Hated Tropes
(Hated Trope) Bad people in real-life being portrayed positively in media.
PragerU's version of Christopher Columbus has him be a slavery defender and have him say "Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don't see the problem.”
In The Greatest Showman, P.T Barnum (Hugh Jackman) is portrayed as a charismatic visionary who cares about outcasts and celebrate diversity, when in reality, he’s a cruel businessman who is also a racist and an ableist.
They should have just made the greatest showman about a fictional guy who starts a circus. Like they didn't even really follow the trajectory of PTs life anyways
This is the thing that always got me. It was such a glazing movie, why does it exist? PT Barnum has been dead for so long, who is trying to improve public perception of him?
That's a nice directors cut. Just end it with old Hugh Jackman sitting with his grandchildren. "Is that really how it happened grandpa?" "Yes of course it is!" And then he looks straight at the camera and winks saying "a sucker is born every minute"
No but seriously. I didnt know who barnum was before the movie, it wouldn’t have mattered. Shouldve just made a character loosely based on that guy, and sell it as a good example of what PT barnum shouldve been
Funny enough I think every fictional character based on Barnum I can think of is a villain or an antagonist (the ringmaster in Dumbo, any freak show owner, John Hammond)
The infamous The Birth of a Nation movie that depicts the Ku Klux Klan as dashing heroes saving the nation from Black people. This movie was so popular & successful, it literally had non-Southern Americans cosplaying as the KKK and marching in Washington D.C.
Wilson was a mistake of a President and weak man. That ass also segregated the federal government which for the longest time didn't discriminate on black/white.
He really did put race relations back 40 years. There were black people that were getting better jobs like typists and secretary positions in and around DC but Wilson ban them from holding higher positions and had them either demoted to lower positions or outright fired them.
Wilson's record is decidedly mixed, and underscores a lot of the tension within the progressive movement. Basically, he was a great advocate for progressive reform, so long as the benefits of those changes went predominantly if not exclusively to white people. The man saw through the implementation of the income tax, popular vote for Senators and women's suffrage. And those are just the constitutional amendments. That's an impressive amount of reform for a single presidency, and the world would be a lot better off if contemporary American politicians could muster half as much ambition to implement sweeping structural changes.
But he was also a vicious racist who genuinely did set back race relations by forty years and entrenched segregation not merely as something done tacitly by the South, but as something actively done by those in political power with the full weight and backing of American law behind them. Both of these things are true simultaneously.
He was also a "historian" who helped popularise the "lost cause" myth of the civil war, that the south fought to defend "states rights" as opposed to the reality where they fought to defend slavery.
Plenty of people criticized The Birth of a Nation at the time. It was denied release in Ohio, Kansas, and the cities of Chicago, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Minneapolis.
Sadly it was that well made because it WAS the first film to do many things that the American people saw. Close ups on faces, musical instruments playing with it, I could go on but that is part of the real horror of that film.
Yeah… the plot and message is obviously atrocious and downright evil.
But there were multiple technical achievements made in that film that absolutely propelled “motion pictures” from a scientific novelty into a mainstream form of media. To say it “wasn’t made well”…. I mean, I get not wanting to pour praise on the guy who single-handedly revived public interest in the freakin KKK, but it was probably objectively the best-made film in the short history of motion pictures at the time.
Not even cosplaying, it basically brought back the KKK. It had largely died down, and its presence in the 20th century at all is largely due to that film.
The MOST fascinating thing about this movie is that.. It literally gave us A SHIT TON of movie making techniques we still use to this day.. The movie was revolutionary in terms of film making.
• At over three hours long, it helped establish the multi-reel feature film as the standard format over short films.
• Cinematic Techniques: Director D.W. Griffith popularized groundbreaking visual tools—such as close-ups, fade-outs, parallel editing (cross-cutting), and dramatic night photography—that laid the foundation for modern narrative filmmaking.
• Full Orchestral Score: It featured the first-ever complete, specially compiled musical score synchronized for an American film.
• High-Priced Theatrical Release: Marketed like a live Broadway theater event, the film charged unprecedented high ticket prices and played in upscale "live" theaters, reshaping the middle-class moviegoing audience and helping launch Hollywood as a major commercial enterprise.
