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Historical Villain Downgrade
- 243 statements
- 46 feature instances
- 98 referencing feature instances
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Of course, we all know what an Historical Villain Upgrade is: that's when you take a Historical Domain Character who is generally notable for being not a nice person (or at worst, an opponent of whomever your hero happens to be) and transform them into full-on Hollywood-style villain. But there are certain characters in history whose actions can't be depicted realistically on, say, a children's TV series. Sometimes not even on adult series. That's where the Historical Villain Downgrade comes in. You don't need to dwell, for example, on the fact that Adolf Hitler was responsible for a systematic genocide that resulted in almost twelve million deaths; it is enough for audiences to know that he was a Very Bad Man. Likewise, you might present Emperor Caligula as a lech with a god complex. No need to get into squicky details of his life. Basically, this trope occurs whenever a historical villain's evil actions are either glossed over or reduced in severity, in order to make them palatable, even as a villain, to mainstream television audiences. Sometimes it's because Reality Is Unrealistic — there are a few cases of real people displaying such extreme levels of evil that if put it in a movie script, the audience would just roll their eyes at the absurdity of it. Note that this trope isn't the same as Historical Hero Upgrade. That trope is when you turn a historical-domain character (whether they were nice or not) into a full-on Hollywood-style hero. This trope is when you tone down some of the worst actions of your historical-domain character, but keep him as a villain. Compare with Lighter and Softer, Politically Correct History or Historical Downgrade. Contrast Historical Villain Upgrade. If a villain indulges in self-downgrading within the story, that's Evil Is Petty; if downgrading is all a villain does, that's Poke the Poodle. See Historical Relationship Overhaul for other changes a Historical Domain Character may receive. Examples |
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| Historical Villain Downgrade / int_12058c99 | type |
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Hark! A Vagrant often does this for laughs, such as this comic about Genghis Khan. | |
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Being a kids' show, Horrible Histories has to do this occasionally; though they do talk about death and violence frequently, some historical figures still have to be downgraded or at least simplified. Hitler is rarely used at all, and a lot of things are omitted from the segments about people like Caligula or Henry VIII. | |
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Hugh Spencer the Younger in Edward II is undoubtedly an opportunist who's happy to accept the rewards Edward showers on him for his support against the barons, but the Compressed Adaptation leaves no room for him to engage in the historical Hugh Despenser's land-grabs, extortion, and general exploitation of his relationship with the king. | |
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Narcos gives this treatment to Pablo Escobar's mother, Hermilda Gaviria, depicting her as a relatively benevolent matriarch who always acts to protect her family. In reality, Hermilda betrayed Pablo to a rival cartel to save her own skin and suggested putting out a hit on her own grandson in order to steal his share of Pablo's fortune. | |
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Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The Movie 1st provides an in-universe example, given it's nature as Recursive Canon. While the movie doesn't make any attempt to gloss over Precia's crimes, it does try to paint her as more of a Tragic Villain who is shown to regret her actions in her final moments. Given that Fate served as a technical advisor for the movie, it would be fair to assume that she asked for her mother to be portrayed in a more sympathetic light. | |
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One episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers has Doctor Blight and her future self go back in time to sell a nuclear bomb to Adolf Hitler, who is only called "the Fuhrer". The good guys react to him with horror, and he's so hateful that his gaze actually hurts Captain Planet, but the show never explains to its young viewers who exactly he is or what makes him so evil. Also, they redesigned his mustache so they could avoid really showing him. | |
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Parodied in Freefall, set on a newly colonized planet 500-odd years in the future, where cultural mores have drifted a bit: | |
