Historical Villain Upgrade / Literature

Historical Villain Upgrades in literature.

---

Examples using real people

Creators:

• Bernard Cornwell does this on occasion in his historical fiction, but at least he's polite about it. In the Author's Notes for the books of his series The Saxon Stories, Cornwell apologizes to Æthelred of Mercia for depicting him as a weak and devious snake and terrible husband, a characterization with no support in the historic record, but which makes for a better story.

Multi-work cases:

• The Vicomte de Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas started a trend of adaptations and derivative works depicting Louis XIV as a brutal, warmongering tyrant who wasn't even the rightful king of France. The Man in the Iron Mask is a particularly strong case of this, with the Sun King portrayed as a vicious and psychopathic rapist. Louis XIV may not have been a saint, but he's generally considered by historians to have been a successful and benevolent ruler, and there's not one shred of hard evidence that he was anything but the legitimate monarch of the Kingdom of France.

Specific works:

• In 1632, Cardinal Richelieu is one of the larger villains of the series. Series creator Eric Flint himself said that he would've liked to make Richelieu one of the good guys, but he needed someone intelligent to oppose the heroes.
• Actes And Monuments by John Foxe (more commonly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs) rakes Mary I, better known as Bloody Mary, older sister of Elizabeth, over the coals and then some (her nickname reflects that). Though her government did burn a number of Protestants for heresy, it was no worse than what Elizabeth did to Catholics. This included being hanged, drawn and quartered for the "crime" of harboring a priest, or being a priest oneself and administering the sacraments to closet Catholics in the country. It was also a crime to not attend Anglican services if you were a Catholic (although that would only get a fine). Foxe and similar writers did not care about (or outright approved of) Catholic persecution by Elizabeth. At the time, no one in England had the concept of religious freedom except for a tiny radical minority. Further, while Mary did restore Catholicism, she did not reverse all of her father's (Henry VIII) reforms, recognizing the reality of the situation and making English Catholicism its own religion.
• Africanus Trilogy:
  • Quintus Fabius Maximus is almost turned into his historical antithesis in these books. In real life, he was the maximum defender of Rome, a man who rejected personal political benefit in order to do so, who often arbitrated conflicts between senatorial factions to keep Rome united, and who was certainly one of the most popular figures in the history of Rome. In those books, he is instead a manipulative, power-hungry megalomaniac and sexual deviant who lets countless problems occur in order to profit off them, and whose already meager popularity fades after his death in the shadow of Scipio and Cato.
  • Marcus Porcius Cato, who takes up Fabius' mantle as Scipio's Arch-Enemy in the third book, is given this treatment as well. The real Cato was a massively popular politician who came on top of Roman society through being incredibly humble, just and austere, to the point it was said that he dressed like his own slaves and shared all the pains of every campaign with his soldiers. In the novel, he's a squeamish, pedantic intriguant who seems to be very unpopular and whose political power all comes from evil machinations.
• Count-Duke of Olivares became a Manipulative Bastard and/or a Chessmaster (although not a Magnificent Bastard) in Alatriste. In real life, he was the power behind a weak king, and of course not exactly a fan favorite of the peasants; however, the author provides Olivares with realistic opportunities to be a villain.
• Alexander Trilogy: The real Attalus not only rejected Demosthenes's attempts to corrupt him, he even informed Alexander of them (and was still executed for the trouble). On the other hand, this version of him withholds the information and dies while resisting his arrest, implying he had accepted the offer.
• In Kim Newman's Anno Dracula short story "Vampire Romance", the villain turns out to be a vampirized Richard III, who is worse than Shakespeare portrayed him. He resents Will for saying he sent someone to kill the Princes in the Tower; he dealt with them personally.
• Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow is set during the Wars of the Roses and features King Richard III of England. Influenced by William Shakespeare's plays and the "Tudor myth", which vilified the House of York, Stevenson depicts him as a dour, ambitious and ruthless hunchback who thinks little of executing innocent prisoners of war. Real life Richard III was in fact a decent and relatively fair king.
• China's first emperor Qin Shi Huangdi is the Big Bad in Bridge of Birds, in which he is depicted as being immortal and having magic powers. While he is historically seen as a brutal, (albeit effective) tyrant, he's clearly not as bad as the book portrays him.
• In the Burton & Swinburne Series, novel Springheeled Jack - Charles Darwin, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Florence Nightingale are all Mad Scientists trying to breed humanity into specialized castes and have been experimenting on chimney sweeps as their first subject.
