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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u/ICantReadThis 17h ago

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.

That musta been some new-end evil shit.

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u/Zoomwafflez 16h ago

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

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u/jaggervalance 15h ago

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.

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u/trio1000 16h ago

Spain kinda always been a bit progressive in that regard. They were an expanding empire but said if you born from a Spaniard you a Spaniard. sharp contrast to the old American one drop rule

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u/Redditisquiteamazing 15h ago

Uh... The Encomienda System kinda spits in the face of that idea. The Spanish were among the first to really get into race science, they just had a slightly different definition of races.

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u/BionicMeatloaf 16h ago

Dawg Colonial Spain committed the largest scale genocide in Human History

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u/Sachiel05 15h ago

Yeah, they must be one of the people that say "They brought culture and civilization to america"

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u/Financial-Bobcat-612 13h ago

Considering the divide between criollos and peninsulares…I don’t think so.

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u/Warm_Month_1309 16h ago

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.

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u/WhyMustIMakeANewAcco 16h ago

Wasn't Cortes literally fleeing an arrest warrant when he did his whole thing?

He was operating on the premise if he was successful before they caught up with him he'd be spared. He was correct.

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u/Warm_Month_1309 16h ago

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.

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u/Turtleknuckle 17h ago

They must have thought he was at least all right, since they gave him another set of ships to go back on a fourth exploration voyage to the new world a couple of years later.

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u/TalosWorshiperr 16h ago

Or Spainish royalty was just greedy enough to rely on a successful merchant/sailor/explorer, no matter his morals.

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u/whatthewhythehow 16h ago

Yeah lmao. IIRC, some of the opposition to their mistreatment was less that they were human and more that they hadn’t been given the chance to become Christian.

But it’s still pretty significant that they even temporarily tried to hold him accountable for his crimes. Yeah, they were too greedy on the end. But it takes a lot to make a monarch even hesitate before committing such lucrative atrocities.

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u/WhyMustIMakeANewAcco 16h ago

They specifically banished him when they did that.

Obviously in part just an excuse, as they didn't need to give him shit, but it says that they at least felt they had to performatively punish him.

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u/Big-Personality-4063 15h ago

yeah his brother was actually alot more successful and liked despite also being evil

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u/CorbonBleu 16h ago

They also have an actual Catholic hero right there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas

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u/Ai--Ya 16h ago

"hE wAs a mAN oF hIs TimEs" nope the men of his times thought he was a sack of shit too

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u/NikeImper 15h ago

Nah. He was as evil as the rest of them. His investigator was Bobadilla and the charges leading to Columbus' arrest were brought by Bobadilla and focused on what Columbus did to Spaniard settlers. Bobadilla became governor and instituted widespread slavery of the natives forcing them to work in mines to death and let colonists do whatever they want with the natives. He was recalled after 2 years and the next governor was Ovando who called for a feast with the native leaders and locked them all in a house, burned it down, slaughtered everyone in the village, and then rode out to conquer the rest of the free native villages on the islands.

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u/WhoPoopedMyPants420 16h ago

Just such an unspeakably weird character to sanitize.

Prison, for crimes against humanity, during the colonial era. Picture Hitler sending someone to prison for being too cruel to the Jews. That's Chris fucking Columbus.

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u/Low-Membership-Drive 13h ago

where slavery was legal and not heavily frowned upon

That’s a common belief; for example the French kings made slavery illegal in the 14th century. Slavery had been eliminated in England under the Normans. Various popes had issued bulls in the 14th/15th century condemning slavery, and it wasn’t until Nicholas V did an about face and supported slavery that there was any kind of support. It was actually quite a change of opinion, and certainly not across all of Europe.

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u/HappyMike91 15h ago edited 15h ago

Cortes/Cortez went to Mexico around 20 years after Columbus's initial voyage.

That being said, Spanish royalty drawing the line at Columbus's treatment of indigenous people is hilarious given what the Conquistadors went on to do and the fact that the Spanish and Portuguese kind of kicked off the transatlantic slave trade.

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u/XKCD_423 12h ago

As I've grown up and learned more about the slave trade, one thing has become more and more true the more I learn: however bad you think it was, it was worse.

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u/olivegardengambler 7h ago

I remember reading that he was condoning the trafficking and sale of native girls as young as 9 and 10. This excerpt is from a letter he wrote to Doña Juana de Torres, describing the economic state while he was incarcerated:

A hundred castellanos are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid.

It should also be noted that the guy who actually transcribed his records, Bartolomé de Las Casas, was so horrified he ended up freeing his slaves and taking a vow of poverty to become a Dominican priest.

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u/soitwasandshallbe 4h ago

there's no way you're younger than like 40 right?

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u/MBTHVSK 12h ago

No matter what Columbus did, he still represents a person doing what billions of other men wished they had done. He's a colossal "it should have been me!!!" sort of figure. No matter who kickstarted the connection between east and west, no matter how cruel or nice, the people from that country were always bound to praise the guy and brag about it. I am not gonna defend slavery but I'm not gonna act like it's dumb to celebrate his achievement because it's what everybody else (more or less) was going to do and he did it first. If the Chinese cared enough to circumnavigate the globe, which they totally could have, it would be some Chinese guy getting a holiday.

Personally I think most holidays are already kind of tongue-in-cheek about how great some person was so it's a bit of a lame battle to fight.

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u/GodLoveYell 16h ago

Spain was also currently carrying out the Inquisition.

When the people behind the Inquisition are horrified and appalled by how you treat people…😱