Historical Hero Upgrade: Difference between revisions
m
clean up
m (update links) |
m (clean up) |
||
Line 24:
==Examples using real people==
=== Media in General ===
* Recently some people have attempted to give this to Countess Elizabeth Báthory, one of the worst serial killers in history. Nicknamed the 'Blood Countess,' she is believed to be responsible for torturing hundreds of young women to death, but they only had the evidence to convict her for 80 of them. First with her husband and, after he died, as a solo killer with a three friends acting as accomplices, she would order them into her dungeon and sadistically beat them. Despite having hundreds of witnesses testify that young women would regularly enter the castle and only their corpses would come out, some people still claim she was innocent and the victim of a conspiracy by the catholic church and the Habsburg empire that ruled Hungary at the time, claiming that they wanted her money and land, and did not like seeing a woman in power. There are a few problems with these theories: first, her crimes were reported by the Lutheran church (which she was a member of), secondly, the Habsburgs waited about a decade between the crimes being first reported and launching an investigation, and finally, she did not have any land, money, or direct power after her husband died: their son inherited his father’s land, and their eldest daughter acted as regent while he was a minor. While it is true that, as the wife, and later, mother of the Count, she had a lot of pull, she was technically powerless. About the only detail about her life that actually ''is'' certainly a myth are the rumours that she would [[Blood Bath|bathe in the blood of her many victims]]. On a related note, Báthory has the strange distinction of also receiving [[Historical Villain Upgrade
** ''Bathory'' took the position that she was completely innocent of any of the murders, and was really a kind a loving mother and ruler who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was the victim of the malicious slanders of greedy noblemen. That's not even getting into the ridiculousness of the monks spying on her.
** ''[[The Countess]]'' is similar, but with one main difference: Elizabeth Bathory is guilty of several murders. However, she is driven to it by circumstances, and an attempt to stay young and beautiful while she is in power. In this film, she is definitely a [[Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds]]. You still feel sorry for her and sympathize with what she is going through
Line 31:
* [[The Caligula|Vlad "the Impaler"]] was a particularly ruthless warlord who usually gets a [[Historical Villain Upgrade]] due to his association with Bram Stoker's novel ''[[Dracula]]''. However, he is also a celebrated national hero in Romania, since most of that ruthlessness was at the expense of their enemy, the Turks.
* Brutus
** While in ''[[Divine Comedy]]'', Dante puts him as a great traitor in the deepest level of hell, [[William Shakespeare]] saw him as a man who died for the Republic's interests. For a long time the prevailing opinion among liberal-minded intellectuals that Brutus was a shining paragon of republicanism and Caesar a grasping tyrant. They probably patterned this off of his ancestor ''Lucius'' Brutus, slayer of the last king of Rome, who (if he actually existed) got a
** Plutarch wrote in his book of historical biographies, ''Parallel Lives'', that Brutus was the last great republican, so it isn't unambiguously a case of an upgrade.
* ''[[Jeanne D'Arc]]'', of course, does this to Joan of Arc. Another, more peculiar example lies in {{spoiler|Giles de Rais, who was an infamous serial killer in real life, but here he is one of Joan's most steadfast allies.}} By all accounts he WAS a loyal French royalist AND a savage, possibly, Satanic murderer. The two aren't incompatible. That, and there is no small amount of dispute over WHEN his murders started.
Line 73:
* The real ''[[Rob Roy]]'' was both a murderer and a cattle thief. The movie Rob Roy turns him into a heroic man of impeccable honor, though strangely it still does make passing mention to cattle-thieving.
* In ''[[Valkyrie]]'' apparently the [http://www.verbrechen-der-wehrmacht.de/docs/home_e.htm German officer corps actually cared about Jewish people, was disgusted by their slaughter], and masterminded a plot to assassinate Hitler that would include the closing of KZs. [http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/GENOCIDE/reviewstr12.htm Never mind Stauffenberg's views of the Poles as "an unbelievable rabble" best under the whip, and their country as one filled with "a lot of Jews and a lot of cross-breeds"].