• In Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood: His Odyssey (as in the film based thereon), the British King James II has the title character and his rebellious fellows sold into slavery for a profit. As such with the story being from their point of view, they see that King as foul tyrant and treat the news of his deposing in favor of William of Orange as a moment of celebration, especially since the new King is eager to emancipate them and recruit them for his navy.
• The highly controversial history book Churchill's Secret War has been accused of doing this to Winston Churchill. In addition to supporting the (credible but disputed) claims that Churchill intentionally starved thousands of Indians during the Bengal famine of 1943, it also accuses him of orchestrating the murder of Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, a claim which most historians have rejected.
• Not all of the Jury of the Damned in "The Devil and Daniel Webster" were really that evil in reality. In particular, Thomas Morton was only evil in the sense of being an enemy of Puritans and was an early proponent of treating Native Americans decently.
• The Diaries of the Family Dracul:
  • Vlad the Impaler made a pact with the Devil in exchange for becoming a vampire, and has spent centuries feeding on the blood of hundreds, primarily infants.
  • Countess Elisabeth of Bathory was already a Serial Killer with a bodycount numbering in the hundreds while she was still alive. After she became a vampire, she became even worse.
• In The Divine Comedy, Brutus, Judas Iscariot and Cassius are depicted as the ultimate traitors, being gnawed upon by Satan for eternity. Judas being there is understandable (being the betrayer of Christ) but Dante considered the assassination of Julius Caesar, the crime committed by the other two, to be the second-worst crime ever committed, as it represented the destruction of a unified Italy and the killing of the man who was divinely appointed to govern the world. (Again, this is Dante's personal opinion.) In fact, the book has a lot of historical figures - many of which are obscure to modern readers - suffering in Hell; for example, Cleopatra VII is among those in the Second Layer, devoted to the Lustful, while The Prophet Muhammad - described by the author as a schismatic - is in the Ninth Bolga of the Eighth Layer, the place for Sowers of Discord. The structure of the layers of Hell and who belonged there is entirely based on Dante's opinion of what is perceived as sin and who he believed belonged there. Another thing to be noted is that Dante could only be as accurate as his sources were, so often what seems him using this trope is really just his sources being unreliable. For example, the reason Muhammed was between the schismatics? It's not a judgment on Islam: Muhammad was sincerely believed by Dante to have been a Christian prophet. The common belief then was that Muhammed began as a Christian, but had been angered by not being able to become Pope and thus set up his own religion with himself at its head, hence the schism.
• The Epic Of Sundiata: Historically, Sumanguru Kante was a ruler of the Sosso people who tried to conquer the Mandinka and other kingdoms. He may have actually been as cruel as he's portrayed in the epic, but he definitely wasn't an evil sorcerer in real life.
• Eurico the Presbyter: Ebas is a Visigothic noble who throws his countrymen under the bus and sides with the Umayyad Caliphate when they invade Hispania in hopes of taking the throne for himself only to be killed by The Hero for his treason. The historical one is Shrouded in Myth and there are several legends that are hard to discern if its true or not, but he is alleged to have fought alongside his fellow Visigoths and barely escaping with his life when the Arabs won, only to be executed by them much later.
• It is unlikely that General José de Urrea was anywhere near as black as J.T. Edson paints him in Get Urrea. In particular, historians now believe that the Goliad Massacre was perpetrated at the orders of Santa Anna and not Urrea. Also, while public opinion varies greatly on where Wyatt Earp lies on the scale of heroism and villainy, Edson always portrays him as a petty and vindictive thug with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
• In The Gods of Manhattan, Willem Kieft is portrayed as a Sinister Minister. Also, Aaron Burr is the series' villain.
• Mao's nephew in "Fear, Loathing and Gumbo on the Campaign Trail '72". In real life, he was a politician of the Chinese Communist Party but quit politics after spending some time in prision, becoming a humble technician. However in Gumbo '72, he (now known as the Lesser Mao) becomes a brutal Tyrant who completely ruins China, uses nukes like there's no tomorrow, creates a massive global drug market (that then causes a massive crisis in the USA), outlaws literacy and causes his country to collapse into a new warlord era. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney go through this as well, especially Rumsfeld. While in OTL he was a "only" a warhawkish neoconservative with very bad acting skills, in '72 he turns into a corporate fundamentalist tyrant who Unpersons his enemies, destroys the USA's Environment, supports the genocides in Israel and South Africa, orders wounded soldiers executed rather than pay for their welfare and causes the collapse of NATO, all but assuring the Soviet Victory in the Cold War.If that wasn't bad enough, when he gets dragged to one of his very own Insane Asylums his VP is assasinated and the Christian Values Party wins the election. You can probably guess where this is going.
