Historical Villain Upgrade/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A real-life not-completely-evil person who, through the lens of history, is viewed as a villain.

  • Straight: Alice Troper was, back in the day, a very ambitious and powerful aristocrat. When Alice and Bob: The Motion Picture comes out, she's painted as an irredeemably evil matriarch.
  • Exaggerated: In real life, Alice spent her entire life as a nun, doing nothing but praying and worshipping the gods. In The Movie, she rapes men and women, betrays her own country for more money and power, and gleefully carries out a genocide.
  • Justified: The makers of Alice and Bob: The Motion Picture sided against Alice Troper, so naturally they'd want to make her look bad.
    • Earlier historical records were biased against Alice.
  • Inverted: Historical Hero Upgrade
  • Subverted: Later historical evidence reveals that Alice Troper did indeed poison her husband for power.
  • Double Subverted: ...but her other evil actions have been either fabricated or exaggerated.
    • The historical evidence was not accurate.
  • Parodied: The character of Alice in the movie rattles off all the good things she did in real life - and then the heroes summarily hand waves them away.
  • Deconstructed: Popular opinion of Alice Troper never recovers, causing her to be viewed unfavorably throughout history for a very, very long time.
  • Reconstructed: "Alice Troper: The Miniseries" comes out, rehabilitating people's opinions of Alice.
  • Zig Zagged: The movie dips in and out of a sympathetic portrayal.
  • Averted: The movie writers decide to do the research and paint the characters correctly.
  • Enforced: "Well, boys, I like the script, but those moronic viewers can't understand subtle, nuanced characters. If you just make Alice an evil, puppy-kicking harpy then I think things will go over much more easily."
  • Lampshaded: "Alice Troper, did you really poison your family members for power? Really?"
  • Invoked: The movie makers spew propaganda to paint Alice as a villain.
  • Defied: See "Averted".
  • Discussed: "The history books may put you down as some kind of hero, Alice. But you'll always know the truth about what you've done!"
  • Conversed: "So Alice was a Depraved Bisexual who couldn't go 24 hours without kicking a dog? So much for my Ph.D. thesis."

Salieri wants you to go back to Historical Villain Upgrade. Don't worry, he wasn't THAT bad.

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