** The movie is wrong in his portraing of Stauffenberg and Co. as democrats, but despite their Anti-Semitic, racist views they did despise the industrialized murder of the Jews and their planned cabinet consisted mainly of Social-Democrats and Liberals, some of whom actually were in KZs at the time of the coup. So the Upgrade is not from [[A Lighter Shade of Grey]] to Heroes, but from the historical [[Anti-Hero
** The German officers who attempted to assassintate Hitler were primarily old-guard conservatives of a monarchist bent; they despised Hitler not only for his crudeness but also the fact that he was the representative of the "upstart" middle/lower classes. Many turned against him simply because he was losing the war.
** Various members of the July conspiracy and the Kreisau Circle had different views. The vast majority were monarchists, various members were anti-Semites (though generally of the religious rather than racist variety), most wanted an authoritarian future, but several protested the treatment of Poles and Jews. The film's mistake is portray [[Black and Gray Morality|black and (fairly light) grey morality]] as [[Black and White Morality]].
Line 82:
** Not quite; a sleazy journalist pestered him for a story and then wrote about the downfall of [[Al Capone]] in [[Loosely Based On A True Story]] terms, with Ness as [[The Hero]]. But Ness actually lamented that, since he knew full well his role in Capone's downfall was limited and didn't like that the credit was stolen from other people.
** He's a bit more sympathetic in Brian Michael Bendis's comic ''Torso''. As Cleveland's head of Public Safety, he tries to prevent pedestrian traffic deaths (about 400 people a year) while the public is more concerned with a serial killer who's stalking prostitutes and immigrants in a tent city on the outskirts of the city that most of the population didn't care about anyway.
* Lucilla, sister of the Roman Emperor Commodus has been given a
* Early in the USA's history, General Custer was often depicted as [[The Messiah]], a brave hero who fought against the Indians and died alongside his men. This myth extended to both literature and eventually, film. This is most notable in 1941's ''They Died with Their Boots On''. More modern sympathies with the Indians have caused him to no longer be portrayed this way, however. Custer's heroic myths are due to his wife, who outlived him (she died in 1933, a little under 50 years after him). She wrote ''three'' books depicting her late husband as a folk hero. She was afraid he would be blamed for the humiliating defeat and slaughter his troop suffered, and thus spent the rest of her life lobbying extensively to make her husband look a hero.
** ''They Died with Their Boots On'' also manages to [[You Fail History Forever|fail history forever]] by portraying him as a champion of Indians' rights.
Line 99:
=== Literature ===
* [[Older Than Print]]: The ''[[Arabian Nights]]'' gave Haroun al Rashid a
* ''[[Romance of the Three Kingdoms]]'' has a few:
** This is especially the case regarding on Liu Bei. True enough, he had noble goals. However, his traits have often been exaggerated to make him seem as if he was an extremely honorable man; never mind that he made lots and lots of mistakes that make him pale in comparison to Cao Cao's war abilities (such as irrationally leading the disastrous attack on Yi Ling, or slamming his infant son to the ground, effectively dooming his future empire). Yeah, author favoritism is also at fault here.
Line 119:
** To be fair, Anne is also depicted as intending (at least at first) to manipulate Henry using both lust and love, and to maneuver him into serving the schemes of her father, a notable member of Henry's court, long before she begins to legitimately care for him. Both depictions are much more morally gray than normal, and as such, probably a more accurate depiction of real people, at least morally if not historically.
*** She is also portrayed as having slept with Sir Thomas Wyatt before her marriage with Henry VIII. There are indications Wyatt may have had romantic feelings for her, though there is no proof that Anne reciprocated, and certainly not that they had sex, as it would have gravely endangered any future marriage of Anne's if she were found to not be a virgin. Wyatt ''was'' arrested for adultery with Anne, writing a poem about witnessing the beheadings of Anne and her co-defendants from his cell window in the Tower of London, but released a year later.