• Nikola Tesla gets this treatment in Goliath. His real-world eccentricities are ratcheted up several levels.
• Grounded for All Eternity: Samuel Parris is an evil soul who escapes from Hell to wreak havoc in Salem, Massachusetts and tips the balance between good and evil out of order. He's also depicted as having near-singlehandedly orchestrated the Salem witch trials out of greed.
• William Makepeace Thackeray's historical novel Henry Esmond has an extremely negative presentation of John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, presenting him as an amoral Magnificent Bastard willing to betray anyone to advance himself. His wife, Sarah, is presented as a social climbing bitch. Worth noting is that John's descendant, Winston Churchill was prompted to write about his ancestors in part to address the portrayal in the novel.
• The Lion of Carthage: Hannibal Barca is portrayed as significantly more petty and resentful than how historical sources characterize him (keep in mind most of our sources are Roman, so they were unlikely to blow smoke up his ass). A notable example happens in the siege of Salmantica: where the real Hannibal saw its population as a collective Worthy Opponent whom he eventually let free for their bravery and ingenuity, the literary Hannibal is enraged at them and it takes Hasdrubal to convince him not to order that they be butchered.
• Maiden Crown inverts this: the entire point of the story is to undo the Historical Villain Upgrade given to Queen Sophie of Minsk in the ballad about her husband, King Valdemar I, and his mistress Tove, and portray her sympathetically. Sophie is shown to be a naive young princess who gets uprooted from her home and is expected to be a loyal wife to a king she has never before met, and constantly struggles to please others and stay true to herself in a foreign court where strangers are watching her every move. The stresses she endures are what lead her to commit her infamous act in the ballad of causing Tove's death; the afterword notes that though the ballad states Valdemar never had anything to do with Sophie again after she killed Tove, the historical Valdemar and Sophie had six children, so a reconciliation would have had to have taken place if the ballad were treated as history.
• Gregory Maguire's Mirror, Mirror (2003) combines history with the tale of Snow White and casts Lucrezia Borgia in the role of the wicked queen. Although the Borgias were not a nice family, there's little evidence Lucrezia had the expertise in poisoning she was later accused of (in fact, the attributes of the poison she was most famous for don't even exist in any known real substance). And, obviously, the Snow-White-like events of the novel don't have much basis in real history either.
• In Musashi, the titular character's Foil and Worthy Opponent Sasaki Kojiro is given this. Although not without noble qualities, he is for the most part arrogant, sadistic, and only interested in his innate talent so much as it can make him rich and famous. In Real Life, the main thing against him is that he was killed by Folk Hero Miyamoto Musashi. Debate still rages as to whether or not Musashi cheated or if he had been ambushed and murdered by a group, with or without Musashi's knowledge.
• Several of the Red Swords in Mordred's Heirs. Gray's sword is implied to be Genghis Khan and believes in solving every problem with slaughter, and though we don't have any specifics on the Sandoval the time period and the name suggest Emil Sandoval may have been an alternate history version of a famous Conquistador with the rest of his achievements left in the dust in favor of playing up speculated abuses of the natives.
• In Gideon Defoe's The Pirates series:
  • The first book makes Archbishop Samuel "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce into a mad scientist who kidnaps women to turn them into a facial scrub that gives him his astonishingly youthful appearance. (He is in his late thirties, but looks like he's in his mid-thirties.)
  • The third book makes Wagner into an unrepentant smear artist, working for Nietzsche, who has constructed a huge robot suit in order to crush Europe beneath his boot. He is doing this because he thinks it will impress girls.
  • The fourth book features Napoléon Bonaparte, and while he's not given much of a "villain upgrade", he does become the Pirate Captain's Sitcom Arch-Nemesis.
• The Plot Against America: The portrayal of Charles Lindbergh as a A Nazi by Any Other Name (as rooted in truth as it is) can come off as this especially at first to readers who didn't know that Charles Lindbergh held such views and mainly knew about him as a celebrity pilot. Roth does soften this a bit by implying that Lindbergh is coerced into implementing his pro-German policies (whereas his Vice President, isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler, is depicted as a true fanatic-the real man, though opposing US entry into the war, was liberal, not a Nazi sympathizer).
• Niccolò Machiavelli's name is pretty much synonymous with Manipulative Bastard. While it's true that his most well known book (The Prince) talks extensively about this kind of person, Machiavelli himself was just a writer and guilty of none of the scheming in the book. He also wrote some other books in favor of freedom and democracy, and even The Prince discourages doing bad things for any reason other than pragmatism. Moreover, many historians believe the book may have actually been a Stealth Parody.