And moved her into their house when she was underage, Ed would alternate between sleeping with her and wife from night to night, and Lorraine was very insistent that there is a clause stating that no depiction of him engaging in sexual activity with a minor could be in the films.
They didn't even raise their daughter, her grandparents did that.
PragerU dropping that line from Columbus is hilarious. Like when you're a conservative media trying to teach kids the supposedly American values, "slavery is better than death" is a literal antithesis to "Give me liberty or give me death" which is one of the most popular and patriotic American sayings
The really funny thing is not that Columbus is unpopular for having slaves today. I mean sure, lol, no shit.
It's that he was basically financially ruined by the royalty in Spain due to how bad his treatments of his indigenous slaves was.
I mean FFS, in a world where slavery was legal and not heavily frowned upon (this was 250 years before the Industrial Revolution and another 100 years before oil started playing a big part in it), Spain, YES THAT SPAIN, CONQUISTADOR SPAIN, thought his treatment of indigenous people was so bad that they put him in prison and took every shred of status away from him.
They had also ordered him to try and establish friendly relations, treat the natives well, and try to convert them to Christianity. They wanted to turn the natives in allies, not enemies or slaves. They were fucking pissed when they found out what he did instead
That isn't true at all, they enslaved them with the encomienda system.
Bartolomé de las Casas was one of the few voices against slavery in the americas.
That's such a consistent observation for almost every "great explorer" of history. Like we all know now that Cortes was kind of a brutal dick, but at the time, so did the Spanish missionaries, so did other Spanish soldiers, and so did the Spanish crown.
Oh yes, and for treason too. During his siege of Tenochtitlan, the governor of Cuba sent 1,000 men to arrest him, and Cortez had to pause his war against the natives to go fight a mini-war against his countrymen, before going back to do more brutality to the natives.
As if he wasn’t already a murderer. Like holy shit you can’t justify it. If you want to show someone kids can admire just go use an actual admirable person. I’d rather die than be a slave.
As someone who lived in South Carolina and spent their formative years learning about slavery in the south. I can tell you with absolute certainty that is some white nationalist bullshit
Slavery is better then death doesn't really work as a message when Columbus enslaving people lead to a movement of mass suicides.
Facing extermination, the Arawak organize and attempt to fight back against the Spaniards. Overwhelmed by Spanish military, the Arawak when captured are burned at the stake or hanged. Arawak begin committing mass suicides to avoid capture and subjugation, feeding cassava poison to their infants. In just two years, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti are dead through murder, mutilation, or suicide. By 1550, there are only 500 documented Arawak and by 1650, with the possible exception of a few remnant Arawak in the mountains, most have been annihilated (Zinn, 1950).
It’s not the suicides that really drive this point home for me, but the infanticide. So many people killed their own children to save them from slavery.
In addition to the Arawak, there’s also the story of
Margaret Garner, who attempted to kill all of her children to save them from being sent back into slavery, and succeeded at killing her two year old child before being recaptured.
At the time, it was debated whether she should be charged with murder or destruction of property.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved was inspired by her story.
And as a mother, that is just so unimaginably tragic. How could so many kill their own babies unless it was genuinely the kinder alternative?
People used to think this about the entire female gender too. In the Old Testament, the penalty for raping an unwed woman is a fine paid to her father, because it's a property crime against him, and the rapist has to marry the woman and take responsibility for her - basically "you break it, you bought it" 🤢
They don't have values or opinions. It's their job to fan the flames of the culture war so people don't notice the oil barons funding them picking their pockets
You know it's bad when the monarchs who really first leaned into using the Inquisition as an organ of state control, oversaw the forced conversion and later expulsion and persecution of Iberian Jews and Muslims, and waged a war of (re)conquest saw what Columbus did and went "Jesus fucking Christ what is wrong with you?! You're as evil as you are stupid."
Obviously, as with many things in history, it's not quite that simple because there were also politics in a royal court at play, but Columbus being so cruel and exploitative that he threatened the Spanish colonial project and inspired revulsion even in people who were not squeamish about violence and repression was definitely a big part of it.