**** If anything, Anne was more fairly depicted in The
=== Theatre ===
* ''[[Henry V]]'' ignores several inconvenient aspects of the historical king, probably because he was a [[Badass]] warrior King of England at a time when English nationalism was on the rise after hundreds of years of domination by French overlords. Still, he could easily have been seen as a villain, even by the Elizabethans. He executed captured enemy knights, presided over some horrible bloodbaths, doomed both sides to keep fighting a pointless war, burned "Protestant" heretics<ref>strictly speaking, Lollards, but these were seen as Protestant forerunners by many Elizabethans</ref>
* ''[[Henry VIII (play)|Henry VIII]]'' ends with Henry and Anne eagerly expecting his heir, the future Queen Elizabeth - ignoring the fact that the entire point of the exercise had been for Henry to get a ''male'' heir, and indeed that Catherine had ''already'' borne a female heir ([[Unperson|who would grow up to be Bloody Mary]])... not to mention the infamous mess that would come a few years later, with Catherine dead and Anne convicted of capital crimes, both under very suspicious circumstances.
* Thomas More's portrayal in ''[[A Man for All Seasons]]'' tends to focus on his bravery in maintaining his principles even when he knew this would result in his gruesome death, presenting him as a champion of the freedom of the individual conscience. Even apart, however, from the [[Values Dissonance]] that led him (like nearly everyone in his own time) to approve the burning of heretics, More was fully convinced that the state ''had a perfect right'' to suppress any '''open''' dissent; his entire defense was based upon the plea that he had not made his personal opinions known. He was definitely no advocate of free speech, as the play seems to suggest he was.
Line 129:
=== Videogames ===
* Pretty much ''everyone'' in the ''[[Sengoku Basara]]'' series that wasn't instead [[Historical Villain Upgrade|made into an outright villain]] gets some degree or another of this, but [[Tokugawa Ieyasu]] is the
* Taking a leaf from ''[[Romance of the Three Kingdoms]]'', ''[[Dynasty Warriors]]'' promotes Liu Bei to a man concerned primarily with virtue and honourable behaviour.
** To a lesser degree, his son Liu Shan is also portrayed as, while far from the warrior his father was, a man of virtue.
* ''[[Assassin's Creed]]'' has this and its [[Historical Villain Upgrade|counterpart]] '''as its entire plot'''. The series's main draw is how the developers use the [[Rule of Cool]] to combine [[Shown Their Work|exquisite research]] with Historical Upgrades. [[In the Past Everyone Will Be Famous|Everybody of note in the past]] belonged to one of two [[Ancient Conspiracy|Ancient Conspiracies]]; the [[Black and Gray Morality|Templars and the Assassins]]. The [http://assassinscreed.wikia.com/wiki/Templars Templars] work to [[The Evils of Free Will|eradicate free will in the name of peace]]. The [http://assassinscreed.wikia.com/wiki/Assassins Assassins] hunt and kill [[Aristocrats Are Evil|Evil Aristocrats]] wherever and whenever possible "[[The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified|to safeguard Mankind's evolution]]"(and peace). If somebody in the past was awesome, he's in the series somewhere with his life examined in detail - with [[Hidden Depths]] because history was [[Written by the Winners|Written By The Templars]].
** For starters, the Hashshashin themselves. IRL(as far as we know), they were Hassan-I-Sabah's private army, and brainwashed with drugs to boot. They built a reputation at the time as his enemies were [[Asshole Victim
*** There is no [[Real Life]] proof of their supposed drug-use, only hearsay from their foes. But they definately were ruthless religious fanatic, not entirely unlike the modern Islamic terrorists.
** [[Richard the Lion Heart|King Richard I]] of England, however, got a fairly realistic representation: he went by the title "Lionhearted" even in his own day, and it did not refer to heroism but a love of combat. So, though he's driven to conquer Jerusalem, he [[I Gave My Word|keeps his promise]] to listen to [[Player Character|Altaïr]] finally after he beats [[Big Bad|Robert De Sable]] in single combat, and lets Altair go free afterwards. He's undeniably a jerkass, but he's still portrayed in a relatively positive manner - basically a [[Noble Demon]].
| |||