• Rob Roy: Invoked when Diana Vernon bitterly states Shakespeare's plays have vilified both the House of York and their loyalists.
  "But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakespeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out".
• Older Than Print: Romance of the Three Kingdoms does this for several historical figures. The kingdoms of Wei and Jin are often depicted as a cruel sinister empire bent on crushing everyone opposing them
  • Cao Cao was a very capable ruler, well-versed in matters military (he annotated Sun Tzu's The Art of War) and literacy (he was also an accomplished poet), despite his attitude getting in the way of certain things. In the book, he's simultaneously upgraded to the Big Bad of the tale (despite there being three kingdoms, remember?) via his negative traits being highlighted more, and downgraded to a chump whose schemes to take over the whole of China get persistently foiled by Zhuge Liang. His Dynasty Warriors portrayal however, is starting to see better light in terms of how reasonable of a ruler he can be, which may be akin to how he was in real life.
  • Lü Bu, who in real life was a brilliant administrator as well a good shot with the bow, is treated as a Blood Knight who is only out for himself while he can't run an empire worth a damn. The reason why the story turns him into a dumb villain is because he was the antithesis of Confucian ethics, along with the unpleasant rumor that he had an affair with Dong Zhuo's maid. Even outside of his exaggerated status in Dynasty Warriors (don't pursue Lu Bu!), Lu Bu was even a demonic villain in the PS4 version of Knights of Valour.
  • Minor warlord Zhang Lu. In the novel, he's greedy and craves power/territory as a means of playing up the righteousness of Shu and Ma Chao (who's a definite case of Historical Hero Upgrade). In Real Life, Zhang Lu was one of the more fair rulers of the time, building roads with free rest stops and food and using taxes collected to support the commoners instead of indulging himself. In fact, when he was forced to retreat during Cao Cao's invasion of his territory he explicitly left behind his wealth proclaiming that it belonged to the country and not him, an act which greatly impressed Cao Cao, causing him to let Zhang Lu peacefully surrender.
  • Sima Yi was one of Cao Cao's trusted officers who was one of Wei's loyal officers but the novel depicted him as an Evil Chancellor who destroyed Wei from within and a contrast to Zhuge Liang's Undying Loyalty to Liu Bei. The perception induced by the novel of Sima Yi as a backstabber gets played up multiple adaptations such as older titles of Dynasty Warriors before the 7th title. Even adaptations that paint Cao Cao with a degree of nuance or even positively tend to have far less regard for Sima Yi. Part of this was because the Sima family did end up exerting authority over the Cao clan, even going as far as to murder one of their emperors. Later, their rule over China collapsed into infighting and fragmentation in mere decades, with Sima Yan, the same person whom unified the Three Kingdoms laying the seeds for the Jin dynasty's collapse.
• A lot in The Royal Diaries book series, which are fictional diaries about real princesses. An example is Mary I in Red Rose of the House of Tudor, who is portrayed as devious, cunning, and hateful towards her younger siblings. While her relationships with Elizabeth and Edward certainly cooled later in life, during their childhoods, the much-older Mary acted as a mother figure, and was on record as being hopelessly naïve and guileless. The enmity between her and Elizabeth didn't really kick into gear until after Mary became queen; it's not until she starts burning Protestants that she really deserves this.
• Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu in the Sano Ichiro series. He indeed ruined the currency system of the time, and instituted policies that did nothing to alleviate suffering under the shogun's rule, but nothing indicates he was as scheming, vicious and relentless as he is in the books. He was little more than a yes man to the shogun.
• Scary Stories For Young Foxes portrays Beatrix Potter as a "skin-stealing witch" from the perspective of the vulpine protagonists. Fitting, since her capture and preparation of various animals for artistic studies, taxidermy, and company would make her quite villainous from an animal's perspective. That being said, the real life Potter's conservationist efforts are completely overlooked in favor of exaggerating her hand at amateur taxidermy.
• The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel has a sort of variant. The villains are historical figures (specifically, they're John Dee and Niccolò Machiavelli), but it's implied that the way they got immortality made them worse. Their actual historical lives are portrayed at some points, with great accuracy and not a lot of undue villainy.
• A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes novel, includes a mild case with Brigham Young. He doesn't serve as an antagonist for Holmes, but he's portrayed as a crazed religious zealot with zero sympathy for anyone outside his devoted group of followers, and he turns out to be directly responsible for the events motivating the sympathetic vigilante who commits the murders.