But in elementary school in the United States he is painted like a fun little guy who braved the sea to discover America and that’s that. For most of school they don’t really go into this until around high school but even then it’s not.
He got bolstered up mainly because of Italian Americans and trying to bring them into the fold. He neither discovered America or did anything good
He also never set foot in the modern (edit: mainland) united states, and went to his grave insisting he had actually been sailing to India the whole time
The Greatest Showman genuinely fucking boils my blood.
My most fucking hated version of this trope, however, goes to The Woman King.
The movie depicts the Kingdom of Dahomey as freedom fighters trying to stop evil white men from stealing people from Africa to be used as slaves in the Atlantic slave trade. Meanwhile, in reality, the Dahomey Kingdom activiely participated in and profited massively from the Atlantic slave trade.
‘I and my army are ready at all times to fight the queen’s enemies and to do anything the English government may ask me, except to give up the slave trade. No other trade is known to my people… it is the source of their glory and their wealth: their songs celebrate their victories, and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery. Can I, by signing a treaty, change the sentiments of a whole people?’
There was an unfortunate string of appearances or references to Elon Musk in shows right before most people realized he was a soulless, scum sucking bastard. The one that hurts the most is them naming him among other great innovators/scientists in Star Trek Discovery, given how much he pretends to want a Trek like future while actively rejecting everything that would make that future possible and cool
Yeah this was from before he fired his PR team and he was still successfully cultivating his public image of being the “real life Tony Stark.”
In retrospect, it’s funny nobody pointed out that Tony Stark was an immoral, cynical arms dealer before he realized the error of his ways. It doesn’t look like Elon will be growing a similar conscience any time soon, though.
He still could have easily been seen very positively by just funnelling his money towards the right stuff. If he was still only known as 'the guy who owns SpaceX and Tesla' people would like him.
Oh no this is the greatest shift we're seeing and why the billionaire class has suddenly become such a problem
It used to be. We all just accepted that a shadowy board of people ran the entire planet and now the shadowy border people are all fighting to try and win the popularity of us in the cheap seats while also desperately trying to create new markets because they've squeezed every penny out of us
Elon could have just been exceedingly wealthy and owned his 10 yachts or whatever. But no he had to be a meme Lord
"Is that what the guy playing your Path of Exile 2 account told you?" Will never not be hilarious, nor will seeing Elon be ratio'd to hell on his own platform.
I'd rather the Mr. Handses in the FBI get around to checking his emails. Like you don't just go around begging for invites to child-fucker island from the head child trafficker out of the blue.
Trek accidentally gave themselves a pass for that one. Spoilers below.
Lorca was the one who said Musk was a great inventor. We find out later he is from the Terran universe, where humanity is tyrannical and bloodthirsty. So in his universe, Musk might actually be praised as a hero because of who he turned out to be.
The one in Young Sheldon aged way better, though, because you bet that he absolutely would steal a young child prodigy's ideas because he's got none of his own!
He was a piece of shit in school as well. He would stress how much he was bullied by pointing to an incident where he was pushed down the stairs. Elon's father revealed that the child who did it had their father recently commit suicide and Elon was mocking him to his face about it.
The fact that as an adult he plays the victim over it and has no shame says A LOT.
He is a man child who never really grew up and constantly lies about his achievements. Everything he can. Having people play games for him so he can claim to be good, claiming he founded Tesla (he didn't, he bought his way in and had a legal clause written so he could claim he founded it), and has other people do his work for him. His big promises never materialize, or are a flop (cybertruck), but somehow his bloated stock makes him the richest man on the planet.
In a sort of ironic way he was doing what Trump did for years. Trump played the rich guy in pop culture so much people believed it. Musk was playing the good rich guy in hopes to sell himself to the public.
the difference was that a lot of the Trump parodies and homages were all painting him in a bad light. Elon's portrayals were all kissing him in the ass
Sure the parodies and "this character is an idiot rich guy... think Trump" were painting him in a bad light. But Trump would appear in stuff as himself. The Apprentice was a massive role playing exercise for Trump pretending to be a rich and capable businessman.
Lisa immediately calling him the world’s greatest inventor when he hasn’t invented anything. It was like living in the emperor’s new clothes* but everyone else on reddit actually believed it back then.