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Catch Me If You Can: The movie ignores Abagnale's cons he pulled on ordinary people, most notably the Campbell family who he wined and dined with their own money. There's also no mention of his sexual abuse crimes; he once infiltrated a college posing as a doctor hired by Panam. However, he wasn't trying to recruit various female students to become stewardesses as part of some clever Distracted by the Sexy scheme against the FBI, he was just there to perform "physical examinations" on them. Around 12 young women fell for the scam until Abagnale was discovered. | |
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The Death of Stalin: While Nikita Khrushchev isn't exactly a good guy, except in the sense of being the least bad of the Politburo, he does get depicted as more consistently likeable on a personal level than he actually was. The real Khrushchev was a jovial man, but also a notorious Mood-Swinger who had angry, threatening outbursts. They were so infamous that they were used to justify his overthrow, being cited as a sign that Khrushchev couldn't be trusted to continue leading the country. In this movie, he only loses his temper once, and that's when he rants at Beria for his many horrible crimes during the latter's "trial" and execution. Vyacheslav Molotov is depicted as a jocular, Affably Evil guy. This cheerful grandpa persona was an invention of his actor Michael Palin, and the real Molotov was far more serious and intimidating. Lazar Kaganovich is a ruthless political operator, but also one of the few people to be consistently on Khrushchev's side. Kaganovich's role as one of the main architects of the Holodomor — an event where millions of Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death by the Soviet government — is never mentioned, and the fact that he was a die-hard Stalinist to his dying day is also glossed over. Downplayed with Lavrentiy Beria; even in a cast full of unlikable Villain Protagonists, he stands out from the rest due to being a depraved sexual predator who has not a single redeeming quality. This is accurate to real life, but according to the director, they actually had to tone him down for the movie. For example, even Stalin himself was wary of him: after learning his daughter was alone with Beria at his house, he telephoned her and told her to leave immediately, and Beria even gloated about Stalin's death in real life, even going so far as to brag that he killed him. |
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In the Crusader version of Stronghold, the atrocities of The Crusades are completely ignored. While the Crusaders in The First Crusade are mentioned as "ransacking the countryside for food" and while the fall of Jerusalem mission has a large amount of civilians around the camp fire (all of whom get killed by your forces on the way to the enemy lord), the more gruesome aspects of these wars are utterly ignored. | |
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Deadwood: The real Al Swearengen's whorehouse was a sexual slavery racket in which he lured young women and forced them into prostitution through abuse. The Swearengen on the show is a cutthroat and at times abusive to his prostitutes, but he isn't nearly so systematic about it, and he gets several Pet the Dog moments. | |
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The Nazis in Bedknobs and Broomsticks are, of course, the bad guys. However, since this is a Disney film aimed at children, they aren't shown doing much real warfare or any of the other things they were infamous for. Even though, during the climax, a battalion of them is conducting a small-scale invasion / operation of sabotage on British soil, they never directly use their weapons on a human. The climactic battle is fought against possessed armors and furnitures. | |
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Civilization's Civilopedia generally glosses over the boatloads of terrible things its various civilization leaders did. The general trend appears to be that only leaders famous for warmongering and being all-around jerks like Josef Stalin or Attila mention their crimes. Others whose crimes are not completely confirmed, were the result of Values Dissonance (e.g. slavery before the ~1500s) or were somewhat balanced out by good acts generally receive little to no badmouthing in the Civilopedia. | |
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Zhang Fei from Dynasty Warriors gets his horrible behavior ignored. Historically speaking, he was a cruel and violent man, prone to beating his own men and brutally murdered several innocents. He was so unbearable, he was assassinated by his own men. Unlike Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which blames this behavior on alcohol, Dynasty Warriors ignores it completely. This comes as a small problem as the death of one of Shu's most important characters goes completely unaddressed. | |
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Tibeats and the Epps in 12 Years a Slave managed to be even worse in real life than in the film. For instance, the film omits a later scuffle between Northrup and Tibeats that ended with Tibeats chasing Northrup with an axe. Contrary to the film, the real Mr. Epps was even more violent and sometimes went into "whipping moods", where he would chase his slaves around and whip them seemingly For the Evulz. In real life, Mrs. Epps was the one who tried to bribe Northrup to kill Patsey, not Patsey herself. | |