• The SPQR Series by John Maddox Roberts, which is a series of murder mysteries set in the last years of the Roman republic, almost always has a historical figure as the murderer and frequently has the murder reveal an underlying scheme for world domination. Special recognition goes to the books' version of Julius Caesar, who as of the thirteenth book is just finishing up his elaborate plan to become God-King of Rome.
• Sir Alexander Leslie is often said to be the source of the poem, "There Was a Crooked Man." What was so crooked about Sir Alexander Leslie? He negotiated peace between Scotland and England.
• Alexandre Dumas does this with a few characters in The Three Musketeers, but still keeps the characters three-dimensional:
  • Cardinal Richelieu is something of an Anti-Villain and Well-Intentioned Extremist. Although he hires the main villain of the first book, Milady de Winter, uses underhanded methods, and stands in opposition to the heroes, Dumas takes some time out to note that he's still a loyal and skilled servant of France (and very grateful to D'Artagnan for disposing of Milady when she went rogue.) His overt villainization is reserved for condensed and simplified adaptations—especially the movies. In reality, he's remembered as one of France's greatest statesmen. Dumas had to write another novel (The Red Sphinx) portraying Richelieu in a sympathetic light just to reassure people he really wasn't trying to demonize him.
  • In 20 Years After, Richelieu's successor Mazarin is portrayed as greedy, vain and cowardly, but he's also very shrewd. The stories emphasize how unfairly he's judged by the French for his Italian heritage.
• Alexander Hislop's book The Two Babylons has a good deal of this.
  • It claims that the Assyrian empress Shammuramat (referred to as Semiramis) invented polytheism (and with it, worship of Mother Goddess figures) as a means of securing her own grip on power. Hislop also claims that Semiramis committed incest with her son (the Biblical king Nimrod) and even identifies her with the Whore of Babylon.
  • As for the Catholic Church, it's depicted as a veiled continuation of the religion Semiramis invented, the product of an Ancient Conspiracy.
• The Trials of Apollo: The leaders of Triumvirate Holdings are all ancient Roman emperors who were able to become Deities of Human Origin - the emperors, in order of introduction, are Nero, then Commodus, then Caligula. They orchestrate a Corporate Conspiracy as part of a plan to overthrow the Olympian gods.
• The Ultimate Solution by Eric Norden: The victorious German Reich is portrayed as a society of psychopathic pedophiles who get their rocks off to little girls being sexually tortured and consider gladiator deathmatches between black slaves a fine form of entertainment. Even children are so sadistic that they watch TV shows that teach them how to have fun by torturing small animals to death. Homosexuality and homoeroticism are widespread, unlike the real-life Nazis' policies towards gay people. The novel ends with the Reich being taken over by fanatical "Contraxists" led by Reinhard Heydrich who want nuclear war with the Empire of Japan because the latter failed to assist them in the global eradication of all Jews.
• In a particularly weird literature example, the villain of The Wild Road is most often called The Alchemist. He performs cruel experiments on cats to learn their magic, tries to ascend to godhood by trying to surgically add cat body parts to himself and wields an evil magical staff powered by cat skulls. It's never directly stated but so-heavily-implied-as-to-be-obvious that he's actually Isaac Newton.
  • In the sequel, The Golden Cat, The Alchemist is more of a Greater-Scope Villain who has to work through proxies. One of them is Kater Murr, a character from E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.
• Wolf Hall
  • The book is told from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell, and he does not view Thomas More in a positive light. Although Cromwell has respect for More as a jurist, More is portrayed as a bad husband with a cruel sense of humor. Whenever Cromwell is meeting with one of his Protestant friends, the specter of More hangs over the conversation thanks to the debated charge that More personally tortured heretics and the less-debated fact that he presided over the burning of six Lutherans, with each one noted in the text. Cromwell also gripes that More is probably going to give himself a Historical Hero Upgrade in his writings after Henry charges More with treason.
  • The author admits in a note at the end of Bring Up the Bodies that the view of Jane Rochford as a vindictive woman who hated her sister-in-law and sold her brother to the scaffold is a retroactive characterization applied after her involvement in Henry's disastrous fifth marriage to Catharine Howard. Jane was turned into Anne's nemesis because Mantel didn't want to add even more names than there already were (and the books already have plenty of characters, and she points readers towards the book Jane Boleyn by Julia Fox for a better view of the historical woman.
• "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper": It's hard to upgrade history's most famous serial killer, but Jack the Ripper gets a lot of the treatment anyway. His murders prove to be an occult means of extending his lifespan and he's still alive today to kill the narrator.