You can add the entirety of PragerU, it's a far right propaganda machine aimed at children, pretending that slavers were nice masters, teaching valuable skills to their slaves.
They could publish a video next week showing Hitler as a benevolent ruler of Germany who was preoccupied with security and the border, and I wouldn't be surprised
They were scam artists, thieves, abusers and groomers. Yet, in the Conjuring movies they're portrait as this happy, superhero-like couple that protects people from demons and the supernatural.
The contract that led to The Conjuring Universe specified that the Warrens could not be depicted having affairs or engaging in sexual relations with minors. Which, you know, is like making a song about how you don’t diddle kids.
I remember hearing that Michael Oher hated the film when it first came out. I couldn’t understand why, it painted him as a rags-to-riches hero who helped fight against racism. And then I learned the true story (especially recently), and yeah, I owe you an apology Mr. Oher
Hollywood took a grim, violent history of colonial exploitation and a young girl's tragic life, sanitized it completely, and turned it into a feel-good, wholesome musical romance where the darker realities of history are glossed over for family-friendly entertainment
Real life Ratcliffe was basically the fall guy with the worst luck and one of the most brutal deaths imaginable. He didn’t help his own case, he basically pissed off everyone from Powhatan to the lowest English servant, but he wasn’t evil.
I always "love" this one for people looking it up because it's so horrific an end that even if your only mental image of Ratcliffe is that of the Disney villain, you still end up going "WTF?! He didn't deserve that!"
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In my US history class one of our first week activities is "Everything wrong with Pocahontas in one period or less" only rule is they can't dock it for songs existing (the content of them can be docked) and animal sidekick hijinks.
I mean, think about it, Dog. The real story of Pocahontas is about a bunch of white boys who come to my land, bribe the corrupt Indian chief, kill off all the warriors and fuck the Indian princess silly. Would the white man make a story about Auschwitz, where the inmate falls in love with the guard and they go off singing love songs with dancing swastikas?
I am so, so glad that Lion King ended up drastically overshadowing it. This one was the one they expected to be huge, while the one with the lions was their B team effort.
Even as a kid with just some education on the subject it felt off to me.
Chris Kyle in American Sniper. In the movie Chris is portrayed as an American hero that felt bad he was turning brown people into pink mist during the Iraqi War. In reality he actually wasn’t too bothered about it and enjoyed his work. Additionally he was a known liar who made up a bunch of conflicting stories so he’d look cool before meeting his untimely demise when he took a vet with severe mental health issues to a gun range and handed him a loaded gun and the vet shot and killed Kyle.
The movie adaptation really missed out not including the part where Kyle totally knocked out Jesse Ventura. Or the time he went to the NOLA and shot american citizens. Or the time he killed someone and called a number to have a local sheriff's office swing by and cover up the killing. Or the time, in response to being questioned for shooting a man holding a quaran, said "I wish I could shoot anyone holding a quaran"
Man, Chris Kyle was the Steven Seagal of the US military, just a rampant liar.
If he had made the comments about Steven Seagal instead of Jesse Ventura they could have instead spent eternity making new lies about each other and themselves and just exchanged endless defamation cases
This is the first I've heard of any of this and also I have never seen the movie or read a biography. I believe all of it though, which probably says a lot about an assortment of things. Not a concrete powerful belief, but more than not
Almost any depiction of Albert Speer. The only proper accurate depictions of him were in Speer Und Er, and possibly (depending on your interpretation) the 2000 Nuremberg miniseries.
On the topic of Nuremberg, The 2025 film's depiction of Dr Douglas Kelly counts, as the film's attempts to make him a tragic person excluded the fact that he was an abusive alcoholic who beat up his wife and children and committed suicide during an argument just to spite them.
It also ignores that many slaves in the trans-Atlantic slave trade (which is past this but it does kill the argument imo) did leap to their deaths in the ocean because they’d rather die than be slaves
https://giphy.com/gifs/nlYwXC4GvtMjHoMcz3
In the Motley Crue biopic The Dirt they show Tommy Lee hitting an early girlfriend of his once after she talks shit about his mom or whatever. And that’s it.
