for its own sake.
- The "Good" Kingdom's rump state demonize and denounce The Empire's conquest as a bunch of imperialist monsters hell-bent on genociding anyone standing in the way. In reality, this is merely irredentist propaganda, and the Empire was only acting to liberate the slaves in the Kingdom (which the Kingdom pretends are "just" "servants" in their propaganda).
- Subverted:
- Centuries after the war, the historic research reveals that The Good Kingdom really was as evil as the Imperial historians proclaimed.
- The Empire considered what they did right at the time but shifting values make their descendants feel very guilty about it. They scour the earth for overlooked evidence and put together the damning history of what really happened.
- The Empire's fictious accounts go out as planned, and they're the only perspective featured in all the history books... as evidence of their crimes. Sure, the winners wrote all the information, but who's editing it?
- Double Subverted: …but that evidence was also forged.
- Parodied: Just because they can, Imperial historians write that The Good Kingdom was populated by one-legged, two-headed people with flowers for hair who fought with golf clubs.
- Zig Zagged:
- The Empire sets out to rewrite history, but their Blatant Lies spark off a rebellion and lead to a coup. Following this upheaval, the rebel leaders glorify themselves and vilify The Empire. Most citizens are aware of this, but don’t care because they hated The Empire anyway. …However, eventually some of the nastier things the rebels did to defeat their enemies come to light, including acts that make them similar. This creates a rift between those demanding the full truth be told and those who prefer to ignore those travesties because they ultimately benefited from them. This leads to another revolution, the former heroes are overthrown, and these rebels set out to ensure their image remains clean…
- The Empire doesn't hide away from its atrocities, and doesn't go out of its way to villainize the Good Kingdom, but it still justifies its many crimes on the basis of patriotic fervor.
- Some of the Imperial scholars try to conceal the atrocities committed by the Empire, while others do not care and might even be proud of the crimes.
- Averted: The history of a conflict is written by an impartial observer (possibly by an even stronger superpower).
- Enforced: “Just to show how evil The Emperor is, let’s give him a Propaganda Machine for Blatant Lies!”
- Lampshaded: “History is written by the winners, remember?”
- Invoked: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”
- Exploited:
- The Protagonist doesn’t care if they have to slaughter everyone in that village to get the Spy, because if the Empire said that they found the village already slaughtered nobody would believe them.
- Knowing the possibility that The Empire and the Good Kingdom could have potentially forged their written accounts, a third party not allied with either decides to write down their conflict... but hates them both, and so writes down every atrocious thing both have done to sour the public opinion of the two nations while spreading the accounts farther than the Empire and the Good Kingdom's reports ever would have reached on their own. The real "Winner" is the one whose story is the most well known, after all.
- Defied:
- “This folder contains the full truth I discovered about the war. Five hundred such folders are currently on the way to every major publishing house in the world.”
- The historian cites both the reports made by the historians from The Empire and those made by The Good Kingdom apologists, compare them, analyze how does the historical evidence supports the claims made by both sides, and concludes what is right and what is wrong about each view, without fully taking a side.
- Discussed: “If we die now, his truth will be the only one remaining.”
- Conversed: “I mean, what’s the point of fighting in the first place, if they cannot win and will be remembered as villains for all eternity thanks to the winners’ propaganda?”
- Implied: Imperial-friendly accounts from the time since it conquered the Kingdom are readily available to anyone inclined to read them; those friendly to the old Kingdom are restricted.
- Deconstructed: The Empire tries to rewrite the history of a recent war but its citizens lose patience at such blatant lies and spark a rebellion.
- Reconstructed: …after the coup, the rebel leaders glorify themselves and vilify the previous government even further.
- Future generation of historians are Genre Savvy enough to realize the biases involved in the accounts by The Empire and look for alternate document sources or archeological evidence.
- Played for Laughs: The Kingdom is treated as having the stuff of a joke.
- Played for Drama: Alice and Bob were 2 Mooks in service of The Empire, who were Just following orders to enact a final solution treatment on the Kingdom. Now that the empire has won, it has rewritten the history books to glorify itself and demonize The Good Kingdom. Unfortunately for Alice and Bob, The Empire sets out to exterminate the mooks ordered to do the dirty work so that the truth doesn't leak out.
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