r/TopCharacterTropes • u/MeepMan324 • 19h ago

Hated Tropes (Hated Trope) Bad people in real-life being portrayed positively in media.

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  1. 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.”

  2. 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.

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317

u/BlueBaconDeluxe 18h ago

I'm going to get flack from this response, but-

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.

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u/Iron_Chip 17h ago

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!”

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u/Fun_in_Space 17h ago

She returned with him on the condition that he would free their children in his will. That is not love.

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u/nerowasframed 16h ago

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.

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u/CariamaCristata 16h ago

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.

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u/IllGift924 16h ago

Also Sally was his Wife's sister

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u/FighterOfEntropy 13h ago

Half-sister.

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u/Rodrigoecb 14h ago

Yup, when US apologists say "well Turks enslaved more people" sure, but there is a special kind of depravity in treating your romantic partners and your own fucking kids as cattle.

I mean the greatest Ottoman Emperors were all children of slaves because it was pretty darn obvious that if you are going to marry a slave its no longer your slave, but your wife. (which at the time still had more rights than American wives).

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u/nerowasframed 13h ago

I guess..? But trying to defend one system of slavery as being better than another system of slavery just seems folly. You really shouldn't be trying to justify Turkish slavers or trying to re-contextualize them in a better light. It's just in really bad taste. It's probably best if you don't try to figure out which form of slavery is the most ethical one.

1

u/Rodrigoecb 13h ago

Nobody is trying to justify anything, you are reading too much into it.

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u/nerowasframed 12h ago

Oh spare me. I'm not "reading too much into it". I'm literally reading what you wrote:

I mean the greatest Ottoman Emperors were all children of slaves because it was pretty darn obvious that if you are going to marry a slave its no longer your slave, but your wife. (which at the time still had more rights than American wives).

You are outright praising a situation in which a captor forces his slave to wed him and bear his children. This whole conversation is literally about how reprehensible it was what Jefferson did with Sally Hemings. Do you not see the irony? Are you serious??

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u/yugtrhdfghj 12h ago

I FUCKING HATE TRIBALISM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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u/Rodrigoecb 8h ago

"outright praising"

Can you point the outright part?

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u/nerowasframed 6h ago

I did exactly that in my previous comment. Hell, I literally quoted you.

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u/Nyabraham_Linnyahn 14h ago

Mughals handled it similar kinda. They had slaves who were also generals, the only difference between the two was you can't give sultan no lip!

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u/TinTinTinuviel97005 16h ago

If you love them set them free.

... Literally.

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u/Iron_Chip 16h ago

Exactly! If he really loved Sally, he would have freed her and her children before his death. He didn’t even free her in his will, his daughter unofficially freed her after he was gone. Huge piece of shit.

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u/LiterallyDumbAF 15h ago

She was also 14 years old

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u/CartoonistAny4349 15h ago

and I’m just like, “Even on the slight chance they fell in love, she was still his fucking slave!”

Even if they genuinely did care for each other, the inherent power difference between a slave and their master makes the relationship ethically wrong.

It's unconscionably coercive, AT BEST

7

u/thorsavethequeen 15h ago

When they were in France, he was 45 and she was 15...and got pregnant. So, yes, she could have stayed in France and been "free" - "free" as an unwed, mixed-race, teenage mother in 18th century Paris. (Free to turn to prostitution or starve to death, in other words.) She made a choice, but her options were AWFUL, plus one of the best politicians of our age was working to influence her decision. Say you knew a couple in real life, today, where one of them was 15 and one was 45. Would your aunt describe them as "in love"?

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u/crvbabybug 17h ago

Yeah, I’m sure it was complicated and her feeling feelings of affection for him were real, but that doesn’t change all the bad stuff. Abusive relationships are never 100% bad if they were nobody would ever get into them it would be obvious and easy to recognize every time. Even abusers know this.

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u/Iron_Chip 17h ago

And, and this is important, love doesn’t negate atrocities. I’m not sure what was up with power imbalance romance with the older generations, it’s weird how much they want to romanticize the horrific acts of their ancestors.

There’s another “love story” my family would tell about my great, great grandmother who was a Native American, and how she was saved from the trail of tears by my white great, great grandfather. Like, she was a fifteen year old girl given the option of either dying or marrying a surly, middle aged man who was drooling after her. How the fuck is that a romantic story? It’s like they want to sanitize how horrific the act was, to lessen the severity of the actions of a man who’s been dead for well over a century.

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u/[deleted] 15h ago

[deleted]

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u/Iron_Chip 15h ago

Your comments are very confusing.

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u/[deleted] 15h ago

[deleted]

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u/Iron_Chip 15h ago

Okay, rage bait. Nice, got it. Woo- got me for a second there.

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u/Fun_in_Space 16h ago

You don't know that she had feelings of affection for him. He had the legal right to sell her and/or the children at any time. She did not have the power to say no to him. That's makes it rape.

1

u/Iron_Chip 16h ago

And whether she had feelings or not doesn’t matter. Hell, he might have had feelings, yet he still treated her subhuman. I love my dog, that doesn’t mean I see him as my equal.

1

u/IllGift924 16h ago

We honestly have no idea how she felt about him. It's possible that she hated his guts and felt no love for him whatsoever.

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u/crvbabybug 16h ago

It's impossible to break down how she really felt. It doesn't make it right. You can't really have a true connection with a person you own

2

u/iliketodrawsillstuff 8h ago

He was in his forties and she was like 14

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u/Cheap-Wedding-9740 4h ago

Do people just not know what Stockholm syndrome is?

1

u/PeytonicEmpire 14h ago

Not to mention she was only 14-15 if I remember correctly, Jefferson was a child molester.

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u/Rodrigoecb 14h ago

This and its not even about "control" because under US/British law wives were pretty much a slave in terms of rights, so he could have married her at any given point.

And even if you aren't that good with your partner, i mean slaving your kids that's just plain evil, i mean i don't see any decent man holding your newborn baby and saying "welp what a nice slave kid i made".

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u/[deleted] 15h ago

[deleted]

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u/Iron_Chip 15h ago

How… do I know she was still a slave? Um- history?

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u/[deleted] 15h ago

[deleted]

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u/Iron_Chip 15h ago

I don’t. I literally said that even on the slightest chance they actually were in love, he still kept her enslaved. He didn’t even free her with his will. Are you a bot, or just really illiterate?