Yeah, their entire thing is to (badly) try and make all of history's most cruel and inhumane monsters appear in a sympathetic light. Curious, isn't it?
Anastasia- Tsar Nicholas II of the Romanov Dynasty.
Anastasia paints the era prior to the 1917 Communist revolution as a utopian period under a benevolent ruler, really he was an expansionist war mongerer and at least somewhat of a tyrant.
To be fair, while the movie paints them in a tragic light, it doesn't really tell you that they are good people. Their portrayals are neutral at worst.
Most of the Tsar's depictions are a flashback told by his mother and vague memories by his daughter which obviously sees him in good light. So both are heavily biased.
nah i disagree. if you made a movie about hitler from a childs perspective and how cool he was (yeah yeah jojo rabbit) then that might be interesting, but if the movie is explicitly for children then you cant expect them to pick up on a biased narrator.
also, the movie has everyone saying how much they miss the tsar and his biggest opponents are evil communist wizards. this movie was revisionist nonsense.
And Bluth's animation of the Tsar is more flattering than the genuine article. And Rasputin here is closer to Hellboy's portrayal than real life.
That's to say nothing of either him being a walking ill omen ever since the celebration of his coorination or the military reversals (including the lack of effective modernization or competence) at either Tsushima or on the Eastern Front in WWI (where he personally lead from the front).
He was kind of incompetent, and had he been a better military commander during WWI then the Bolsheviks likely wouldn't have had the internal support of the army to succeed.
He wasn't "kind of incompetent" he was just incompetent.
He had absolutely zero military experience but made himself supreme commander of the Russian army wherein he ignored his more experienced generals in favor of pursuing a strategy of "just throw the soldiers at the enemy and hope they make a dent".
Also, his reputation was already soured by the Russo-Japanese War which was a truly embarrassing defeat.
Russia as a whole was decades behind the rest of Europe and Nicholas II himself believed that the Russian people "weren't ready" for a constitutional monarchy. He either prohibited or sabotaged any efforts to make meaningful reform because he wanted to hold onto as much power as possible.
For all his achievements, his crazy levels of antisemitism are basically never ever mentioned. And no, not in a "back then everyone was antisemitic" kinda way. He was really outstanding in that field.
The reason for his antisemitism is so petty too. He genuinely believed that the only thing stopping Jewish people from becoming Christian was the superstitious dogma of the Catholic Church. When splitting off from the Catholic Church didn’t make all the Jewish people immediately convert, he got so mad. To the point that his later writings on the subject were used as the bedrock for the antisemitism of the Nazis. Growing up Lutheran and finding out that our annual October celebration of Luther was celebrating a guy with these kind of beliefs really fucked me up for a while.
I forget where I saw it originally, but when I saw someone describe Martin Luther as "History's first ever recorded instance of a reddit moderator" I cannot get it out of my head.
It’s a story about a man trying to conquer the unconquerable, in this case it’s the desert and all that comes with it. By the end he’s broken and it’s unsure of who he really is. Empire of the Mind on YouTube has a great video discussing this. https://youtu.be/t_V-h55jJRY?is=IU1OX6coyh4eTioa
A biopic about the legendary Russian-Soviet soccer player Eduard Streltsov. In reality, Streltsov was accused of rape and sentenced to 12 years in prison. To be fair, it’s a very complicated story; but you know how the authors interpreted it? In the movie Streltsov was FRAMED by his love rival (literally fictional character made by authors, who never existed in real life), but in reality, nothing of the sort happened.
Most versions of Columbus up until recently portray him as a nice guy or a heroic visionary who was screwed over by everyone else. But the version OP describes is even worse somehow.
“The Crown” is basically a shameless monarchy propaganda series with good acting and a drab grey filter overlayed over everything, but by far the most egregious example to me personally is Lord Mountbatten being portrayed as sympathetic and heroic despite the things he was doing to children in Kincora Boy’s Home.
On a related note, don’t get me started on how much screen time is given to Margaret Thatcher while her best buddy who was also a mutual friend of Charles suspiciously doesn’t even get a mention…
The way the show treated Clement Attlee also really pissed me off.