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The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc: Bishop Pierre Cauchon is here portrayed as trying to save Jeanne, and somewhat sympathizing with her. There is no historical evidence of this-much the opposite. | |
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In Mrs. America, the creative team made a deliberate decision to play down Phyllis Schlafly’s real life antagonism to Civil Rights and racial integration to make her seem more sympathetic. She was part of the team that pivoted the Republican platform in 1960 from Eisenhower’s support for them to Nixon being against them. | |
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Birdman of Alcatraz portrayed Robert Franklin Stroud as orders of magnitude gentler than his prison records show. Of course, it would be very hard to buy the idea of a world-renowned bird scholar also being a sadistic murderer and child pornographer, even if you did want to vilify him. | |
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In Hitler Rants, the notables of Nazi Germany are nowhere near as evil or threatening as they were in real life. Adolf Hitler is little more than a Butt-Monkey who comes up with ridiculous and nonsensical plans, Hermann Goering is hardly anything other than a quiet Big Eater who habitually checks his watch, Joseph Goebbels generally doesn't do anything worse than rant and snark, Alfred Jodl generally objects to Hitler's plans rather than doing anything himself, Wilhelm Burgdorf is pretty much just a temperamental drunk, and Hans Krebs' defining traits are his obsessions with maps and fish. Even Hermann Fegelein — a "Master of Antics" who's constantly pulling nasty tricks (usually on Hitler) — is a saint compared to his real-life counterpart, who committed serious war crimes and was described by Albert Speer as the most personally loathsome of Hitler's inner circle. | |
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Downfall (2004): Hermann Fegelein is a self-serving opportunist, but he's still portrayed with some sympathy as a man who doesn't want to die for a megalomaniacal dictator's delusions and tries to get other people to come to their senses and flee Berlin before it's too late. The real Fegelein certainly didn't become Heinrich Himmler's adjutant by being a nice person with concern for others. In reality, in his role as the commander of the SS Cavalry Brigade, he committed severe war crimes, such as killing at least 17,000 Soviet Jews in the Pripyat swamps of Ukraine in 1941. He was also corrupt even by the standards of the SS, and one of the main sources for his personal wealth had been the plunder of valuables his unit encountered on the Eastern Front by truckload. To top it all off, Albert Speer described him as the most personally loathsome member of Hitler's inner circle. While his infamous reputation is alluded to in the generals' disdain for him, none of his actual misdeeds are ever brought up. | |
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Raging Bull: The movie supposedly omits Jake LaMotta's worst excesses. In his autobiography, ghost-written by Peter Savage, he admits to raping a woman and hitting a man with a lead pipe whilst mugging him. LaMotta believed he had killed the man, only to discover years later that his victim survived. note That being said, whether these crimes actually happened is up for debate; the source for this, the "autobiography" was allegedly mostly written by Peter Savage, Jake's friend (and a model for Joey, a composite of Jake's brother, Savage and one other friend) and it was written largely to gain a movie deal and was said to be filled with deliberately sensationalist, over-the-top material. When he watched the film with one of his ex-wives, LaMotta asked her: "was I really that bad?" She replied "you were worse!" | |
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Queen for Seven Days: Lee Yung is a villain, but a relatively sympathetic one. The real Lee Yung, better-known as Yeonsan-gun of Joseon, was a mass-murdering psychopath whose actions included beating two of his father's concubines to death and kidnapping thousands of women and forcing them into his personal brothel. | |
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Casino doesn't try to pretend that Ace is any kind of hero, but he's portrayed as a doting husband who only makes his wife wear a beeper after she tries to run off with their daughter. His real life inspiration Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal actually brutally beat his wife, openly cheated on her & humiliated her by buying other women more expensive gifts than her yet was still enough of a hypocrite to make her carry around a beeper so he knew where she was all the time and that she was being faithful before she tried to run off (which considering how he was treating her was a lot more understandable). | |
