You need to login to do this. And every tale condemns corpse bride russian jewish folk tale for a villain.

OK, let’s say you’re still writing that movie, which is Very Loosely Based on a True Story. But there’s a problem: most of the Real Life figures were morally grey and complex people. How are you going to make sure that your audience knows who the bad guy is? Well, all you have to do is to pick someone who wasn’t on your side. Your new villain wasn’t actually “evil” per se.

This trope is the opposite of a Historical Hero Upgrade, although many figures often get one of those as well in works with a different viewpoint. Usually this is a part of Politically Correct History. When Fan Fic writers do this to a canon character, it’s Ron the Death Eater. Dracula, in the many instances where he is said to have been Vlad the Impaler. Prehistoric Monster, when prehistoric animals such as dinosaurs are depicted as unrealistically violent monsters.

At least in the US, Benedict Arnold, who is considered a vile, cowardly traitor, but started out as a very capable American commander during the American Revolution. At the time, after having credit for the victory stolen by his commanding officer who had done much less than Arnold to win it, he’s said to have wished that the bullet had struck his heart instead. La Malinche, a Nahua woman who had an affair with Hernán Cortés and helped him in his conquest of the Aztec Empire, is seen by many in contemporary Mexico as a traitor for helping the Conquistadors to subjugate “her people. One of the best-known examples is the composer Antonio Salieri, contemporary to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Rasputin the Mad Monk is generally considered nowadays as a relatively harmless, if highly sleazy, eccentric religious figure, but during his life he was thought to hold the imperial family in thrall via strange supernatural powers. King John of England, villain of the Robin Hood stories. He didn’t betray his elder brother Edward.

He might or might not have murdered any of his family members. Notably averted by the University of York, where a popular legend credits him as the first person to propose establishing a university in York. Most historians also stress his incredible legal reforms during his time at the Council of the North and furthermore his very active monarchy which in its brief rule, passed far more legal statutes than King Edward IV and led to the poor being given the right of bail. George III of Great Britain is popularly remembered by Americans as a tyrant, mostly due to the way he was portrayed by pro-independence propaganda. In reality, he had virtually nothing to do with the policies that so annoyed the colonists, but as the sovereign, he received all the blame.