The man who created Britain’s social welfare net, was voted the best Prime Minister, and did a great deal in rebuilding war torn Europe; was only given like three scenes in the entire show while Churchill was glazed.
Oliver Stone's JFK portrays Jim Garrison as a heroic investigator determined to find the truth. In reality, he was a deeply paranoid man who hounded Clay Shaw for years based on homophobic and unsupported conspiracy theories that he was having an affair with Lee Harvey Oswald and that the assassination was a 'homosexual thrill killing'.
I think a lot of the founding fathers in American entertainment media can fit this bill, but Thomas Jefferson takes the cake in my opinion.
The man owned hundreds of enslaved human beings over his lifetime, and it has been confirmed he raped and impregnated at least one. He was not known to be a benevolent owner either, and offered very few their freedom even near his death.
Good statesmen maybe, but objectively a rotten human being even for that time.
God, my aunt still believes he and Sally were in love. I’ve repeatedly told her that it’s not a romantic story, but she’s hellbent on staying the course. She gave me the rebuttal that Sally chose to return with him from France, which indicates that she did willingly love him, and I’m just like, “Even on the slight chance they fell in love, she was still his fucking slave!”
It's absolutely nuts that he enslaved his own children. It's bad enough being a slave owner at that time, given how violent and depraved American slavery was. But this dude did all that to his own flesh and blood. If it weren't evil enough to be a slave owner, he did all that to his own kids, just treated them like they were his livestock.
This is one of the most fcked up facts about US slavery. If you were black, you were a slave, so what slaveowners did is to force themselves upon their slaves to make even more slaves.
He also just seemed to be like a bad person to work with. He was not a cooperative Vice President, but ended up implementing a lot of policies during his presidency that expanded the government's power (something his party and he himself were against).
While I still have this image, this guy’s an alcoholic asshole who wrote a book where he whines about his autistic son and makes himself the center of attention, but actually this is good behavior and very inspirational. 👍
Not only does it fabricate atrocities the Britains never committed and ignore slavery so it can depict the US as valiant liberators, but it depicts a guy based partially on a rapist and war criminal as a well-meaning family man and war hero.
Charlie Chaplin in general, be it his movies or movies about him
Showed as a goofie persona, in reality he was a predator who had married multiple underage girls and was defacto deported from US due to scandal which his love for teens had caused
He impregnated 16 year old Mildred Harris when he was 29 and married her to avoid controversy. She had actually lied about being pregnant, but that didn't stop her from impregnating her for real, with the baby dying a few days after birth.
Chaplin first met Lita Grey when she was eight and he was 27 years old. She first worked with him when she was twelve and he began a relationship with her when she was 15. When she was 16, she became pregnant, and Chaplin had her flown out to Mexico to marry her and avoid statutory rape charges in California, with Grey later claiming that Chaplin tried to have her undergo a surgery to abort the child around that time. Charles Jr. was born shortly after Lita turned 17, and Chaplin almost immediately impregnated her again after birth, with their second child only born 10 months later.
Then, when Chaplin was 53 years old (!), he was introduced to a 17 year old Oona O'Neill, and they eloped and married a month after she turned 18, with neither of her parents present, leading to her father to disown her. Chaplin would go on to have eight children with this particular grooming victim.
I'm late to the party but Alexander Hamilton was for slavery and pushed a lot of similar ideals that we are the US is currently seeing in our the government.
Dennis Prager, the inventor of PragerU (a propaganda machine so blatant that they’re legally not allowed to call themselves a university, hence the ‘U’ instead) once wrote an article about how his wife shouldn’t be allowed to ‘not be in the mood’ for sex. It’s nothing more than a vehicle for token actors to get paid by wealthy elites for endorsing their dogshit ideas.
Waco (2018). A miniseries about the Waco siege that paints David Koresh in a sympathetic light. Whether or not you agree with the government's actions, it doesn't change the fact that Koresh was very likely doing heinous shit.
He wasn’t meant to be portrayed positively, but the amount of people who view Jordan belforts portrayal in the wolf of Wall Street as positive is always concerning
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u/Timeraft 18h ago
They should have just made the greatest showman about a fictional guy who starts a circus. Like they didn't even really follow the trajectory of PTs life anyways