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Happens sometimes in the Dear America series, due to the fact that it's made for children. A very obvious example of a whole group being downgraded is in My Heart is on the Ground by Ann Rinaldi, which makes the white men who took Lakota children to be "reeducated" in the ways of white people seem only like misguided missionaries. | |
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The SS camp commander Amon Göth in Schindler's List is an Ax-Crazy, overgrown child who uses the Holocaust to indulge in murder and seemingly does everything in his power to cement himself as an irredeemably evil piece of work. The real life Göth was even worse. Spielberg had to tone down the man's senseless cruelty because his crimes were so horrible and numerous (which included a frequently-used Torture Cellar built under his house, feeding prisoners alive to his starved dogs, shooting playing children with his sniper rifle, personally killing five hundred people, and more) that it was thought an audience simply wouldn't have believed it on screen. Some had trouble even grasping that a lunatic such as the one shown in the movie could keep his job. (And indeed, he didn't keep his job; Göth was dismissed in 1944 for, among other reasons, his mistreatment of prisoners. Yes, even the Nazis thought he was going too far.) | |
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Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series: The first game gives what many accounts would consider an accurate depiction of Stalin's regime, but in the next two games they're just a joke. This might be partially explained by the fact that between the first two games the USSR was apparently a western puppet regime, which only broke free thanks to Yuri's influence. Out-of-universe it's just because the creators decided to emulate cheesy 1950s Dirty Communists propaganda (mind control plots, anyone?) rather than documentary material about the horrors of the early Soviet regime. The Empire of the Rising Sun in RA3 are clearly modeled after Imperialist Japan, which in real life was infamous for its war crimes, which include pointless mass murders by the hundreds of thousands, enslavement of tens of thousands of women as sex slaves, and performing medical experiments on prisoners from their colonies that killed thousands of people. Even the whole honor aspect that's presented as a joke in the game was a scary thing in real life: they considered surrender dishonorable and would execute enemies who surrendered or use them as slave labor, and fed their civilians propaganda about the Allies that drove them to commit suicide by the tens of thousands when America invaded the Japanese home islands. All of these thing are of course never brought up in the game and the Empire is simply presented as an over-the-top comedic organization. |
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Feud heavily tones down Joan Crawford's behaviour on the set of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. She's still presented as an unbearable diva, but Bette Davis is given more antagonistic moments to make Joan look more sympathetic. The series leaves out that on the latter film, she turned up to one week's location filming in Baton Rouge with twenty suitcases and forced the wardrobe mistress to iron all her dresses in 100-degree weather, that she refused to work longer hours and eventually stopped speaking to Robert Aldrich altogether (forcing him to communicate through her makeup artist). It also implies that her adopted daughter Christina's book Mommie Dearest was complete fabrication, when many of Christina's stories were verified by people who had known her (Joan concedes when talking to her daughter Cathy that she was "perhaps too strict" with her children). Her moment of accepting an Oscar on Anne Bancroft's behalf just to one-up Bette is given a sympathetic light, implying that the former only went along with it out of pity. | |
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GoodFellas is told through the eyes of Unreliable Narrator Henry Hill, who implies that for all the bad things he does in the movie (theft, assault, drug dealing, drug taking, etc.) he had never personally murdered, with the closest he gets being to lock the door while Jimmy and Tommy beat Asshole Victim Billy Bats to death and helping them cover it up (though this would still make him culpable legally). In Real Life he is known to have murdered at least two people. Jimmy and Tommy, though, while each portrayed accurately as extremely ruthless and violent gangsters who murder countless people throughout, were actually even worse in Real Life: Jimmy Burke (Conway in the film), in particular, would sometimes lock children in refrigerators, murdered or had murdered even more people, and really did screw nearly everyone out of the Lufthansa heist; the killing spree was partly prompted by the others asking for their fair cut. Tommy DeSimone (Tommy DeVito) killed random strangers for target practice and was killed by the mob not just for the murder of Billy Bats, but because Paulie found out he had tried to rape Hill's wife Karen while Henry was in prison (Henry didn't find this out until the trial shown at the end of the movie). Paul Vario (Paulie Cicero) was also much more violent in reality: what disdain he had for it was pure Pragmatic Villainy as violence drew attention and was bad for business. He was also having an affair with Karen, hence selling out Tommy for the Billy Bats murder. | |