In-Universe examples

• The Bartimaeus Trilogy: British schools teach that the last Czech emperor (deposed by the British) was a grotesquely obese man who shot an exotic bird to have it for dinner each night, as shown by a scene of Kitty in school. But Bartimaeus was actually there to meet him, due to having served one of his court magicians, and he paints a different picture ^note While Bartimaeus is an Unreliable Narrator, he has no reason to whitewash his master's boss. The emperor was certainly pudgy, but nowhere near as fat as described. As for the birds, they were his pets, and he was as fond of them as one would expect a pet owner to be.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe: In the novelisation of "Shada", Salyavin, who in the original TV story was presented more morally ambiguously, is depicted as a harmless rebellious prankster, who was imprisoned by a government that feared his Mind Manipulation powers and were angry that he mocked them, and put him down in history as a terrifying supervillain.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Queen Rhaenyra, one of the two feuding monarchs of the Targaryen civil war, was blamed for events that she had nothing to do with, such as the Blood and Cheese assassinations or Helaena's mysterious death, which led to her being compared to Maegor the Cruel ever after. While she did share many of Maegor's traits (paranoia, the use of torture, a love of summary executions for anyone suspected of disloyalty, and an explosive temper), she had good traits as well as bad ones, and never quite reached his level of psychotic evil. Rhaenyra at least attempts to be merciful towards Alicent, where Maegor would've just killed her and her entire family the minute he conquered King's Landing, and damn the consequences.
  • Aside from her gruesome death, Lady Serala of Myr was nothing more than a footnote in the history of the Defiance of Duskendale, a minor rebellion driven mostly by her husband's ambition and shortsightedness. However, most of Westeros views her as an seductive witch who manipulated her husband into rebellion. This view is particularly common in Duskendale itself, as the locals find it easier to pretend that the treason was inspired by a scheming foreigner than to admit that their lord was a traitor and a fool.
  • The Hoares are frequently described as very evil, but in perspective their rule was far more reasonable and pragmatic than most of the Ironborn rulers who preceded and succeeded them, and was one of the most progressive and prosperous periods in Ironborn history, as they discouraging reaving, protected the Faith of the Seven, and developed trade and friendlier relations with the other kingdoms until Harwyn's conquest of the Riverlands. Their bad reputation is most likely a result of the influence of both the Drowned Men, who resented the deviation from the good old ways of reaving, looting, and kidnapping slaves, and the Riverlanders, who despised the Hoares as foreign conquerors.
• The Seven Citadels: The empire of Galkis has legends and literature about an evil Enchantress in the jungle who entraps men with her beauty until a hero defeats her with the help of the God Zeldin. It turns out that the story is based on inaccurate rumours of the sorceress Tebreega, who, while misanthropic, is happy to work on her biological research in the jungle and does no harm to any humans. In stark contrast to her popular depiction, she is also very unattractive, and content to be so. An extra layer is added when she does confess to the protagonists that when she first learned magic, she transformed herself into the beauty she'd always wanted to be, using men and then hating them for their shallow love of beauty, until she grew disenchanted with humanity as a whole, implying that the villainous depiction of her has some roots in the truth.
• Timeline: The Hundred Years War French leader Arnaut is remembered in the 20th century as The Caligula, but the time travelers find that Arnaut, while being indeed as ugly as history remembers him and capable of great cruelty, is a rather Reasonable Authority Figure and actually better than his supposedly saint-like enemy, Lord Oliver.
• The Zodiac Series: The morality tales of the Houses paint their versions of Ophiuchus as wicked villains, with what remains of the history about him claiming he resented his newfound mortality and committed some heinous crime trying to become immortal again. While he certainly fits the bill in the modern day^note Sort of — while he is genuinely bitter about what happened to him, it's implied his behavior in the first book was an act, he himself implies — and Thirteen Rising confirms — that by all accounts, he was an incredibly compassionate person who just got horrendously unlucky.

---