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New Deal Coalition Retained: An Alternate History variant occurs with Idi Amin. While he's an authoritarian megalomaniac, he's not the deranged mass murderer he was in our timeline, and he manages to keep Uganda prosperous. | |
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The Irishman: In his book, Frank describes going on many hits on direct orders from Jimmy Hoffa. Leaving aside questions of the book's veracity, Hoffa is never shown directly ordering a killing in the movie. Chuckie O'Brien is often suspected of having been the man who drove Hoffa to his death. While that is depicted in this film, he is wholly unaware and Sheeran emphasizes he was the victim of an overzealous Justice Department desperate to convict the accomplices of Hoffa's murder. |
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In the TV version of Generation Kill, there is a minor character who told the POV group that Delta Company attacked a civilian hamlet because of cultural differences. The aftermath of this firefight is not described, though Fox News reporter Oliver North (Yes, that Oliver North) is said to be filming the incident. The author of Generation Kill later divulged that the real incident was far worse than the show's description: it caused massive casualties and Oliver North is said to be eager to take part in the attack himself. | |
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Nero appeared on one of Sherman and Peabody's segments of Rocky and Bullwinkle, where he was presented as Not Evil, Just Misunderstood. His music teacher started the Great Fire of Rome in this reality. Though it perhaps bears mentioning that the true extent of Nero's culpability is not at all clear, as discussed in detail on the Dated History page, so this might be an unintentional subversion. | |
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Black Mass portrays Steve Flemmi as considerably more conflicted about his role in the Winter Hill Gang than he actually was. According to many people who knew him, including former associate Kevin Weeks, the real Flemmi enjoyed murder. | |
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Asterix plays Caesar's campaigns for laughs while using Non-Lethal Warfare and generally makes life in 52 BC Europe palatable to everyone. It's a rather complex case: on one hand, this being a comedy, most of his crimes against Gaul are downplayed-there are Gauls who seem to be no worse for wear, living in Roman land and he often makes peace with Asterix as it is in his best interests. On the other hand, he is often played as a vindictive and hateful Big Bad who would love nothing more than turn the Gauls to toast, a Bad Boss who will reward any failure with a free ticket to the Circus Maximus and a megalomaniac whose ego will never accept the village's independence. | |
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Uday Hussein's sadistic nature is toned down quite a bit in the House of Saddam Mini Series because the producers thought that the audience would just have trouble accepting that a human being could be as wantonly cruel as he was in real life. | |
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Straight Outta Compton actually tones down infamous Death Row Records executive Suge Knight's Ax-Crazy behavior, with multiple real-life violent antics of his left out of the movie. Such was his behavior that he actually ran over and killed a man and injured another after getting into an argument with them on the set of the film itself. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison in 2018. | |
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In his afterword for Sharpe's Enemy, the author notes that he probably wrote the deserters' leader Pot-au-Feu as a more likeable figure than he really was. | |
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Pain & Gain: The film depicts Adrian Doorbal as a relaxed, even-tempered man who treats his girlfriend, and later wife, Robin with nothing but love and respect, and is appalled when Lugo (accidentally) kills Frank Griga. According to Marc Schiller (the Sun Gym Gang's first victim), the real life Doorbal "loved violence" and took sadistic glee in torturing him. It was also Doorbal who killed Frank Griga and Krisztina Furton, not Daniel Lugo as depicted in the film. And whereas Lugo's killing of Griga was an accident, this does not appear to be the case in real life; Doorbal crushed Griga's head with a blunt object strangled him and then finished him off with an injection of horse tranquilizer. It was Lugo not Doorbal who tried to pacify Furton with horse tranquilizer. Doorbal also allegedly married his girlfriend Cindy Eldridge, on whom Robin is based, to keep her from testifying against him and got involved with a woman who worked in his lawyer's office while he was still married to Eldridge who later filed for divorce so she could testify against him. Doorbal's marriage to Eldridge only lasted four days. | |
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Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto is Lighter and Softer than one might expect of a Borgia play. Cesare's first line is "My father is a monster", but we don't actually see Rodrigo do anything that monstrous. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Cesare is something of a Wide-Eyed Idealist who dreams of reforming the church and is inspired by Dante's Paradiso, though he's already well on his way to becoming The Chessmaster who inspired Machiavelli. | |
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There's an in-universe example in the South Park Halloween episode in season 1, arguably a parody of this trope as well. Cartman dresses up in a Adolf Hitler costume for Halloween, so the principal shows him a classroom video about how Hitler was a bad person. Because it's made for 8-year-old American children, it only says that "Adolf Hitler was a very, very naughty man!" and merely shows him standing on a balcony above some parading soldiers and giving a speech in German, which Cartman can't understand because of the language barrier and the lack of subtitles. note Ironically, a later episode, "The Passion of the Jew", revealed that Cartman could speak German, but he blatantly mispronounced every word beginning with a j. Based on that, the children are supposed to learn An Aesop that dressing up as Hitler at school is not acceptable. Things like the Holocaust and other war crimes couldn't be shown of course, because it's directed towards children. Cartman finds Hitler very cool instead, and imagines being in his place. | |
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In Conspiracy (2001), which revolves around the 1942 Wannsee Conference where prominent officials of Nazi Germany met to discuss the implementation of the Holocaust, SS Major Rudolf Lange is given this treatment. Given the subject matter, it is not surprising that all the people portrayed in this film are unambiguously evil. Major Lange, however, is depicted as almost sympathetic, possibly to better contrast with the even more brutal figures sitting at the table such as Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller. He is clearly haunted by the atrocities that he has overseen in Latvia, expresses contempt at Heydrich for insisting on euphemisms during casual discussions of organized genocide, and shows a philosophic bent. In real life, the guy was an unrepentant anti-Semite, mass murderer, and ruthless careerist. | |
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Downplayed in The Devil's Double with Uday Hussein, son of Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein and Ax-Crazy personified with a penchant for rape and torture. While the movie depicts Uday's atrocities and makes no bones of hiding it, it still comes nowhere near the real thing. For example, during the climax, he is gelded by his body double which did happen in real life after an assassination attempt, making it look like his days of raping are over. In reality, doctors managed to treat his wounds and he embarked on a sexual rampage, raping any young girl and women he could find to prove his virility. | |
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Rabbit-Proof Fence depicts AO Neville as a Well-Intentioned Extremist who, although terrifying, seems to believe he's doing what's best for the mixed race Aboriginal children. In real life, he was far worse, and openly stated how he supported the idea of cultural extinction; even publicly saying in a 1937 conference that he hoped Australia would one day forget there ever were any Aboriginals. | |
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One episode of Histeria! indicated that the World's Oldest Woman had met Hitler. Granted, the scene showed her shouting down to him in what was clearly Fire and Brimstone Hell. | |
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Sabrina the Teenage Witch's aunts met Caligula in one episode. While the true extent of the real Caligula's madness is debated it's generally agreed that he was at least rather unstable, but the Sabrina version appears a bit quirky but harmless. | |
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This happens to Hitler in most Captain America's comics. While he's still depicted as an evil dictator, his actions are considerably toned down compared to Hydra's actions (including the ones made by Red Skull, who is always depicted as being worse than Hitler himself). | |
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